Amphion Orator. Michael Taormina

form and some propositions on the idea of nationhood by postcolonial critics” (KellerKeller, Marcus 5-6). “Fictive ethnicity,” for instance, is much less prominent in the royal odes than the notion of public goodcommonwealthpublic good, common interestcommonwealthcommon interest, or commonwealthcommonwealth. Nor does the postcolonial rejection of teleology and transcendence sit well with early modern cultural assumptions. My approach is thus more narrowly historical, more synchronic, and less worried about the “Medusa-like power to fascinate” (Hampton 27) that early modern literature and poetry may exert over readers too willing to accept their ideological claims. I have no stake in Malherbe’s construction of French nationnationhood, and the complexity of the task I found myself engaged in—discovering the grand tapestry of the royal odes, contextualizing the various threads, and showing how they all seamlessly fit together—was so overwhelming that it precluded the critical distance needed to deconstruct Malherbe’s nationnational ideology.

      characters of stylestyleIn my view, France in the late sixteenth century was not yet a nationnation-state, but it was a nationnation, or at least had achieved sufficient national consciousnessnationnational consciousness to enter a period of dire crisis when, as Mack P. HoltHolt, Mack P. writes in Renaissance and Reformation France, “the advent of ProtestantProtestantism in the 1540s shattered the unity of religion” and “led to the contesting of the monarchy itself” (HoltHolt, Mack P. 23). The Catholic faith and the monarchy were the two strongest unifying threads in the nationnational tapestry. Four decades of civil war did not succeed in destroying the French state, although it was teetering on the brink, but the 1580s and 90s did witness the emergence of competing ideas of the nationnation. By 1600, Catholic orthodoxy could no longer play the role it once did in nationnational identity. Loyalty to the king and to the commonwealthcommonwealth had gained the upper hand. HoltHolt, Mack P. does not dispute the consensus view that the sixteenth century is the crucial period when the transformation of France into a nationnation-state “first took root” (HoltHolt, Mack P. 2), but he significantly postpones its full-blown emergence until sometime after the Fronde (1648-1652). In 1600, therefore, the monarchy still had major problems to solve before the state could achieve its full strength, and the composition of the French nationnation was still in abeyance.

      Malherbe’s reimagining of the French nationnation, it follows, does not represent a precocious step toward the secular nation-state. Rather, his de-emphasis of religious orthodoxy and his choice of new myths and images for the nationnation are a creative response to the rich and confusing national tapestry that was inherited from the late Middles Ages and badly damaged in the late sixteenth century. As Colette Beaune amply demonstrates in The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbolsnationmyths and symbols of of Nation in Late-Medieval France, the consciousness of belonging to a nationnation was “entwined” with the precarious rise of the House of France (Beaune 311) and fostered by the veneration of saints and kings. Its traces are attested in the liturgies, hagiographies, and histories composed by medieval clerics and royal propagandists responding to the changing political environment. There was nothing accidental about it. A shifting web of shared myths and symbolsnationmyths and symbols of gradually and deliberately enveloped disparate cities, towns, and regions by fueling a collective sense of exceptionalism for the kings, the kingdom, and the peoples of medieval France. It was propagated from the Paris basin, though “its slow evolution was far from continuous or unrelenting” (Beaune 314). “Different areas of France were moved by national ideology at different times” (Beaune 323). Unlike most modern nationnation-states, the sacred was the basis for this collective identity, which may be encapsulated by the term Most Christian, “applied without distinction to the French king, the people, and the territory” (Beaune 192). The emergence of an imagined community in France, with some of the basic features of a nationnation, did not have to wait for the waning of religious belief.3

      allegoryfigures of thoughtThere are several characteristics of nationnations recognizable in the wealth of material that Beaune mines from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. First, the French nation was thought to be chosen by God.4 Such a notion stresses the continuity of the past with the present and posits a destiny to be realized in the future. Saint Remigius was alleged to have promised that the kingdom of Clovis would triumph over all other rival nationnations as long as it adhered to the true faith (Beaune 181), while successive generations of commentators elided the kingdom’s ethnic and cultural diversity as well as prior political differences to forge the vision of a unified chosen people, a New Israel, “the people of the New Alliance” (Beaune 180). Second, the French nationnation claimed autonomy. The mythical continuity of the royal bloodline (single, pure, sacred, perpetual) from Clovis onward set the kings and the kingdom of France “above the claims of the Church and the Imperium” (Beaune 172). Third, it inspired acts of patriotismpatriotism and xenophobia. As early as 1124 something akin to national sentimentnationnational sentiment was responsible for the spontaneous and unexpected baronial support of Louis VI against Henry V, the Holy Roman Emperor. In the fifteenth century, a surge of collective identity swept over parts of France that was tied to the veneration of Saint Michael. Charles VII had turned from Saint Denis to venerate the warrior angel as early as 1418, while royalist armies after the “miraculous” victory at Orleans in 1429 reported sightings of a rider holding an unsheathed sword in the sky and took to processing “behind the banner of Michael’s white cross, like masses of reverent pilgrims” (Beaune 158-159, 18). The crusades to the Holy Land and the persecution of Jews and heretics were the negative flipside to this growing consciousness of French exceptionalism.5 Fourth, the net result of various medieval stories tracing the origins of the Gauls and Franks to the mythical city of TroyTroy was to create a common ancestry, “to root nationnational solidarity in a thick soil of blood ties” (Beaune 226). Such myths promoted the unity of north and south, the three estates, noble and commoner, kings and subjects. They made of the peoples of France a vast clan whose shared and ancient lineage ennobled them, argued for their moral and cultural superiority, and justified their political independence from England, Rome, and the Germanic Empire. Finally, the resistance of nobles and commoners to royal taxation and administrative centralization beginning in the mid-fourteenth century presupposes a developed consciousness of solidarity independent of loyalty to the monarchy. In the War of the Public WealcommonwealthPublic Weal (1465), the question was whether the king and the centralized state were the sole protectors of the public goodcommonwealthpublic good: great nobles asserted that “the commonwealthcommonwealth stood above the king” and that they shared responsibility for its protection (Collins, “State Building” 612). Theoretically, the king defended the public goodcommonwealthpublic good, and when one fought for the king, one fought for both. Occasionally, however, the public goodcommonwealthpublic good could be evoked against private interests, even those of the king, especially if the king’s policy were perceived to be unjust (Collins, “State Building” 617). The goodcommonwealththe good of the French nationnation was then identifiable with the commonwealthcommonwealth, “those interests common to all households living in a given politypolity” (Collins, “State Building” 608).

      political eloquencegenera dicendi (kinds of speaking)The issue, therefore, is not whether a French nationnation existed in the early modern period, but whether a sufficient number of people believed that it did and behaved as if it did.6 We know that it was not a pure fiction because material traces of the conditions of its existence persist, but there were indeed phantasmic components that made it, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, an imagined community. One of the primary tasks of this book has been to historicize and to analyze the myths and images contained in Malherbe’s royal odes which would have contributed to the reimagining of the national communitynationnational community—if contemporary readers had been up to the task and bought into them. I take no firm position on whether they did, although I suspect that most did not. By all appearances Malherbe’s vision for the French nationnation was overtaken by events and swept aside for other more compelling imagined communities.

      If the particulars of medieval French nationnationhood constitute the symbolic strata against which to compare and to appreciate the imagined community of the royal odes, it is because Malherbe was uprooting and planting in the same medieval soil as his sixteenth-century predecessors. The significant social and political developments that separate Malherbe from his Renaissance counterparts are what account for the noticeable differences in their political and esthetic commitments. One must