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great soulmagnanimityFrançois de Malherbe (1555-1628) is one of France’s greatest poets. Between 1600 and 1627, he published a series of encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry odes whose grandstylegrandeur and complexity are unmatched in the history of French literature. Although Malherbe is arguably the most influential lyriclyric poetry poet of seventeenth-century France, his legacy is puzzling for a twenty-first-century reader. A poetic doctrine bears his name, yet he never wrote it down. He is renowned for his strict rules of versification, yet one of his mentors, Du PerronDu Perron, a lesser poet, more skillfully composes meters.1 He supposedly rejected far-fetched metaphormetaphors, dense and convoluted syntax, and obscure mythological allusions, yet these pervade his poetry. The royal odes have been praised for their harmony, logic, and majesty, and disparaged for their disorder, formalism, and dullness. Their loftiest ambition is to forge a new nationnation after the Wars of Religion; yet Malherbe allegedly scoffed at poets in private conversation, famously ridiculing himself and his peers as “excellent arrangers of syllables” (Racan, Malherbe 34). His celebrated translation of the letters of SenecaSeneca between 1601 and 1605 reflects the shift in French eloquenceeloquence toward the “classical compromise,” which balances judgment and invention, citation and imitation, argument and style.2 Yet Malherbe’s mature poetic style embodies the CiceroCiceronian AtticismCiceroAtticism described by Du VairDu Vair in De l’éloquence françoise [On French Eloquence] (1594), albeit tinged with the plainstyleplainer variety of HellenisticstyleHellenistic grandstylegrandeur that was flourishing in contemporary sacredeloquencesacred oratory oratory. Malherbe was a provincial noble educated for a career in the magistracy, yet his odes aspire to achieve a universal eloquenceeloquence that transcends the idioms of caste and region and surmounts the vicissitudes of history.

imagoimageThis book does not propose to unravel such a Gordian knot. Rather, it by-passes the circular dead end in which Malherbe studies languished until fairly recently.3 The formalist impulses of twentieth-century criticism, bolstered by testimony cherry-picked from Malherbe and his contemporaries, encouraged successive generations of literary historians to reduce the poet to a technician.4 This assessment must have had the appearance of self-evidence, echoing as it does early criticism of Malherbe’s poetry. Chapelain famously wrote that it lacked genius and inspiration, an opinion which gained wider acceptance as the seventeenth century progressed.5 The view of Malherbe as a fastidious versifier also confirmed the modern prejudice that early seventeenth-century poetry was merely a game, while a poet was, in Malherbe’s own words, “‘pas plus utile à l’État qu’un bon joueur de quilles’” [no more useful to the State than a good player of skittles] (Racan, Malherbe 37). This book, however, rejects the view of the royal odes as mere sophistical argument or playfulness. Instead, it recognizes them as an earnest response to the political challenges facing the new Bourbon dynasty, and thus it takes seriously their ideological mission, attending to their rational persuasion and emotionemotional power. What pulls them more toward oratory and away from sophistry is the way they subordinate their esthetic achievement, and their desire for glory and applause, to the general welfarecommonwealthgeneral welfare of the monarchy and the nationnation.

judicial speakinggenera dicendi (kinds of speaking)The present reexamination of Malherbe’s royal odes has been made possible in large part by the scholarly recovery of the rhetorical tradition in early modern France. As Marc FumaroliFumaroli, Marc writes in the preface to his magisterial L’Âge de l’éloquence: Rhétorique et ‘res literataria’ de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique: “Rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, traverses social, political, and religious spheres, embracing and capturing all human experience without sacrificing its connections to philosophy, law, ethics, and theology” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge x). “Evolving with the passage of time, this mother of all structures presents the historian with the advantage of accounting for tradition, recurrence, and re-use” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge ii). Although poetry was classified, taught, and practiced as a branch of rhetoric, literary critics have yet to think systematically about the rhetorical strategies and tactics of Malherbe’s royal odes. Even FumaroliFumaroli, Marc’s history of French eloquenceeloquence overlooks these magnificent poems, reducing Malherbe to the influence of his celebrated stylistic reforms. In FumaroliFumaroli, Marc’s eyes, French poetry in the age of eloquence is an ornament of power, a benign form of sophistry, removed from the real battles of public life. Following the success of Ronsard, it had only just hoisted itself to cultural and political prominence through emulation of Greek and Latin models (Italian models played a significant role as well), and even so, the membership and prestige of ancient poets in the res literaria [literary canon] depended entirely on their eloquenceeloquence, that is, their poetry’s perceived stylistic power and beauty, especially to the extent that these were invested with social, political, or religious value.

FumaroliFumaroli, Marc’s point is well taken, but Malherbe’s royal odes aspire to much more. Although encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry in nature, they stake out clear positions in political matters. Their debt to artistic pistis, pisteisproofpersuasion (pisteisproofartistic (pistis, pisteis, pl.): logosprooflogos, ēthosproofēthos, pathosproofpathos) situates them in the Aristotelian tradition, where rhetoric has always maintained a close relationship to practical reasonphronēsispractical reason (phronēsisphronēsis).6 When we take seriously the idea that Malherbe’s royal odes partake of both rhetoric and poetry, it becomes possible to ascertain how much these poems share in common with “ethical and political activities that are matters of virtuevirtue” (GarverGarver, Eugene 7). Although eloquenceeloquence, the highest accomplishment of rhetoric, is often, and erroneously, reduced to questions of style (Gr. lexis, L. elocutiostyleelocutio), it has in fact always depended on broader and more fundamental principles: 1. an external purpose given by the social context in which public speaking is practiced; 2. expert knowledge of the artistic means to achieve the goals of the speech; and 3. the speaker’s close attention to the historical particulars of the occasion. Again, to cite FumaroliFumaroli, Marc: “All rhetoric implies a sociology of social roles and of the institutions in which these roles acquire meaning” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge iii). Therefore, when one examines Malherbe’s royal odes through the prism of their eloquenceeloquence, one is forced to treat them as more than well-wrought urns whose classical allusions are purely decorative. To reexamine the odes from this perspective is to insist that any historically grounded reading of them must also take into account—besides their noteworthy style—their purpose and goals, the substance and modes of their argumentation, their emotionemotional force, and their conception of audience, real or imagined. Such is the undertaking of this book.

I.

logosproofThe first and most apparent goal of Malherbe’s royal odes was to inspire literate contemporaries with admiration for the early Bourbon monarchs: Henri IV, “Qui ne confesse qu’Hercule / Fut moins Hercule que toi” [Who does not admit that HerculesHercules / Was less HerculesHercules than you] (“Ode au feu Roi sur l’heureux succès du voyage de Sedan,” vv. 99-100); Marie de Médicis,7 “C’est Pallas que cette Marie, / Par qui nous sommes gouvernés” [She is Pallas AthenaAthena, this Marie / By whom we are governed] (“Pour la Reine mère du roi pendant sa régence,” vv. 179-180); and Louis XIII, “Prends ta foudre, Louis, et va comme un lion / Donner le dernier coup à la dernière tête / De la rébellion” [Take your thunderbolt, Louis, and like a lion, / Deliver the last blow to the last head / Of the rebellion] (“Pour le Roi allant châtier la rébellion des Rochelois,” vv. 2-4). Such mythic heroization, more than mere exaggeration and flattery, aimed to produce awe and reverence. These were the proper feelings for a subject to have toward his or her monarch, and they were weakened, if not destroyed, during the religious warsreligious wars. Catholics and ProtestantProtestants, in their zeal to prevail ideologically and militarily over their adversaries, flouted royal authority and developed theories of sovereignty exploring justifications of principled disobedience and even regicide (especially on two occasions, after the Saint-Bartholomew massacre in 1572, and following Henri III’s assassination of the Guise brothers in 1588). This change of attitude could be characterized as a prerevolutionary desacralizationdesacralization, that is, the effacement of the divine aura attaching to Henri III and the unintended abdication of his role as leader of the French Church and defender of Catholic orthodoxy. Henri IV, a newcomer to the throne, publicly reviled as a relapsed heretic, would have wanted to reclaim this aura of sacrality for himself and his kingship, however problematic that may have appeared to contemporaries. When he abjured his ProtestantProtestantism in 1593, he could have been heeding the dictates of his conscience, or he could have been heeding Machiavelli’s well-known advice to a ruler who wished to consolidate his power. In any event, the new king would have wanted not to be hated, but rather to be feared and loved. Thus the first relationship which the odes seek to repair, between monarch and subject, rests on a complex network of ambivalent feelings: fear and love, but also dread, awe, and reverence. Such affects informed the early modern experience of admiration, that is to say, wonderwonder.8 The emotions inspired by divinity, miracles, unknown peoples and nationnations, and powerful natural phenomena were also provoked by royal majesty. A monarch’s ability to astonish reinforced this power (BiesterBiester, James 10). Because the prestige of wonderwonder extended “throughout Europe, in disciplines and activities ranging from rhetoric and poetry to philosophy and theology, from outward colonial enterprise to internal competition for power and patronage” (BiesterBiester, James 9), the textual and cultural genealogy developed by BiesterBiester, James, set against the sociology of Marc FumaroliFumaroli, Marc’s L’Âge de l’éloquence, sheds valuable light on the political functions of wonderwonder in early seventeenth-century France and its rhetorical production in Malherbe’s royal odes, allowances made, of course, for changed sociopolitical circumstances and, therefore, distinct purposes and artistic means.

megalopsychosmagnanimityEvery one of Malherbe’s odes contains at least one term related to wonderwonder (merveille, miracle, étonnement), while the events and the deeds they describe, not to mention the rhetorical devices they use, are deeply infused with this protean emotion. Aligned with Henri’s broader ideological program, this poetic production of wonderwonder has two purposes. The first is to demobilize political resistance to the Bourbons. Contemplative feelings inspired by the miraculous turn of events, by the extraordinary virtuevirtue of the historical actors, or by the inscrutable destiny of France, transform both greater and lesser subjects into spectators whose fear and reverence encourage them to accept forces beyond their control. The second purpose, more active, is to transport the subject “beyond logical demonstration” (BiesterBiester, James 44). Such emotionemotional force serves the loftier ambitions of the royal odes, namely to renovate the monarchy and to instill a sense of unity in a fractured nationnation.

pathosproofThe goal of inspiring subjects with feelings of wonderwonder for the Bourbons is indeed an attempt to sacralize, or re-sacralize, the new monarchs. However, such sacralization was filtered through a reinvigorated national sentimentnationnational sentiment in the early seventeenth century, and to that end, the royal odes aimed to restore the prestige and authority of the monarchy itself:

Le fameux Amphion, dont la voix nonpareille,
Bâtissant une ville étonna l’univers,
Quelque bruit qu’il ait eu, n’a point fait de merveille
	Que ne fassent mes vers. (vv. 149-156)
[The famous Amphion, whose incomparable voice / Astonished the universe by building a city, / Whatever fame he may have had, has not accomplished any greater wonder / Than my own verse.]

Taken from the final ode of the sequence, “Ode pour le roi allant châtier la rébellion des Rochelois” (1627; 1635), this stanza looks back on Malherbe’s career and asks the reader to rate his achievement as no less marvelous than AmphionAmphion building the walls of Thebes. By grounding the unity of the nationnation inpatrienation something other than the Catholic faith, the royal odes claim they have erected ideological ramparts around the monarchy more effective than any physical wall. The stones, as it were, are the hearts of the French people moved by the odes’ eloquenceeloquence and henceforth united in support of an ethnically French monarchy, as required by the Salic Law. The mythical city that the odes claim to have built represents the new nationnation. Of course, it is less a place or a territory than an imagined community expressed in the form of a patriotic ethospatriotismpatriotic ethos modeled on the monarch, the nationnation’s protector and embodiment, and defined as loyalty and service pro rege et patriapro rege et patria [for king and fatherland].9 The creation of this new national communitynationnational community bound by affective ties between monarch and subject, as well as among subjects, is the highest purpose and final end at which the royal odes take aim.

King, monarchy, nationnation: the odes indeed reimagine all three. A new image for the monarch presupposes a new image of the monarchyimageof the monarchy, and this in turn rests on a new image of the nationimageof the nation. The first two are evident in the odes; the last is more difficult to perceive. Nowhere do the odes use the term patrienationla patrie [fatherland; nationnation; country], a neologism in sixteenth-century France. Instead, they use the collective “nous” [we, us], sometimes refer to “France” and “les Français” [the French], and mention recognizable enemies of the monarchy and the French: “Espagne” [Spain], “les Anglais” [the English], the Holy Roman Empire (“l’aigle”), the Ottoman Empire (“l’infidèle Croissant” [infidel Crescent]), and a few minor antagonists. However, the concept is always there, lurking like a noumenal ground requiring close reading, logical inference, and affective sensibility to be apprehended. The excellence, remoteness, and knowability of the nationnation in the royal odes belongs to the same “‘ancient dilemma of knowledge and representation’” affecting the objects of faith in sacredeloquencesacred oratory oratory.10 Similar to a Christian orator charged with bringing the objects of faith, the most remote and the most worth knowing, into some kind of relationship with what human beings are able to grasp, Malherbe uses mythologymythology and figures of thoughtfigures of thought to strike the imagination of his contemporaries and fill their hearts with emotionemotions attaching them to the new national communitynationnational community. The words “étonner” (to astonish) and “merveille” (marvel, wonderwonder) of the somewhat obscure analogyproofanalogy in the stanza above (Malherbe : nationnation :: AmphionAmphion : Thebes) indicate which feelings contemporary readers—including a young Louis XIII—were supposed to experience once they had solved the stanza’s riddle and—only then—accurately reckoned the central role that the royal odes allege to have played in the rebirth of France following the Wars of Religion.

The Malherbe that emerges from this interpretation of the odes is still the consummate craftcraftsman, but one who also dared to claim a political voice for himself. The mythological figure of AmphionAmphion symbolically reunites the disunion that CiceroCicero lamented in De OratoreCiceroDe Oratore (1.8.33-44), the divorce of phronēsisphronēsis from eloquenceeloquence, ofpractical reasonphronēsis the practical wisdomphronēsisman of action from the man of words. What substitutes for this lost unity is the dyad of monarch and poet, which the royal odes recoup from the social practice of literary patronage. When Henri IV selected Malherbe, in his capacity as poet, to speak for the new dynasty, he did so knowingly and purposely. This alliance of king and poet marked a return to a normal state of affairs following the religious warsreligious wars.

One must recall that poetry at this time had not yet achieved literary autonomy. Poets relied on royal and aristocratic patrons for financial and political protection, and this dependence forced poets to straddle conceptually distinct categories: poetry and politics, eloquenceeloquence and virtuevirtue, and two kinds of ethosethos—the rhetorical and the moral. How did these arrangements work? As Peter W. Shoemaker so beautifully explains in Powerful Connections: The Poetics of Patronage in the Age of Louis XIII, the monarch, members of the royal family, powerful nobles and prelates, and upwardly mobile bourgeois, all seeking the prestige conferred by belles-lettres, collaborated with poets to use poetry in the service of social standing and political influence. They looked to poetry to craft idealized representations of their characterethoscharacter—a kind of public imageimagepublic image destined for their literate peers—while poets did not miss the opportunity to use such alliances to promote their own work, often portraying themselves in similarly idealized terms. No longer mystics, prophets, or religious militants, early seventeenth-century poets became spokespersons addressing elites on behalf of elites. Malherbe was not the first but certainly the most visible to turn away from the humanist audience of Ronsard toward courtcourt (royal)ly elites, which by default included in their numbers some erudite Gallicans and Jesuits but were composed mostly of relatively uneducated aristocratic connoisseurs of belles-lettres.

In the first decade of the seventeenth century, literary patronage was only beginning to get back on its feet. Prolonged military conflict had suppressed the normal levels of literary and cultural production. In his monumental Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle, Antoine Adam sneeringly asserts that Henri IV was “profoundly indifferent to literature, concerned only with repairing the country’s finances” (Adam, Histoire vol. 1, 24). But royal finances were in genuine disarray after more than three decades of civil war, and Henri had promised large sums to LeagueLeaguer governors to secure their submission to his authority. Real financial worries motivated Henri IV’s placement of Malherbe not in his own clientele, but that of the duke de BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de. However, without a political use for the poet, such a shrewd politician as Henri IV would not have bothered at all. The first odes, enhancing Henri IV’s personal image, were meant to play a part in the king’s broad and on-going public relations campaign. It was understood that Malherbe was the king’s man.

Henri had acceded to the throne a weak king, mistrusted by political enemies on both sides of the sectarian divide. In his new role, therefore, he took a variety of steps to strengthen his personal authority. Some of these were aggressive policies that fostered state-building and administrative centralization.11 Others involved a drive to remake his public imageimagepublic image: he made a point to be seen praying in every church in Paris; he undertook extensive public building projects; he welcomed the Jesuits back to France; he encouraged royal panegyric. He also took the crucial step of renegotiating his conjugal alliance. Henri had his marriage to Marguerite de Valois annulled, and he wed the ultra-Catholic and fabulously rich Marie de Médicis. Receptions of the new queen in Avignon and in Paris were carefully choreographed events whose idealized images portrayed the sovereign couple as Olympian gods. Similar imagery, though with a different meaning, occurs in Malherbe’s odes.12

After the untimely death of Henri, with Marie de Médicis serving as regent, the particulars of Malherbe’s project changed in a significant way, but the immediate purpose of the odes, as well as their lofty ambition, remained fundamentally unaltered, as the poet now worked to bolster her authority amid noble discontent and rebellion. If Malherbe’s panegyrics lapsed into silence after 1613, it was almost certainly due to the delicate task of navigating the dangerous waters of courtcourt (royal) patronage during a time of growing political instability. The insurrection of Condé in 1614, and the young Louis XIII’s coup d’état in 1617, followed by the exile of Marie de Médicis to Blois, could not have been encouraging signs for the poet, who had published strong support for the queen mother. The difficulty that Malherbe had in getting the royal treasury to pay his stipend could not have helped. Then, after more than a decade, following a tentative rapprochement signaled by a few sonnets, an aging Malherbe composed an ode for Louis XIII, who in 1627 was still consolidating the bases of royal power when he launched the final siege against the last ProtestantProtestant stronghold at La RochelleLa Rochelle. That ode would be Malherbe’s last.

The loftier ambitions of Malherbe’s poetic sequence, namely renovating the monarchypolitymonarchy and uniting the national communitynationnational community, become visible only when the odes are set against the crisis of nationnational identity precipitated by the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion. This sectarian civil war in the second half of the sixteenth century nearly unraveled the tapestry of the French nationnation. In Renaissance and Reformation France, Mack P. HoltHolt, Mack P. observes that the rapid growth of Calvinism in the 1550s and 60s forced the national communitynationnational community of subjects to question the nature of their ties to the king. The traditional sacred oath sworn by the monarch to protect the kingdom from heresy created a destructive double-bind during the Reformation. If the king honored his oath, he was bound to persecute ProtestantProtestants who nevertheless considered themselves to be “good Frenchmen,” that is, loyal to the king and, therefore, still belonging to the national communitynationnational community. For most HuguenotsHuguenots, religious differences were a question of conscience, not of disloyalty. But if the crown appeared to accept peaceful coexistence with them, “then it was very easy for the HuguenotsHuguenots to remain loyal to a king who recognized their legal rights and protected them, while French Catholics’ links to the crown were thus jeopardized by the monarch’s own straying from his constitutional and sacred duty to defend the Catholic religion of his subjects” (HoltHolt, Mack P., Renaissance 26). The Holy LeagueLeague in the 1590s, formed by Catholics wishing to enforce the Catholicity of France, both the crown and the nationnation, grew out of deeply held religious conviction and a genuine “spiritual panic” that unchecked heresy and the evils of civil war presaged God’s disfavor and imminent judgment (Crouzet 75). Hard-line French Catholics, led by the Guises, were genuinely prepared to scrap the Salic Law and accept a Spanish monarch.

The importance of this historical backdrop for Malherbe’s royal odes has not gone unnoticed. Jean-Pierre Chauveau, in Poètes et poésie au XVIIè siècle, acknowledges their participation in the wider artistic and literary effort to restore the unity of the French nationnation in the early decades of the seventeenth century, while in Figurations of France: Literary Nation-Building in Times of Crisis (1550-1650), Marcus KellerKeller, Marcus analyzes their construction of French nationnationhood and offers an insightful, though somewhat anachronistic critique, focusing on the composition of a nationnational “nous” [we] and the key figures that define it. But neither critic examines in a comprehensive way the odes’ rhetorical constitution of the nationnation. The ideological make-over which the royal odes propose for the monarch and the monarchypolitymonarchy, in addition to repairing the vertical relationship between subject and sovereign, also requires that they redefine the complex network of horizontal relationships, among subjects, that constitute the basis of any national communitynationnational community. This unity, while remaining focused on the monarch as protector and embodiment of the nationnation, proceeds from a complex mode of address (ēthos), KellerKeller, Marcus’s national “nous” [we], but the analysis of this ethosproofēthos must push beyond the level of figuration to include the constitutive roles played by argument (logosprooflogos) and emotionemotion (pathosproofpathos). Representation is important to the extent that the odes consistently offer a choice between alternatives: the chaos and destruction of civil war versus the political utopia of Bourbon rule. But that means persuasion is even more crucial. The royal odes propose to unite the diverse subjects of France by moving them both cognitively and emotionally to make the right choice.

The importance to the royal odes of the stoicstoicism revival of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has also been noted. One might think that Malherbe’s sustained engagement with stoicstoicism philosophy, or the image of Henri IV as HerculesHercules, would confirm Denis Crouzet’s sweeping historical argument that the propaganda campaign of royalist Politiques, infused with the tenets of Christian stoicstoicismism, enabled an ethnically French absolutismabsolutism to triumph over LeagueLeaguer demands for European Catholicity.13 But the royal odes do not make a good fit. Besides the fact that they fall back on stoicstoicismism only when disaster strikes, their stoicstoicismism is far from orthodox. Their imagery and argument certainly echo royalist pamphlets of the 1580s and 90s and, in a limited sense, arise from them. Like those Politiques who condemned religiously motivated violence as the surest way to undermine the state, Malherbe clearly places the general welfarecommonwealthgeneral welfare of the nationnation above confessional loyalties.14 However, contrary to stoicstoicism fatality, the heroism of the royal odes underscores the monarch’s power to shape the outcome of events, while their patriotismpatriotism, contrary to the stoicstoicism condemnation of the passions, seeks to move the French subject with an array of powerful feelings, including anger and hatred. Even in their darkest moments, the royal odes still offer a moral choice, using both rational and irrational means of persuasion to produce the consensual allegiance to king and commonwealthcommonwealth that is at the core of the new national communitynationnational community.

What has escaped the attention of critics is the allegoryfigures of thoughtallegory of the ship of stateship of state that joins the royal odes into a unified sequence. Like the word “patrienationla patrie” [fatherland, nationnation, country], one cannot find anywhere in the odes such a phrase as “le navire de l’État” or “le vaisseau de l’État” [the ship of stateship of state]. Even today it is not a common syntagm in French. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, the analogyproofanalogy was commonplace (see QuintilianQuintilian 8.6.44). The figurative variants of this suppressed semantic nucleus appear in every ode. Such ubiquity raises the reader’s suspicion that the imagery means more than it says, a figure of thought known as emphasisfigures of thoughtemphasis or significatiofigures of thoughtsignificatio (QuintilianQuintilian 8.3.83; 9.2.64; Rhet. ad HerenCiceroRhetorica ad Herennium. 4.53.67 ff.). Provoked by the ship of stateship of state motif, the reader’s active understanding is able to weave a series of odes with loose thematic connections into a fully integrated grand tableau.

The classical allegoryfigures of thoughtallegory, more significantly, constitutes a substantive revision of the traditional myths and symbolsnationmyths and symbols of ofmythologyunderlying myth of the sequence the nationnation. The replacement of the myth of TroyTroy with the ArgoArgo myth redefines the basis for political association in France. It is no longer blood and soil but the collective good that binds the head and members of the body politicbody politic. Such a motif also reflects a de-emphasis of religion. If Henri IV is treated as quasi-divine, it is due to his superlative virtuevirtue, which participates in the virtuevirtue that orders the universe. It is no longer the Church that confers the aura of sacrality, but rather the monarch himself that inflects the sacrality of his mystical bodymystical body (of the king), the patrianationpatria, the nationnation. In the new imagined community, modeled on the Bourbons and guided by them, the unforgiveable crime is therefore no longer heresy but sedition. Continued rebellion against the crown is seen as threatening the safety of the ship, that is, the state, whose wreck will undermine the monarchy, the last unifying thread of the nationnation. It is noteworthy that the royal odes appropriate the all-important task of forging a nationnational identity which traditionally belongs to epicepic poetry poetry. Yet they accomplish it with images and argument rather than narrative, replacing the plot of epicepic poetry fiction with metaphormetaphor and exampleexample, but creating a no less powerful nationnational mythologymythology.

II.

There are several good reasons why these complex poems deserve to be the focus of a book-length study. First, both supporters and detractors of Malherbe’s reputation as the father of French poetry, reformer of the French language, and founder of the Grand Siècle, have looked to the odes time and again to bolster their diametrically opposed arguments. While it is true that Malherbe’s literary preeminence was beginning to wane by mid-century, particular odes would nevertheless remain for many seventeenth-century critics unquestionable models of eloquenceeloquence, nobilitynobility, and finesse.15 Second, as I mentioned, the odes form a unified sequence composed over the course of a quarter century. David Lee RubinRubin, David Lee asserted the thematic unity of the odes, but he never posited that the odes form a unified sequence based on a recurrent intertext, a common ideological goal, and shared rhetorical tools. This books does so. It shows that the sequence as a whole fashions an overarching nationnational mythmythologyunderlying myth of the sequence that imagines the Bourbons as quasi-divine heroes commanding the ship of stateship of state and steering it through the storms of political discord to a new Golden AgeGolden Age, where peace, justicevirtuejustice, and prosperity at home are matched by French hegemony abroad. The major odes in the sequence are well over a hundred lines, and they were, by all accounts, difficult to write and long in the making. Odes were often an easy way to make a splash in the literary world, but Malherbe did not write them simply to get noticed. Rather, the odes themselves, here and there, suggest that they aspire to outdo not just contemporary rivals but ancient models as well. Indeed, and this is the third point, their public occasions, their royal addressees, and their illustrious association with HoraceHorace and Pindar (two of the great models of eloquenceeloquence handed down from antiquity) make the odes a privileged vehicle for the demonstration of la grande éloquence [the grandstylegrand style], the most elevated and powerful genus dicendi [kind of speaking]. This style was so prized by both ancients and early moderns, it was endlessly reinvented by them. Malherbe’s own formulation of the grandstylegrand style would certainly have been credited to the poet’s genius, but showing off the potentialities of the French language would have been even more valuable to the fledgling Bourbon dynasty. The vernacular brought to the height of esthetic perfection in poetry offered an image of the political and moral excellence, and therefore the permanence, to which the French monarchy aspired. Malherbe’s odes strove to set the standard for royaleloquenceroyal eloquenceeloquence in a political and cultural climate where the exact formulation of the style best suited to royal majesty was passionately disputed. 16

What is more, the royal odes’ attempt to erect a linguistic norm perceived as the perfection of the French language accords with their ambition to foster nationnational coherence and unity. FumaroliFumaroli, Marc justly sees Malherbe’s role at the Bourbon courtcourt (royal) as “the magistrate of the royal language, dictating its grammatical, lexical, and rhetorical use, and crystallizing its laws in the example of his verse” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, Précis 95). What FumaroliFumaroli, Marc calls “the only true mission of the poet,” namely “to accord the language with royal grandstylegrandeur” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, Précis 95), simultaneously serves the ambition to unite the French nationnation. In La conscience nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion, Myriam YardeniYardeni, Myriam stresses that the French language was a crucial vector of national consciousnessnationnational consciousness: “the language was seen as a basic element of one’s love of country [patrienationla patrie]. Any effort that aimed at its diffusion, its implantation, or its embellishment becomes an act of patriotismpatriotism. This sentiment is not limited to the narrow milieu of the educated and extends far beyond the ivory-tower patriotismpatriotism of scholars and poets. All understand that the language is their national heritage [patrimoine]” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 43). Malherbe’s proverbial obsession with purity of diction, grammatical correctness, and polished sonorousness, criteria borrowed from CiceroCiceronian AtticismCiceroAtticism (CiceroCicero, De OrCiceroDe Oratore. 3.38. 53-54; BrutusCiceroBrutus 252; OratorCiceroOrator 24-25), parlays the perceived universality of the Tullianus stylus [CiceroCiceronian style] into a national language that seeks to transcend dialects of region, caste, and profession.17

By far the most compelling reason to reexamine the royal odes, however, is to retrieve their impassioned patriotismpatriotism. To anyone familiar with the prosodic and philological niggling that still surrounds Malherbe’s poetry, the focus on patriotic sentimentpatriotismpatriotic feeling, fervor, sentiment should be a welcome breath of fresh air. Close inspection of the odes invariably reveals a speaker who raises up his voice at a crucial political juncture. The future of France always seems to hang in the balance, and the general welfarecommonwealthgeneral welfare of the nationnation rides on his utterance. Such public and political speech grew out of the political turmoil that prevailed during the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion. “Deliberativeeloquencedeliberative, that is, politicalpolitical eloquenceeloquence,” writes FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, “crept through the whole kingdom, no longer in its discreet form, appropriate to the spirit of courtcourt (royal), or the ‘Council of the Prince,’ but as public harangues in the ‘republican’ style which could claim direct descent from CiceroCicero and Demosthenes” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 492). “In the midst of a civil war recalling the Rome of CiceroCicero, CaesarCaesar, Octavian, and Antony, the clergy and the magistracy, by turns, shifted toward a deliberativeeloquencedeliberative eloquenceeloquence foreign to the character and the tradition of the French monarchy” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 493). A vigorous pamphlet literature amplified these orations, publicizing the competing ideological claims of ProtestantProtestants and Catholics and politicizing the rhetorical climate. When Henri IV acceded to the throne and politicalpolitical eloquence was no longer welcome, epideicticeloquenceepideictic oratory took up the slack (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 238). As orators and poets competed “to remake and to perfect national unitynationnational unity around the king, and to secure a dearly won peace” (Chauveau 63), “the art of royal praise became the crucible of a literary language transcending provincial particularisms and caste idioms. Remaining the privileged route for poets to obtain honors, titles, pensions or commissions, this prime vector of literary change between 1600 and 1630 mingled eloquenceeloquence and poetry” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, Précis 98). Catapulted to the forefront of emerging literary trends, encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry poetry became a natural outlet for the expression of political aspirations.

Jacques Morel has documented the poetic climate of Malherbe’s early years, finding almost identical rhetorical strategies and political imagery in the work of Bertaut, Du PerronDu Perron, Laugier de Porchères, Rosset, and Vauquelin des Yveteaux. Malherbe shares their use of a current event as a pretext for praising the virtues of Henri IV, their recourse to amplification, their heroic idealization of the king, and their occasional remonstration (Morel, “Henri IV et ses poètes” 214). But Malherbe sets himself apart from this crowded field in several important ways. First, if it need be said, Malherbe distills and clarifies the poetic tendencies of his contemporaries. He does what they do, only better. The prominence given to Malherbe’s poetry in Toussaint du Bray’s anthologies suggests the dominant reputation for eloquenceeloquence that Malherbe enjoyed in poetic circles, while the poet’s love letters and letters of consolation were coveted models of epistolary eloquenceeloquence.18 In Le Secrétaire de la Cour (1625), dedicated to Malherbe, Puget de La Serre declared: “you are the most eloquent of men” (ctd. in Winegarten, p. 18).

Second, building on Ronsard’s ennoblement of poetry in the 1550 Odes and the political engagement of Les Discours (1560-1584), Malherbe’s royal odes boldly chart a new political course. The kingdom’s leading orators preserved, even cultivated, a sacerdotal aura (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 489), and this includes a royal magistrate like Guillaume Du VairDu Vair, one of Malherbe’s early mentors. However, despite typical commonplaces invoking Apollo, the Malherbian speaker is less a prophet than a statesman. The reimagination of the national communitynationnational community in the royal odes depends on the construction of a primarily civic relation between the poet and the reader as the crucial step toward reestablishing trust among subjects of the French king. That is why the notion of ethosethos, both moral and rhetorical, is so important. It is not simply a tool of persuasion; rather, its power to produce trust in an audience makes it a cornerstone of political community. The royal odes define it neither by poetic inspiration, nor by some transcendent link to God, but by practical reasonphronēsispractical reason (phronēsisphronēsis), the moral virtuevirtues and, paradoxically, superior craftcraftsmanship. This latter is not as formalist as it might at first appear. If we understand craftcraft to mean artistic persuasion, induced by argument or style, then it has a causal relationship with eunoia [goodwill]ethoseunoia (goodwill), a quality perceived in the speaker but obtained through the production of pleasure and emotionemotion in the audience (GarverGarver, Eugene 110; AristotleAristotle, Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 2.1.5). In the royal odes, feelings of wonderwonder produced by elevated diction, metaphormetaphor, hyperbole, significatiofigures of thoughtsignificatio [suggestion, significatiofigures of thoughtallusion], emphasisfigures of thoughtemphasis [hinting], ratiocinatiofigures of thoughtratiocinatio [inference], etc., and the pleasure afforded by figures of speech, smooth rhythms and rhyme, work in tandem with the emotionemotions inherent to civic relations: friendliness, confidence, and kindliness, but also anger, shame, and hatred (AristotleAristotle, Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 2.2-11). “The emotionemotions can be constitutive of particular judgments,” observes GarverGarver, Eugene, “because they are constitutive of the enterprise of judging and deliberating” (GarverGarver, Eugene 109). If the royal odes do not primarily judge or deliberate, they nevertheless lead the reader to affirm the values and beliefs, and to feel the appropriate emotionemotions, that create and support the imagined national communitynationnational community. Taking a page from Renaissance sacredeloquencesacred rhetorics rhetorics, they use emotionemotion to reaffirm the affective ties that bind monarch and subject and link subjects to one another. Their grandstylegrand style, in a manner similar to what AugustineAugustine advises, stirs up the full array of emotionemotions (admiration, joy, indignation, hatred, fear, anger, etc.), with the goal of transforming “will and heart” (ShugerShuger, Debora K. 48), not with love of God and of neighbor, but with love of king and of country.

This is the third way in which Malherbe’s royal odes distinguish themselves from contemporary poetic production: their reimagining of the national communitynationnational community according to loyalty and service pro rege et patriapro rege et patria [for king and fatherland]. This emotionemotionally-charged commitment echoes the quasi-secular patriotismpatriotism that arose in the 1590s, when France overcame the threat of dissolution and Henri went on the offensive against Spain. In La conscience nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion, Myriam YardeniYardeni, Myriam painstakingly shows how Catholicity, indeed, religion itself, lost its privileged position as the unifying thread of the nationnational tapestry. The royal odes reflect this development, exhibiting a stance in diametrical opposition to LeagueLeaguer propagandists who subordinated the French state to the Catholic faith and would have preferred the dissolution of the monarchypolitymonarchy to religious plurality—going so far as to strip the HuguenotsHuguenots of their nationnational identity by treating them as foreigners. In a way similar to what one finds in ProtestantProtestant tracts predating Henri’s accession to the throne, the royal odes decouple religion and nationnation, while the implicit freedom of conscience that they grant to the ProtestantProtestant minority presupposes the arguments for tolerance staked out early on in the conflict by royalist Politiques concerned with national unitynationnational unity. Patriotismpatriotism, that is, one’s commitment and service pro rege et patriapro rege et patria, subordinating one’s private and partisan interest to the collective good, is henceforth to constitute the unifying thread of the nationnation. Malherbe has equally harsh words for ProtestantProtestants and Catholics whenever powerful nobles from either group revolt against the new regime. Similar to royalist pamphlet propaganda from the 1590s, the royal odes treat all political adversaries as traitors, bad Frenchmen, and propose instead that the nationnation prefer the legitimate monarch and choose the public goodcommonwealthpublic good. The same gamut of patriotic feelingpatriotismpatriotic feeling, fervor, sentiments, or national sentimentnationnational sentiment, which burst forth in the 1590s, animates the odes: wonderwonder, pride and gratitude inspired by the monarch; hatred, fear, and indignation directed at the rebels; joy, hope, and emulation shared by all good Frenchmen. If such patriotismpatriotism is always mediated by loyalty to the monarch, this is certainly because the monarchy is the only remaining symbol of national unitynationnational unity, but also because the Bourbons have demonstrably, or so Malherbe contends, put the general welfarecommonwealthgeneral welfare of the nationnation ahead of every other consideration, thereby proving that they deserve to rule. Working from ideological assumptions that emerged only toward the end of the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion, the royal odes propose to complete what has been only imperfectly accomplished.

What is noteworthy, moreover, about their subordination of religion to the state is that the monarch and the patrienationla patrie [nationnation] occupy a transcendent position usually reserved for divine things eliciting love, joy, awe, and reverence. The Wars of ReligionWars of Religion disrupted the coincidence of two separate obligations, rex [king] and patrianationpatria [fatherland; nationnation; country], and the odes attempt to make them coincide once again, with the difference that the Church is henceforth subordinate to patrianationpatria. In KantorowiczKantorowicz, Ernst H.’s terms, amor patriae [love for the nationnation] has not simply been set against the corpus mysticum [mystical bodymystical body (of the king)] of the Church, but raised above it. The king’s virtuevirtue, so superlative as to be quasi-divine, should be seen as a reflection of the nationnation, that is, collective qualities inflected through this particular individual. To say that the king is the embodiment of the nationnation is to point to the king’s two bodies, the one collective (the body politicbody politic) and the other personal (the physical body). But it is this latter that serves as the concrete, sensuous representation of what cannot be otherwise directly perceived. The obscure forces operating behind the opportune arrival of this savior of the nationnation at this juncture in history, as well as behind the king’s extraordinary feat of turning back the tides of destruction that threatened to engulf the nationnation, are causes that one cannot fathom—although they go by various names in the odes: Dieu [God], le grand démon de France [the great daemondaemon of France], les destins [destiny]—and they constitute the imperceptible grounds of wonderwonder. Because the king’s will is the expression of the divine will, his person mediates the special relationship that allegedly exists between God and the French nationnation. As Christ is where God and humanity intersect, so the king is where transcendent forces and the French nationnation meet. The odes’ patriotismpatriotism is not a religion, but their God is a nationnational God. Only in the case of Marie de Médicis does the image of the French monarch begin to approach something like a world redeemer. Numinous feelings of awe, reverence, hope, and fear projected onto the monarch reflect back on the patrienationla patrie [nationnation]. Thus the patriotismpatriotism of the odes and their project of sacralization are related: sacralization demobilizes resistance to the new dynasty even as it elevates the monarch as the pattern of amor patriae [love of country], the proper affective commitment to the public goodcommonwealthpublic good. Such a model is charged with powerful emotionemotions but also redirects them toward the nationnation.

Instrumental to this affective reorientation is the overarching myth that unifies the sequence of royal odes. The grand tableau that must be inferred from their classical and biblical exampleexamples and imagery is a subtle but powerful source of the civic unity which the odes seek to instill. Malherbe’s recourse to the classical commonplace of the ship of stateship of state to unify his poetic sequence and to model the new unity of the nationnation distances the royal odes from the neo-Stoicstoicism political ideology which was the “philosophico-ethical union at the root of the union between the HuguenotsHuguenots and the politicians for the defense of the state” (Crouzet 84). The odes share with royalist pamphlets the intention to integrate the new dynasty into the “mystico-prophetic legend of the French monarchy” (Crouzet 90), but the royalists’ “temporal messianism” (Crouzet 93) differs from Malherbe’s in significant ways. Such royalist pamphlets as Declaration du Roy de Navarre sur les calomnies publiées contre luy (1585), Panegyric Au très chrestien Henry IIII (1590), or Le Labyrinthe de l’Hercule gaulois triomphant (1601) depict Henri IV as a Christ-like stoicstoicism HerculesHercules whose reign is founded on “eternal Reason” (Crouzet 93), that is, “a historical necessity dictated by the order of the universe” (Crouzet 90), “a cosmic force acting through the royal figure” (Crouzet 90). Malherbe’s royal odes also acknowledge the special relationship that must exist between God and Henri given the miraculous arrival of this leader to perpetuate the providential history of France, but they underscore Henri’s virtuevirtue more, assign human actions more credit for victory or defeat, and so portray Henri rather as a classical hero whose magnanimitymagnanimity is virtuegreatness of soulmagnanimityso great as to make him a demi-god. The relationship of husband and wife (“one flesh”), and then of father and son (“one blood”), promote Marie and Louis to the level of co-equals. If the Bourbons are the captains and/or pilots of the ship of stateship of state, then their subjects are the crew, and all have embarked on a political adventurehero cycleadventure to quest cyclehero cyclerestore quest epichero cyclepeace, justicevirtuejustice and prosperity at home while returning France to imperial greatness abroad. The odes thank God for Henri, see his leadership as indispensable to the general welfarecommonwealthgeneral welfare and thus advocate for his unconditional acceptance by all good Frenchmen, but they also call for civic engagement by subjects of the new nationnation according to the portion of virtuevirtue allotted to each.

While the accentuation of this nationnational myth is somewhat more secular, it is no less deeply spiritual. This is not simply because the odes endow the monarch and the nationnation with numinous feelings. Rather, the quest-like structure of the political adventurehero cycleadventure recalls the “hero cyclehero cycle” of Joseph CampbellCampbell, Joseph’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the pattern of departure-trial-return that underlies stories of adventurehero cycleadventure and/or spiritual illumination and describes the process of spiritual rebirth, whether personal, societal, or cosmic. “The hero is symbolical,” writes Campbell, “of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us all” (CampbellCampbell, Joseph 31). The royal odes’ portrayal of the Bourbons as mythical heroes, and the representation of the nationnation’s rebirth as the return of the Golden AgeGolden Age, attest to the nationnational myth’s spiritual objective, namely to move French subjects with love for monarch and nationnation. Such a universal change would be the nationnational rebirth which the odes herald, and it has two aspects. On the one hand, the hero saves the nationnation by action and exampleexample: the loyalty and service to the patrienationla patrie exhibited by the monarch models the same commitment for the nationnation’s subjects and, through emulation, inspires it in them. On the other hand, the return of the Golden AgeGolden Age announced by the odes imagines a spiritual transformation on the grandest scale. The symbolic death of France during the armed struggle of the civil war and its symbolic rebirth under the heroic leadership of Henri, Marie, and Louis reproduces the cosmogonic cycle of dissolution and renewal (CampbellCampbell, Joseph 224). Such a transformation is total and presupposes the harmonious reintegration of the individual in society and the cosmos. For this reason, it is correct to call the nationnational myth of the royal odes universal, that is, all-encompassing.

Whether or not the Golden AgeGolden Age returns in fact, the odes present the questhero cyclequest as both collective and individual, requiring not just the goodwill and cooperation of the nationnation’s subjects, but the watchfulness of God, the action of the king, and the service of the great nobilitynobilitygreat nobles in particular. The new Golden AgeGolden Age is a “second coming,” so to speak, and most important, its imminent arrival demands a change in the reader to bring it about: the move from a partisan point of view to a collective national sentimentnationnational sentiment. In a nationnation fractured by religious dispute, the odes’ mythological allusions serve as a kind of substitute liturgy. Echoes from classical poetry, the PsalmOld TestamentPsalmss, and the ProphetOld TestamentProphetss become the common glue to hold together the various constituencies of the nationnation, but also the means by which the reader will undergo the necessary change. “It has always been the prime function of mythologymythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those human fantasies that tend to hold it back” (Campbell 7). The odes certainly set out to persuade with argument, to move the reader with admiration, with fear, with emulation, etc., but their highly allusive composition also requires the reader’s active understanding. Most fascinating in this regard is Malherbe’s use of figures of thoughtfigures of thought—significatiofigures of thoughtsignificatio [suggestion, allusion], emphasisfigures of thoughtemphasis [hinting], and ratiocinatiofigures of thoughtratiocinatio [inference]—which early modern rhetorical theorists, Catholic and ProtestantProtestant, developed from their reading of HellenisticstyleHellenistic rhetorical treatises to create an alternative conception of the grandstylegrand style that could include the Bible as one of its models.19 Such figuresfigures of thought occur in the odes primarily with reference to classical myth, but also encompass biblical allusions, suggesting that a “veiled spiritual meaning” attaches to specific images, a reading practice that one also finds in contemporary books of Ignatian spirituality.20 The literate constituencies targeted by the odes are implicated in the imaginary political adventurehero cycleadventure by having to work out the meaning of the odes for themselves, thereby undergoing the desired cognitive and affective modifications. Malherbe’s odes work with the reader to bring about the change of heart and motivation of will necessary to unite the nationnation on a new mythical foundation, the ship of stateship of state en route to utopia (cf. HoraceHorace, “Epode 16”). Reworking the famous slogan of Guillaume Postel (“one faith, one law, one king”), the royal odes propose what Jean de Serres could write in 1597: “one king, one law, one nationnation [patrienationla patrie].”21 Their aim is to propagate and to eternalize the ideology of this new national communitynationnational community.

The pillar of Malherbe’s patriotismpatriotism is magnanimitymagnanimity, the virtuevirtue for which the odes so highly praise the Bourbons. According to AristotleAristotle, magnanimitymagnanimity is the greatest of the virtuevirtues, implying the presence and perfection of all the others (NEAristotleNicomachean Ethics (NE) 4.3 1123b30-1124a). For the generations of Frenchmen born and raised in civil strife, the idea of virtuevirtue was key in the justification of power and privilege. Political elites wanted to believe that virtuevirtue entitled them to rule. But magnanimitymagnanimity was especially appropriate to the Bourbons because the new regime needed its subjects, both greater and lesser, to believe that Bourbon authority was deserved as well as legitimate. Malherbe consistently asserts that Henri IV and Louis XIII deserve to be king—and Marie de Médicis, to be regent—thanks to their extraordinary achievements, but most of all, because they have the right concern with honor, putting the general welfarecommonwealthgeneral welfare of the nationnation ahead of all else. On that basis, the odes un-self-consciously celebrate Henri IV and Louis XIII as quasi-divine heroes of superlative virtuevirtue (or in Marie de Médicis’ case, a great-souled goddess), anticipating the vogue for the idealized aspirations and superhuman individuals observed in theater and the heroic novel after 1630.22

But the odes do not just point to magnanimitymagnanimity and the other virtuevirtues. They also illustrate them, exemplifying what they assert. The odes assume, as does AristotleAristotle, that virtuevirtue is learned by the imitation of exampleexample, and similar to Montaigne’s “De l’institution des enfans” [On the Education of Children] (Essais 1.26), they presuppose that intimate acquaintance with exampleexamples of magnanimitymagnanimity, by exercising the reader’s judgment, inculcates the same virtuevirtue.23 If their praise of magnanimitymagnanimity aims to elicit, on behalf of the Bourbons, the admiration of the nationnation’s subjects, the royal odes also model the acts of loyalty, service, and emulation which they seek to inspire. As paradoxical as it might sound to anyone familiar with AristotleAristotle’s discussion of monarchypolitymonarchy in the PoliticsAristotlePolitics, it is the virtuevirtue of magnanimitymagnanimity in the royal odes that fosters the creation of a civic community under a monarch. Malherbe’s praise for the magnanimous monarch whose patriotismpatriotism is a model for his subjects evokes a monarchypolitymonarchy that mixes aristocratic and democratic elements in a manner that recalls the “harmonic justice” of the perfect politypolity that BodinBodin, Jean envisions in Les Six Livres de la République (1576). Such praise and inculcation of magnanimitymagnanimity are supposed to foster in French subjects the corresponding moral ethosethos, the kind of person defined by this all-important virtuevirtue. Modeled on the Bourbon commitment to the nationnation, this moral characterethoscharacter becomes the patriotic idealpatriotismpatriotic ideal for the greater and lesser subjects of the new national communitynationnational community. Aimed at the nobilitynobility and, indeed, offered to the whole nationnation, it is embodied and performed by the odes’ rational modes of argument, particularly exampleexample. By contrast, the sequence’s overarching myth and recurrent mythological motifs perform a different function, transporting these magnanimous subjects “beyond logical demonstration” to implicate them in a political adventurehero cycleadventure bigger than themselves.

The unstated premise that allows the odes to exemplify the virtuevirtues they praise is the conception of action and eloquenceeloquence as complementary activities of practical wisdomphronēsispractical wisdom (phronēsisphronēsis).24 Such a premise rescues the odes from being no more than sophistical mystifications of power. Although Malherbe was literally a “poète à gages” [salaried poet], the royal odes aspire to do more than simply satisfy the poet’s professional obligation or merely persuade their target audience. The emphasis they place on virtuevirtue, and the rhetorical effort they make to establish a close relation between poet and reader, in other words, subjects of the Bourbons, suggest that they partake of what Eugene GarverGarver, Eugene calls a civic rhetoric, “one in which more than the external goal is at stake. The audience is not an enemy, and the civic rhetorician must construct a civic relation between himself and his audience” (GarverGarver, Eugene 46; see also 6-12). “Civic rhetoric aims at an identity between the speaker making the arguments and the audience receiving them” (GarverGarver, Eugene 47). Although the royal odes, being a species of poetry, approach the delicate balance of civic rhetoric from the side of pure craftcraft, that is, a skill or knack in which there is no guiding end, their integration of argumentative reasoning (logosprooflogos, Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 1.2.3) makes them a technēcrafttechnē in the full sense of the term, while their celebration of virtuevirtue assimilates them to a civic activity, orienting them toward the goodcommonwealththe good (GarverGarver, Eugene 7). Although a highly ornamented and emotionally charged discourse like encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry poetry, consigned to a professional poet, would seem to be incompatible with, or at least irrelevant to, the speaker’s virtuevirtue, the quality most essential for a good citizencommonwealthcitizen (GarverGarver, Eugene 6-7),25 it is my contention that the odes partake of rhetoric in the noblest sense of the term, integrating “the apparently opposed properties of citizencommonwealthcitizenship and artfulness” and exhibiting “a harmony between reason and characterethoscharacter, logosprooflogos and ēthos” (GarverGarver, Eugene 12). The capacity to reconcile the potential conflicts between craftcraft and virtuevirtue, or the contradictions between tools and technēcrafttechnē, makes ethosproofēthos central to Malherbe’s royal odes. Its function is to maintain such contraries in a causal relationship, bringing tools under technēcrafttechnē, and technēcrafttechnē under virtuevirtue.

The scholarship on Malherbe has yet to recognize the value of ethosethos and virtuevirtue as concepts critical to correctly grasping the ideological purpose of the odes. The rhetorical education that writers and poets received in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, not to mention the politicized atmosphere created by civil strife and pamphlet propaganda, suggest that Malherbe intentionally engaged the political arena. It was understood that epideicticeloquenceepideictic eloquenceeloquence, to which poetry belonged, could have political consequences. Stella P. Revard, a classical scholar of the Pindaric ode, puts it best when she observes that “the poetry of praise always has an agenda” (Revard xiii). For the sake of their ideological purpose, the odes have been invested with the assumptions and the tools of politicalpolitical rhetoric. Ethosethos is the most important persuasive technique they employ, and virtuevirtue, a quality of characterethoscharacter, is what they most single out for praise. But this is where things get interesting. Malherbe’s odes clearly invite the confusion of actions and texts, persons and speech, doing and making. Their confusion of rhetorical ethosethos with moral ethosethos, I believe, is deliberate. The odes are designed to make their readers believe that the characterethoscharacter portrayed in and through discourse—whether of the poet himself or one of his patrons—is the actual person. The immortal glory offered by this poetry was very much intended for the living.

III.

Whether Malherbe’s royal odes belong to the paradigm of the Renaissance, Classicism, or the Baroque, twentieth-century critics have disagreed. Although Malherbe famously rejected the late-Renaissance esthetic of Desportes, leader of the school of Ronsard, it can be shown that the royal odes share many of the same rhetorical and poetic devices. Following Boileau’s lead in the L’Art poétique 1.131-162 (1674), most critics, like FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, continue to see in Malherbe a precursor of the French classical esthetic. Others, taking their cue from Jean Rousset, have preferred to classify Malherbe’s poetry as baroque, and with good reason: the royal odes exhibit the goal, the broad themes, and many of the rhetorical features of baroque poetry. 26 Rousset must be credited with providing scholars with a powerful framework to investigate the mentality, culture, and literature of early seventeenth-century France, even if the category suffers from internal contradictions, with respect to France, that are difficult to resolve.27 In this book, however, none of these literary and historical paradigms has been used to unpack the form and function of Malherbe’s royal odes. My concern was simply that the theoretical challenges involved in engaging the vexed questions they raise would divert too much attention from analysis of the poetry and its historical context.

Instead, this book’s reconsideration of Malherbe’s royal odes in terms of ideology and eloquenceeloquence has been nourished by several overlapping areas of historical research. My thesis director, Pierre Force, an unfailing source of erudition and encouragement, first set me on this path many years ago when he urged me to read Marc FumaroliFumaroli, Marc’s L’Âge de l’éloquence. Since then, the work of many other scholars, Jean-Pierre Chauveau, James BiesterBiester, James, Debora K. ShugerShuger, Debora K., Eugene GarverGarver, Eugene, Mark Bannister, Peter W. Shoemaker, Mack P. HoltHolt, Mack P., Myriam YardeniYardeni, Myriam, Marcus KellerKeller, Marcus, and David Lee RubinRubin, David Lee, have immeasurably contributed to casting the odes in their proper historical and rhetorical light. But I owe a special debt of gratitude to Kathy EdenEden, Kathy, whose analysis of CiceronianeloquenceCiceronian decorum as it relates to literary hermeneutics suggested how I could legitimately link close textual analysis to historical context, especially for odes composed in an eminently oratorical age:

CiceroCicero defines eloquenceeloquence as the ability to practice decorum, defined in turn as the ability to accommodate the occasion, taking account of times, places, and persons: ‘This, indeed, is the form of wisdom that the orator must especially employ—to adapt himself to occasions and persons .’ As it affects poetry, he continues, decorum comes under the careful consideration of the grammaticus (OratorCiceroOrator 72). For the interpretation of poetry, as the grammarian’s chief function, depends in large part on the very same set of questions asked by the orator in the interests of decorum: who, to whom, when, where, why, and so on. [ ] Interpreting poetry, in other words, is fundamentally a historical investigation, one grounded in the very questions that constitute the principle of decorum (EdenEden, Kathy, Hermeneutics 26-27).

Accordingly, Malherbe’s practicing of decorum in the composition of his royal odes not only requires that readers look beyond the text to the historical particulars of time, place, and persons, but actually justifies seeing these as already embedded in the fabric of the text. This is not to say that the odes are only mirrors of their context, but rather that an immanent reading of the odes reveals the dominant values, beliefs, and assumptions that Malherbe’s intended audience took for granted28—provided we keep in mind what the composition of such an audience owes to the poet’s own creative imagination. A merely positivist reading would risk overlooking how the poet-orator constructs an adequate concept of his audience (Perelman 33)—adequate to the historical particulars, certainly, but also to the poet’s own poetic imagination. Malherbe’s royal odes address the monarch and the subjects of France, but they also aim to create a new national communitynationnational community out of the existent constituencies they address.

By attending to the odes’ rhetorical tactics and strategies, this book restores the sociopolitical dimensions to a poetic form—the royal encomiumencomium—too quickly dismissed by critics as “a game” or “merely an ornament of power.”29 Poetry may not have been the divine discourse of the humanities, with special access to wisdom, as the Pléiade contended. But it was more than mere honnête divertissement (noble diversion).30 Poetry was a minor art in a variety of ways, but major political elites nevertheless made use of it for their own purposes. This fact alone would have sufficed to assign poetry a sociopolitical function even if Malherbe were not aspiring to be more than a bon joueur de quilles [good player of skittles]. The extra-literary function of the royal odes is not merely suggested by their conditions of production: such a purpose is sometimes explicitly stated in the poems. Only when severed from any meaningful external purpose does early seventeenth-century poetry, and the royal encomiumencomium in particular, look like an ornament or a game. Is it any surprise, then, that twentieth-century criticism, with its formalist bias, has paid such excessive attention to word usage, grammar, versification, logical coherence, or semantics in early seventeenth-century poetry? Even the more seductive theoretical approaches inspired by Bachelard or Genette miss the mark, as they mistakenly assume poetry’s full-fledged emancipation from patronage, when in fact it was taking its first steps toward literary autonomy only at the end of the seventeenth century. Norbert Elias in The Court Society does well to remind us that what modern readers too often take to be purely esthetic values were perceived by early moderns also as “the finely shaded expressions of social qualities” (Elias 58). The pleasure of the esthetic, of play, simultaneously served other ends—social and political ends. If poetry in the early seventeenth century was a game, it was a dangerous one. The claim that poets were minor rhetoricians, or that poetry occupied a minor place in the res literaria [literary canon], is belied by the political persecution of Théophile de Viau for a sonnet. If nothing was really at stake in the writing of poetry, then why did anyone take the trouble to notice? By the same token, the stark contrast between the high ambition sounded in Malherbe’s odes and his deprecating remarks about poets and poetry needs to be taken in context. As Racan himself observes of the master: “His greatest happiness was to entertain his friends Racan, Colmby, Yvrande and others, with his contempt for all those things which the world most esteems” (Racan, Malherbe 33). Such disdain for poetry and poets was surely ironic, an aristocratic pose meant to shock and to delight close friends. Malherbe’s sardonic sense of humor is not a reliable indication of his true feelings, or, if it is, must be read in reverse. He was likely parodying the reductive view of the poet’s role in French society, one which neither he nor his friends shared—at least, that is, before Racan became devout. So, while trying to avoid the mistake of giving poetry too central a place in early seventeenth-century France, this book nevertheless rests on the claim that poetry was an important ornament wielded by the powerful for social and political ends.

Part I, “Praising the Great Soulmagnanimitygreat soul,” sets up the social, political, and rhetorical framework for the close reading of the odes in Part II. Chapter 1, “Literary Patronage,” shows how the magnanimitymagnanimity of Malherbe’s royal patron, Henri IV, influences the entire sequence’s conception of audience. Ethosethos is the rhetorical tool that allows the poet to adapt himself and his poetic discourse to the monarch, whose two bodies, personal and collective, determine the royal odes’ construction of a new national communitynationnational community. Chapter 2, “The Evolution of Noble Identitynobilityidentity,” looks to the changes affecting noble identitynobilityidentity in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to explain the centrality of virtuevirtue in the royal odes. The analysis of Aristotelian magnanimitymagnanimity in particular reveals an unsuspected logical consistency and political ground underlying these encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry poems. The praise for Henri IV’s magnanimitymagnanimity justifies his accession to the throne but also transforms the king into a quasi-divine hero. Chapter 3, “The Search for Royal Eloquence,” the longest of these preliminary chapters, situates the royal odes relative to Gallican and JesuiteloquenceJesuit eloquenceeloquence. It examines the hybrid genus dicendi of the odes, their accessory political functionpolitical function, and their incorporation of the rhetorical methods of wonderwonder in support of Henri’s ideological program. To grasp Malherbe’s idea of eloquenceeloquence, the roles of phronēsisphronēsis [practical wisdomphronēsispractical wisdom], moral virtuevirtue, elocutiostyleelocutio [style] and the emotionemotions are analyzed. The “admirable style” is not wholly rejected but rather modified by a CiceroCiceronian AtticismCiceroAtticism tinged with the suggestiveness and emotionemotional intensity of HellenisticstyleHellenistic plainstyleplainness. While owing more to the polish and abundance of Isocrates, Malherbe still borrows from the Longinian sublime. Powerful figures of thoughtfigures of thought underpin the self-description of the royal odes as portraitethosportraits portraitMinervaof characterportraits of character capable of changing readers’ perceptions of the monarch. The result of such close rhetorical analysis is to show on what basis the speaker of the odes becomes a model subject of the new nationnation.

Part II, “The Sequence of Royal Odes,” the heart of the book, demonstrates the underlying unity of the corpus by performing a close reading of each ode from start to finish and in chronological order:

À la Reine sur sa bienvenue en France (1600; 1601);

Prière pour le Roi allant en Limousin (1605; 1607);

Ode sur l’attentat commis en la personne de sa majesté (1605; 1606);

Ode au feu Roi sur l’heureux succès du voyage de Sedan (1606; 1607);

À Monseigneur le duc de BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de (1608; 1609);

Sur la mort de Henri le Grand (1610; 1630);

À la Reine sur les heureux succès de sa régence (1610; 1611);

À la Reine mère du roi pendant sa régence (1613; 1621);

Pour la Reine mère du roi pendant sa régence (unfinished 1613; 1630);

Pour le Roi allant châtier la rébellion des Rochelois (1627; 1635).31

The number of odes examined here expands the corpus studied by David Lee RubinRubin, David Lee from seven to ten, adding the shorter Horatian odes “Sur la mort de Henri le Grand” and “À la Reine mère du roi pendant sa régence” as well as the long fragment “Pour la Reine mère du roi pendant sa régence.” The expansion is justified by the intertextual motifs woven throughout the sequence, that is to say, the image of the ship of stateship of state and/or images of flood and storm, which lead an attentive reader to infer the overarching mythological questhero cyclequest. Such active participation is a figure of thought known as emphasisfigures of thoughtemphasis or significatiofigures of thoughtsignificatio (Quintilian 8.3.83; 9.2.64; Rhet. ad HerenCiceroRhetorica ad Herennium. 4.53.67 ff.), and it is how a reader would have become implicated in the political adventurehero cycleadventure and would have undergone the desired cognitive and affective modifications, that is, the movement from a partisan point of view to a collective national sentimentnationnational sentiment. This second half of the book therefore closely examines the argument and style of each ode, showing how the themes, imagery, and exampleexamples of each are fitted to the particular historical occasion as well as to the sequence’s overarching mythological pattern. Ethosethos, virtuevirtue, and the resources of elocutiostyleelocutio remain the guiding principles by which to explore these multiple connections.

With Malherbe’s royal odes placed in their proper historical context, meaningful intentions emerge from their stylistic choices. Such intentions have less to do with what Malherbe meant to say than with what he did say and what that implies when considered against the political, social, and rhetorical backdrop. Every poem, every metaphormetaphor, is treated as an intentional object, that is, something purposefully constructed. This approach respects the Aristotelian distinction between actions and products and leaves the poet’s psychological intentions in the realm of speculation. It treats the stylistic choices evident in the text as decisions whose meaning and implication become plain once they have been set in their original context. The resonances of Malherbe’s odes with the pamphlet propaganda of the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion, generously cited in Myriam YardeniYardeni, Myriam’s La Conscience nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion (1559-1598), were especially illuminating. Malherbe’s decision to compose odes in the grandstylegrand style, rather than prose pamphlets, on behalf of his Bourbon patrons, most likely had to do with the alleged permanence and universal appeal of poetry. The immortality and universality which the royal odes claim for themselves are recruited to serve the greater goodgreater good of the monarchy and the nationnation.

That said, the revelation of the hero cyclehero cycle—an ahistorical structure—came as a complete surprise. David Lee RubinRubin, David Lee must be credited with first seeing that the mythological themes informing Malherbe’s first ode to Marie de Médicis could be extended to the entire series. When I began to follow up RubinRubin, David Lee’s leads, however, looking closely at the odes’ mythological exampleexamples and images, and tracking down their textual sources, it dawned on me that the odes as a whole formed a unified sequence, and that, although RubinRubin, David Lee did not do so, an underlying mythological pattern for the whole sequencemythologymythological pattern could be found. My attention to the odes’ rhetorical strategies and tactics suddenly broadened to include the story they were trying to tell. That story had a hero, and the hero was engaged in a questhero cyclequest. But the sequence told it indirectly, through allusion from multiple sources, giving only bits and pieces in any single ode. Joseph CampbellCampbell, Joseph’s hero cyclehero cycle from The Hero with a Thousand Faces suggested itself because any particular story, or myth, does not have to include every stage of the cycle for the whole to be implied, and most important, every particular hero-story is a variation on the general pattern, so that the diversity of mythological exampleexamples and images presented in Malherbe’s odes could remain united in the motif of the questhero cyclequest. The underlying presence of the pattern means, too, that the incongruous details of any myth may be discounted. While my choice to use CampbellCampbell, Joseph’s hero cyclehero cycle to interpret the overarching story of the sequence may raise objections in some quarters, the ubiquity of the ship of stateship of state and storm/flood imagery as the mythological motif unifying all the odes is undeniable once the reader has been alerted to it. CampbellCampbell, Joseph would argue that the monomyth of the hero’s adventurehero cycleadventure has such deep roots in the human psyche, as attested by the psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams, that Malherbe need not have consciously incorporated it into the odes.32 Alternatively, Malherbe’s recourse to heroic myth may have simply unlocked a potential unity that the poet was able to keep exploiting and deepening over the years. I see no reason to choose between these alternatives.

I would just add that Malherbe’s use of an image—metaphormetaphor, exampleexample, comparisoncomparison, metonymycomparison, analogyproofanalogy, etc.—to suggest more than is being stated (emphasisfigures of thoughtemphasis, QuintilianQuintilian 8.3.83), sending an erudite and diligent reader to a classical or biblical intertext where an illuminating story is being told, recalls the contemporary practice of Jesuit books of spirituality which used a mystical version of peinture [vivid description] to unlock the veiled meaning of engraved images that referred back to passages in the Bible.33 This similarity of intertextual reading practices suggests that Malherbe could have invested his odes’ rhetorical images with spiritual meaning, and that the royal odes contain a deeper or hidden message which may be accessed only by reflection, provided the intertext has been dug up. If such a reading is plausible, and I don’t see why it is not, then the presence of Joseph CampbellCampbell, Joseph’s hero cyclehero cycle in the odes looks much less ahistorical.

What does seem clear in retrospect is that Malherbe’s contemporaries, when reflecting on the poetic achievement of the odes, could not see the forest for the trees. The relatively uneducated members of the royal courtroyal court, which constituted Malherbe’s captive audience, could hardly have been expected to pick up on such veiled allusions, while rivalry and caste loyalty probably blocked the royal odes’ reception among the more erudite members of the Church and the ParlementParlement. Malherbe was after all contesting their self-appointed magistracy of royaleloquenceroyal eloquenceeloquence. The myopic reading of the odes by erudite belle-lettrists like Chapelain, Godeau, or Guez de Balzac was perhaps the fault, at least in part, of Malherbe himself. His infamous critique of Ronsard, his rude snubbing of Desportes, and his exclusive poetry atelier (where his epigones gathered to discuss the mechanics of verse) fit two ready-made narratives: the petulant modern rejecting the humanist legacy, and the grammarian demanding clarity, logic, and coherence at the expense of inspiration. My aim in refocusing the lens on the royal odes is to widen and to deepen the reader’s gaze in such a way as to recover the big picture while not losing sight of tactics and tools. The approach I have taken, however, has little to say about the actual reception of the royal odes. That would have required writing an altogether different book.34

The early seventeenth century was certainly no Golden AgeGolden Age of poetry. Malherbe did not, as a result of his odes, wield any political authority, although that did not stop him from pursuing pleasure, privilege, and fame alongside his social superiors. Already in 1630, the year Malherbe’s complete works were posthumously published, the elevated themes and style of the odes had started to look tiresome, and their attempt to reimagine the nationnation was not taken seriously—if readers were even aware of it. “If the writing of encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry odes quickly turns to repetitive formulas and to academic exercise, becoming a pretext for essays and polemics among specialists, this is surely because its finality is increasingly less perceptible, and because a divide opens up between the means of expression handed down by literary tradition and the real aspirations of the social group at whom this literature is aimed” (Chauveau 66). Chauveau and others have noted how lyriclyric poetry poems of the early seventeenth century turn away from the implicit comparisoncomparisons anchored in classical and biblical poetry that inform the royal odes. Poetry was migrating away from courtcourt (royal) to aristocratic salonsalonss, where poets and poetasters composed lyriclyric poetrys exploring the refinements of honnêtehonnête hommehonnêtetété [nobilitynobility] and galanterie [flirtatiousness]. Malherbe frequented the Hôtel de Rambouillet [the Rambouillet Townhouse] as early as 1615, but “between Malherbe and the other poets of the seventeenth century [i.e. Voiture, Sarasin, Corneille, etc.], there existed little personal contact at the Hôtel” (Abraham, “Malherbe et l’Hôtel” 84). What is more, a new political and cultural climate was emerging in the 1630s, shaped by such momentous events as the siege of La RochelleLa Rochelle (1627-1628), France’s entry into the Thirty Years War (1635), and La Querelle du Cid [The Quarrel of the Cid] (1637) which led to the publication of Chapelain’s Sentiments de l’Académie sur le ‘Cid’ [The Academy’s Opinions on the ‘Cid’] (1638). Heroic novels, the tragedies of Corneille, literary criticism, conversation, and light verse now preoccupied the literati. Aristocratic taste had moved on.

Undoubtedly, the audience for Malherbe’s royal odes had always been select, and the scope of their impact limited, but Malherbe, despite his sardonic quips, never conceived his work as a minor art. On the contrary, the odes fearlessly engage the issues that most concerned ruling elites in the early seventeenth century: the proper functions of kingship, the political stability and economic prosperity of the kingdom, the crisis of noble identitynobilityidentity, the political authority of women, and the imperial ambitions of the Habsburgs. The odes’ highest purpose is to reimagine the nationnation—indeed, to call into being a new national communitynationnational community. To say that they are ideological is to insist that they make claims about the way things are, affirm the values and beliefs of a dominant social group, and present a patriotic vision of the nationnation risen from the ashes of the civil war. Much more is at stake in Malherbe’s odes than questions of style, but those stakes are always filtered through style.

Although this book is a work of historical criticism in French literature, I have tried to make it accessible to anyone who might take a comparatist’s interest in early modern poetry. I have generously quoted and translated the odes and the critical literature whenever it was appropriate. Indeed, I hope that anyone who loves poetry will be fascinated by the pomp and elegance of Malherbe’s royal odes, their profound erudition, wild flights of imagination, and direct engagement with the powerful. Malherbe is the consummate craftcraftsman, and his odes generously repay detailed analysis. But the path to appreciation requires that we understand how the odes work, and for that one cannot lose sight of their political, cultural, and rhetorical contexts. The imposition of historically alien values and expectations, whether of the later seventeenth century, or of our own era, merely ends up obscuring what is most astonishing in this poetry. These odes indeed have the power to astonish—that was one of their goals—if only we will deign to learn their language and to dream their dreams.