Corneille's Œdipe and the Politics of Seventeenth-Century Royal Succession

L'expérience montre qu'il est beaucoup plusassuré de recevoir un roi de la main de Dieuque de celle des hommes, c'est-à-dire parsuccession plutôt que par élection, à causedes grands désordres qui arrivent tandis quel'on est occupé à la recherche d'un princeagréable à tout le peuple.

Cardin Le Bret, De La souveraineté du roi

Few characters convey the meaning of "downfall" as poignantly as Oedipus Rex. It is an irony of history, therefore, that it was Nicolas Fouquet—the man whose stunning downfall in 1661 came to exemplify the absolutist power of Louis XIV—who suggested in 1658 that Pierre Corneille rewrite Sophocles's most famous play. Scholars of the period have long debated why Fouquet, minister of the Crown's finances and generous promoter of the arts, would have encouraged the aging playwright to take up the subject of the tragic Theban king.¹ Why choose a play centered on a king's fatal mistake? Why, in a time when the classical imperatives of theatrical decorum and verisimilitude were gaining ground, opt for such a violent and implausible plot? Why, critics wonder, write an Oedipus play in 1659? Though the answers to these questions remain speculative, what is certain is the critical status afforded to Œdipe as a turning point in the Cornelian corpus—it marks the beginning of the so called demolition of the Cornelian tragic hero, a concept whose validity I will address in this essay. Significantly, this literary turning point coincides with a historical turning point in the monarchical project known as absolutism.

Corneille wrote Œdipe in the wake of the monarchy's successful defeat of the parlementarian and aristocratic-inspired uprising of the Fronde (the major events of this rebellion spanning 1648-1653).² Following this tumultuous period, the monarchy gained the upper hand in affirming its unrivaled sovereignty over all French subjects, be they the most prominent aristocrats of the day, but the victorious Crown was still reeling from the frondeurs' challenges to its supremacy.³ Thus, with Louis XIV's coronation in 1654, the monarchy guided by Cardinal Mazarin was determined to prevent future threats to the Crown and assiduously embarked on an image-building campaign. With the specter of the aristocratic threat still fresh, but relatively quelled, Mazarin and the young Louis began to erect a formidable industry of royal glorification. This endeavor, famously characterized by the coherence and pervasiveness of its message, was unprecedented in the history of the French monarchy and still resonates today. From coins emblazoned with the royal insignia (nec pluribus impar), to historical treatises, ornate palaces and artworks—which came to define Louis's reign—the royal rhetoric included a well-documented focus on the unique status of the king's body.⁴ I argue here that Corneille's Œdipe, in its atypical blending of the hero and the king, should be understood in the context of this royalist discourse, which enforced a profound division between mortal bodies and the royal body. Yet, it is not surprising that Œdipe has seldom been included in the Cornelian canon for it thwarts ingrained ideas about Cornelian heroism. I aim to show, however, how this mid-career tragedy is both pivotal for understanding Corneille's relationship to monarchical rhetoric, and essential to any investigation of theatrical portrayals of the king's body in absolutist France.

Critics have commonly focused on only a handful of Corneille's most famous plays that fit the mold of the self-sacrificing héros généreux. I propose an alternative that avoids attempts to place Cornelian heroes within a single unifying framework. Instead, I draw a distinction between the Cornelian aristocratic hero and the Cornelian royal hero. This view, which considers the play within the context of the dominant monarchical narratives of the period and contemporary debates on royal succession in particular, renders the playwright's decision to write Œdipe in 1659 intelligible.

This essay will read Œdipe's downfall as the result of a mistaken attempt on his part...