The Renaissance

In the sixteenth century French writers rediscovered the ancient world, made use of a new technology, the printing press, and began to argue that their own language was good enough for poetry, philosophy and law. The century produced a giant comic novelist, a thinker who invented a new kind of writing about himself, and a group of poets who wanted French to rival Latin. It was also a century of religious war. This chapter follows the French Renaissance through its main voices. Names, dates and attributions are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

Print, Learning and the Vernacular

Printing reached France in the late fifteenth century, and cities such as Paris and Lyon became centres of the book trade (check the details). Cheaper books spread the learning of ancient Greece and Rome, which scholars called the "new learning", and spread debates about religion as well. At the same time the French language gained status. A royal ordinance of 1539, often cited, required legal documents to be written in French instead of Latin (check the date and the wording). The question of whether the vernacular could carry serious writing was one the century answered by doing it.

François Rabelais

François Rabelais (born around 1483 to 1494, died 1553, check the dates) was a former monk who became a physician and a writer. His comic books about the giants Pantagruel and Gargantua, first published in the 1530s (check the dates), mix scholarship, obscenity, satire and invention on a vast scale. They mock pedants, the clergy and wars, and describe a utopian abbey, Thélème, whose motto is usually translated as "do what you will" (check). The books were condemned by the theology faculty of the Sorbonne, and the author had to be careful (check the details). The word "Rabelaisian" in English still means exuberant, earthy and satirical.

Michel de Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne (1533 to 1592) was a nobleman from near Bordeaux who retired from public life around 1570 to read and write in a tower of his château (check the details). The result was the Essais (Essays), a long and growing collection of short prose pieces first published in 1580 and later expanded (check). He is often described as the inventor of the essay as a literary form, in which a writer explores a subject, and himself, by thinking aloud. His motto, usually given as "What do I know?", sums up a sceptical, tolerant temperament (check). His friendship with the writer Étienne de La Boétie, who died young, is a recurring theme (check).

The Pléiade

A group of poets in the mid-sixteenth century, later called the Pléiade, set out to enrich French poetry by imitating the ancients and the Italians. Their manifesto, a work by Joachim du Bellay published in 1549, argued that French was a language worthy of great poetry and should be "defended and illustrated" (check the title and the date). Two names dominate.

Women Writers of the Century

Several women wrote at the highest level. Marguerite de Navarre, sister of King Francis I, was the author of the Heptaméron, a collection of tales told by a group of travellers, published after her death (check). In Lyon, Louise Labé published love poems in the 1550s that are still admired for their frankness (check). Their presence shows that the Renaissance was more open to women writers than it is sometimes said to be, though they remained exceptions.

Religious War

The century was shadowed by the Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants, which began in the 1560s and lasted decades (check). Atrocities such as the massacre of Protestants in Paris in 1572, known as the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, left a deep mark on writers (check). Montaigne's tolerance and the satire of Rabelais are partly responses to a world in which religious difference was lethal.

Exercises

Next chapter: The Grand Siècle: Classical Theatre, which covers Corneille, Racine, Molière and La Fontaine.