The Style of the State in French Theater, 1630–1660

Neoclassicism and Government

Katherine Ibbett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754665663
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351881418
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Engaging with recent thinking about performance, political theory and canon formation, this study addresses the significance of the formal changes in seventeenth-century French theater. Each chapter takes up a particularity of seventeenth-century theatrical style and staging"for example, the clearing of violence from the stage"and shows how the conceptualization of these French stylistic shifts appropriates a rich body of Italian political writing on questions of action, temporality, and law. The theater's appropriation of political concerns and vocabularies, the author argues, proffers an astute reflection on the practices of government that draws attention to questions obscured in reason of state, such as the instrumentalization of women's bodies. In a new reading of tragedies about government, the author shows how the canonical figure of Pierre Corneille is formally engaged with the political strategizing he often appears to repudiate, and in so doing challenges a literary history that has read neoclassicism largely as a display of pure French style.

Chapter 1
Introduction:
Curious Perspectives

What do we look at when we look at the French seventeenth century? The frontispiece of Jean-François Nicéron’s La perspective curieuse of 1638, engraved by Pierre Daret, suggests some ways one might proceed (fig. 1.1).¹ A classical arch, framed by columns, lies off-center of the image. Through it we glimpse the edge of a colonnade and some statuary figures turning their backs on us. We cannot see what they are looking towards, and we seem to come up on the action from behind, perhaps a bit late to find out what is really going on. In the archway are four putti, some armed with little sticks that seem to direct the viewer’s attention, as a professor might direct the class’s gaze with a laser pointer. One putto gazes up, enraptured by something in the sky behind the arch. We cannot see what he is looking at. One shows another something engraved on a panel in the archway, but the shadow falls so that we cannot see what it is they are examining with such attention. Still another peers around at a truncated column sporting a picture of the king, Louis XIII. We can see the king, but can the putto? Or is he craning his neck in a vain attempt to make sense of an anamorphosis?

The image appeals in part because of the busy-ness of the putti. They are absorbed in looking, and, ignoring the monumental structure glimpsed through the archway, they look in a series of different directions. There is no sense that they must march willy-nilly through the archway and gaze upon whatever it is – temple, stage, forum – that lies beyond, and that clearly demarcates the center of things. In this book I want to urge a similar sort of attention to some texts from broadly the same period as Nicéron’s treatise. The neoclassical theater of the period, in particular, has been so often and so forcefully framed – as canonical, as classical, as a particular manifestation of a particularly French (read austere) style – that in reading it we are encouraged to walk through an archway with our eyes on the prize, reading it only and exhaustively through a particularly historically-determined lens. Because neoclassical theater has been made into something central to a certain vision of French identity, it stands as a monument that forces the eye in certain directions. In this study I want to look at different texts and in different directions, putting together a series of curious perspectives on the monumental and the too often monolithic corpus of the neoclassical stage.

Fig. 1.1 Pierre Daret. Frontispiece to Jean-François Nicéron, La perspective curieuse, ou, Magie artificielle des effets merveilleux (1638).

What I am interested in – and I believe these texts are too – is in looking at the relation between state and theater in a decentered way that might unsettle our critical commonplaces. I resist the tendency to regard the century merely as a preamble to the grand edifices, social and architectural, of Louis XIV’s Versailles. Unlike much work on seventeenth-century theater, this is not a story of monarchic power expressed through dazzle and display, nor is it a story that leads us to the inexorable glories of the century’s most famous playwright, Jean Racine. I hope not to put off my reader at this early stage if I say that this is a book interested not in dazzle but in something rather more humdrum: in how the practical concerns of government are taken up by the practice of the stage. In focusing on the years of Louis XIII’s reign and on the regency that ruled during the minority of Louis XIV, I look not to the glorious figure of the king but to the more shadowy presence of the minister. During these years, France was beginning to centralize governmental and cultural power under the guidance of the controversial figures of the Cardinal Ministers: Richelieu, appointed first minister in 1624, and Mazarin, whose death in 1661 eventually made space for Louis XIV’s declaration of absolute rule. The position of these ministers at the heart of the state both prompted and participated in a shift of attention from abstract theories of sovereignty towards a new concern with political practice and legitimacy.

This concern with questions of practice and legitimacy extended to the rapidly-professionalizing stage. Whereas the Renaissance stage had been marked by bloody violence and grand spectacle, the officially condoned theater of the seventeenth century saw the development of a more muted style shunning on-stage violence and celebrating a new theatrical decorum. Critics and political figures encouraged and welcomed these changes, seeing them as a particularly French aesthetic, and they have been considered as such almost ever since. This book examines the political significance of these changes, exploring the relation between a French theatrical style and the French state and in so doing reexamining the figure of the playwright Pierre Corneille, a figure central to neoclassical theater. Along the way, it proposes that what at first glance seems rather dull – the routine life rather than the glorious death, the machinery of state rather than the spectacle of royal power – nonetheless makes up its own extraordinary narrative about this period. What happens if, in peeking behind the monumental edifice, we see how the monument of the seventeenth century was put together?

In pursuit of this curious perspective, in this introductory chapter I will launch into thinking about seventeenth-century theater by tackling other genres and other historical moments. In so doing, I want to explore how a particular French narrative that informs the usual ways we read this period and genre has been refracted throughout different textual forms, from the anti-Italian writings of mid-seventeenth-century France to the schoolbooks of the Third Republic. It is my contention that these very different texts have produced a certain version of Frenchness that finds its hero in Corneille, that solidly French idol. In sifting through these varied texts, I want to make strange that which has come to seem all too familiar, and to show the possibilities of reading this period’s productions otherwise.

I begin not far from neoclassical theater, at the mid point of the seventeenth century, but in a context that seems rather different from the disciplined drama of the stage: the Fronde, a period of rebellion led largely by discontented aristocrats turning against the rapidly entrenching power of the state and in particular against the easy target of the chief minister, the Italian Giulio Mazzarino known in France as Jules Mazarin. In the years from 1648 to 1652, when staged drama must have paled in relation to what threatened to appear on the streets of Paris, a vast and teeming body of other sorts of publications and other genres appeared: the mazarinades, a profusion of at least five thousand pamphlets which attacked, variously, Mazarin, his dead predecessor Richelieu, the queen mother, the organization of the state, and the moral laxity of foreigners, and which found agreement only by bemoaning the dismal muddle of French political life.² One such pamphlet tells us that “Les Presses des Imprimeurs gemissent jour et nuict pour exprimer les gemissemens des miserables sous l’oppression de cette sangsüe Siçilienne” [The printers’ presses moan day and night to express the groans of those who are miserably oppressed by this Sicilian leech], or, that is, Mazarin himself.³ As this delightfully alliterative formulation suggests, the bloodsucking behavior of the Italians in general and of Mazarin in particular was a particularly pungent theme of these leaflets.

Indeed, though the pamphlet terms it strongly, France was in a sorry state after years of government directed by Richelieu, under whom France’s nobility had grown increasingly dissatisfied with the encroachments of absolutism and centralization. The country’s finances had been increasingly squeezed by France’s commitment to military spending both overt and covert. Mazarin took over the government in 1643 after the death of Richelieu and, faced with the state’s increasing financial fragility, brought in various measures of expediency.⁴ The resistance of the parlement (France’s highest court) to such changes led to greater tension between that body and the minister. In 1648 Mazarin had leaders of the insubordinate parlement arrested and Paris erupted in insurrection. By 1650, Mazarin’s main challenge came from a group of discontented princes and nobles who challenged the primacy of Louis XIII. By 1652, the force of the uprising had fizzled out, but the turbulent period had left its mark on French political discourse and understandings of national identity.

Very few of the mazarinades set up a consistent political program.⁵ This is a body of writing in which there is no one clear hero but rather a multitude of contesting figures matched only by an antihero, Mazarin as Machiavel. The pamphlets often refer us to yet another pamphlet, with a vertiginous effect for the modern reader.⁶ (One obliging author reaches out a helping hand across the ages by providing footnotes to his rant neatly explaining the significance of the dramatis personae, but such guidance is rare.⁷) To come to terms with the mazarinades means taking on cacophony, and perhaps that was true even for the pamphlet writers themselves. With the fracturing of France came a concomitant sense of the fracturing of an audience, so that one pamphlet addresses itself hopefully to

Amy ou ennemy Lecteur qui que tu sois, Royalistes, Frondeurs, bon Parlementaires: ou Cardinalistes, Mazarinistes, Partialistes, Machiavelistes, Atheistes: Ou Jesuites, Jansenistes, Molinistes, Arnaudistes: Bref toute la liste des Partizans, Maltotiers, Monopoleurs, Donneurs d’Advis, Presteur, Usuriers, Traittans, sous Traittans, Commis, sous Commis, Homme d’affaires, Intendans, Fuziliers, Harpyes de l’Estat, Sangsües du Peuple, Antropopages, Mangeurs de Chrestiens, Pestes des Provinces, Potirons d’Esté…⁸

[Reader, be you friend or enemy, whoever you are, royalists, frondeurs, good men of the court sessions: or supporters of the Cardinal, of Mazarin, partialists, Machiavellians, Atheists; Or Jesuits, Jansenists, supporters of Molinius or of Arnaud; in short the whole list of Partisans, of those who claim what is not their due, monopolists, advice givers, lenders, usurers, taxmen, sub-taxmen, commissionaires and sub-commissionaires, businessmen, overseers, fusiliers, harpies of the state, leeches of the people, cannibals, eaters of Christians, provincial pests, summer pumpkins…]⁹

Reading the mazarinades, it is all too easy to lose the plot.

Why, then, do I suggest that such a profusion of pamphlets sheds light on the orderly world of the neoclassical theater? Though their tumult seems far removed from neoclassical elegance, I contend that the mazarinades expound a series of values that have become determinant for our readings of the period, and that by unpacking the discourse of these pamphlets and examining its history we gain a more precise critical purchase on the development of critical understandings of seventeenth-century texts. By reading the mazarinades in tandem with later writings about the literature of the period, I want to explore the terms within which a critical norm of Frenchness has been established, a norm against which I frame the questions pursued in this book.

I begin with one sigh amongst many gleaned from these pamphlets, a sigh making the distance from the apparent order and resolution of neoclassical tragedy readily apparent. In Le Diogene François, ou l’homme d’estat a la France soupirante the author bemoans the state of France and suggests the country is in crisis because it has lost a heroic masculine ideal: “Qu’est il maintenant dans la France? où il peut se dire avec verité, qu’il y a plus de peuple, mais moins d’hommes que jamais.”¹⁰ [What is going on now in France? France, of which it can be truthfully said that there are more people but fewer men than ever.] Just as the clarity of the theater’s order is swamped by the cacophony of voices stemming from the pamphlets, so the “hommes” or heroic ideal famously figured by that theater have been overrun by “peuple,” by a sheer mass of bodies that have pushed the concerns of the individual central conscience aside. This is nothing as glorious as the death of the hero, for that implies some kind of apotheosis: this is, rather, the engulfing of the hero by ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Curious Perspectives
• 2 The Politics of Patience: Staging the Spectator
• 3 Conservation, Corneille, and the Question of the Colonial Governor
• 4 Taking One’s Time, or, Cléopâtre is Corneille
• 5 The Rules of Art
• Coda Offstage
• Bibliography
• Index