French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (8 page)

However, it is at this point, the moment of the hero's return from
the battlefield, that Horace's attitude towards his own heroism
crosses the line into civil violence. Horace's sister Camille was
Curiace's lover, and she does not greet him with the respect that
he demands, saying to her `render [the honour] that you owe
to the fortune of my victory'. He is, to say the least, unfeeling,
focused entirely on his brilliant achievement and, as he said
earlier, unwilling to recognize any personal attachment or identity
in this state of war. But this extremism, or even fanaticism, is
matched by his sister's - it runs in the family, apparently - for
instead of yielding and keeping silent, she insults him and
escalates the verbal combat to the point of cursing the Rome that
Horace claims to incarnate. She calls down the fire of heaven on
the city. The altercation between Camille and her brother is the
most violent part of the play as it appears on stage, for the sword
fight between Albans and Romans takes place off stage, as does
almost all physical violence in French drama after the 1630s.

And this second encounter ends badly for Horace. He becomes
so enraged that he kills his sister. For what he then calls `an act of
justice', he is put on trial. The play culminates, then, in a full act
devoted to the incompatibility between unflinching, unfeeling,
Horatian-style heroism and the requirements of a society of laws,
individual identities and duties, and political hierarchy. In the
civil society that is depicted in Corneille's version of Rome, the
purely masculine virtues required in war cannot be allowed to
run unchecked. As Horace's chief accuser, Valere, points out, by
shedding his sister's blood, Horace has not only killed an unarmed
woman but a Roman citizen. The violence that was tolerable when
it took place outside the city and aimed itself against non-Romans
has now entered the city itself to threaten all. The most general
paradox that Corneille displays here is that while the peaceful civil
order is based on fratricide (Rome's war against its kindred city
Alba, like Horace's murder of his sister, is set in the perspective
of Rome's legendary founding by Romulus, killer of his brother
Remus), such violence should never be rekindled.

Though important for any consideration of heroism, the general
paradox of the warrior's return to the city is less original than the
insight into Horace's own experience of this status that Corneille
subtly conveys. Generations of audiences and readers have
generally found Horace to be much less appealing a character than
his opponent Curiace, but the play suggests a terrible suffering
within the hero. The price of his victory has been the sacrifice
of all feeling, all perception that is not directly oriented towards
slaying the designated enemy. And that sacrifice is directed at a
single moment, after which, inevitably, the hero begins to decline
into an ordinary life that is forever closed to him. Horace asks to
be executed, claiming that `Death alone today can preserve my
glory / And it should have come at the moment of my triumph'.
At the end of Horace, just as at the end of The Misanthrope, the
audience is left to puzzle over how such an outsized, unyielding
protagonist can fit back into the ordinary social world.

The decline of the hero

Heroes, in other words, are useful to have around at certain
moments, but fit awkwardly into the social framework over the
long haul. They are not necessarily even `good' by prevailing moral
standards. La Rochefoucauld wrote memorably that `There are
heroes of evil as well as of good'; we need only think of two of
Corneille's other protagonists, both heroic and monstrous - Medea
in his first tragedy Medee (1635) and Cleopatra in Rodogune,
princesse des Parthes (1644) - or of Racine's later depiction of the
Emperor Nero in Britannicus (1669). As literary theorists tried
to square the heritage of ancient tragedy with Christian, modern
values, there was considerable unease at placing characters
capable of extreme acts, good and bad, in the position of `hero'.
Corneille's younger rival Jean Racine paraphrased Aristotle's
dictum in the Poetics on tragic heroes, saying that they should
have `a middling goodness, that is, a virtue susceptible to
weakness'. Racine worked to create characters with this middling
goodness, or bonte mediocre. Avoiding the spectacular qualities
and acts of such Corneille protagonists as Horace, Chimene in
Le Cid, and Auguste in Cinna, Racine in most of his tragedies
depicted protagonists who are quite middling, even `mediocre'
in the modern sense. They are people like ourselves, or like
the version of ourselves we see on day-time television, but in
magnificent verse. Such are the protagonists of Phedre, in which
the eponymous protagonist is an unfortunate woman who has
fallen in love with her adolescent stepson - she considers herself
a monster, but this is the `monster' next door, who, once rebuffed,
acquiesces to a plan to accuse Hippolyte of raping her.

We can see why it has been said that Racine turned tragedy into
bourgeois melodrama. In his Andromaque (1668), a tragedy which
takes its title from Andromache, the widow of the Trojan hero
Hector, now become the slave of Achilles' son Pyrrhus, Racine
illustrates this concept of the protagonist of middling goodness with such thoroughness that one might even be tempted to say
with Karl Marx that `history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy,
the second as farce'. The main characters of this play belong - with
the possible exception of Andromaque herself - to a post-heroic
generation. Their parents were the great Homeric heroes and
heroines of the Iliad, Agamemnon, Helen, Menelaus, Achilles,
and yet the new generation of Hermione, Orestes, and even
(though to a less marked extent) Pyrrhus is obsessed with a desire
to live up to and compete with its forebears. Hermione recalls
that her mother was so beautiful that the Trojan war was fought
to bring her back to Greece, yet she cannot even get Pyrrhus to
honour his promise of marriage to her. Orestes dithers irresolutely
over his unrequited love for Hermione, failing to carry out his
ambassadorial mission, which is to find and slay Hector's son
Astyanax to eliminate all trace of the royal family of Troy. Pyrrhus
himself is described as the `son and rival of Achilles'. But while
their parents shook the world with epic battles, this group ends up
with a sordid palace intrigue of murder and suicide.

Yet despite the clear difference between the larger-than-life
protagonists of Corneille and even Moliere and Racine's selfconsciously mediocre characters, there is a remarkable similarity
with regard to the ambivalent theme of heroism. The reason that
the protagonists ofAndromaque arrive at their dreadful end is
that they tried to stage heroic feats for which they did not have the
ability and which, in any event (and this is the most striking parallel
with the historical situation of 17th-century France) belonged to
the past and should have been left in the past. InAndromaque, just
as in Horace, the moment in which it was useful to act as violent
military heroes has gone by, and the protagonists would have been
well advised to adopt the skills of peacetime. A certain amount of
heroism is admirable, as Moliere's honnete homme Philinte might
have said, but there is a time and place for everything.

These major dramatic works give us some sense of the continuity
in the way civility, conformity to circumstance, and politeness were proposed as ideals, even when they were projected back into the
French version of Greco-Roman antiquity. But we should now recall
the social circumstances that gave these ideals such weight, and even
urgency. The transition from the religious wars of the 16th century to
the more stable, and even more bureaucratic, regime of the Bourbon
monarchs was not at all easy. The assassination of Henri IV was a
great blow; the subsequent regency of Marie de Medicis ended with
a coup d'etat staged by her son, King Louis XIII, whose long-serving
prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu, executed, imprisoned, or exiled
members of the `devout party' which derived in large part from the
Catholic League that had been such a challenge to the last Valois and
to Henri IV before his conversion. But outright civil war returned at
mid-century during the tumultuous and complicated time known as
the `Fronde' (`slingshot' in French), which lasted from 1648 to 1653,
and set troops loyal to the regent Queen Anne of Austria against a
fluctuating alliance of nobility and parlementaires (members of the
Paris legislative court).

This confrontation ended, after devastating large parts of the
country, by reaffirming the monarchy. The ambivalence towards
aristocratic, independent heroism - newly illustrated by the
rebellion or treason of the Prince de Conde and of the King's uncle
Gaston d'Orleans who allied themselves with Spain against the
Queen - could only be reinforced by this catastrophic and wasteful
adventure, which left a deep impression on the young Louis XIV,
only ten years old when the Fronde began. In the decisive steps
taken to further centralize power and to remove any remaining
independence from the upper aristocracy, Louis made conformity
- outward conformity, at least - a central value of French culture
of the second half of the century. This certainly is one of the
reasons why the status of the hero as it appears in the three major
dramatists shows a significant downward trajectory from Corneille
to Racine, even though all three show heroism as leading to conflict.

Another reason for the change in the status of the hero may be
the rise in influence, towards mid-century, of a disenchanted worldview associated with the religious movement known as
Jansenism, centred on the convent of Port-Royal, and influential
with many leading writers of the `moralist' tendency, such as
Blaise Pascal and Francois de La Rochefoucauld. This movement
was not simply about advocating austere morality (though some,
like Pascal, were quite ascetic), but rather in large part it consisted
of giving a pessimistic view of human society and its motives, and
aimed at a dispassionate analysis of relationships. It saw mankind
as anything but heroic.

In the second half of the century, a different type of protagonist
emerged, in keeping with the intensification of court and urban life in proximity to the court, with the domestication of
the aristocracy, and with moralist disenchantment. This new
protagonist is typical of a trend - or of a number of converging
trends - in which there is an `inward turn' of literature, a turn
towards `literature of psychological analysis', a social and cultural
movement called preciosite, and the rise of social spaces, the
salons, organized by women.

Salons and the rise of literary women

The term `salon' is now used somewhat anachronistically (the
term itself became prominent only in the 18th century) to
describe the private meeting places where women received
guests in the 17th century - major contemporary terms for such
places were ruelle, alcove, or reduit, meaning the narrow space
between a bed and the nearby wall in which guests might stand
or sit to converse with the hostess, who remained recumbent.
Two such salons stand out: the Chambre bleue of the Marquise
de Rambouillet and the samedis (Saturdays) of Madeleine de
Scudery. These cultivated women controlled the space into
which they invited distinguished male as well as female guests,
making the salons women-centred conversational places in
sharp distinction to the taverns in which male writers might
meet on their own. The values promoted in this environment
included freedom from arranged marriages and friendship
between women and men. Detractors of women such as Boileau
called them precieuses, a term Moliere popularized in his
Precieuses ridicules (1659) and LEcole des femmes (The School
for Wives, 1662).

The novel of courtly manners

In this context, emphasis shifts to a new conception of the hero, or
rather of the protagonist (since the term `hero' was generally not used
for non-military distinction): the person who exemplified exquisite
refinement in friendship and love and was capable of exceptional
fidelity to ideals. No one exemplifies this type of protagonist better
than the central figure of Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette's brief novel,
La Princesse de Cleves (published anonymously, 1678). This work,
often praised as one of the first `psychological novels' or `novels of
analysis', is set in the Valois court of the previous century. Arriving
at Paris with her widowed mother at age 16, the protagonist, an
innocent young woman, receives from her mother three basic
instructions about the world she is about to enter. The first is to
distrust appearances: what seems to be is almost never the case. The
second, somewhat contradictory, lesson is to learn from listening to
stories about the wretched experiences of other men and women at
the court. And the third lesson is that for a woman, the only way to
happiness consists of loving her husband and being loved by him
in return - in short, to be completely different from other women,
typified by those whose tales she hears and who are engaged in
multiple, unhappy, adulterous love affairs. From the very start of her
story, then, the heroine aims both to understand and to be different
from other women, and to find that elusive happiness that is said to
be available only to the happily married woman.

As the wife of the perfectly honourable Prince de Cleves, the
young woman soon meets the highly desirable Duc de Nemours, whose reputation as a lover is universal. The love affair that
follows is one in which the Princess and the Duke are alone on
only two occasions, never touch, and are never publicly known to
have feelings for one another. Despite the constant surveillance,
intense curiosity, and gossip of the court, the story of the Princess's
discovery of love and of her own nature is known to no one except,
in part, to the Princess, her husband, her mother, and the Duke
himself. It is tempting to say that it is a story in which nothing
happens, yet, adjusting the scale of perception, we can see how
Lafayette has moved events inward, into the minds and feelings of
her characters, where life-and-death struggles occur and virtue is
pitted against betrayal. Tiny, almost imperceptible, signals allow
the characters to communicate with one another. For instance,
the Duke, wishing to show his affection for the Princess in a way
that could never be understood by anyone except herself, identifies
himself at a tournament by wearing yellow and black. Everyone
wonders why, since these colours had no apparent connection to
him. The Princess, however, immediately understands that it is
a favour to her, for one day at a conversation at which the Duke
was present, she had said that she liked yellow but could not wear
it because she was blonde. On another occasion, the Princess did
not go to a ball, claiming to be ill (though she appeared to be in
radiant good health). This is another of those secret signals, since
the Princess has heard it reported that the Duke said that there
was no greater suffering for a lover than to know that his mistress
was at a ball that he himself was not able to attend.