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  • Écrits de jeunesse: tradition humaniste et liberté de l’espri
  • D. J. Culpin
Claude Fleury : Écrits de jeunesse: tradition humaniste et liberté de l’esprit. Édition critique établie et présentée par Noémi Hepp et Volker Kapp . ( Sources classiques, 45). Paris, Champion, 2003. 233 pp. Hb €45.00.

This volume contains three little-known texts by Fleury which date from a period twenty-five to thirty years before the publication of his celebrated Histoire ecclésiastique. The first and longest, entitled 'Si on doit citer dans les plaidoyers', takes theform of a dialogue in two parts which, according to the editors, is a 'vrai dialogue' dealing with a 'vraie question'. Never previously published, this text was composed in 1664 and offers an account of a conversation that took place in September 1663 between Fleury and three lawyer friends, René de Marillac (who adopts the traditionalist position and defends the use of quotations), Gérauld de Cordemoy (who provides a light-hearted touch), Michel Le Peletier (the most forceful of the interlocutors) and Fleury himself (whose modesty and sociability are combined with vast knowledge). Their conversation deals with the related technical issues of whether lawyers should fill their plaidoyers with quotations and whether these quotations should be in a language other than French. But it also touches on the aesthetic of the dialogue itself, and thereby raises [End Page 108] broader questions; for, as Fleury himself puts it at the start of the second dialogue, 'Il faut encore que tout le dialogue soit assaisonné d'une certaine urbanité'. In short, a lawyer's excessive use of quotation infringes his social obligation in respect of honnêteté. The second text included in this volume, the 'Remarques sur Homère', is a shorter and less carefully crafted work than the 'Dialogues'. It was written between January and April 1665 and previously edited by Noémi Hepp, with fuller critical apparatus, in 1970. The 'Remarques' are the result of Fleury's desire to re-read Homer's Iliad in order to form his own judgement of an increasingly maligned author. Ultimately, he finds himself more favourably impressed than he had expected to be, and concludes 'qu'il n'est pas certain qu'il y ait des défauts dans Homère puisque tout ce qui nous y déplaît vient de la différence des mœurs et du langage'. The final text in this volume, the short 'Discours sur Platon', written in 1670 and published in 1686, shows a similar desire on the part of the author to engage directly with a major figure in the culture of Greco-Roman antiquity. Fleury concludes that Plato's morale is superior to his physics and metaphysics and, in doing so, he points towards the 'interprétation moraliste' of Plato's dialogues that will culminate in the work of La Bruyère. These texts illustrate the equilibrium of Fleury's own intellectual position, finely balanced between respect for antiquity and liberty of judgement; they also illustrate the evolving ethic and aesthetic of French Classicism during the period to which Fleury belonged.

D. J. Culpin
University Of St Andrews
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