Paper VII Early Modern French Literature 1530 to 1800
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Model Essays on Early Modern French Texts (Written by a First Class Oxford Student)
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Paper VII Early Modern French Literature 1530 to 1800
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24. ‘L’humanisme tout entier peut tre pens l’image de la transmission’ ( RIC
M CHOULAN). Discuss with reference to any ONE OR MORE writers.
‘The ancients thunder out oracles of eternal truth; in the moderns you have little fabrications
whose examples vanish through insomnia the more closely you examine them.’ (Erasmus)
In highlighting the supremacy of the theologians of antiquity over those he encountered in his own
day, Erasmus was giving expression to the central humanist tenet known as ad fontes that
exhorted a return to the foundational texts of the ancient world. It was there that early modern
writers should seek refuge, for it was there that they would nd the key to self-education. Their
duty was to then transmit these ancient ideas to their contemporaries through their own writings.
Montaigne’s De l'institution des enfants and de Gournay’s Egalité des Hommes et des Femmes
suggest, however, that Erasmus’ model is slightly over-simplistic, insofar as neither writer conveys
ancient ideas in pure form. Drawing on post-modernist theories, this essay suggests that both
writers relied heavily on the evidence furnished by their ancient predecessors, using these as
‘story elements’ (White) for their personal narratives. It is in this ‘emplotment’ phase that
sixteenth-century writers made something out of their ancient predecessors that, if not
necessarily startlingly new, was at least highly original.
Marie de Gournay, electing a militant promotion of gender equality through the right to a fair
education as her principal narrative, and can be seen to draw on several ancient sources of
authority to buttress this argument. In the opening pages of her work, De Gournay attacks male
chauvinists, who base their arguments concerning the constitution, physical make-up and value
of the female on ‘la foie populaire’ and ‘ouï-dire’. What makes like arguments so pernicious is
that, as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, they have ‘passées en proverbe’. In their ceaseless repetition,
they have taken on false claims to authority that can only be successfully dislodged through an
appeal to the highest possible sources of wisdom, which de Gournay goes on to adumbrate as
follows: God, the Church Fathers and ‘ces grands hommes qui ont servy de lumière à
l’Univers’ (for the most part ancient writers). It is unsurprising that de Gournay should highlight
these three sources; both the scholastic and humanist traditions had erected and rmly
established all three as the ne plus ultra of authority. Indeed, de Gournay herself introduces Plato
as an author ‘à qui nul n’a débattu le titre de divin’, the result being that the subsequent
anecdotes regarding Lastemia’s intelligence and Axiothea’s memory (both taken from Plato) gain
considerably in leverage. It must be acknowledged that de Gournay does expand beyond ancient
texts; she cites Montaigne as placing women ‘à l’égale contrebalance des hommes’ in De
l'a ection des peres aux enfans. But Montaigne’s authority was itself largely derived from his
extensive use of ancient writers. So far, therefore, this all seems fairly indicative of de Gournay’s
desire to transmit the ideas of her ancient predecessors: she needed authoritative sources to
uproot the unfounded prejudices that had taken seed in European society. Ancient texts
comprised one category of only three with su cient purchase to do so.
Yet if de Gournay was one of a myriad of bees gathering nectar from ancient sources, to take her
mentor Montaigne’s expression, the honey into which she transformed them was very much her
own. Drawing on ancient sources was for de Gournay above all a means serving a very personal
end: making an e ective and convincing case for gender equality through education. If she was
liberal with respect to the owers on which she chose to alight, she was far more selective with
regard to those whose nectar she brought back to the beehive. Unsurprising, then, that ancient
female monsters such as Scylla, villains such as Medusa, and bad wives such as Helen are
entirely absent from her text, although she was in all probability fully aware of their existence.
Equally foreseeable is her incorporation into her book of ancient sceptic philosophy in such a way
as to undermine clear distinctions between beast, man and God, and therefore notions of a
divergence in intellectual capacities between men and women (Krier). De Gournay somewhat
acknowledges her selective approach—albeit only obliquely—in declaring the impossibility of
listing all the ‘grands et doctes esprits des femmes’ contained in Greco-Roman and religious
sources. De Gournay does not merely ingest and regurgitate ancient texts. She also digests them,
including in her own work only those examples that provide the most convincing evidence in her
opinion of the liminal position of the human ‘esprit’ between masculinity and femininity. It is this
that helps explain why references to the body are so scarce in de Gournay’s treatise. The human
body had pervaded ancient writings (c.f. Socrates and Galen, amongst others), who portrayed its
fate as closely intertwined with that of the human mind. In other words, the gendered nature of the
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, body was seen to provide evidence for the gendered nature of human intelligence. The body is
consequently only exploited twice by de Gournay, and both times for its metonymical potential.
The loquacious Arete has the ‘langue d’Homère’, whilst Judith’s plan is described as ‘tombant au
coeur d’une jeune dame, entre tant d’hommes lâches et faillis du coeur’. This marks a stark
contrast with Montaigne’s De l'institution des enfants and those sections of Rabelais’ Gargantua
and Pantagruel that deal with education, which exploit the body frequently. In selectively quoting
and integrating Greco-Roman writers into her own work, the autodidact de Gournay only proves
her point by demonstrating that she, a woman, is capable of just as much erudition as her male
counterparts. The dictates of renaissance scholarship made de Gournay keen to subversively
usurp the masculine authority of her ancient predecessors by transmitting many of the examples
contained within their texts. Her plea nonetheless takes on an original sense of purpose and a
confrontational urgency with regards matters of female education—‘mon livre n’espère pas grand
accueil de toi’—that is absent from the ancient writings she used to help formulate and buttress
her narrative.
If De Gournay selectively transmitted examples contained within ancient sources with the aim of
promoting gender equality through education, her adoptive father Montaigne did so with the
motive of forming and exercising his own judgement, and getting to know himself better. For any
upstanding citizen of the sixteenth-century, transmitting the ideas contained within ancient
writings was necessary to the exercise of good judgement on two principal counts. At a practical
level, it avoided unnecessary trouble with censors, who within Montaigne’s own lifetime had
denounced Copernicus for contravening the Aristotelian understanding of the universe and whose
watchfulness had only increased in the post-Reformation era. Drawing on ancient sources would
have given his writings at the very least the appearance of being inscribed within the classical
tradition, and thereby have helped Montaigne avoid accusations of unorthodoxy that might have
sti ed future attempts to exercise his judgement through writing. Censorship in the period was
often underpinned by an intellectual understanding of ancient writers as expounders of eternal
wisdom. This belief constitutes the second reason as to why Montaigne would have felt he
needed ancient writings to form and exercise his judgement, which acts as a stomach that breaks
down ‘ce qu'on luy auoit donné à cuire’. The quality of the understanding human judgement
distills, which then goes on to re ect back on and in uence our judgement (‘moy-mesmes, qui
seray par aduenture autre demain, si nouuel apprentissage me change’) is inherently dependent
on what it is given to digest. In drawing on and transmitting the ideas contained within the works
of the ancients, Montaigne was nourishing his own mind and that of his reader with what were
widely held in the period to be the most informative sources around: ‘à me recognoistre au prix de
ces gens là [the ancients], si foible et si chetif, si poisant et si endormy, ie me fay pitié, ou desdain
à moy mesmes.’ The alliance of apparently contradictory reactions to himself in this sentence only
strengthens the notion that Montaigne the modern o ers a very sorry sight indeed when stood
against the intellectual giants of antiquity, no matter the angle from which he is viewed. For a
combination of intellectual and practical reasons, therefore, it was bene cial to Montaigne to
transmit certain aspects of ancient writings to his readers.
But no more than some aspects. If he quotes extensively from ancient authors in De l'institution
des enfants, as indeed in his essays more broadly, Montaigne does not simply copy their ideas.
Rather, he sifts them through means of his judgement, taking this latter as the yardstick by which
he accords prominence to ancient writers’ ideas his own mind and writings. Where Montaigne’s
judgement excludes material, this often goes unannounced. Absent is the example of poor
judgment represented by Agamemnon’s alienation of his best ghter, Achilles, as well as the
former’s claim that fate was of tantamount importance in inducing him into error. This case would
simply not have squared with Montaigne’s belief in the importance of individual judgement by
removing autonomy from that individual. Elsewhere, and to a far greater extent than de Gournay,
Montaigne openly acknowledges what might be seen as the post-modernist selection process he
performed on his material. Plato claims in his Republic that the actions of the very smallest
children can tell observers something about their preferences and what they will become;
Montaigne believes from experience that Plato is wrong and says so: ‘Platon m me en sa
R publique, me semble leur donner beaucoup d’autorit .’ By contrast, Juvenal’s dictum ‘a sound
mind in a sound body’ becomes all the more pertinent because the violent times in which
Montaigne lives require, in his personal experience, a healthy body to be successfully navigated:
‘Il le faut rompre la peine et pret des exercices, pour le dresser la peine et pret de la
desloueure, de la colique, du caut re et de la ge le, et de la torture… Nous en sommes
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