La Querelle du Cid (1637–1638): Édition critique intégrale (review)

La Bruyère wrote that ‘Le Cid enfin est l’un des plus beaux poèmes que l’on puisse faire; et l’une des meilleures critiques qui ait jamais été faite sur aucun sujet est celle du Cid’. This ‘édition critique intégrale’ takes La Bruyère’s judgement as its starting point. It is a monumental work: an expansive tribute to the enduring interest of literary debates provoked by Corneille’s 1637 play. Jean-Marc Civardi, whose work here is based on a thesis supervised by Georges Forestier, has updated Armand Gasté’s 1898 collection of more than 30 discourses, letters and pamphlets which go to make up the ‘querelle du Cid’. He has reordered (pp. 51–53) and reexamined these documents, and added one: the anonymous ‘Anatomie du Cid’. Notably, he has studied questions of attribution, finding in favour of Jean-Pierre Camus as the author of the Défense du Cid, traditionally given as the work of Nicolas Faret (pp. 439–454), and troubling the identification of Rotrou as the ‘inconnu et véritable ami de Messieurs de Scudéry et Corneille’, suggesting Du Ryer or Rayssiguier as possible alternatives (p. 554). Civardi’s substantial introduction (274 p) comprises three main sections: ‘La présentation de la querelle’, ‘Les enjeux de la querelle en 1637’ and ‘Les enjeux modernes de la querelle’. Following a detailed discussion of chronology and genre, Civardi gives an account of the thematic lines of attack: chiefly, that Corneille was a plagiarist, and that, in composing Le Cid, he was insufficiently attentive to the rules of tragic composition (inventio, dispositio, vraisemblance, bienséance and so on). The ground shifts here: Corneille is not really entitled to call himself an author, and he is also a bad author. Looking at the different ways authority is denied and granted Corneille in the ‘querelle’ then leads Civardi, citing the work of Hélène Merlin amongst others, to an evaluation of the social status of the author, the place of the public, and the changing nature of criticism and censorship in the seventeenth century. Civardi’s introduction tends towards an état présent of existing work by dixseptiémistes, but his main contribution naturally comes with the magnificent editing work he has done on the texts themselves. While it is good to have the obscure twists and turns of the quarrel collated here, better-known work is also presented afresh, and it is particularly useful to have the published text of the Sentiments de l’Académie française set directly alongside the corrected manuscript version. Throughout, Civardi’s edition is replete with variants and with the footnotes that were entirely lacking in Gasté. And what footnotes they are. It is almost enough to lead one to wonder if Civardi makes it all too easy. Not for his readership the pleasures of scanning synonyms in Furetière or of detective work on www.frantext.com . It is all there already in the notes: defined, documented, explicated and then further dotted with tiny 10-point asterisks. This is, in fact, the only volume this reviewer has ever encountered where a footnote can include its own footnote (see p. 315 for an example of this kind of ingenuity; and credit is due to Champion, throughout this volume, for rising to typographical challenges in such an elegant fashion). This is, therefore, a remarkably thorough work of scholarship, and truly a reference point in the field.