L'écrivain Face Aux Puissants Au Moyen Âge: De La Satire À L'engagement by Jean-Claude Mühlethaler (review)

Mühlethaler's book is a collection of sixteen separate essays, plus introduction, written at different times. The essays cover a wide variety of works, but there is an element of repetition. Several of the same authors, works, and themes come up for discussion in more than one study. One of the principal topics he explores is political satire in France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He points out that satire is not a distinct genre but a way of critically addressing an issue. It can embrace theater, poetry, fiction, essay, etc. Besides satire, political writings can be pedagogical. In what is termed a miroir des princes, an author directly speaks to a king or other leader to make admonitions concerning the proper way to rule. Most of these writers were influenced by the political ideals of the recently rediscovered works of Aristotle. According to the latter, a ruler's primary goal should be the welfare of the whole population, including its lowest members, rather than personal gain or satisfaction. In the case of both satirical and pedagogical literature, the authors had to be discreet so as not to offend too openly the powers that be and jeopardize their own safety. Techniques like allegory, imaginary dreams, or reinterpretations of classical authors like Ovid and Virgil were a means to couch the writer's ideas in a self-protective format. A third topic considered by Mühlethaler is to what extent late medieval writers anticipated Sartre's definition of the author who is "engagé" or "embarqué" in the sociopolitical issues of the day. For Mühlethaler, emotional involvement, intense but rationally controlled, is a hallmark of these engaged writers. Compassionate interest in contemporary problems in the nation and a feeling of individual participation in their identification and resolution lead them to descend from the security of their study and enter the arena of political action. Among the authors whom he singles out for this distinction are Christine de Pizan and Alain Chartier. Both were writing in the early decades of the fifteenth century. Both had close ties to the royal households of the time and were therefore not contemplating events from a scholarly distance. Christine and Alain were writing at one of the saddest times in all of French history, with the collapse of the French monarchy after the battle of Azincourt (1415) and the violent civil strife between warring branches of the French royal family (Bourguignons vs. Armagnacs). In works such as Christine's Épistre à la reine and Lamentacion sur les maux de la France and Chartier's poem Quadrilogue invectif, they each pleaded for an end to the killing and the establishment of a national unity. They both expressed an incipient sense of national patriotism, presenting France as the long-suffering mother of her people. They also lived long enough and had the perceptiveness to welcome and celebrate the unforeseen intervention of the young maiden Jeanne d'Arc in the salvation of their country.