 |
Christian Jouhaud
EHESS (Paris)
If we choose not to be bound by previous over-restrictive
classifications (which, for example, draw too fine a distinction between
political expression, literary polemic and religious controversy, or which
classify printed materials into inflexible bibliographical categories) we
may take it that, in France, the age of the lampoon runs from the end of
the League (1594) to when Louis XIV started to reign in his own right
(1661). This view depends, however, on keeping to the Latin definition of
the term : libellus - booklet, pamphlet, a very broad
definition that is somewhat distant from the one more prevalent in the
17th century. Distant, therefore, from the views of Gabriel Naudé
who, at the start of the century, wrote in his pamphlet Le Marfore ou
discours contre les libelles that lampoons "are sold
secretly, cost a great deal, are worth nothing and are all the
worse for coming from a populace that is rough, uneducated and
uncouth”[1]. At some remove too from Furetière's
definition of libelle in his dictionary at the end of the century
: "a written piece, containing insults, criticisms and
accusations against someone's honour and reputation"[2]. Both men
were pamphleteers who would have argued to that there was nothing
separating defamatory lampoons from high political literature. Nothing,
that is, but a huge gulf, on the right side of which they themselves made
a pretence of standing. In fact, we know that the range of lampoons is
immense: from newsheets to pamphlets of all kinds (just think of Pascal's
Provinciales) , and including almanacs and works for the stage. (A
writer who had not assembled his plays into a volume of Collected
Works was a publisher merely of lampoons.)
You can quickly spot the periods when the publication of lampoons was
most prolific by leafing through the Catalogue de I'histoire de France
in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. There are two peaks
(1614- 1617 and the Fronde, with its 5000 titles) corresponding to the
political crises marking the two regencies. These key moments, clearly
political, should not, however, make us forget the publications linked to
the trial of Théophile de Viau or to the battles of words between
Catholics and Protestants, or those of the Le Cid Controversy[3].
To say nothing of the brochures and books celebrating the capture of
La Rochelle, or the continually rising tide of royal decrees.
Anyone opening a collection of lampoons for the first time is struck by
the contrast between the relative unity of editorial forms and the
diversity of textual forms. And often, once he has started to read, by the
opaqueness of the contents, an understanding of which calls for the
marshalling of considerable contextual information. Analysis of the text
is thus directed inevitably along the path of contextualization which, in
the first place, is political: it is essential to recognise the events
recorded, identify the people mentioned and understand topical allusions.
It very soon becomes apparent that lampoons published at a particular time
(a few days, weeks or even months apart) are related to each other; the
polemic creates intense textual links, producing clusters or networks of
texts grouped around one event. I find it advisable, therefore, to map the
connections between these texts. Indeed, such mapping is a necessary first
step towards reconstructing their meaning, in terms not only of the
political climate prevailing but also of their ideological significance
and even, if you will, their capacity to indicate the existence of a
'collective subconscious'.
This basic fact can be coupled with what is known about the writers,
about those who commissioned the lampoons and about the relations between
them - information which, in most cases, is extremely difficult to obtain.
But, in general, hidden behind the networks of texts lie networks of men,
reflecting the socio-political realities and practices of the time. Often,
the networks pre-date the outbreak of the polemical battle they support
and influence. The web of texts, written anonymously and sometimes
distributed in secret, can itself provide a clue to the identity of the
protagonists, thanks to the momentum that carries the polemic forward from
one text to another. This natural movement leads, in fact, from the ideas
expressed to the men expressing them and, between accusation and response,
reveals the links between the men. This applies just as much to the
pamphlets published during times of political unrest as to those, for
example, during the Le Cid Controversy.
It should not be forgotten that lampoons are an integral part of social
dispositions and processes that explain how they work as texts. They are
part of the power structures. For example: in April 1651, the 'vieille
Fronde' faction led by Jean-François de Gondi (Cardinal de Retz)
and the party of the prince du Conde fell out and began printing lampoons
attacking each other. In his Memoires, Retz recalls the response
that he chose to make to the appearance of "twelve or fifteen Libels
against me, all of them worse one than the other.":
"I had them brought to me at Dinner-time, that after
Dinner they might be read to all the Company that I had
with me. And when Ijudg'd that I had given Particular persons
sufficiently to understand that I despise'd these sorts of
Invectives, I resolv'd to let the Pub lick see that I knew,
however, how to take them up. To that effect, I set
carefully about writing a short but a general Answer, which I call'd
"Apologie de I'ancienne et legitime Fronde" that
appear'd to be literally writ against Mazarin, but the Meaning
of which was chiefly against those who made use
of his Name for undermining the Royal Authority. I got
that Answer to be cry'd about and sold allover Paris, by fifty
hawkers, who appear'd at once, having each their particular
Station appointed, with Persons to support them. I went that same
Morning, to the Parliament accompanied by 400 Men..." [4]
So, some lampoons are published in Paris. The narrator of the Memoires
chooses to protect himself from any possible repercussions by having
them read out "publiquement” (aloud for all to hear) to
the guests gathered round his dinner table. These ("the Company
that I had with me) are "particuliers" ("particular
Persons”) - private individuals - but some are also a
means of spreading the news through the city. They can bear witness to
Retz's public expression of contempt for the lampoons attacking him and
thereby bring it to the wider public. We see here how the two antithetical
notions of "public" and "private" are
found together in a sort of narrative strategy which leads, as we might
see it, to their subversion. Yet that's not the end of the story, since
Retz decides to reply further by printing lampoons addressed "to
the public". Doubly addressed, in fact, first by their content
and then by the manner in which they are distributed (backed by a show of
force) that testifies to the power of the party they are defending; in a
word, they demonstrate that power publicly. This demonstration is itself
reinforced by the move on the Paris Parliament, which allows the
Coadjuteur to be seen in public with an escort of four hundred men.
Quite apart from these varied applications, polemical confrontation -
whatever its basis and purpose - sets in motion a specific dynamic that,
elsewhere, I have called "polemical chain reaction"[5].
A lampoon appears, it provokes a response and that, in turn, gives
rise to another. From one text to another, the tone becomes more heated,
the polemic becomes more violent and rational argument is undermined. The
dispute, whether political, religious or academic, becomes increasingly an
attack on individuals; and first in the line of fire are the authors
themselves. The opponent is unmasked, while one's own position is
concealed; unless, on the contrary, that position is trumpeted to provide
greater legitimacy for the attacks. The thirty-seven texts in the Le
Cid controversy are a perfect illustration of this process. The
dispute begins over the interpretation of the success of Le Cid, continues
with a theoretical debate on the subtle art of pleasing a theatre
audience, and turns into violent attacks against named opponents.
Corneille is threatened ("the only sequel to Le Cid will
be fifty blows with a stick") and is said to have
received somewhat more than threats in a nasty encounter at Rouen. In the
other camp, a lampoon had accused the poet Jean Mairet of not being "from
any better stock than his (that is, Corneille's) manservant". This
thrust hit home so well that in his reply to this text, Mairet deemed it
appropriate to publish a long genealogy intended to prove the quality of
his ancestry on both his father's and his mother's side. And it is the
intervention of political power that eventually leads the debate back to
the theoretical questions initially at issue. We know that Richelieu asked
the Academie française (founded in 1635 and whose first act
this was) to examine the case and put an end to it with a decision, while
he also forbade the protagonists from continuing their attacks on each
other[6].
The imagery of war is used by the seventeenth-century polemicists
themselves. Mathieu de Morgues, one of the most brilliant and determined,
made use of it, for example, when denouncing Cardinal Richelieu's campaign
against Marie de Medicis, the queen mother, after she fled to the
Netherlands (1631):
" We saw at the Beginning of our Troubles small Tracts, each of
seven or eight Pages, attacking the Queen Mother, like the initial
Assaults of Skirmishers detach'd from the advance Guard; then, for a
Year they batter'd us with a huge Volume of divers Pieces
constituting the main Battle; as their Rearguard, they kept back
for us, the Handiwork of Dupleix ..."[7]
Speak of war, even a paper war, and you speak of battles, combat,
strategies, tactics, victories, defeats and violence. It is useful,
however, to ask what type of violence (and hence what type of control) can
be effected by the written word. One specific characteristic of textual
violence will be noted straightaway: it enables you to strike at an
opponent - levelling accusation, denunciation and even insult - and, at
the same time, to represent the action you are actually taking. For
example, you can seek to discredit your adversary by making vehement
accusations against him but, at the same stroke, present him as already
discredited. It is a tactic which anticipates its supposed effects,
representing them as already obtained, while simulating its own violence.
Action and the simulation of action are thus inseparable and
interdependent, joined in a simulacrum or image whose
effectiveness is tested not directly on the opponent but first of all on
the reader, watching from the wings.
Texts may be presented as the field of battle itself, in a
transposition, wholly fictitious, of the noble model of a university
debate, where two opponents fire words at each other in a battle of ideas.
Or again, texts may be just one weapon among many deployed within a wider
struggle, a kind of supporting action or a rhetorical opening shot, as one
might speak of logistical support or the artillery barrage before an
assault. A single text may fulfil both functions, but each leads to a
different process of contextualization; each attributes to the reader a
different position; each presupposes an end-result that does not meet the
same tactical requirements. The religious conflicts of the sixteenth
century had invested the model of the university debate with an intensity
of violence never before reached and had contributed greatly to its
diffusion in print. After peace was restored (albeit with the kingdom
split along a religious divide), techniques for conducting disputes became
even more important. With recourse to arms forbidden, words to some extent
enabled the war to be pursued by other means.
But returning to the question of violence in lampoons, I should like to
stress its fundamental ambivalence. The paper wars are really wars at
arm's length; although they may encourage recourse to other forms of
violence, it is clear that they are also a substitute for it. Here are two
examples.
The first is a lampoon - a handbill ('placard ') - published the
day after a double explosion of violence: first, the murder, at the King's
command, of Concino Concini, the favourite of Queen Marie de Medicis (24
April 1617), and then the riot in which the mob opened up Concini's grave
and fell upon the corpse in a macabre parody of a public execution (the
body was castrated, cut up into pieces and burnt). The handbill praises
the King's action and treats this riot on the level of a Carnival
festivity, depicting Concini as a squirrel, in an iconographic setting
that uses emblematic techniques. The squirrel form allows the savagery of
the castration both to be shown and to be toned down at the same time. The
violence of the deed, perhaps carrying a serious threat of potential
unrest (at any rate in the mind of the authorities) is thus tamed and
deflected. By virtue of being published, urban unrest loses its subversive
dimension. So, in giving them meaning through a sanitised display of
violence, the handbill ensures that the scenes following the minister's
death remain socially and politically innocuous. By bringing the two
violent episodes (the murder and the riot) together in the illustration
and text, the handbill even seems to consolidate them into a single act.
The judicial ritual enacted by the people is recognised as such, although
the authorities usually deny this moral dimension in such cases. The
interpretation thus provided by the broadsheet seems a posteriori to
legitimise the riot which, in turn, helps to justify the King's action. In
this sense, the riot protects the act.[8]
My second example is that of the twelve mazarinades that appeared at the
end of August and in September 1652, after the death in Paris of a young
pin-maker, killed in a confrontation with a company of the Tonnellerie
district militia. Analysis of these texts reveals how, towards the end of
the Fronde, an anti-semitic campaign had developed and played its part in
the conflict. This group of lampoons attributes to the Jews
characteristics which the mazarinades had so often accorded to Mazarin
himself, as if the intention were to remove from him the attributes that
had made him the arch-villain in a multitude of publications. It appears
to be an attempt at depoliticisation, inciting public hatred and, at the
same time, sanitising political violence. Violence is invoked, while being
simultaneously prolonged (to boost profits for the printers?) and
deflected towards absent scapegoats.[9]
A consequence of defining lampoons as a literature of action (as I do)
is to underline their authors' expectations as to the effects likely to be
produced, and therefore to bring to the fore their manipulative dimension.
(It is a question of getting things believed, voiced and indeed acted
upon.) The reader, or in any case the recipient, was clearly conceived as
a target. (The term 'reader', of course, covers a large number of reading
practices, often different, corresponding to various levels of competence
and to different reading situations.)
It was Gabriel Naudé who propounded a theory on this manipulation
of the written word in political conflict. His Le Marfore ou discours
contre les libelles and particularly his Les considerations
politiques sur les coups d'Etat, deal bluntly with the question of
manipulating and using the recipients of lampoons. He sees each author
simply as a political tool in the hands of a noble actor-head of a faction
who controls the whole initiative and conduct of the action. But this
essential manipulation of the written word in the service of tactical
goals is made explicit, and possibly made public, by men of letters who
are themselves advisors to the great nobles - or think they are. They
claim to enlighten them, through their scholarship, on the true nature of
political action and the necessity of using techniques of dissimulation,
including the written word, as a means of manipulation. The target
readership for these manipulative texts (as their authors thought them) is
identified with the "vulgaire" or the "peuple"
transformed into an object, most notably in these lines from Naudé:
"It behoves Princes and their Ministers to learn how to handle
and persuade it (the People) with fine Words, to seduce and deceive it by
Appearances, to win it over and
turn it to their Ends by Preachers and Miracles on the Pretext of
Holiness; or by Means of learned Scribes, having them pen secret Booklets,
Manifestos, Vindications and Declarations, artfully composed in order to
lead it by the Nose and have it approve by the Label what is hidden in the
Bag…"
While the leader of the party must [...]:
'"With a steady and confident Gaze, and as from
the Battlements of a lofty Tower, watch the whole of this World,
set out before him like a disordered Theatre full of Confusion,
where some are playing Comedies, others Tragedies, and where he is at
Liberty to intervene like some Deus ex Machina whenever and as
often as the Fancy takes him or when Circumstances may
persuade him to do so. .." [10]
The force of these statements is compelling, but we should not suppose
there to be a perfect match between this theory of action and the actions
themselves, actions in which the formulator of the theory was involved by
creating texts intended to make people act. And as for Naudé, we
cannot simply assume that consistency and the supposed continuity of a
career of service would have led him to tell the truth ("give the
game away") in his Considerations politiques sur les coups
d'Etat, so providing us with a text which, read at a distance, might
serve as the "battlements of a lofty tower' from
which to watch, analyse and conduct the action. As several recent works
show, Naudé was not that author who, transformed into a shadowy
political actor by his knowledge and his power as a secret advisor, would
have successfully matched the political knowledge of the noble actor with
the manipulative action of writing. Current research draws our attention
to the complexity both of Naudé as a person and of his writings.
Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, for example, sees in the Considerations
a dimension that he calls "political pornography". Naudé
showed himself to be systematically unveiling the hidden motives behind
the actions of the great nobles; he attempts to remove the aura of mystery
and expose the revealed secret, not by disclosing it, but by demonstrating
its crucial presence[11].
Dubosc-Montandre, a pamphleteer for the Conde party whom I have
particularly studied, was a spectacular example of an author committed,
with sustained determination, to the service of the Prince de Conde. Yet,
in a lampoon of March 1652 entitled Le Point de l'Ovalle, using an
emblematic to statement (which has, furthermore, remained famous while all
trace of the author seems to have been erased), even he proclaimed the
necessity in the name of "poor people" to rid themselves
of the great nobles:
"Let us recognise that the great Nobles are there only because
we are carrying them on our Shoulders: we have only to shrug to strew them
over the Soil and to effect a Master-stroke that will be spoken of
to Eternity..." [12]
In the paradox - and even the duplicity - of this text which seemed to
be a call to support the Prince and, at the same time, a call to struggle
against the great nobles, A Viala saw an effect of what he called "clientele
constrainf', On the one hand, the author is subject to and accepts the
realities of the social power system, and on the other, he introduces into
his discourse equivocations and distortions that mark the limits of his
adherence to socio-political constraints. So, a "pamphlet
commissioned by a patron could in fact become a scathing
attack on himself'. Michel de Certeau has put forward a similar
interpretation: for him, such textual violence "has reduced the
potential for personal identity and recognition that every society must
provide for its members"; the nobility's client lampoonists,
although '" reliable' in their nocturnal activities, produced by
day confusion of places and identities". It is just one impact of
the "field of politics" on "existing protocols"
or, if you will, one of the effects of the political crisis on
literary output and its framework of social relationships[13].
For this reason, one can only agree, on the one hand, with the
assessment that common values and beliefs were thrown into confusion by
the lampoons that preached, if only in appearance, subversion of the
socio-political order. But, on the other hand, one must equally take into
consideration the 'reliability', of the service rendered. This dual
reality constitutes an inescapable framework for the analysis of the
contents. From this viewpoint, we can see that analysis of the positions
taken by the authors is not subordinate but essential. What is more, since
we are unable to analyse how the lampoons were received by actual readers,
we can (in the case of a continuing polemical confrontation) consider the
'conditions' in which they were produced as being also the 'conditions' in
which they were received. The lampoonists in their writing environment
(complex) themselves constituted a public, but a public made up of
practitioners of propaganda, capable of manipulating its hidden motives
and able to judge the standard of performance achieved by others in the
manipulating business. They were united by the shared knowledge of how to
do it and how to read it and, therefore, linked in a way that transcended
the antagonism of the camps and factions they served. So they formed a
limited public, very different from the one in front of which, day after
day, they played out (or pretended to) their tragedies and comedies in the
service of their patrons.
In referring to these practitioners of the written word as constituting
a public and, up to a point, a public opinion (but a limited public
opinion), I mean those who wrote - authors, therefore: those whose
position enabled them to do so. They were those who lived in or close to
the social and intellectual circles where one could consider oneself an
author, a narrow urban public strongly represented in various centres of
opinion and above all characterised by the switching of roles - and of the
representation of those roles - between readers and authors. Each of the
readers was also a potential author, or at least his reading was
influenced by the possibility of himself taking up the pen (even if,
however, this possibility remained unfulfilled) and by the possibility at
any rate of his becoming a publication agent, a 'publiciser'[14].
This public made up of professional writers (' practiciens de
I'ecrit) acquired an even greater importance at a time like the Fronde
when the political crisis had weakened and above all divided from other
traditional centres of opinion those whose unity of thought and action
arose from their functioning as a body. So it is that certain literate
men, whose social and intellectual identity was usually defined by
belonging to a body, a company, a community (magistrates, students,
religious etc), were able to liberate themselves from these allegiances
and, as it were, be caught up in those centres of opinion shaped by the
authorial imagination.
A strong characteristic of this lampoonistlauthorial imagination is to
represent the receiving public as divided in two: a limited public and the
general public; a complicit public and a manipulated public - two totally
equivocal images. What degree of complicity is involved - an identity or a
close proximity of views? And what kind of manipulation is envisaged -
that of effective propaganda or a paradoxical manipulation of those who
are going to believe totally in its effectiveness, namely those who
commissioned the work and for whom the public is defined only in terms of
the success of the manipulation? In this respect, we have only individual
cases, specific circumstances: we cannot proceed without reconstructing
them and the socio-political frameworks - contexts, if you will - in which
recourse to the written word was made. In short, the production and
development of lampoons in the early modern period cannot be separated
either, on the one hand, from instruments of persuasion such as printed
matter, pictures, theatrical performances etc (the way they were used, the
struggle for their control) or, on the other hand, from the social
relationships surrounding the production of the written word at a
particular time.
[1] Gabriel Naudé, Le Marfore ou discours contre les libelles,
Paris-Zanzibar, 1997 [1620], p. 19.
[2] Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, La
Haye-Roterdam, 1690.
[3] Christian Jouhaud, Les pouvoirs de la littérature.
Histoire d’un paradoxe, Paris, Gallimard, 2000, Chap. IV.
[4] Cardinal de Retz, Mémoires, in Œuvres,
Marie-Thérèse Hipp and Michel Pernot ed., Paris, Gallimard,
Bibl de la Pléiade, 1984, p. 436
[5] Christian Jouhaud, Mazarinades. La Fronde des mots, Paris,
Aubier, 1985.
[6] Armand Gasté, La Querelle du Cid. Pieces et pamphlets
publies d'apres les originaux, Paris, 1899. The first pieces against
Corneille are: L'autheur du vray Cid espagnol a son traducteur
francoys and the Observations sur le Cid ; the first response
by Corneille: Lettre apologetique du Sr Corneille, contenant sa
reponse aux observations faictes par le S. Scuderi sur le Cid,
followed by La voix publique a Monsieur de Scudery sur les
Observations du Cid. See also : La victoire du sieur Corneille,
Scudery et Claveret. Avec une remontrance par laquelle on les prie
amiablement de n'exposer ainsi leur renommee a la risee publique, Gasté.,
pp. 198-201. The menaces against Corneille in La suitte du Cid en
abrege ou le triomphe de son autheur en depit des envieux, ibid., p.
348: " . . . after that the Sieur Corneille, instead of acquiescing
to the aguments that convict him or of responding as a learned man,
borrowed the genius and the style of the fishwives of Rouen, in order to
make generous use of it, as he did against a number of cultivated folk,
solely for the reason that they are friends of his Corrector or partisans
of his reasons; his rage has extended particularly to the Sieurs Mairet
and Claveret, whose reputation and birth he attacks daily with impostures
and slanders, which makes me say to you that fifty well-applied cudgelings
will justly be THE VERITABLE SEQUEL TO THE CID, Adieu." Richelieu’s
order to stop the polemical fight : Lettre de M. l'abbe de Boisrobert
a M. Mairet, A. Gasté, op. cit., pp. 352-354 ("you will
read the rest of my letter as an order that I send you at the command of
his Eminence.... "). Ibid, p. 111 : the conclusion of the Jugement
de l’Académie française... began thus: "After
what you have just seen, judge (Reader) if a Work whose subject is
worthless, which violates the principal rules of the Dramatic Poem, which
lacks judgment in its arrangement, which has a good deal of bad verse, and
of which almost all the beauties are stolen, may legitimately aspire to
the glory of having never been surpassed that its author attributes to it
with so little cause."
[7] Mathieu de Morgues, Lumières pour l’Histoire de
France et pour faire voir les calomnies, flatteries et autres défauts
de Scipion Dupleix, [1636], 243 p., p. 12.
[8] Christian Jouhaud, “Readibility and Persuasion : Political
Handbills”, in The Culture of Print, Power and the Uses of Print
in Early Modern Europe, Roger Chartier ed., Polity Press, 1989, pp.
235-260.
[9] Christian Jouhaud, "La haine publique (Paris 1652)", Nouvelle
Revue de Psychanalyse . 33, 1986 (2), pp. 43-51.
[10] Gabriel Naudé, Considérations politiques sur les
coups d'Etat, Les Editions de Paris, 1988 (1st ed. 1639), chap. IV,
pp. 138-141.
[11] Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, Dis/simulations. Jules-César
Vanini, François La Mothe le Vayer, Gabriel Naudé, Louis
Machon et Torquato Accetto. Religion, Morale et politique au XVIIe siècle,
Paris, Champion, 2002. Marcel Gauchet, « L’Etat au miroir de la
raison d’Etat : la France et la chrétienté », in
Y.-Ch. Zarka (ed.), Raison et déraison d’Etat. Théoriciens
et théories de la raison d’Etat aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles,
Paris, PUF, 1994, pp. 193-244. Cahiers du Centre de Recherches
Historiques n· 20, 1998 : Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, «
Gabriel Naudé : destinations et usages du texte politique »,
pp. 69-78, Hartmut Stenzel, « Apories de l’humanisme et raison d’Etat
dans le Mascurat de Gabriel Naudé », pp. 79-96. Robert Damien,
Bibliothèque et Etat, Naissance d'une raison politique dans la
France du XVIIe siècle, PUF, 1995.
[12] Le Point de l’Ovalle, in Hubert Carrier, La
Fronde, Contestation démocratique et misère paysanne, 52
mazarinades, Paris, EDHIS, 1982, tome 1, texte n· 20.
[13] Alain Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain, Sociologie de
la littérature à l’âge classique, Paris, Les éditions
de Minuit, 1985, pp. 60-68. Christian Jouhaud, « Histoire et histoire
littéraire : naissance de l’écrivain », Annales
ESC, Juillet-Août 1988, pp. 849-866. Michel de Certeau, « L’expérimentation
d’une méthode les mazarinades de Christian Jouhaud »,
Annales ESC, mai-juin 1986, pp. 507-512.
[14] De la publication. Entre Renaissance et Lumières,
Ch. Jouhaud et A. Viala ed., Paris, Fayard, 2002. Introduction.
Back to Contents
|