L'Éloquence du sage: platonisme et rhétorique dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle (review)

L'Éloquence du sage is as an accomplished piece of work from an experienced L'Ecritic. Christine Noille-Clauzade writes with both concision and imagination — differentiating her volume from some of the weighty theses published in this series. She develops her earlier work on rhetoric into a discussion, via the seventeenth-century reception of Plato, of the ethics of decisions about eloquence. Does the attempt to persuade a reader or a listener inevitably provide a radical distraction from deliberation or reasoning? If so, is this the same as saying that the art of persuasion blocks the channels through which reasonable behaviour and virtue are attained? Noille-Clauzade's chosen 'tranche' of time situates her study after the relatively secure containment of Greek studies in closely knit pockets of erudition like the academy of the Dupuy brothers, and at a point where, thanks to the schools of Port-Royal, to the Maurists and to such figures as the Président de Lamoignon and Bossuet, philhellenism was imprinting itself slightly more obviously upon contemporary culture. Noille-Clauzade excludes 'tout ce qui concerne la reprise thématique' of Plato's works (the italics seemingly seeking to detract from the fuzziness of the category), and puts largely to one side the hermeneutic tradition associated with the widespread allegorization of his writings in the form of Neoplatonism (she passes a little quickly over occultism and symbolism and their 'evacuation' in the seventeenth century). She is, though, attentive to the broad malleability of Plato's work — the proliferating emotions of the Ion, the elimination of same in the Republic — and finds a similar 'jeu d'échos' in the texts under consideration here. Guez de Balzac and La Mothe Le Vayer find a place here, with their ambitions to separate 'les bagatelles', on the one hand, and 'les belles lettres', on the other, and their use of Socratic rhetoric to lend philosophical dignity to the latter. La Fontaine and La Bruyère are analysed as they combine lyricism and atticism in different ways. Bossuet's marginal notes — 'Platon', we find, 'dit plusieurs choses sérieuses en se jouant' — are put interestingly into context. Fleury is shown to use Plato to draw attention to the formal beauties of Scripture, and parallels are drawn between his reflections and Fénelon's experimental Télémaque. This is, overall, a well-written account of an early-modern brand of idealism 'qui fasse du philosophique la grandeur du littéraire' (p. 236).