Eros rebelle. Litterature et dissidence a l'age classique (review)

Michel Jeanneret, best known for his studies of Rabelais and French Renaissance Humanism, has now written what we might call an archaeology of shock. Sexual shock to be specific: sexually explicit literature and the repressions deployed against it. More precisely, Éros rebelle explores the culture wars that took place over sexuality in seventeenth-century France. In a broader context, Jeanneret sees sexually explicit literature as an integral part of a culture-wide battle over rules, which split French society into two camps along Horatian lines, the proponents of plaisir versus the moralistic guardians of utile. In Jeanneret's vision, not surprisingly, the precipitating event was the Council of Trent, with its pronunciamentos regarding sex and decorum. The reform of clerical and lay morals undertaken by Catholic authorities in rebuttal to Protestant critiques of laxity and corruption condemned what Jeanneret calls "l'érotisme allègre de la Renaissance" to obsolescence. Henceforth, sexuality and discourse about it would not be neutral.

Jeanneret's premise is as sound in its essence as it is troubling in its potential for oversimplification and partisanship. "Nous baignons aujourd'hui," he affirms, "dans une culture molle et permissive, si libérée des interdits (du moins en apparence) qu'on cherche laborieusement ce qui pourrait encore surprendre ou choquer" (9). At these words, the spectre of Lynne Cheney and her cohort of censorious thugs from the "culture wars" of the Reagan and Bush Senior regimes arises instantly in the American consciousness, as do memories of the more original and exhilarating clashes of the sixties. Fortunately, although the story of sexual rebellion and repression is continuous, Jeanneret opts out of facile continuities and concentrates on reconstructing the specific provocations and responses of seventeenth-century writers, censors, and critics, blending cultural and political history with astute rhetorical and narratological analyses of a variety of texts, chosen from across the spectrum of genres. He proposes Éros rebelle as a third way between today's commercial mass culture, which through sheer repetition wrings all memory of provocation and scandal from erstwhile shockers (a Madame Bovary, a Déjeuner sur l'herbe), and the rationalizing blinders of scholarly method and rigor, which can easily have the same effect: "ils apprivoisent l'étrange et rabattent sur le terrain du discours ordinaire ce qui, à l'origine, heurtait la norme" (10). Certainly, when described in the abstract, Jeanneret's "third way" will not seem original or pathbreaking to Anglophone proponents of cultural studies. But the execution of his project is profoundly satisfying: the historical moment is as pivotal as he claims, the stakes (including the fiery one) as high, the aesthetic appeal of the works (excepting the absolute raunchiest) as deep, the cultural arena as broad, reaching as far as Corneille and Molière. One leaves the book with a deeper understanding of the crisis in épistemè that overtook France and Europe throughout the seventeenth century.

Jeanneret dates the onset of the crisis to the years 1600-1625, and the publication of anthologies of sexually explicit lyric poems—totaling more than 1500 poems in this quarter-century, according to Jeanneret. The trial of Théophile de Viau (1623-1625) for contributing to the salacious Parnasse des poëtes satyriques (1622) brings the conflict into the open, "crystallizing" the forces of repression and "playing the decisive role" in their campaign against sexually explicit literature. "Pour la première fois, la censure ecclésiastique cède le pas à la justice séculière. Certes, les intérêts du Trône et de l'Autel sont étroitement liés et les dévots agissent derrière les décors, mais le poète est jugée par le Parlement de Paris" (124-25).

This ephemeral and clandestine lyric literature serves as Jeanneret's key to the clashes of the 1600s. It is, frankly, not usually very good; its main poetic challenge often seems to be maximizing the percentage of its vocabulary devoted to vitz...