Amphion Orator. Michael Taormina

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