Mark Bannister

Heroic hierarchies: Classical models for panegyrics in seventeenth-century France

In sixteenth-century France, the panegyric, considered to be primarily a didactic exercise, was essentially linked to rhetoric, and classical references used in it were largely decorative. Several factors, notably the increased national confidence resulting from the reign of Henri IV, a new view of human nature which stressed the heroic potential in mankind, and an evolving interpretation of the function of historiography, combined to produce a new approach towards the panegyric, apparent in the 1630s and 1640s. Comparisons of major contemporary figures, especially Louis XIII and, during the regency of 1643–1651, the Prince de Condé, with heroes of the ancient world produced a kind of hierarchy with Alexander at its head because of his individualistic ambition and self-reliance but with the modern hero surpassing him and all other ancient heroes. During the personal rule of Louis XIV, comparisons with the ancients became redundant, not only because of the level of adulation accorded to Louis but because of a loss of faith in the heroic potential of the ordinary mortal.