Emily Butterworth

Churchill College, Cambridge

The rules of engagement that emerge in polemical texts from the early seventeenth century appear highly conventional – indeed, almost ritualised. The conventions developed from the scholastic disputatio and, especially, the pamphlet polemics of the Wars of Religion. Indeed, they retained much of the pamphlet’s aggression and energy.[1] For reasons of clarity and precision, pamphlets and polemical texts often respected the order of the adversary text, shadowing its every move and riposting every argument in detail. The conventions of these rhetorical jousts owed much to those of the duel, to which writers made frequent reference either metaphorically or directly; this is especially true of the conférence, a public verbal combat on religious or doctrinal topics that took the form of statement and response. Self-defences and polemical texts transposed armed combat onto the printed page: it has been argued that written polemic was a substitute for or an extension of the armed struggles of the Wars of Religion.[2]

The adversary text was reproduced within the frame of the response, often in italics in order to distinguish it from the reply; quotations were followed by long refutations, sometimes more than twice as long as the adversary text. This use of quotation obviously provided a golden opportunity to represent the adversary text in a particular light, even to deform and distort it. A later canonical example of invective, Pascal’s Provinciales (1656-1657), made extensive use of quotation in both refuting and accusing his target group, the Jesuits. Pascal’s practice of quotation has been described as an ‘imposture littéraire’, in which literary methods deform and betray the quoted text or thought.[3] In defensive texts of the early seventeenth century, a time when the practice of quotation was being interrogated, this practice was exploited and transformed by polemicists in order to attack their adversaries and persuade their audience. In doing so, writers sought to bring about the desired perlocutionary effect: the repair of the damaged reputation. In defending its subject and accusing its adversary, the defence is a performative text. I propose to analyse the practice of defensive writing through the case study of the controversy surrounding Estienne Pasquier and François Garasse, exemplary of textual polemics of the period.

Pasquier (1529-1615), a Parisian lawyer, attracted the wrath of the Jesuits by pleading the case against their students being admitted to the university of Paris in 1564. In response to the attacks that he consequently received, Pasquier published his Cathechisme des Jesuistes in 1602. Garasse (1584-1631) targeted Pasquier in his experiment in invective, an ‘art de l’invective’ that Marc Fumaroli has described as the double of Coton or Richeome’s ‘art de la louange’.[4] Indeed, Fumaroli argues that Garasse initiated a literary quarrel over the limits and legitimacy of invective in a Christian context, a quarrel in which Pascal’s Proviciales represented an important stage. Garasse’s most celebrated combat was perhaps his writing against Théophile de Viau in which he brands the poet a ‘libertin’: an accusation, it has been argued, that was more of a literary creation and polemic construction than a realistic critique of Théophile.[5]

Garasse’s Recherches des recherches (1622) was a hostile dissection of Pasquier’s Recherches de la France (first published in 1560), a miscellaneous collection of history and anecdote.[6] Pasquier’s book was revised and augmented by his sons after his death and it was this larger volume that provoked Garasse’s invective. Pasquier’s sons solicited the aid of the lawyer Antoine Rémy to defend their father’s good name; two years later Rémy published an anonymous reply to Garasse, the Deffence pour Estienne Pasquier.[7] In this analysis, I will concentrate on the polemical tactics and strategies employed by Rémy in his defence.[8]

Rejection and self-justification

The Deffence is a long refutation of Garasse’s work and, as its title suggests, a piece of forensic rhetoric (Rémy was, like Pasquier, a lawyer at the Paris parlement) aiming to exonerate its subject and condemn its target. It is, then, explicitly rhetorical, a persuasive exercise directed towards both Garasse (who is often directly addressed in the text) and the potential reader. Although the Deffence is an anonymous work that never mentions Antoine Rémy by name, it is nevertheless intrinsic to Rémy’s persuasive project that the authorial persona be convincing, even personable, and entirely free of the simmering passions that motivate Garasse. The construction of an authorial identity is essential, just as orators must establish their own credentials if they are to sway their audience.

Rémy deploys the first person extensively in his preface to the reader in precisely this persuasive purpose. His ‘je’ is authoritative, measured, but also definitive, almost authoritarian: ‘Je confesseray franchement’ (fol. e iir); ‘je voudrois bien sçavoir’ (fol. e iiiiv); ‘je ne vis jamais […] je m’imaginerois’ (fol. e vir); ‘je vous advertiray en passant’ (fol. e viiir). The first person is a constant presence in the preface, reassuring, advising, picking out the detail of the argument against Garasse. This construction of an authorial identity – trustworthy, convincing – is an essential part of the persuasive project.

From the start, Rémy is faced with a paradox: he must engage in polemic while appearing innocent of its baser motives. To this effect, he begins the Deffence with a lengthy disclaimer, distancing himself from any involvement in personal polemic. He would never have even read Garasse’s books, he protests, were it not for the uncommon vitriol of Garasse’s attack on Pasquier. He has been forced to pick up his pen in reply:

Si vous n’eussiez tesmoigné une haine irreconciliable contre les Cendres & la Memoire, de feu Estienne Pasquier, l’allant attaquer jusques dans le plus creux de son sepulcre, sept ans apres sa mort: je ne me fusse jamais donné la peine de feüilleter vos escrits, ny d’eventer vos boufonneries… (fols a iir-v)

Rémy is the reluctant polemicist, goaded into action: in this light, the whole Deffence could be characterised as an extended preterition. Indeed, what the Rhetorica ad Herennium describes as the effect of preterition (in that text occultatio) is key to the defensive project: the creation of suspicion, an effect much harder to counter than a direct accusation.[9] While not wishing to give credence to the adversary’s arguments, Rémy is obliged nevertheless combat them. Garasse, in contrast, is characterised as a compulsive (‘insatiable’, fol. a iiv) polemicist, motivated by rage and hatred. Since the Deffence is repeatedly contrasted directly to Garasse’s work, this accusation of passionate involvement rebounds favourably on the defensive text: if Garasse exhibits ‘boufonneries’, ‘insolence’ and ‘inhumanité’, the Deffence, it is implicitly suggested, is reasonable, courteous and moderate.

The Deffence also, and more importantly, claims to hold the truth in contrast to Garasse’s lies, ‘calomnies’ and ‘impostures’. In this Rémy represents himself as participating in an inevitable and impersonal revelation: ‘La verité se recognoist tousjours, & quelque couleur qu’un Imposteur puisse donner à ses mensonges, on découvre tost ou tard ses artifices, & la laideur de son ame’ (p. 118). In this ineluctable movement towards truth, Garasse will be found out: his impostures are too ugly to remain hidden. Rémy must to testify to truth; and yet the paradox of the long reply to a supposedly self-evident imposture remains. To explain this paradox, Rémy claims that his intervention has, in fact, become necessary because of the degradation of the epoch: ‘C’est un malheur bien déplorable à un Estat, de voir que la médisance y soit tellement en credit, qu’on ne puisse éviter les atteintes de sa langue venimeuse’ (fol. er). Because slander has such currency in the world, Garasse’s lies pass, and the Deffence d’Estienne Pasquier is necessary.

In order to differentiate it from the dogmatic Recherches, the Deffence is styled as a response to as well as a refutation of Garasse’s work. A prefatory letter makes this intention clear: ‘A François Garasse, en quelque lieu qu’il puisse estre’ is a direct address to the Jesuit, and it condemns him in no uncertain terms. It equally, however, seems to invite a reply: ‘si […] vous trouvez dequoy esgayer vostre plume, je vous prie de me faire sçavoir au premier jour’ (fol. a iiiiv). A model of dialogue and exchange is ostensibly advocated, and contrasted with Garasse’s domineering language – particularly with the fact that he has published his attack after Pasquier’s death, thereby ensuring the impossibility of the right to reply. Rémy writes, for instance, that ‘Ce sont les plaintes que je vous faites, & dont je vous demande raison, maintenant que vous estes encore en pleine vie’ (fol. a iiiiv): he would welcome a direct response from Garasse, a response that is possible because the latter is still alive. This would ideally inaugurate an open exchange between the two writers: ‘j’ay une plume toute fraiche taillee, qui n’attend que vostre resolution’ (fol. a iiiiv).

This open invitation is, however, somewhat belied by the tone and vocabulary of the Deffence: it is far from being the measured and moderate correction it here purports to be. The tone of the Deffence is uncompromising and critical: Garasse’s work is repeatedly rejected in its entirety with contemptuous markers such as ‘bouffoneries’, ‘imposture’, ‘mesdisances & outrages’, ‘calomnies’, ‘sterilité d’esprit’ (all chapter headings). The reader is left in no doubt as to the villain of the piece: it is ‘le boufon’, ‘l’imposteur’, ‘l’injurieux’ and ‘l’impie’ (again, all section headings) – that is, of course, Garasse.

The reader appears the ultimate point of reference for the defence. Even in the prefatory letter to Garasse, Rémy claims, ‘J’ay creu que le public auroit interest de cognoistre la fausseté de vos accusations’ (fol. a iiv). Public interest becomes the major motive behind Rémy’s counter-attack, further absolving him of any responsibility that might be attached to polemical texts. The ‘Preface au lecteur’ seeks to reinforce this impression of innocence and good faith, as Rémy assures his reader that there is no beam in his own eye: ‘quant nous voulons reprendre quelqu’un, il faut premierement regarder dans nos yeux s’il n’y a point de poudre’ (fol. e iiiiv). This use of prolepsis, in which Rémy replies in advance to a hypothetical objection in order to disable it, also shores up his own good faith. While the adversary is hateful, enraged, and slanderous, the author of the Deffence establishes his credentials of honesty and transparency. To this end, he promises to report the facts as they are: ‘devant que de passer plus outre, je voudrois bien sçavoir de Garasse ce qu’il pretend par son libelle’ (fol. e iiiiv).

This open transparency is also extended towards the reader. The Deffence is punctuated with direct address to the audience, calling on them to read the evidence and decide for themselves. ‘Je vous veux faire voir les paroles de Pasquier’ (p. 610), ‘Vous avez veu ses médisances en general, vous allez voir par le menu les calomnies & les Injures qu’il a inventées contre Estienne Pasquier’ (p. 667); ‘je vous veux faire voir par experience’ (p. 718). These examples call on the reader as on a judge or a jury: the evidence is put before them, they will judge Pasquier and Garasse in accordance with it. Indeed, Rémy’s authorial presence is at times deliberately effaced in order to emphasise the reader’s judgement: ‘D’interposer mon jugement dessus, je ne le veux point faire: […] j’en laisse le jugement au Lecteur’ (p. 824). Rémy presents himself as the transparent medium through which the truth will be made known: but this is, of course, a hidden ‘jugement’ of his own, as he occludes his involvement to emphasise a universal truth.

Fabricating the adversary

Garasse, Rémy argues, is an unscrupulous polemicist who will go to any lengths to persuade his readers of his version of Pasquier. Rémy pictures Garasse as a scavenger, rooting around in the back of bookshops for material to feed his libelle: ‘Vous le voyez tous-jours en la boutique de quelque Libraire, à recoudre & rappetacer quelques LAMBEAUX’ (p. 406). The image of Garasse as a rappetaceur of old books and writings suggests that he constructs his attack from pre-extant material, cobbling together a straw man that bears little resemblance to the historical Pasquier – an ‘amalgame et fiction’, as Louise Godard de Donville argues in her work on Garasse.[10]

In the Recherches des recherches, Garasse enumerates the ‘marques aenigmatiques d’un mesdisant’, offering the reader an enigma – a literary device that Rémy abhors, while replicating it – which when unravelled reveals a slanderer or, more specifically, Estienne Pasquier (Recherches, pp. 1-18). The slanderer is a monstrous creature, whose body is fragmented and catalogued: the nose of a rhinoceros, goat’s ears, bat’s wings. Each attribute signifies some characteristic of the slanderer: the parts of his body become parts of a riddle.[11] Donville has shown how this procedure is standard in Garasse’s invective writing, whereby he creates a patchwork figure that is representative of literary and philosophical models of a particular type. This patchwork figure is then applied to the historical person of the adversary – here Estienne Pasquier embodies all that is perverse and wrong in the slanderer. The actual historical figure is lost in the characteristics of the type. Indeed, Garasse makes an explicit reference to Theophrastus’s Characters in his chapter on the slanderer, allying himself by association with the caricaturist (Recherches, p. 12).

Rémy seeks to demonstrate how Garasse twists what he reads in Pasquier’s work and misinterprets it to fit his own designs. Garasse simply ‘se bat contre son Ombre’, his own negative projection.[12] Garasse is a ‘LECTEUR GROSSIER (comme il confesse luy-mesme, p. 482)’ (p. 629). Reference to Garasse’s text, however, proves that Rémy himself somewhat deforms his adversary in quotation. Garasse in fact posits a hypothetical ‘lecteur grossier’ to draw attention to Pasquier’s use of metaphor:

Je desirerois que Maistre Pasquier eust choisi une comparaison plus sortable pour exprimer sa nature, de peur que quelques lecteurs grossiers, tel que je puisse estre, ne passent trop simplement de la metaphore, jusques à la proprieté du langage… (Recherches, p. 482)

Rémy thus makes use of his own constructed adversary: in deforming the quotation from Les Recherches, he can present Garasse as a bad and careless reader whose preconceived ideas distort his interpretation of Pasquier. Once Garasse is defined as a bad reader, all of his readings of Pasquier can be rejected as fallible. The humanist emphasis on proper reading practice is put under strain by those very polemical practices that ostensibly seek to uphold it.

Quotation and deformation

The Deffence contains extensive quotations from Garasse’s Recherches des recherches, printed in italics or capitals and followed by lengthy refutations; this is a conventional tactic in defensive writing from the pamphlet polemics of the Wars of Religion. Rémy also includes many quotations from Pasquier’s own works to refute the claims – or ‘calomnies’ – made by Garasse. Ostensibly, Rémy declares his fairness and even-handedness; in practice, quotations can be twisted and even deformed to serve the purposes of the polemicist.

From the start, the Deffence undertakes to reply systematically and exhaustively to Garasse’s text, and in order to do so, models itself closely on the Recherches. This poses a few problems for Rémy: firstly, his model is chaotic and monstrous; and secondly, the boundaries between the two texts risk erasure.

Rémy is careful to emphasise the monstrosity of the Recherches des recherches. It is disordered, irrational, packed full of lies; an ‘Avorton’, a ‘monstre sans teste’, ‘un vray Amphitheatre, plein de monstres’ (fols ev-e iir). It is a derivative text, made up of ‘pieces rapportées’, like a substandard commonplace book. However, in order to dispute successfully Garasse’s arguments, the reply is forced to mirror the organisation of his text. Rémy expresses reluctance at this necessity:

Or pour proceder avec quelque ordre parmy l’ordure & le desordre que Garasse nous fait paroistre en son libelle des Recherches, je veux m’accommoder à son stile pour ceste fois… (fol. [e vi]r)

Indeed, the Deffence follows the organisation of the Recherches exactly, responding line-for-line and sometimes word-for-word to Garasse’s contentions and arguments. At times, Rémy imitates not only the method of his target text, but much of the vocabulary and stylistic traits as well. For example, the opening disclaimer referred to above (‘Si vous n’eussiez tesmoigné une haine irreconciliable contre les Cendres & la Memoire’, fol. a iir) is more than just a rhetorical flourish, a denial of responsibility and statement of reluctance. It is obviously and deliberately caulked on the target text, Garasse’s Recherches des recherches. Garasse opens his polemic with a letter to Pasquier, who died seven years before the publication of the Recherches: ‘Si vos enfans n’eussent […] aprés vostre decedz publié les opprobres de leur pere […], je n’eusse pris le loisir ny la patience de remuer vos cendres, & foüiller dans vos livres’ (Recherches, fols a iir-v).

Such surreptitious quotation is one of Rémy’s most frequent tactics. His sentences are peppered with words printed in capitals, signalling that they have been lifted from the target text to be used against it. Garasse’s text is thus re-framed and recited in another, friendlier context; effectively, it is turned back onto itself. For instance, Garasse’s words are reprinted to lend them a whining and hypocritical tone in the following passage:

Un Calomniateur & Injurieux vous couvrira de tous les opprobres, vilennies, mensonges, & impostures malignes qu’il aura peu controuver: & puis quant il sera au bout de son roollet […], il vous viendra dire d’un visage pasle, & remply d’hypocrisie, mais que vous ay je fait, moy qui ne fis jamais aucun tort à personne, & qui n’ay d’esprit, de venes, & de poulmon, que pour le public? [Pag. 31. De son Apolog.][13]

Re-cited within the surrounding text of the Deffence, Garasse’s words take on an entirely different tone. Simply repeating Garasse’s words out of context has a strong suggestive effect.

This practice involves a risk, however: that of the dissolution of boundaries between the two texts in the polemic. Rémy refers constantly to his use of Garasse’s words in order to draw attention to it, but also as if somewhat anxious about it: ‘le battre de ses mesmes armes’ (fol. [e viii]r); ‘pour me servir de ses mots’ (p. 6); ‘pour me servir des mots de Garasse’ (p. 514); ‘une fois en ma vie me servir des armes de Garasse’ (p. 714). The repeated formulae of attenuation or hesitation (‘une fois en ma vie’, ‘pour ceste fois’) form part of the technique of preterition through which Rémy distances his text from Garasse’s. They also signal an anxiety surrounding the practices of emulation and quotation in the early years of the seventeenth century.

A recurring feature of the Pasquier polemic as I have analysed it here is a striking similarity between the Recherches and the Deffence. They seem to participate in a strange symbiosis in which they both share the same conventional ground: both texts emerge from the same rhetorical system. This is perhaps inevitable: the defensive text must respect conventions and rhetorical structures if it is to be an effective response. But fighting on the same terms – ‘de ses mesmes armes’ – brings the reply close to what it seeks to refute. The adversaries seem ultimately to be replaced by their polemically constructed representatives; the discursive practice of polemic itself displaces the opposing sides with their own logic.

Footnotes

[1] On religious polemic during the Wars of Religion, see Bernard Dompnier, Le Venin de l’hérésie: image du protestantisme et combat catholique au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Centurion, 1985), pp. 169-97; Geneviève Guilleminot, ‘La polémique en 1561: les règles du jeu’, Le Pamphlet en france au XVIe siècle, Cahiers V. L. Saulnier 1 (1983), pp. 47-58. On pamphlet politics and methods of polemic in the early seventeenth century, see Jeffrey K. Sawyer, Printed Poison: Pamphlet Propaganda, Faction Politics, and the Public Sphere in Early Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

[2] Dompnier, Venin de l’hérésie, pp. 169 and 176.

[3] See Roger Duchêne, L’Imposture littéraire dans les ‘Provinciales’ de Pascal (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1985), pp. 171-84.

[4] Marc Fumaroli, L’Age de l’éloquence: rhétorique et ‘res literaria’ de la Renaissance au seuil de l’âge classique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), pp.326-34 (p. 327).

[5] See Louise Godard de Donville, Le Libertin aux origines à 1665: un produit des apologètes, (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1989), pp. 119-327.

[6] François Garasse, Recherches des recherches & autres oeuvres de M Estienne Pasquier (Paris: Sebastien Chappelet, 1622); Estienne Pasquier, Recherches de la France (Paris: V. Sertenas, 1560).

[7] Deffence pour Estienne Pasquier […] contre les impostures & calomnies de François Garasse (Paris: 1624).

[8] For an analysis of pamphlet techniques, see Marc Angenot, La Parole pamphlétaire: contribution à la typologie des discours modernes (Paris: Payot, 1982). Although it concentrates on the modern period, I found that Angenot’s study contains many useful tools.

[9] Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4:27:37.

[10] ‘Les combats exemplaires du père François Garasse’, in G. and G. Demerson, B. Dompnier, A. Regond (eds.), Les Jésuites parmi les hommes aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Association des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Clermont-Ferrand, 1987), pp. 197-204 (p. 201); and Le Libertin, pp. 113-15.

[11] On the enigma in the seventeenth century, see Nicholas Cronk, ‘The Enigma of French Classicism: a Platonic current in seventeenth-century poetic theory’, French Studies 40 (1986), 269-86.

[12] Deffence, p. 70. Fumaroli comes to the same conclusion with reference to the contrasting rhetorical stances of Garasse and Théophile: ‘Garasse […] combat en Théophile sa propre ombre, ou plus exactement sa propre vérité’ (L’Age de l’éloquence, p. 677).

[13] Deffence, pp. 642-3. The text of Garasse’s referred to is the Apologie du P. François Garassus, pour son livre contre les athéistes et libertins de nostre siecle (Paris: Sebastien Chappelet, 1624).

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