Testaments pour rire: testaments facétieux et polémiques dans la littérature d’Ancien Régime, 1465–1799 by Pierre and Marie-Hélène Servet (review)

This remarkable pair of volumes represents an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of early modern French literary culture. The volumes contain ninety-five examples of testaments: fictional texts presented as a person’s last will and testament and which constitute a literary genre much practised in early modern France. Although certain instances, such as Villon’s Testament, are well known, the genre has not received much scholarly attention, and the editors have made the welcome decision to include neither the Villon nor other fairly well-known testaments, such as Courtilz de Sandras’s Testament politique du duc de Richelieu, the work published by Voltaire as Le Testament de Jean Meslier, or Gouges’s Testament politique d’Olympe de Gouges, in order instead to privilege a wide range of little-known examples of the genre, many of which remain anonymous and are presented here in a scholarly edition for the first time. The editors present the corpus in a long Introduction, which usefully sets out the relationship between the literary genre and its legal model, noting common rhetorical features, such as the use of the list and the codicil, and which charts the rise and fall of the literary genre from the mid fifteenth to the late eighteenth century, with periods of particular flourishing during the Fronde and the Revolution. The corpus itself, which includes works in verse and prose, is divided into two overlapping categories, the humorous (or facétieux) and the polemical, each of which is subdivided: the humorous category includes carnivalesque and burlesque testaments of beggars and outlaws, jesters and tricksters, syphilitics and prostitutes, while the polemical category, the larger of the two, includes texts that purport to be the last will and testament of prominent writers such as Garasse and Scarron, religious figures such as Luther and Calvin, political figures including Henri de Valois, Richelieu, Mazarin, Lamoignon, and testaments published during the Revolution professing to contain the will of the Duchesse de Polignac, Marie-Antoinette, Mirabeau (a figure central to the Revolutionary use of the genre), and Robespierre. Both categories contain testaments of inanimate objects, animals, and social or political phenomena, such as Mardi Gras, war, the aristocracy, and the republic. And, as a whole, the corpus offers material to interest cultural historians as well as literary scholars insofar as, for instance, the items bequeathed in the testaments include everyday objects alongside precious ones — hats, coats, and shirts; rings, diamonds, and snuffboxes — as well as donkeys and wives, time, poverty, and impotence. Every research library should own a copy.