French Literature

A Cultural History

Alison Finch

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745657196
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is the first to offer a cultural history of French literature from its very beginnings, analysing the relationship between French literature and France's evolving power structures from the Middle Ages through to the present day. It shows the political connections between the elite literature of France and other aspects of its culture, from racism, misogyny, tolerance and liberal reform to song, street performance, advertising and cinema. The nation's literature contributed to these and was shaped by them. The book highlights the continuities and the unique fault-lines in the society that, over a millennium, has produced 'French culture'. It looks at France's early and continuing struggle for a national identity through both its language and its literature, and it shows that this struggle co-exists with openness to other cultures and a bawdy or subtle rebelliousness against the Church and other forms of authority. En route it takes in cuisine, gardens and the French tradition in mathematics. The survey provides an accessible approach to key issues in the history of French culture as well as a wide context for specialists.

1

From the Beginnings to the Renaissance

The medieval period originated in the break-up of the Roman Empire, shifting the global cultural struggle from ‘Europe’ (Greece, and later Rome) versus ‘Asia’ (Persia) to Christian Europe versus Islam; a recognizable ‘French’ monarchy started in 987 with the election of Hugues Capet as king of France. The Capetians survived in a direct line until 1328, and branches of the family continued to rule thereafter. This continuity, with relatively few dynastic struggles, already gave France an advantage; but, as yet, the early French monarchy was centred in the tiny territory of the Ile-de-France, and the king ruled precariously over unreliable vassals. Nevertheless, capable of rebellion though they might be, they recognized the king as a figure to whom loyalty was owed, and it was less through violent annexations, more through diplomacy and the building of ties by marriage, that the Capetian kings slowly strengthened and extended the royal sphere until the French crown became the foremost one in Europe, and the one with which the Popes had the closest alliances. (This is one reason why the Papacy moved temporarily to Avignon from 1309 to 1377.) But ‘Gallicanism’ was also developing in the French Church, limiting the Pope’s authority, tilting the balance of influence to the bishops or the monarch, and ensuring a degree of Church autonomy that would continue right through to Napoleon.

From early on, therefore, there existed an independent land called ‘France’, one whose nationhood was still weak and whose powerful princes and local lords had to be won round to any sense of ‘the centre’, yet one in which the monarchy’s gradual consolidation normally proceeded without all-out collisions like those which in England led to the assassination of the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket in 1170, or to the signing of Magna Carta forced on King John in 1215.

Fault-lines, naturally, existed. In The Identity of France (1986), the historian Fernand Braudel has declared: ‘Yes, France is certainly diverse, and that diversity is visible, lasting, and structural’ (his italics: II 669); and he suggests that France is ‘too good’ at internecine strife, wars of religion, even civil war. ‘Every nation is divided, and thrives on division. But France illustrates the rule rather too well: Protestants and Catholics, Jansenists and Jesuits, blues and reds, republicans and royalists, right and left, Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, collaborators and resisters – division is within the house and unity is no more than a façade, a superstructure, a shout in the wind’ (I 119). Here then are some of these divisions, already declaring themselves in the Middle Ages: between centre and regions; between the two great medieval civilizations of North and South (with their different languages, langue d’oïl and langue d’oc); between the assertion of authority and the rejection of it; between different belief-systems and ideologies. But if there was ‘division within the house’, there was still a ‘house’, providing room for the arts to develop locally and centrally, particularly during what has been described as ‘the twelfth-century Renaissance’ – and room for Paris to become established as a European focus for intellectuals. For the Middle Ages gave us universities, and in the twelfth century that of Paris became pre-eminent, attracting students from all over Europe to learn from its great thinkers, the most renowned being Pierre Abélard (1079–1142/4). By the time the famous Louis IX was reigning (1226–70), it was taken for granted that national and international prestige could be demonstrated through centres of learning and through religious architecture and art. Through other means too: Louis IX, like his predecessors, led a Crusade, albeit one during which he was captured and had to be ransomed; and he sanctioned the Papal Inquisition in Languedoc. But along with these acts of violence (for which he would be canonized), he encouraged artistic production, for example building the exquisite Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.

Partly, then, because the initially weak Capetian kings kept power internally through negotiation not battle, ‘France’ was able to develop art and writing, the latter at first in the monasteries but soon spreading to secular communities. While the commissioning of music and expensive artefacts fulfilled a social function as affirmations of luxury, hence status, regional seigneurs often favoured writing as a means of enhancing their position. Thus ducal patrons might commission chronicles designed to highlight their achievements or genealogy – to demonstrate, say, their descent from Charlemagne, which affirmed their legitimacy vis-à-vis the present king; these histories could shade off into fictional narrative. But it was not only commissioned chronicles that contributed to prestige. It is often supposed that in ‘undeveloped’ societies antagonism was and is settled purely by might and main; the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has however noted that fine verbal performance can sometimes more successfully contain an opponent than physical violence. If, in an angry dialogue, one interlocutor makes a clever riposte, ‘to respond with knife or fist would demean the assailant by suggesting that he was incapable of responding with some witty line of his own’ (The Poetics of Manhood, 1985, 143). Herzfeld’s comments indicate that in certain contexts skilful language is a particularly effectual non-physical demonstration of status. It can hold conflict in equipoise. France’s elite would appear to have learned this lesson early on – to have placed high valuation on a linguistic dexterity that can both express tension and be used to deflect its bodily enactment.

Of course the application of the lesson would be uneven; nor should we suppose that all medieval French literature expresses tension: the saints’ lives (hagiographies), among the earliest of chronicles, voice duty to God in pure form and thus generally lack the mental agon, the contest, of self against self to be found in almost all the literature the West now values, going back to Homer. But much of this early literature does depict both outer and inner strife. For instance, in the medieval French epic, loyalty was owed first to the Lord God, then to one’s liege, and, later, to one’s Lady: these loyalties could however clash. The first masterpiece of French literature, La Chanson de Roland, shows how works can both describe struggles and paradoxically be ‘used’ to consolidate political aims. Composed in Northern France in the late eleventh century, the Roland narrates the end of the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne’s campaign against the Saracens of Spain. The Christians accept the Saracens’ deceitful offer of peace, an offer opposed only by Charlemagne’s nephew Roland. Roland’s treacherous stepfather Ganelon conspires with the Saracens, who ambush Charlemagne’s army; Roland, commanding the rearguard, at first refuses the advice of his friend Olivier to blow his oliphant (ivory horn) and summon help from the rest of Charlemagne’s retreating army. Roland dies, Charlemagne takes vengeance on the Saracens, and the traitor Ganelon is executed.

This epic enjoyed great popularity in the Middle Ages and was translated and adapted into Latin, Norse, Middle High German, Dutch, Welsh and Middle English. Arguably, at the time of its dissemination it reflected, and even contributed to, some sense of quasi-national community: it refers to ‘dulce France’, ‘sweet France’ (line 109 and elsewhere), and to the bitter tears, the swooning in dismay, of ‘100,000 French’ (‘Cent milie Franc en unt si grant dulur, / N’en i ad cel ki durement ne plurt’; ‘Cent milie Francs s’en pasment cuntre tere’, lines 2907–08, 2932). It illustrates, too, the literary representation of history for purposes of propaganda: the original battle, in 778, was against the Basques not the Saracens. But the Crusades were now on the horizon: the Roland was composed soon after 1086, and the Pope’s first call to the Crusades was in 1095. These Crusades have been described as Western Europe’s first colonial venture, and differences between ‘Moor’ and ‘Christian’, with concomitant distortions of Islam, mark many works of medieval French literature. Thus this early masterpiece serves a directly political end. Nor does the story end there. As the most widely known of the hundred or so medieval French epics that have come down to us, the Roland shows how culture can be commandeered by posterity as well as by contemporaries for purposes of national solidarity. For it is uncertain whether the origins of the tale are Germanic or ‘French’, and, as we have seen, at the time it was written there was no undiluted French national feeling in the modern sense. Nevertheless, in later centuries the Roland was held to be a prime example of ‘Frenchness’, never more so than in the late nineteenth century, in the wake of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1).

But the Roland is significant in other ways. It has been described as a ‘liturgy of genocide’: in haunting verse it details multiple dismemberings and disembowelments of both French and pagans with no visible compassion for the pagans. Yet it is a tale of moral as well as of physical conflicts. These moral conflicts arise when Charlemagne wishes to cease fighting and accept a truce; in Ganelon’s treason itself; and when Roland puts his pride above his duty to preserve his men. Psychological and political complexity fuse when the Roland shows the different reactions of individuals to the same communal crisis, and when it suggests that though this may be a tale of ultimate ‘triumph’ for the French, theirs is a Pyrrhic victory. For the work depicts the horror of the French losses at least. ‘When Count Roland sees his fellow-nobles dead, / including Olivier whom he loved, oh so much!, / he feels tender and begins to weep. / His face lost all its colour;/ so great was his suffering that he could not stand upright’ (lines 2215–19). The verse structure itself can recreate the shock of the violence. ‘When the emperor goes to search for his nephew, / in the grass of the meadow he finds so many flowers / that are crimson with the blood of our barons’ (lines 2870–2): the third line, with deliberate suddenness, contrasts the natural beauty of the flowers with the slaughter that stains them. Charlemagne is often said to be weary, not to know what to do; and when, at the very end, the angel Gabriel summons him to further warfare against the pagans, he weeps and says, ‘God! how hard is this life that I lead’ (line 4000). In short, as much imaginative energy goes into the temporary defeat of the French as into their ultimate victory, as much into tragedy as triumphalism. The Roland serves as a model of a certain kind of literary engagement with history, an engagement that shapes a multiperspectival awareness of national events, and heightens sensitivity to the relationship between the personal and the political.

This model was followed by other medieval authors. The Roland is a chanson de geste, that is, a ‘song about history, about deeds’. The genre flourished until the early fourteenth century; these long and often rough-hewn epic narratives recreate the trauma of violence. The late twelfth-century poem Raoul de Cambrai even explores the point at which a lord’s ill-treatment of his man justifies the man’s disloyalty, and asks whether, after a formal renunciation of fealty, the slaying of lord by man should be regarded as treason or not. Somewhat later narrative forms like the first-person dits, and historical accounts like Froissart’s Chronicles (1360–1400), evoke the sufferings of terrified victims; whether directly or ironically, they can query the necessity for violence, and can stage not all-powerful monarchs but uncertain or weak kings. Thus many of these works – including those commissioned as propaganda exercises on behalf of nobles – described a political system in which, in theory, abuses could be challenged, authority-figures held in check. Arguably they helped to maintain such a system, or the idea of it: an idea that, for much of France’s history, guarded against the worst excesses of absolutism.

And this varied governance allowed for the spread of culturally rich regional courts whose seigneurs not only enjoyed works about their own ancestors but also, as I have suggested, created communities that vied with each other in elegance and refinement. For as well as an intense engagement with ‘history’, French literature was developing another typical characteristic. From the late eleventh century on, the troubadours – poet-musicians – performed at, and were financially supported by, all the major courts of France; they were also in demand at those of Spain, Portugal, northern Italy and England. The troubadours’ depiction of love sometimes resembles a game with defined rules; their exquisite verse deploys intricate, virtuoso rhyme-schemes. Later in the Middle Ages, lyric poetry became still more intricate, almost mathematical in its structures. This delight in the ‘rules’ of love, and in linguistic patterning and ingenious play, is perhaps more consistently self-conscious in French than in other national literatures. Sophistication must not only exist but can be advertised as such: it creates importance.

That sophistication depends too on a foregrounding of the female figure. Here we encounter one of the major contradictions of French literary culture, a culture that has almost from the start both demoted and promoted women. For eight centuries France has argued about the role and ‘nature’ of women – arguments doubtless affecting mainly the well-born, but nevertheless a live part of social and literary interchange. The earliest examples of these ‘querelles des femmes’, ‘women-debates’, are to be found around 1200. Feminist critics have focused on the demotions of womanhood; there is another side. The model of courtly love, fin’amor, that France transmitted to the rest of Europe is, to be sure, reliant on an idealized and sometimes condescending gallantry, but it also recognizes that women have desires, and gives their feelings prominence in however stylized a form. Numerous hagiographies laud female martyrs and saints, endowing them with the role of representing ‘ordinary’ Christians. And while much medieval literature is scurrilously misogynistic, comparing women to animals and lumping them all together for negative generalizations, many of the finest writers of the period like Chrétien de Troyes do create nuanced female characters who act with intelligence and initiative.

How did this contradiction arise? We may suppose a basic assumption that the female sex is the inferior one, since this exists in most societies. The early nineteenth-century writer Germaine de Staël was the first commentator to argue that belief in the Virgin Mary began to change men’s attitudes to women (in De la littérature, 1800). Since then, others have discussed the ‘Mariolatry’ that swept France in particular in the Middle Ages, pointing out how many churches and cathedrals are dedicated to Mary (the greatest being Chartres) – not only dedicated to her, but sometimes exclusively depicting scenes drawn from her life. This cult of Mary may have arisen from an early questioning of authority. The Trinity was feared, whether God the Father, the Holy Ghost, or Christ himself. All male, they could be expected to apply laws rigorously (and the king shared in their divine power); whereas Mary might bend the rules, was on the side of the sinner – she could intercede for the thief or mischief-maker in the most unlikely, the quirkiest, of circumstances. The age was not ready for atheism, much less for revolution, but Mary offered a way of ‘thinking round’ the prevailing ideology; and some of the grateful devotion she thus earned spilled over onto real women.

Certainly, France has an ambivalence towards women still more visible than in other European countries, and this has affected both its politics and its literary culture. On the one hand, that culture can be unremittingly sexist. On the other, intellectual women can be lauded, given ‘space’ in which to be creative individuals and to engage with issues of the day. Here are a few examples of the ambivalence. Reigning supreme among the anti-feminist works that proliferated in the Middle Ages was the Roman de la rose, highly popular not only in France but throughout Europe (composed c.1225–78; it was begun by Guillaume de Lorris and continued by Jean de Meun, whose part is much longer and more significant). This verse dream-narrative of a young man’s initiation into love looks misogynistic. It stages coarse advisors and ends as explicitly as may be with a sexual congress that implies painful deflowering for the woman, even hinting at rape: ‘there was a barrier within, which I could feel but not see … Therefore I forced my way into it … in order duly to pluck the rose-bud … I can tell you that at last, when I had shaken the bud, I scattered a little seed there. This was when I had touched the inside of the rose-bud and explored all its little leaves’ (The Romance of the Rose, 333–4; translation by Frances Horgan). Even this work, however, plays so learnedly with literary conventions, and with allegorical figures of Love and Friendship, that it can be interpreted (and has been) as predominantly a ‘debate’ about love and sex; in other words – so its modern supporters argue – the ambiguous structure of the Rose should not be understood as tending in one direction only.

And there were some women writers in the Middle Ages, for instance female troubadours (the trobairitz) and the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman writer Marie de France, who composed a series of witty and dexterous verse tales, the Lais (Lays) and adapted into French fables from Aesop and other sources (including Arabic ones). Marie de France was writing at about the mid-point of the two-century period when, for the elite, ‘English’ and ‘French’ language and culture overlapped to the point of being often indistinguishable. She lived at a court (that of the Plantagenet king Henry II) in France’s first large overseas colony – England. (That colonization meant that the French language fused with ‘English’ and for centuries would shape English ideas not only of cuisine, but also of war, diplomacy, couture, ballet, equestrianism … ). Marie’s tales evoke a world of magic and marvels in which, almost by sleight of hand, adulterous relationships are taken for granted if the marriage is a loveless one; her passionate heroes and heroines see love as an ultimate value. Still more radical are the fables, which describe power-struggles among different ‘ranks’ of animals – in the manner of all fables, but given a sometimes startlingly contestatory twist by Marie.

The most renowned female author of the medieval period is Christine de Pizan (c.1364–c.1431). Extraordinarily, she was a professional writer. Male writers could count on making a living from Church attachments at varying levels of formality, which left them free to compose (thus the medieval Church, paradoxically, helped to support secular literature). But no such flexible structure was available to women. It was precisely this that led Pizan to make a living from her pen. Her output was large and diverse, including political and moral works, but her best-known work now is Le Livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405), and she is held to have been the first woman in the Middle Ages to tackle literary misogyny or anti-feminism openly. The aim of The City of Ladies was two-fold: to refute the equation of women with sinfulness, and to instil a sense of their own worth into female readers. Pizan is not a modern feminist: she does not advocate that women perform striking deeds or seek ‘equal opportunities’; rather, she promotes their moral qualities, and on the face of it her title alludes not to activism but to St Augustine’s conception of the ‘city of God’. Yet the ‘city’ of this political writer does become something secular. It is a community that stretches back in historical time, an entity that denotes mutual protection and ‘civilization’. Furthermore, the work proceeds in a way that we are beginning to discern as another recognizable strand of French culture, in that it self-confessedly focuses on representations. It is just as much about literary, biblical and mythical portrayals of females as about men’s treatment of women, and one of its key targets is not a legal system, but another book – the Roman de la rose, about whose misogyny Pizan at least was in no doubt. Pizan’s own book is the protective ‘city’. The social unit and the written artefact stand for each other.

One specially arresting case of a work deliberately blurring gender, racial, political and genre boundaries all at once is that of the anonymous part-prose, part-verse Aucassin et Nicolette. (It survived into the early modern and modern periods and was revived as an operetta as recently as 1979–80: La Belle Sarrasine, The Beautiful Saracen.) Written in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, Aucassin et Nicolette draws attention to its mixed form by calling itself a chante-fable (song-story). Full of gentle parody and deflation, it tells the tale of two young lovers separated by the wishes of a tyrannical father. Nicolette has Saracen origins; Aucassin, although the son of a Christian count, has a Moorish name. Naively besotted with his Nicolette, Aucassin is an ‘anti-knight’ who, placing love above all other considerations, refuses to fight. This was potentially scandalous in noble feudal society as well as in the world of ‘courtoisie’, chivalric courtesy, where love is the source of prowess, not a reason for running off into a private world. As for Nicolette, far from being a lady on a pedestal, she is resourceful, amusing – this is part of what Aucassin likes about her. ‘Nicolette, … so beautiful when you joke and tease’ (‘biax borders et biax jouers’, VII line 15). The work may well have been unpopular at the time: all copies of it but one disappeared, and no mention is made of it in contemporary texts. But what is important is that it could be written. And certainly popular in the same period was the subtler Chrétien de Troyes (he flourished between 1160 and 1185). Chrétien is the author of five Arthurian verse narratives that put questions about status and ra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Cultural History of Literature
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Note on References, Bibliography and Translations
• Introduction
• 1 From the Beginnings to the Renaissance
• 2 From Sun King to Enlightenment (1630–1789)
• 3 Between Revolutions (1789–1830)
• 4 Balzac and the Birth of Cultural Studies (1830–1870)
• 5 Republic, Reaction and the Murder of Taste (1870–1913)
• 6 Despair and Optimism (1913–1944)
• 7 Commitment and Playfulness (1944–1968)
• 8 After May 1968
• 9 ‘Foreignness’ Early and Modern
• 10 Francophone Literature: Recent Developments
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index