Refinement of the French language
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
At the beginning of the 17th century the full flowering of the Classical manner was still
remote, but various signs of a tendency toward order, stability, and refinement can be seen. A
widespread desire for cultural self-improvement, which is also a sign of the pressures to
conformity in a society constructing itself around the king and his court, is reflected in the
numerous manuals of politesse, or formal politeness, that appeared through the first half of the
century; while at the celebrated salon of Mme de Rambouillet men of letters, mostly of bourgeois
origin, and the nobility and leaders of fashionable society mixed in an easy relationship to enjoy
the pleasures of the mind. Such gatherings did much to refine the literary language and also
helped to prepare a cultured public that could engage in the serious analysis of moral and
psychological problems.
The formation of the Académie Française, an early move to place cultural activity under
the patronage of the state, dates from 1634. Its usual functions concerned the standardization of
the French language. This effort bore fruit in the Académie’s own Dictionnaire of 1694, though
by then rival works had appeared in the dictionaries of César-Pierre Richelet (1680) and Antoine
Furetière (1690). A similar desire for systematic analysis inspired Claude Favre, sieur de
Vaugelas, also an Academician, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) records polite
usage of the time. In the field of literary theory the same rational approach produced the
Poétique (1639; “Treatise on Poetry”) of Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de La Mesnardière and the Abbé
d’Aubignac’s Pratique du théâtre (1657; “The Practice of Theatre”), both treatises instigated by
Cardinal de Richelieu’s personal patronage, which strongly influenced the development of
Classical doctrine.
The earliest imaginative literature to reflect the new taste for moral analysis and
refinement was written in imitation of the pastoral literature of Italy and Spain; the masterpiece
of the genre was L’Astrée (1607–27; Astrea) by Honoré d’Urfé. Manners are stylized, settings
are conventional, and the plot is highly contrived; but the sentiments of the characters are highly
refined, and the psychology of their relationships is sharply analyzed.
Refinement of the language of poetry was the self-imposed task of François de Malherbe.
Resolutely opposed to the Pléiade’s exalted conception of the poet as inspired favourite of the
Muses, he owes his place in literary history not to his undistinguished creative writing but to the
critical doctrine he imposed on fellow poets. Malherbe called for a simple, harmonious metre and
a sober, almost prosaic vocabulary, pruned of poetic fancy. His influence helped to make French
lyric verse, for nearly two centuries, elegant and refined but lacking imaginative inspiration.
Malherbe’s alexandrine, however—clear, measured, and energetic—was a metre marvelously
suited to be a vehicle for Pierre Corneille’s dramatic verse.
Not all poets of the 1620s accepted Malherbe’s lead. The most distinguished of the
independents was Théophile de Viau, who not only was the antithesis of Malherbe in style and
technique but also expressed the free thought inherited from Renaissance Italy. Théophile’s
verse, with its engaging flavour of spontaneity and sincerity, shows a sensual delight in the
natural world. He was the leader of a freethinking bohemia of young noblemen and men of
letters, practising and preaching social and intellectual unorthodoxy. His persecution,
imprisonment, and early death ended all this: libertinage went underground, and repressive
orthodoxy was entrenched for a century or more. The poetry of Théophile and other
independents is a last example of that exuberant and extravagant manner developed in the late
16th century to which modern criticism has given the name Baroque.
The development of drama
Unlike the humanist playwrights of previous generations, Alexandre Hardy was first and
foremost a man of the theatre. Poète à gages (in-house writer) to the Comédiens du Roi, the
company established at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in Paris, he wrote hundreds of plays, of which
34 were published (1623–28). In addition to writing tragedies, he developed the tragicomedy and
the pastoral play, which became the most popular genres between 1600 and 1630. In the theatre
as elsewhere, the pastoral was a refining influence, providing a vehicle for the subtle analysis of
feeling. Although the finest play of the 1620s is a tragedy, Théophile de Viau’s Pyrame et Thisbé
(1623; “Pyramus and Thisbe”), which shares the fresh, lyrical charm of the pastorals,
tragicomedy is without a doubt the Baroque form at its best. Here the favourite theme of false
appearances, the episodic structure, and devices such as the play within the play reflect the
essentials of Baroque art. During the 1630s a crucial struggle took place between this irregular
type of drama and a simpler and more disciplined alternative. Theoretical discussion focused on
the conventional rules (the unities of time, place, and action, mistakenly ascribed to the authority
of Aristotle), but the bienséances (conventions regarding subject matter and style) were no less
important in determining the form and idiom the mature Classical theatre was to adopt.
Comedy gained a fresh impetus about 1630. The new style, defined by Corneille as “une
peinture de la conversation des honnêtes gens” (“a painting of the conversation of the gentry”),
simply transposes the pastoral into an urban setting. At the same time, ambitious young
playwrights competing for public favour and the support of the two Paris theatre companies, the
Hôtel de Bourgogne and the Marais, did not neglect other types of drama; and Corneille, together
with Jean Mairet, Tristan (François L’Hermite), and Jean de Rotrou, inaugurated “regular”
tragedy. But it was some time before Corneille, any more than his rivals, turned exclusively to
tragedy. The eclecticism of these years is illustrated by his L’Illusion comique (performed 1636;
The Comedy of Illusion), a brilliant exploitation of the interplay between reality and illusion that
characterizes Baroque art. The two trends come together in Corneille’s theatre in Le Cid
(performed 1637; The Cid), which, though often called the first Classical tragedy, was created as
a tragicomedy. The emotional range Corneille achieves with his verse in The Cid is something
previously unmatched. Contemporary audiences at once recognized the play as a masterpiece,
but its form was subjected to an unprecedented critical attack. The querelle du Cid (“quarrel of
The Cid”) caused such a stir that it led to the intervention of Cardinal de Richelieu, who referred
the play to the judgment of the newly founded Académie Française.
The effect of the querelle du Cid on Corneille’s evolution is unmistakable: all his
experimentation was henceforth to be carried out within the stricter Classical formula. A
remarkable spell of creative activity produced in quick succession Horace (1640), Cinna (1641),
and Polyeucte (1643), which, with The Cid, represent the playwright’s highest achievement. In
terms of form, the essence of Classical French tragedy is a single action, seized at crisis point.
Another of Richelieu’s protégés, Jean Chapelain, began in the 1630s to exert an influence
similar to that of Malherbe a generation earlier. Chapelain was a major architect of Classicism in
France. More liberal than Malherbe, he made allowance for that intangible element (“le je ne sais
quoi”) that rules cannot produce. The Sentiments de l’Académie (1638; “The Opinions of the
Academy”), compiled by Chapelain as a judgment on The Cid, reflects prudent compromise, but
one can sense beneath the pedantry of certain comments a genuine feeling for the harmony and
regularity that Classical tragedy was to achieve.
Tragicomedy lingered on as a popular alternative. Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-
Genest (1647; “The Real Saint Genest”), for example, provides an interesting contrast with
Polyeucte, treating in the Baroque manner similar themes of divine grace and conversion. By the
1640s the mixture of modes was falling out of favour. Writers and their public had become more
responsive to various standardizing influences. René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode (1637;
Discourse on Method), with its opening sentence, “Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux
partagée…” (“Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed…”), clearly
assumes that the mental processes of all men, if properly conducted, will lead to identical
conclusions. A similar assumption is implicit, as regards the psychology of the passions, in
Descartes’s Traité des passions de l’âme (1649; Treatise on Passions).
The long struggle to produce a literature that could claim to represent the moral and
cultural values of a homogeneous society occupied the whole of the first half of the century. The
spirit of insurrection that inspired the Fronde (a period of civil unrest between 1648 and 1653, in
which the high aristocracy allied themselves with the judicial bodies known as parlements in an
attempt to reassert their independence of the centralizing monarchy) is clearly marked in the
writing of the time, not least in Corneille’s tragedies. His self-reliant heroes, meeting every
challenge and overcoming every obstacle, are motivated by the self-conscious moral code that
animated Cardinal de Retz, Mme de Longueville, and other leaders of the heroic but futile
resistance to Cardinal Mazarin. Neither Corneille’s heroes nor Mazarin’s opponents show a
devotion to cause that is free from self-glorification; in both cases, the approbation of others is as
necessary as the desire to leave an example for posterity. Such optimistic, heroic attitudes may
seem incompatible with a tragic view of the world; indeed, Corneille provides the key to his
originality in substituting for the traditional Aristotelian emotions of pity and fear a new goal of
admiration. Corneille asks that his audience admire something larger than life, and the best of his
plays are still capable of arousing this response.
The heroic ideal
The same appetite for heroic subject matter is reflected in the midcentury novels. These
resemble L’Astrée in that they are long-winded, multivolume adventure stories with highly
complicated plots, but they have moved from the world of the pastoral to that of ancient history.
The two best-known examples, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53; Artamenes; or, The
Grand Cyrus) and Clélie (1654–60; Eng. trans. Clelia), both by Madeleine de Scudéry, are set in
Persia and Rome, respectively. Such novels reflect the society of the time. They also show again
what influenced the readers and playgoers of the Classical age: the minute analysis of the
passions, when divorced from the superficial concerns of these novels, looks forward to the
psychological subtlety of Jean Racine.
Other writers of the period make a more individual use of the novel form. Cyrano de
Bergerac returned to the Renaissance tradition of fictional travel as a vehicle for social and
political satire and may be seen as an early exponent of science fiction. So provocative were the
ideas expressed in his Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune (1656; “Comical Tale of
the States and Empires of the Moon”) and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil (1661;
“Comical Tale of the States and Empires of the Sun”), collectively published in English
translation by Richard Aldington as Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun
(1923), that neither work was published until after 1655, the year of his death. Paul Scarron, an
early practitioner of more realistic writing, was more down-to-earth in purpose and manner: in
Le Roman comique (1651–57) he set out to parody the heroic novels.
The honnête homme
Partly because of the influence of the salons and partly as a result of disillusionment at the
failure of the Fronde, the heroic ideal was gradually replaced in the 1650s by the concept of
honnêteté. The word does not connote “honesty” in its modern sense but refers rather to an ideal
aristocratic moral and social mode of behaviour, a sincere refinement of tastes and manners.
Unlike the aspirant after gloire (“glory”), the honnête homme (“gentleman”) cultivated the social
graces and valued the pleasures of social intercourse. A cultured amateur, modest and self-
effacing, he took as his model the Renaissance uomo universale (“universal man”). François de
La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who had played a leading part in the Fronde, provides an
interesting illustration of the transition between the two ages. The Maximes (1665; Maxims and
Moral Reflections), his principal achievement, is a collection of 500 epigrammatic reflections on
human behaviour, expressed in the most universal terms: the general tone is bitingly cynical,
self-interest being seen as the source of all actions. If a more positive message is to be seen, it is
the recognition of honnêteté as a code of behaviour that holds society together. However, even
this is touched with cynicism. La Rochefoucauld’s view of honnêteté is a pragmatic one, falling
as far short of the ideal defined by Antoine Gombaud, chevalier de Méré, in his Discours de la
vraie honnêteté (1701; “Discourse on True Honnêteté”), as it does of the example set by Charles
de Saint-Denis, sieur de Saint-Évremond, who, in the opinion of contemporaries, most nearly
lived up to such an ideal. Few honnêtes gens had the culture, the taste, and the temperament to
practice the art of living in such an exemplary way, but the ideal of tolerant, cultured
Epicureanism for a while set the tone of fashionable society in Paris.
This period also saw the fullest development of the cult of préciosité, a style of thought
and expression exhibiting delicacy of taste and sentiment. Inasmuch as honnêteté stands for
moderation and achieved simplicity and préciosité for the cult of artifice and allusion, the two
phenomena may seem to be opposites. The sentiments and manners satirized by Molière in Les
Précieuses ridicules (performed 1659; The Pretentious Young Ladies) do not represent the whole
picture, however, and, although the performance of some followers of the mode led to ludicrous
extremes or, worse, degeneration into meaningless cliché, précieuses such as Madeleine de
Scudéry were responsible for introducing a new subtlety into the language, establishing new
standards of delicacy in matters of taste, and propagating advanced ideas about the equality of
the sexes in marriage. Their aims thus ran parallel to those of the honnêtes gens, and the ideal of
the educated, emancipated woman was the female counterpart of the masculine ideal defined
above.
The fullest representation of the honnête homme in imaginative literature is to be found in
the theatre of Molière. A bourgeois by birth, a courtier, and an honnête homme, Molière was also
an actor-manager and an entertainer. He toured the provinces with his theatre troupe from about
1645 until 1658, when they returned to Paris. Molière soon succeeded in winning audiences to a
completely new type of comedy. While his early plays may be divided conventionally into
literary comedy and popular farces, from L’École des femmes (performed 1662; The School for
Wives) onward he fused these two strains, creating a formula that combined the Classical
structure, the linguistic refinement, and the portrayal of manners expected of comedy with the
caricatural characterization proper to traditional French farce and the Italian commedia dell’arte.
Even in stylized verse plays such as The School for Wives, Le Misanthrope (performed 1666), Le
Tartuffe (first version 1664; Tartuffe: The Hypocrite), or Les Femmes savantes (1672; The
Learned Ladies), the comedy of manners merely provides a framework for the comic portrait of
a central character, in which exaggeration and fantasy play a considerable part. However topical
the subject and however prominent the contemporary satiric element in Molière’s plays, his
characters always possess a common denominator of universal humanity. Most of his plays
contain, alongside the comic character, one or more examples of the honnête homme; and the
social norm against which his comic characters offend is that of a tolerant, humane honnêteté. In
Le Tartuffe, and in Dom Juan (1665), topical references and satiric implications were so
provocative in dealing with the delicate subject of religious belief that there were strong
reactions from churchmen. However, from the start of his Paris career Molière could count on
the active support of the king, Louis XIV. A number of his plays were written for performance at
Versailles or other courts; and Molière also wrote several comédies-ballets and collaborated with
Jean-Baptiste Lully and others in other divertissements that brought together the arts of poetry,
music, and dance.
The biggest box-office success of the century, judged by length of first run, was the
Timocrate (1656) of Pierre Corneille’s younger brother Thomas, a prolific playwright adept at
gauging the public taste. Timocrate was exactly contemporary with the précieux novels of
Madeleine de Scudéry, and, like Philippe Quinault in his tragédies galantes, the author
reproduced the disguises and amorous intrigues so much admired by habitués of the salons.
However, the 1660s were to see the rivalry between two acknowledged masters of serious drama.
Pierre Corneille, returning to the theatre in 1659 after a hiatus, wrote several more plays; but,
though Sertorius (performed 1662) and his last play, Suréna (performed 1674), bear comparison
with earlier masterpieces, heroic idealism had lost conviction. While Corneille retained his
partisans among older playgoers, it was Jean Racine who appealed to a new generation.
Racine’s fatalism
Whether Jean Racine’s Jansenist upbringing determined his view of a human nature
controlled by perverse and willful passions—or whether his knowledge of Greek tragedy
explains the fatalism of his own plays—is a question that cannot be answered. Certainly, both are
engaged in the service of a creative imagination that reflects powerfully the frustrating limits
placed on individual desire by society’s conventions and constraints. The world and the
sensibility of his heroes could not be more different from those of Corneille’s. Tragedy for
Racine is an inexorable series of events leading to a foreseeable and inevitable catastrophe. Plot
is of the simplest; the play opens with the action at crisis point, and, once the first step is taken,
tension mounts between a small number of characters, locked together by conflicting ambitions
and desires, in increasingly straitened and stifling circumstances. Racinian poetic language
represents preciosity at its best: the intense and monstrous nature of frustrated passion is thrown
into relief by the cool, elegant, and understated formulations that carry it. His work set a standard
and a model for the study of the entanglement of the public and the personal that continued into
the 20th century. The language of such diverse playwrights as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bernard-
Marie Koltès interacts (albeit in different ways) with the luminous clarity of Racinian style. In
the 1960s and ’70s the director Roger Planchon found in Bérénice and Athalie fresh relevance
for contemporary society.
Racine’s career began in 1664 with the first performance of La Thébaïde (The Fatal
Legacy, a Tragedy), a grim account of the mutual hatred of Oedipus’s sons; this was followed by
Alexandre le Grand (performed 1665), his only attempt at the manner of Quinault. The
masterpieces date from the highly successful Andromaque (1667), another subject from Greek
legend, after which, for Britannicus (1669) and Bérénice (1670), Racine turned to topics from
Roman history. Bajazet (1672) is based on modern Turkish history; Mithridate (1673) has as its
hero the famous enemy of Rome; and finally there followed two plays with Greek mythological
subjects: Iphigénie en Aulide (1674; “Iphigenia in Aulis”) and Phèdre (1677). His last two plays,
Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), written not for the professional theatre but for the girls’ school
at Saint-Cyr, at the request of Mme de Maintenon, turn to Old Testament subjects; but, in Athalie
in particular, the challenge of the individual will to power against the decrees of an authoritarian
father-god presents as powerful a conflict as that found in any of his secular plays.
Nondramatic verse
Nondramatic verse still enjoyed a special prestige, as shown in Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux’s L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry), in which the genres most highly esteemed
are the epic (of which no distinguished example was written during the century), the ode (a
medium for official commemorative verse), and the satire. Boileau himself, in his satires (from c.
1658) and epistles (from 1674), as well as in The Art of Poetry, established himself as the
foremost critic of his day; but, despite a flair for judging contemporaries, his criteria were limited
by current aesthetic doctrines. In Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”; Eng. trans. Boileau’s
Lutrin: A Mock-Heroic Poem), a model for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, he produced
a masterpiece of comic writing in the Classical manner. Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables (1668;
1678–79; 1694; The Complete Fables of Jean de la Fontaine) succeed in transcending the
limitations of the genre; and, although readers formerly concentrated heavily on the moral
teaching they offer, it is possible to appreciate beneath their apparent naïveté the mature skills of
a highly imaginative writer who displays great originality in adapting to his needs the linguistic
and metrical resources of the Classical age.
