Paul Chilton

Humanism and War in the Work of Rabelais and Montaigne

During the sixteenth century the French lived through two contrasting periods of war. The first was a period of expansive ambition and the consolidation of an increasingly powerful royal authority in the face of rival European powers. It ended in 1559 with the Treaty of Câteau Cambresis. Three years later religious riots announced France’s turning inward to a self-destructive period of intermittent bloody civil war. French literature of the Renaissance cannot easily be separated from these events. Humanism, especially as represented by Erasmus, gave French literature an impetus; but the Republic of Letters that crossed national boundaries vied with an emergent national literature in the vernacular. The tension between Erasmian pacifism and a militant patriotism can be discerned in the work of certain writers in the first decades of the century, especially those such as Clement Marot and Marguerite de Navarre who were close to the centre of national affairs. The tensions are especially apparent in Rabelais, as we shall see. French Renaissance poetry was dependent on princely and royal patronage, and the Pleiade poets, in particular Du Bellay and Ronsard, had to combine their vision of the freely inspired poet-seer with the role of publicists and propagandists in a period of conflict. The Protestants had their polemic poets (Marot himself had contributed to the vernacularsalm paraphrases), and in 1616) Agrippa d’Aubigne’s Tragiques (written during the civil wars but only published in 1616) their visionary epic of Huguenot suffering and victory.