Le Cynisme à la Renaissance: d'Érasme à Montaigne. Suivi de 'Les Epistres de Diogenes' (1546) (review)

This significant volume re-evaluates the importance of cynical philosophy within, especially, French sixteenth-century literature and thought, whilst also providing a new edition of the first French translation of the apocryphal Epistres de Diogenes (Poitiers, 1546). That date (coinciding with the publication of Rabelais's Tiers livre) marks something of a climax in Renaissance cynicism, even though Diogenes was known, in different guise, throughout the Middle Ages. It attracted Erasmus via its emphasis on freewill and its mistrust of hierarchy and received opinion. The Cymbalum mundi matches these attitudes in representing des chiens philosophes to the disadvantage of human folly. Rabelais's diogénisme is clearest in the Tiers livre, though his interest in Lucian predates even the manifestly cynical Prologue to Gargantua. The Discours de la servitude volontaire reads as a rhetorical diatribe using paradox to disconcert and thus reform its audience: again cynical procedures. The Stoics, reckoned as the source of La Boétie's absorption of cynical teachings, are similarly influential on Montaigne, who tends to confuse the two philosophies, rarely using the word cynisme itself. However his response to Diogenes' unorthodoxy and his own demystification of vanity and conceit prove the impact of a philosophical trend which he is reluctant to name, though close analyses of his writings and rewritings shows its effect on particularly the later versions of his works. Clément's penultimate chapter considers the poetics of la parole cynique, examining the appeal for Renaissance authors of puns, bons mots, pithy adages, frank talk (Socrates' sermo simplex) and the dosing of serious exposition with wit: to this extent, the comic eulogy and the spoudaiogeloion (a type of writing where meaning emerges from within frivolity) are in their essence cynical modes and prevalent in the satires, dialogues and prose narratives of the late 1500s. Perhaps a study of intellectual nonconformity should not be arraigned too virulently for its own flouting of convention; however, one notes not infrequent misquotations in French (for instance, from Montaigne on p.17) and in Italian (transformata, realita (sic), p. 75) and Latin (postaquam, p. 218n.). Still less orthodox is Clément's tendency to conflate her sentences and to defy orthography: échanges comerciaux (p. 77n.), nicomédisme (p. 108), and so on; whilst a glossary containing malice, tourbe and viande might also have accommodated asserrer, gratuler and summité. Minor editorial issues should not, however, devalue a work which provides a noteworthy addition to our awareness of Renaissance thought. The danger is, as ever, that one over-states a fundamentally valid case and over-simplifies one's supporting evidence. For example, can Rabelais's prime aim be seen as ethical (p. 205)? Would a reader, say, of Ronsard's Hymnes, agree that 'le poétique s'oppose résolument à la spéculation intellectuelle' (p. 188)? Cannot La Boétie's confusions in the Servitude volontaire be as easily assigned to muddled thinking as to une pédagogie cynique (p. 162)? Other such questions remain open, but Clément's prime case remains entirely convincing. Le Cynisme has a vital role to play in the rhetoric, and the crisis of rhetoric, which characterize authorial self-expression in her chosen period.