French Renaissance literature

[2] Michelet defined the 16th-century Renaissance in France as a period in Europe's cultural history that represented a break from the Middle Ages, creating a modern understanding of humanity and its place in the world.

The use of the printing press (aiding the diffusion of works by ancient Latin and Greek authors; the printing press was introduced in 1470 in Paris, and in 1473 in Lyon), the development of Renaissance humanism and Neoplatonism, and the discovery (through the wars in Italy and through Henry II's marriage with Catherine de' Medici) of the cultivated refinement of the Italian courts (Baldassare Castiglione's book The Courtier was also particularly important in this respect) would profoundly modify the French literary landscape and the mental outlook (or "mentalité") of the period.

This period saw a proliferation of pamphlets, tracts, satires, and memoirs; the success of short-story collections ("nouvelles") as well as collections of oral tales and anecdotes ("propos" and "devis"); a public fascination with tragic tales from Italy (most notably those of Bandello); a considerable increase in the translating and publishing of contemporary European authors (especially Italians and Spaniards) compared to authors from the Middle Ages and classical antiquity; an important increase in the number of religious works sold (devotional books would exceed the "belles-lettres" as the most sold genre in France at the beginning of the 17th century); and finally, the publication of important works of moral and philosophical reflection.

The history of literature of the Renaissance is not monolithic: the royal court, the universities, the general public, the "noblesse de robe", the provincial noble, and the humanist all encountered different influences and developed different tastes.

Around Ronsard, Du Bellay and Jean Antoine de Baïf there formed a group of radical young noble poets of the court (generally known today as La Pléiade, although use of this term is debated).

For some of the members of the Pléiade, the act of the poetry itself was seen as a form of divine inspiration (see Pontus de Tyard for example), a possession by the muses akin to romantic passion, prophetic fervor or alcoholic delirium.

The forms that dominate the poetic production of the period are the Petrarchan sonnet (developed around an amorous encounter or an idealized woman) and the Horace/Anacreon ode (especially of the carpe diem – life is short, seize the day – variety).

Du Bellay's greatest poems were written during his long stay in Rome; his discovery of the ruined city, dismay at the corruption of the Papal court and loneliness gave rise to a sonnet cycle of remarkable sadness and severity (partially inspired by Ovid's Tristia).

Scève's Délie, objet de plus haulte vertu, composed of 449 ten-syllable ten-line poems (dizains) and published with numerous engraved emblems, is exemplary in its use of amorous paradoxes and (often obscure) allegory to describe the suffering of a lover.

[5] Poetry at the end of the century was profoundly marked by the civil wars: pessimism, dourness and a call for retreat from the world predominate (as in Jean de Sponde).

However, the horrors of the war were also to inspire one Protestant poet, Agrippa d'Aubigné, to write a brilliant[clarification needed] poem on the conflict:Les Tragiques.

Finally, the Italian Luigi Pulci's Morgant le géant, a comic version of the chivalric novel, was an important model for Rabelais's giants.

The novelty and inventiveness of the last years of the century are best seen in the anonymous La Mariane du Filomene (1596) which mixes the frame-tale, amorous sentiment, dreams, and pastoral elements to tell the story of a man wandering through the Parisian countryside trying to forget the woman who betrayed him.

The French reading public was also fascinated by the dark tragic novellas ("histoires tragiques") of Bandello which were avidly adapted and emulated into the beginning of the seventeenth century (Jacques Yver, Vérité Habanc, Bénigne Poissenot, François de Rosset, Jean-Pierre Camus).

As early as 1503 however, original language versions of Sophocles, Seneca, Euripides, Aristophanes, Terence and Plautus were all available in Europe and the next forty years would see humanists and poets both translating these classics and adapting them.

In the 1540s, the French university setting (and especially — from 1553 on — the Jesuit colleges) became host to a Neo-Latin theater (in Latin) written by professors such as George Buchanan and Marc Antoine Muret which would leave a profound mark on the members of La Pléiade.

Of greater difficulty for the theorists was the incorporation of Aristotle's notion of "catharsis" or the purgation of emotions with Renaissance theater, which remained profoundly attached to both pleasing the audience and to the rhetorical aim of showing moral examples (exemplum).

Étienne Jodelle's Cléopâtre captive (1553) — which tells the impassioned fears and doubts of Cleopatra contemplating suicide — has the distinction of being the first original French play to follow Horace's classical precepts on structure (the play is in five acts and respects more or less the unities of time, place and action) and is extremely close to the ancient model: the prologue is introduced by a shade, there is a classical chorus which comments on the action and talks directly to the characters, and the tragic ending is described by a messenger.

Mellin de Saint-Gelais's translation of Gian Giorgio Trissino's La Sophonisbe — the first modern regular tragedy based on ancient models which tells the story of the noble Sophonisba's suicide (rather than be taken as captive by Rome) — was an enormous success at the court when performed in 1556.