The Complete works of Voltaire published by the Voltaire Foundation were begun in 1968 and will be completed in 203 volumes in 2021. In so far as discoveries of manuscripts and editions will continue to be made, this monumental edition is necessarily incomplete. But it is also incomplete in another more profound sense. Eighteenth-century editions of Voltaire present an often unstable version of the

If Marie Mancini, niece of Louis XIV's chief minister Cardinal Mazarin, has come down through the ages, it has been because of her youthful love affair with the king and the scandal she caused later. She and her sister Hortense fled their marriages and travelled together and separately – but unaccompanied by the train their station demanded and unauthorised by their husbands – across western Europe

This article will reveal that the tragic characters’ unconscious wants, beliefs and desires have a direct influence on their behaviour and their interactions and contribute to the unfolding of the tragic plot in Racine’s Phèdre. This work uses Eric Berne’s transactional analysis to explore the psychoanalytical dimension of Phèdre’s behaviour towards Hippolyte in order to go beyond Roland Barthes’s

This article examines several motets composed to celebrate Saint Louis (Louis IX) in late seventeenth-century France. As praise of Saint Louis overlapped with that of Louis XIV, these pieces offer insights into the interplay between the French baroque sacred repertoire and royal encomium. In their texts and music, the motets reflect shifts linked not just to the ceremonial contexts for which they were

(2020). Editors’ Note. Early Modern French Studies: Vol. 42, ’Staging Justice in Early Modern France’, guest edited by Michael Meere and Valérie Dionne, pp. 105-105.

(2020). IN MEMORIAM – Christian Biet (1952–2020) Early Modern French Studies: Vol. 42, ’Staging Justice in Early Modern France’, guest edited by Michael Meere and Valérie Dionne, pp. 106-107.

(2020). Introduction: Staging Justice in Early Modern France. Early Modern French Studies: Vol. 42, ’Staging Justice in Early Modern France’, guest edited by Michael Meere and Valérie Dionne, pp. 108-115.

L’Antigone de Jean-Antoine de Baïf est la première pièce de Sophocle traduite en français et l’unique tragédie que le poète ait publiée. Souvent considérée comme une simple traduction, cette pièce a longtemps été ignorée du répertoire des Antigones françaises. Toutefois, Baïf procède à une réécriture en adaptant le texte au contexte de la fin du XVIe siècle qui fait écho aux guerres de Religion et

Les Corrivaus de Jean de la Taille (1573) dramatise la souveraineté royale comme source de justice et de concorde. Une double tentative d'enlèvement demeure impunie dans cette comédie humaniste. Le pardon des pères s'exerce au mépris apparent de l'institution judiciaire, entre éthique nobiliaire, royalisme pacificateur et morale évangélique. Le discours figuratif investit les thèmes de l'union et du

This article explores Corneille's ‘prison monologues’ – soliloquies uttered by imprisoned characters contemplating their own forthcoming execution. Unable to engage materially with the world, Corneille's prisoners are effectively reduced to voices; although objectively powerless, they are subjectively able to wield language as a tool to engage with and symbolically triumph over death. Refusing to condemn

On 21 November 1670, Parisian spectators could watch Racine's Bérénice at the Hôtel de Bourgogne and, a week later, attend the premiere of Corneille's Tite et Bérénice at the Palais Royal, as the playwrights and their troupes vied for box office success. Despite Racine's victory, scholarship on the playwrights has minimized the importance of this duel as just one among many guerres comiques. This essay

The eponymous protagonist of Phèdre emerges as a true tragic heroine by exercising her own free will to commit wrong instead of being a mere victim of fate. Criticism focusing on injustice has tended to shine light on Thésée, denying Phèdre royal sovereignty just as French Salic law did to queens. By shifting the spotlight from Thésée to Phèdre, and from the idea of judgment as a means of redressing

This article considers French theatrical adaptations of George Lillo’s 1731 tragedy, The London Merchant, or, The History of George Barnwell. It asks how authors engaged with concepts of crime and punishment in the process of translation across cultures, genres and theatrical traditions. Following analysis of Lillo’s play, itself adapted from a seventeenth-century ballad, the article focuses on French

This article examines the many rewritings of a single story: the adventures of a brigand vigilante, first told in Schiller's Die Raüber, adapted by Lamartelière into the 1792 hit Robert, chef de brigands, and updated over the next decade through new endings and sequels. The evolving nature of this vigilante – from noble brigand to popular insurrectionist to merciful judge to Terrorist – reflects the

Madame d’Aulnoy’s two fairy tales featuring central characters named Belle, La Belle aux cheveux d’or (1697) and Belle-Belle ou le chevalier Fortuné (1698) share similar themes and share many parallels and convergences in addition to sources in common. However, an overlooked and significant element in both stories is the depiction of same-sex desire on the part of central male characters. Ultimately

(2020). Editor’s Note. Early Modern French Studies: Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 1-1.

This article begins by considering a Complainte by the poet Philippe Desportes (1581) which contains the first recorded use of the substantive ‘self’ in French (‘cet autre moy’). Following Terence Cave (1999), it highlights the fact that it occurs in the context of Renaissance writings on friendship predominantly influenced by the ‘Aristotelian-Ciceronian model’. It proposes that alongside this well-established

This article rereads Bernard Mandeville’s infamous poem The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices Publick Benefits (1714; 1723; 1729) and Emilie du Châtelet’s French translation (1735-1738) in the context of the eighteenth-century debates around the differences between humans and animals. It argues that the considerable alterations to the text undertaken by Châtelet should be understood as a response

This article explores the ways in which the characters of Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves manipulate the conventions surrounding death in seventeenth-century France. It argues that Mme de Chartres prevents her daughter from participating in the traditional ceremonies surrounding death that were intended to comfort the living as much as the dying. In so doing, Mme de Chartres creates

This article examines the emergence and transformation of Francion’s epic character in Ronsard’s works from 1550 to 1578. This study of Francion’s genesis in Ronsard’s works relies on the close reading of the variations of the ‘Ode de la paix’ and the beginning of the Franciade, as well as on the analysis of the myth’s reception before and after 1572. In the 1550 ‘Ode de la paix’, the memory of the

In 1667, a group of intellectuals associated with the monastery of Port-Royal printed and distributed a new version of the New Testament in French. This article places their translation within the broader context of post-Tridentine devotional practices, and describes the polemics that followed the publication. The Port-Royal ideal of devotion placed the text of the Scriptures at its foundation. This

The Labyrinth of Versailles was a splendid horticultural space in early modern France frequented by courtiers and very likely by Louis XIV’s son the dauphin. In this article, the author argues that the Labyrinth stood as a vital locus of etiquette formation for the court, and more widely, the surrounding Parisian villages and early modern Europe at large. Fouquet’s usurpation of kingly authority comes

Critics from Joan DeJean to Marina Warner and Jack Zipes have lauded Charles Perrault's Apologie des femmes for its supposed defense of women against Nicolas Boileau's misogynous Satire X. Although Zipes wonders ‘[w]hether these works can be considered pro-women today,' this essay asks: can these works indeed be considered pro-women in the period in which they were written? Scholars studying the quarrel

This essay analyses the different ways in which the concept of liberty is explored in Racine's Britannicus.

Returning to Montaigne’s famous claim of ‘consubstantiality’ with his book, this article examines the place of authorship in the Essais. It proposes that Montaigne constructs an authorial ‘doubleness’, a technique by which static text yields multiple readings depending on how and with whom we associate the role of ‘authorship’. At the close of the ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’, Montaigne silently transcribes

Commentators have often noted ‘la présence latente du Ménon dans le cartésianisme’, but have not offered a sustained account of what this presence consists in. The author argues there exist strong parallels between Meno and the Recherche de la vérité, Descartes’ only extant dialogue, grounded partly in Descartes’ awareness of Plato's text. This parallel offers a useful approach to the Recherche. The

This article compares the theatrical careers of two performers in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti): Mme Marsan, a white European who dominated the public stage in 1780s Cap-Français, and a younger Creole woman of mixed racial ancestry, known as ‘Minette’, who performed in her home town of Port-au-Prince. Its focus is on performances of Marsollier and Dalayrac’s opéra-comique

The central thesis of this article is that Louis XIV’s reign, which has tended to be considered from an exclusively visual perspective, warrants re-evaluation from a sonic angle. Voice and sound assume a particular intensity at the time of the king’s final illness and after his death in 1715: not only do those closest to Louis, including Mme de Maintenon and his two servants, the Antoine brothers,

This article explores the commemorative meaning of sound in early modern Montpellier, focusing on the use of processional music and church bells to remember the French Wars of Religion. Scholarship...

Songs played a significant role in the French Wars of Religion by spreading political and religious ideas, and by involving Protestants and Catholics in the conflict. Performed in the streets, churches, workshops and houses, songs participated in the construction of urban soundscapes during the troubles. This article examines six songs composed after the execution of the duc and the cardinal de Guise

Breton ballads singing tales of crime and justice have been collected by ethnographers since the nineteenth century. These songs refer to a number of episodes of crime and violence that took place during the ancien régime. Composed shortly after the events they describe, they were passed on by families and communities over centuries, almost exclusively in oral culture, since printed broadsheets of

Although Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris and Le Nouveau Paris are framed in visual terms, the attention to types of sound in these works is sustained and detailed. Tracing Mercier’s descriptions of different types of sound, for instance noise, human voices, or music, I argue that Mercier offers us a soundscape of pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary Paris. Sound is used by Mercier as a means

The text and performance of Janequin’s work raises important issues about the representations of social classes in literature and the performance of everyday speech in a choral context. It introduces the voices of Parisian street singers in ways that seem immediately realistic — vinegar, green sauce, mustard, herring — yet also draw attention to their literary construction as ultimately the song exposes

The Fronde generated vast amounts of ephemeral printed media that circulated polemical information and shaped public discourse. Pamphlets, street songs, and placards, known as mazarinades, survive as artefacts of performances that jostled for attention in chaotic urban public spaces. In this article I analyse three placards produced during the Fronde to demonstrate their utilitarian function as a tool

Our current paradigm of sixteenth-century French vernacular discourse can be epitomized on the one hand by the classically inspired poetics of translatio propounded by the Pléiade, and on the other, by the scholarly efforts to establish a noble genealogy for the French language by writers such as the printer and Hellenist Henri Estienne. This picture, however, merely constitutes one of several sixteenth-century

Molière’s 1670 comedy-ballet Les Amants magnifiques presents its audience with the unusual case of a work that relies heavily on spectacle encouraging scepticism or wariness of the theatrical illusion’s ability to deceive. Theatre magic here becomes associated with arcane arts such as astrology, and critics have noted that Les Amants magnifiques seems to undermine the very aesthetic effects that it

Le premier discours du Débat de Folie et d’Amour peut être lu comme un seuil textuel, paradoxal et parodique, des Œuvres de Louise Labé. Alors que la voix auctoriale de l’Épître dédicatoire à Clémence de Bourges plaide pour un élargissement du territoire intellectuel et littéraire des femmes, l’incipit du Débat ramasse en effet l’action dans un périmètre frontalier, celui du ‘guichet’, ni dans le Palais

This study, both structuralist and diachronic, compares two sets of fictional dialogues which mark the beginning and the end of the Enlightenment. These are the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes of Fontenelle (1686-7), and – far less well-known – the ‘Entretiens sur les arbres, les fleurs et les fruits’ of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (a segment within his Voyage à l’île de France, 1773). The debt

The publication of dramatic texts designed initially to be performed on stage requires a form of translation from one medium to another. While a play in manuscript might be subject to modification in the rehearsal stage, a printed version is intended to preserve the text in a more fixed form. Molière became involved in the Paris printing world in order to maintain authorial and commercial control of

Cette étude porte sur le réseau des relations de Bayle en Angleterre tel qu’il apparaît dans sa correspondance, dont l'édition critique est désormais complète (Oxford, The Voltaire Foundation, 1999-2017, 15 vols). Bayle ne parle pas l’anglais mais il suit avec attention les nouvelles politiques, littéraires et scientifiques anglaises: son monde est la République des Lettres, qui ne connaît pas de frontières

Cet article contribue à réévaluer la référence possible au jésuite Juan de Mariana dans La Mariane de Tristan L’Hermite. À cette fin, je ré-analyse la réception de la question du tyrannicide et de la légitimité de l’opposition au pouvoir tyrannique par Nicolas Caussin dans ‘Le Politique malheureux’, l’une des sources de Tristan. Une telle réévaluation semble nécessaire si l’on prend en compte un maillon

Les écrivains de la Révolution ont souvent exprimé leur ambition d’écrire pour la postérité mais ils ont écrit dans un contexte d’incertitude et d’accélération du temps historique. Travaillant à la mémoire de la Révolution, ils ont été conscients de la fragilité de leur entreprise: beaucoup disent proposer des « matériaux » pour l’histoire ou des « esquisses ». Tacite est présenté comme le premier

This article explores the complex relationship between fame, glory, and death through the case of Corneille’s tragedy Horace (1640). Horace eagerly welcomes the chance to fight — and probably die — in a brutal combat against his brothers-in-law, believing that he is being offered a unique opportunity to show his valour and fortitude to his contemporaries and to secure his glorious posthumous ‘immortality’

Montaigne’s annotations on his copy of Lucretius’s poem De rerum natura reveal that he immerses himself in Lucretius’s world of atoms to the point of toying with the idea of a future version of himself, ‘alius montanus’. Montaigne imagines that this future self would be formed centuries after his death from the same atoms which constitute his current self. Whilst the Essais are certainly concerned

Art decays over time, so why should artists put faith in posterity? This question became a major source of disagreement in the correspondence between Denis Diderot and the sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet. For Falconet, art’s physical instability rendered posterity meaningless. Diderot, however, refused to accept this perspective. He insisted that writers like him would save great art for future generations

This introduction sets out the key questions to be explored in the volume, examining contemporaneous definitions and uses of ‘postérité’, and the complex temporal games that both anticipating and describing posterity entail. It considers the precariousness of relying on an unknown future public, how gaps and flexibility might enhance the likely survival of a text or its author, and how the idea of

This article will examine the strategic use of the term ‘postérité’ in the process of authorial self-fashioning. It will explore how Bussy-Rabutin (1618-93), the disgraced and exiled maître de camp turned mémorialiste, used appeals to posterity to restore his reputation and obtain Louis XIV’s forgiveness. Bussy self-consciously deployed the idea of ‘postérité’ to affect his present circumstances: using

Epitaphs record a person’s death, a life that was. Literary epitaphs of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries provided an opportunity, through the medium of verse and prose fiction, for anticipating death and projecting into the future the afterlife that will be constituted by a person’s posthumous reputation. This paper re-assesses writers’ goals in contriving an epitaph fiction. Far from

Plato said that humans reproduce not only to ensure the survival of the race, but also to overcome our own deaths — children preserve our memory and continue a bloodline. In his Confessions, and other works, Rousseau writes explicitly for a putative reader of the future, an inhabitant of a more enlightened posterity. It is in reaction both to these claims and to Rousseau’s notorious abandonment of

Although the title hero never sets foot onstage during the play, Corneille’s tragedy La Mort de Pompée (1643) offers one of the author’s most extensive and gruesome engagements with the corporeality of death. Having been led into a trap set by the cowardly Egyptian king Ptolomée, the Roman military hero Pompée is cruelly assassinated early in the play; his dead body is then decapitated, and then dumped

One of the outstanding poetic achievements of the French Counter-Reformation is the sonnet sequence of Jean de La Ceppède (1550-1623), the full title of which is Les Théorèmes sur le sacré mystère de notre Rédemption, and which appeared in a form whose combination of intense formal focus and broad narrative development is particularly appropriate to the subject. The collection, published in two stages

This article approaches the theme of villainy in two ways. It looks at the vilification of a figure named politique in two pro-Ligue pamphlets printed in Paris in 1589. Within this, the word vilain is deployed as one of several clustered insults used in the process of vilification. I discuss the problems of meaning associated with these word uses which seem primarily intended to insult, wound, and

This article examines the meaning of the word ‘vile’ by investigating how it is opposed to what is ‘precious’. The ‘precious’/’vile’ contrast dates back at least as far as early translations of Jeremiah, and resurfaces in Augustine’s reading of Genesis in the Confessions, and this may explain its presence in early modern French culture. But another powerful source is Petrarch’s Canzone 129, a rewrite

Guillaume Bouchet wrote 36 conversations which he presents as taking place in Poitou at convivial evening gatherings (or ‘Serées’). Each conversation has a theme. That of the sixteenth Serée (first published in 1597) is dreams. The debate is triggered as usual by an incident that has just occurred within the fictional frame: the host refused to invite someone that evening who had turned up earlier

This article studies the various physical, social, and moral criteria that determine villainy – in the various senses implied by Maurice de la Porte’s Epithetes (1571) – in Renaissance birds. It focuses primarily on Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Epîtres de l’Amant Vert (1505–11), two poems whose praise of Lemaire’s patron, Marguerite d’Autriche, is couched in praise of (and by) her pet parrot, the Amant

The guest editors explain how this special issue of Early Modern French Studies identifies and explores the significance of the vile in three key regards: i) the heuristic value of repulsive bodies; ii) a search for transcendent beauty in death and decay; iii) revilement along linguistic, social, and political lines. They argue that, within and between these wider phenomena, variations of vileness

One of the most renowned pages of Pascal's Pensées offers an astonishing phenomenology of the all-powerful action of imagination in human life. This article retraces the genesis of this text and reassesses the sources of Pascal's conception of imagination. It argues that Pascal builds up his definition of the imagination as an ‘anti-theodicy’ which carefully recalls and then criticizes the Cartesian

Depuis la fin du XXe siècle, la critique féministe considère la nouvelle historique comme l'interrogation littéraire par des écrivaines de la place des femmes dans l'Histoire et dans la société. Ce faisant, elle s'oppose à une tendance critique établie depuis Pierre Bayle qui valorise l’écriture masculine de l'Histoire et dénigre l'importance des auteurs féminins. Cet article montre, en utilisant l'exemple

The pious Élisabeth d'Orléans, Mme de Guise, had a vivid correspondence with Armand-Jean de Rancé, abbot of the Cistercian abbey of La Trappe in Normandy. Rancé was considered a champion of unconditional isolation from the world by his contemporaries, but in fact he recommended quite diverse forms and degrees of religious retreat in his letters to men and women, lay and religious. His guidelines to

This article draws a distinction between implicit and explicit forms of violence in Sade's work. It employs Barthes's concept of the neutral to demonstrate that implicit violence is a more creative and nuanced way for Sade to force his readers to bend to his will. This technique relies on the concept of Sadian politeness as a kind of bienséance, in keeping with ideas of eighteenth-century doxa. Sade