L’épreuve libertine: Morale, soupçon et pouvoirs dans la France baroque (review)

In the French literary canon the seventeenth century has long been called the Classical age. Dramatists such as Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine wrote tragedies based on the principles of classical antiquity, and Molière wrote his celebrated comedies, performed at the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV. This century is also that of René Descartes – it was during this period, also that intense philosophical debate took place, concerning religion, the nature of man and the shape of the cosmos. Much of this thought attacked implicitly if not openly the edifices of Church and State, and censorship of written material was a feature of the intellectual and literary landscape. Descartes lived and published outside France, but other writers remained in the country and adopted modes of writing that disguised the radical nature of their thought. Since the late nineteenth century the discovery in archives of hitherto unknown clandestine seventeenth-century manuscripts has revealed that writing, oppositional to the Church and State, was more widespread than had previously been believed. Collectively known as libertinage, this grouping includes a wide spectrum of free thought, from philosophical texts to pornography.

The trial for libertinage of the French seventeenth-century poet, Théophile de Viau, is the subject of Stéphane Van Damme’s book. An important addition to the history and sociology of libertinage, it focuses on Théophile’s trial and sees it as bringing into being a new relationship between the literary and the political and as constituting the founding moment of seventeenth-century libertinage. The word épreuve (trial, putting to the test) in the title of the book demonstrates the dynamic nature of the construction of the notion of libertinage that takes place through the agency of this trial and also describes the moral and physical testing of Théophile. The study, as its title and subtitle - Morale, soupçon et pouvoirs dans la France baroque - suggest, aims to set the trial in the network of social, political, philosophical, religious and literary contexts of the age and to provide no less than a teleology, archeology and ontology of the notion of libertinage, set against the backdrop of the Classical age and the political regime of Absolutism.

Van Damme begins with a chapter on the historiography of the notion. René Pintard’s Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du dix-septième siècle, published in 1943, is the first significant attempt to demonstrate the importance and extent of free, heterodox or oppositional thought in the seventeenth century, defining this as libertinage érudit and distinguishing it clearly from the libertinage de mœurs - libertine behaviour. Van Damme, on the contrary, teasing out the various elements of Théophile’s trial, demonstrates the intricate networks of allegiances and discourses making Pintard’s bifurcation between libertinage flamboyant and libertinage érudit difficult to justify in practice.

Using original archival material as well as trial transcripts published by the indefatigable early twentieth-century hunter of heretics, Frédéric Lachèvre, Van Damme clearly reconstructs the details of the trial. Théophile’s trial was initiated by the publication in 1623 of the Jesuit François Garasse’s Doctrine des beaux esprits de ou prétendus tels. The initial incriminating evidence for Théophile’s condemnation was to be found in a collection of poetry, the Parnasse satirique, in which a poem by Théophile extols the practice of sodomy and utters blasphemies. Although Théophile had powerful protectors, notably the Duc de Montmorency, he was imprisoned in 1623 both on grounds of his writing and as a result of false witness against him concerning his behaviour.

During his imprisonment Théophile wrote many pamphlets, defending himself and rejecting the accusations of his adversaries, who also counter-attacked, some anonymously. Altogether some 74 pamphlets were produced, providing the opportunities for the printing trade and for booksellers who played an important role in orienting and continuing the polemic to commercial ends...