Passion et pouvoir à l'époque classique by Edgard Pich (review)

The opening pages of Edgard Pich's study set out the perspective to be further elucidated in the various chapters of the book, all published elsewhere between 1993 and 2006. The central theme purports to address the workings of passion and power in three tragedies of Racine (Bérénice, Bajazet, Athalie), Molière's L'École de femmes and the polemical texts in the querelle which followed, and a selection of letters of Mme de Sévigné's correspondence. The theme is established by a short piece on Pierre Nicole's essay concerning the education of the prince which appeared in 1670, where the function of royal power is understood as dissociated from the person who wields it, and which is, according to Pich, most evident in Bérénice. Certainly, this approach has some interest in itself, but in most cases it lacks originality. Pich occasionally advances some interesting points, especially in respect of Molière's place in his troupe, where his prestige as the principal actor is devoted to wholly negative roles, passing over the fact perhaps that these are the most satisfying to perform. Pich also ascribes to La Critique de l'École des femmes the status of a new type of comedy dissociated in itself from the actual polemic, although one could take issue with his overall knowledge of theatre within theatre. The study of Mme de Sévigné rests on the argument that the content of the letters is ultimately insignificant relative to the whole 'system' of sending and receiving constructed and invested in by the marquise in order to compensate for the absence of her daughter. A number of issues affect appreciation of this book. Firstly, the selection of Racine's tragedies provides a very limited representation of Racine's overall presentation of passion and power, even in the context of Pich's central point. Secondly, the choice of L'École des femmes, such an obvious critical commonplace, offers no strikingly new perspective. Thirdly, the very limited study of Mme de Sévigné (ending with letters from 1672) is a misleading overstatement of what she invests in the correspondence in respect of the circumstances of her life (but in this Pich is not alone). Overall, the theme adumbrated at the start of the book is lost in a textual microanalysis that soon loses its fundamental direction, sometimes in protracted reruns of very well known literary history or rather straightforward formal considerations. Most crucially, with some rare exceptions (notably Georges Forestier and Claude Bourqui), the frame of critical reference is rooted in a past long gone, even when some of these pieces were first written: Georges Mongrédien, Georges Couton, Jacques Scherer, Raymond Picard, Lucien Goldmann, René Bray wrongly referred to as Robert, and René Jasinsky. Without any disrespect to this scholarly tradition, we really have moved on.