Agrippa d’Aubigné, ou Les Misères du Prophète (review)

Dr Junod’s study (a much reworked version of his doctoral thesis submitted at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore) is a detailed exploration of Agrippa d’Aubigné’s status as a prophet. The poet’s ‘prophetic tone’ has frequently received comment from critics, evoking usually little more than the vehemence of his imprecations; Junod goes behind that generality to ask what is meant. By what authority does a prophet speak? Junod points out that in Christian religious institutions, there is no place normally attributed to a prophet, even though that religion is based on ‘the law and the prophets’. The prophet is usually an outsider, with an unpopular message of reproof or challenge to purification to deliver to his audience; it is the nature of his message that validates his authority and therefore his status. Thus, when Aubigné thunders out his messages, he is not simply speaking as the man Agrippa; he is not simply adopting a persona to communicate his idea; he is an énonciateur—since the message is not his, he is communicating what he has been given (not to say revealed). Aubigné’s position is all the more awkward in that in the theology of the sixteenth-century Reformers the birth of Christ signalled the end of prophecy: all that is necessary to salvation is revealed in the Book, which now requires no further addition. After the first part of Junod’s study (‘La Figure prophétique en aval et en amont des Tragiques’), the author addresses in his second part ‘L’Éthos prophétique: La Création d’une figure de l’énonciation dans les Tragiques’. Various Old Testament prophets (Ezechiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Jonah) are interrogated for their contribution to the construction of the énonciateur of the Tragiques (not to forget a number of extrabiblical prophetic figures such as the Delphic oracle and Cassandra); these models are of different sorts, from the ‘literary’ Isaiah to the uneducated peasant Amos, from the isolated individual to a category in which (quoting Claus Westerman, Théologie de l’Ancien Testament) ‘l’histoire des prophètes eux-mêmes, à savoir l’histoire de leurs souffrances, vient se joindre à la parole prophétique’ (p. 317). Finally, it is Jonah who provides the richest prophetic model for Aubigné: the prophet who, imbued with his own unworthiness, refuses the task laid on him, whose prophetic inspiration is intermittent and interrupted by periods of doubt, and who finally delivers his message with the expectation that it will not be heeded. Of the Tragiques the author concludes: ‘le message que ce texte transmet, à l’imitation de la tradition prophétique la plus classique, nous parle doublement : des misères de la France, et des misères du prophète – dans son sens le plus noble’ (ibid).