Les Récits de conjuration sous Louis XIV (review)

Interest in revolts and representations of them in France persisted well after the Fronde and throughout the absolute rule of Louis XIV. In his well-written Les Récits de conjuration sous Louis XIV, Bruno Tribout helps to illuminate this aspect of the second half of the seventeenth century by offering a carefully researched examination of the aesthetic of some of the principal récits de conjuration written and published in the period. Tribout and the texts he analyses use 'conjuration' not in the earlier sense of the word dating from the twelfth century and relating to oaths, formulas, and rites for driving away the devil and evil, but rather in the political sense that appeared at the end of the fifteenth century, as a clandestine agreement sealed with a solemn promise by a group of individuals against a state or a sovereign, which is close in meaning to 'conspiracy' in English. The corpus of the récits de conjuration analysed in this book includes liberal translations and anonymous texts, some by less well-known authors, others by some of the most important intellectual figures in the seventeenth century, such as Jean-François Sarasin, César Vichard de Saint-Réal, and Jean François Paul de Gondi, cardinal de Retz. At several points Tribout expresses his debt to Jean Lafond, whose groundbreaking article inspired Tribout's research ('L'Imaginaire de la conjuration dans la littérature française du XVII e siècle', in Complots et conjurations dans l'Europe moderne, ed. by Yves-Marie Bercé and Elena Fasano Guarini (Rome: École française de Rome, 1996), pp. 117-35). Lafond's article is excellent, and I would recommend that anyone interested in conspiracies in the seventeenth century read it alongside Tribout's book, or, if one is pressed for time, just read the article, as Tribout and Lafond cover much of the same territory, although Tribout examines a larger number of texts and does so in far greater detail. This is to be expected, as Lafond's article is less than twenty pages while Tribout's book weighs in at 660 pages and is a comprehensive study based on his doctoral dissertation. However, Tribout's study also diverges from Lafond's by reconceiving and clarifying the parameters and characteristics of the récits de conjuration as a genre. Whereas Lafond argues that they form a subgenre of historiographical literature exhibiting formal coherence because of the density and brevity of their expression, Tribout founds the homogeneity of the corpus on the common efforts of the authors to exploit the borders between genres in order to bend a well-known model of history to their own uses, while maintaining an equilibrium between praising good monarchs and subjects who revolt against bad monarchs and blaming bad monarchs and subjects who revolt without good cause. Tribout's book makes a significant contribution to the study of a fascinating group of texts that have received little attention from literary scholars, and it devotes admirable care in attending to the singularity of the texts while working to define the relation among them.