Szabari - Less rightly said scandals and readers in sixteenth-century France

The authors of the Satyre Menippee imagine the utopian possibility of readers expressing their political differences through additions to the pamphlet, thus turning the new literary form of menippean satire into a tool for voicing, enacting, and defusing irreconcilable differences of view that call into question the monarchys politics of reconciliation after the consolidation of political power. Although the absolutist monarchy sought to curb polemical literature as a dangerous speech act that could revive the memory and the disastrous effect of past injuries and destabilize social order, satire continued to attract the interest of collectors who saw in it a diversion conducive to moral reflection, available to those who were able to withdraw from the political arena. As we have seen in Pierre lEstoiles journals, paradoxically, these writers and journalists turn satire into the very tool of this withdrawal by the end of the century.

How important was the literary and imaginary dimension of vituperation for the emergence of a political genre? The humanistic practices that often lie at the roots of polemical literature, or to which authors and creators of polemical literature refer, are rhetorical devices of distancing and reflection. When simplified and manipulated, these devices can be used to draw audiences all the more into an ideology, into a group whose members know. However, they can also be used to distance them from views that are being propagated in the political arena, on the street, in the church, and on the public square. The vivid images that project these communities do not fade even when the causes that have animated them do. Studying the literature of vituperation in sixteenth-century France teraches us that the power of words and symbols lingers beyond the social and political circumstances of their publication.

The images that bespeak a vital political imagination in these pamphlets constitute a robust and oft-revisited quarry in French history. The Satyre Menippee was reprinted countless times with notes and supporting documents in the course of the eighteenth century, while lEstoiles journals were printed in digest fashion under the title Memoires pour servir lhistoire de France (1719). Just prior to the revolution, these books were used to attack the church and the state. Eighteenth-century editions of the Satyre Menippee often helped foster distrust in the Catholic clergy, in the Jesuits, and in devout Catholic practices and rites. In addition, they also contributed to the gradual corrosion of the sacred power of the absolutist state that relied on these rites and on an alliance with the church.

Another image, this one appearing in the Memoires pour servir lhistoire de France , also reactivates the clichs of the past. It shows Madame Montpensier in the center of a gathering of frenzied women (reminiscent of the Furies) with torches, one of whom has a snake twisted around her arm; Jacques Clment kneels in a supplicating pose in front of Madame Montpensier, and a clerical figure with disheveled hair eggs her on ( The re-emergence of the satirical and vituperative models of the sixteenth century show that they were deemed highly useful and that the sixteenth-century satirists had created enduring themes and models of religious and political discourse compelling to later generations caught up in their own struggles for identity and power. Not only individual readers or communities but whole societies can get taken in by the scandalous rhetoric of religious and political satire and its effects, and the French society of the ancien rgime became caught in that which lEstoile aptly terms libert franoise .

. Madame de Montpensier. [Le Roy, Jean, and others], Satyre Menippee (Rouen, 1709). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *FC5.Sa836.1709.

. Madame de Montpensier. Memoires pour servir lhistoire de France (Cologne, 1719). Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, *FC5.L5675.719m.

I did not modernize the orthography of sixteenth-century titles either here or in the bibliography. I standardized and modernized the names of authors when necessary. Works whose authorship is unknown appear as anonymous, except in cases where there exists a strong consensus in the academic community about the authors identity. I listed these titles under the probable or conjectured name in brackets.