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14 q Chapter 1 The Rebirth of the Concours Académique Cultural Politics and the Domestication of Letters in the Age of Louis XIV The praise given to our Monarch every day is always new because every day he gives us new subjects to praise. —Mercure galant, March 1703 Literate Frenchmen in the age of Louis XIV could not graduate from collège, attend a university,or participate in a literary society without at some point encountering an intellectual battle of wits. Indeed,France possessed what we might reasonably term a “concours culture”; competitive examinations, prize contests, and award ceremonies protruded from every corner of the cultural map. To begin with, intellectual competitions saturated the curricula of Jesuit and Oratory institutions. From an early age, social elites at colleges and universities learned the time-honored art of disputation,or “disputatio scolaire,” in which pupils competed in logic-chopping philosophical battles judged by members of the faculty.1 The goal was ruthless: to cut an opponent down to size by exposing his contradictions and fallacious arguments while at the same time exalting one’s own superior reasoning. Students also encountered an array of written competitions. The Jesuits’ pedagogical handbook, the Ratio Studiorum of 1599, recommended regular competitions in Latin prose, Latin verse, Greek prose, and Greek verse. “Moreover,” the text reads, “in each class a prize should be awarded to one or two [students] who have surpassed the rest in their knowledge of Christian doctrine.”2 The winners earned an assortment of dazzling prizes: accolades, ribbons, scholarly distinctions , and, most important, the envy and awe of their fellow students.3 To a large extent, these competitions assimilated the aristocratic values associated THE REBIRTH OF THE ConCours ACAdémique 15 with chivalry and military conquest: honor, glory, merit, and gentlemanly dispute. The concours culture was, in this sense, an aristocratic invention, or at least one inspired by the values of the nobility. Only the most dim-witted of students would have failed to recognize the parallels with military combat. It is little wonder, then, that such contests were commonly referred to as joutes savantes—scholarly jousts—in an effort to connect learned combat with the gallantry of medieval knights.4 In a sense, the roots of this concours culture stretched back to the fabled Greek theatrical competitions of the sixth century B.C.5 Literary hopefuls would travel to Athens to compete in a series of lyrical and thespian-related prize contests at one of several annual festivals in honor of the god Dionysus.6 Evidence suggests that architecture prizes existed in ancient Greece as well and may even predate those of the Athenian literary games.7 In the Dionysian festivals, a council of judges, chosen in a complex lottery system, awarded prizes to poets, playwrights, dramatic troupes, and musical performers, while crowds of well-wishing tourists and civic leaders looked on in admiration.8 The public not only attended the various performances and delighted in the general bacchanalian revelry but also participated in the civic processions that usually preceded the theatrical aspects of the festival.9 (In later years, these festivals shed their artistic trappings to become semi-organized sexual orgies.) As Arthur Pickard-Cambridge once put it, “The importance of the festival was derived not only from the [competitive] performances of dramatic and lyric poetry but from the fact that it was open to the whole Hellenic world and was an effective advertisement of the wealth and power and public spirit of Athens.”10 The prize winnings and the near-apotheosis of the winners—combined with the civic importance of the games—made for high stakes and fierce competition. Competition itself became a dominant mode of creative exchange in the Hellenistic world. It is revealing that the Greek word for competition, “agon,” also signified the Dionysian festival itself.11 The ancient Greeks bequeathed to early modernity (via Rome and the Middle Ages) an enduring cultural model that fused the creative arts with structured competition.12 Medieval troubadour poets and their annual poetry competitions at the Floral Games of Toulouse also exerted a profound influence on the concours culture of early modern France. The Floral Games, named for the gilded bouquets awarded to the winners, traced its origins to the Consistoire du Gai Savoir established in 1323–1324 by seven local poets.13 Every May, the Consistoire would hold public tournaments in elaborate civic festivals reminiscent of ancient Athens, in which the apocryphal patroness of the games, Clémence Isaure, acted...

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