Socio-economic Approaches to French Literature, c. 1540-1630

Non virrus, sed te numerata pecunia tollat?Sícne monetali reddere jura foro?Hanc judex litem mors immatura diremit:Ne tumeas empto te tuus ornat honos.

(Jean-Antoine de Baïf)¹

These Latin verses from 1582 conceal beneath their obscurity a taste of how the writers of the French Renaissance experienced the literary pressures and possibilities of their society's socio-economic organization. Their subject was Odet de Turnèbe, the son of the royal professor and important classical scholar Adrien Turnèbe, who had died at the age of twenty-eight leaving as his legacy a small collection of poems, an unpublished prose comedy, and not-yet-registered letters of provision for the office of First President of the Cour des Monnaies, which regulated the mints and the precious metals. His death had cut short what, from almost any point of view, should have been an exemplary story of social mobility. In only two generations, hard work, an honourable reputation, exceptional talent for the humane letters, and royal favour had brought the Turnèbe family to the upper reaches of the robe nobility. But, like all offices in France, the first presidency of the Monnaies was at least in part venal, and while Turnèbe may have been able to buy it at a discount, money had certainly changed hands when he acquired it. Thus Baïf's question: had humanist virtue or filthy lucre raised Odet to his high position? And if it were the latter, how could his (and by extension his father's) literary efforts be ennobling?

Such questions haunted French literature from the reign of François I^er into that of Louis XIV. They were, evidently, specific forms of general questions that affect almost all literature: how society can or should best support and reward literary production; how literature should be consumed in light of the conditions of its production; and, perhaps most importantly, how literature might portray or thematize the social and economic conditions of its existence, ideally in ways that have some approximation of a universal resonance. Literary critics and historians have always been aware of these factors, but, illuminating as they can often be, such aspects have only intermittently come to the forefront of their interpretative schemas. Still, the influence of Marxist critique is still felt, if not as powerfully as it once was.² And more recently, scholars of anglophone literature working in the new historicism and its more narrowly focused offshoot, the 'new economic criticism', have made these issues central to their work.³ French studies have seen no such organized movement, but plenty of work addressing economic and socio-economic concerns exists, if in a disjointed form, and the historical literature provides the foundation for more.⁴ The goal of this essay will be to point out some of that work, while indicating a few areas where more investigation seems desirable to me, and providing an outline of what the broader contribution of a socio-economic approach might be to our understanding of the later French Renaissance.

One reason why such approaches may have figured less prominently in the criticism of French than of English Renaissance literature is a relative paucity of canonical texts with an economic focus. At least until the appearance of Molière's Bourgeois gentilhomme and Furetière's Roman bourgeois in the 1660s, there was little in France that could compare with the socio-economic immediacy of, say, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice or Marlowe's Jew of Malta. Still, there are some French texts that have drawn attention, if usually rather scattered, for their equally episodic economic focus. For the sake of clarity I shall concentrate on four such groups of texts: Rabelais in the earlier part of the Renaissance; the Pléiade poets; Montaigne's Essais; and Pierre Corneille and Charles Sorel at the dawn of the époque classique.

The éloge des dettes in Rabelais's Tiers livre (Chapters 2-5) is one of the most comprehensively economic texts of the French Renaissance. It combines satire, farce, and evangelical allegory, extending themes that Rabelais had developed...