La Rhétorique; ou, les règles de l'éloquence (review)

Balthazar Gibert was Rector of the University of Paris in the 1720s and the leading academic exponent of classical rhetoric in his generation. As a younger scholar he had published De la véritable éloquence in 1703 and Réflexions sur la rhétorique in 1705–07, stirring up a now long-dead controversy on the subject with Charles Rollin. His originality consists not in his teaching, for he thought any student could learn all that needed to be known on the subject by reading Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian, but in his realization that students no longer possessed the linguistic skills to enable them to do this. So, with what one imagines to have been a certain fastidious reluctance, he allowed himself to be persuaded to produce this massive compendium in French in 1730. The work thus stands at the opposite pole from innovative rhetorical thinking in France, whether produced in Latin by, for instance, Omer Talon in the 1570s, or more daringly in French by the Oratorian Bernard Lamy in 1675. It continued to be a standard reference book throughout the eighteenth century. Further editions were brought out to mark Gibert's death in 1741, and a final edition appeared in 1765 or 1766 (the editor appears to contradict himself on this point between p. 11 and p. 58). Yet, Ben Messaoud contends, he is a strangely under-appreciated and even misunderstood figure. For example, Roland Barthes inexplicably omits him from his aide-mémoire article of 1970 on 'L'ancienne rhétorique', and Marc Fumaroli speaks of him as 'un rhéteur jésuite', whereas he was in reality a Jansenist sympathizer. Such ideological nuances hardly matter, however, by comparison with the sheer bulk of received neo-classical doctrine embodied in the treatise. Here it is at last given the fullest modern editorial treatment, with copious and informative annotation added to Gibert's own footnotes. The rather brief introduction of 55 pages is workmanlike and succinct but perhaps too redolent of the doctoral exercise I guess it originally was.