Renaissance romantique: mises en fiction du XVIe siècle (1814–1848) by Daniel Maira (review)

This doorstop-sized monograph continues a welcome trend of recent critical interest in French literature and culture during the first half of the nineteenth century, together with its competing political ideologies and social loyalties. Between Waterloo and the Second Republic, authors of fiction, poetry, and theater chose again and again to write about the French Renaissance (a period roughly overlapping with the sixteenth century). It is Maira's hypothesis that this "mise en intrigue" (22) of the Renaissance constituted a way for these authors collectively to reflect upon their own fraught time period, both during the repressive Bourbon Restoration through the disappointments of the July Monarchy. This was true, Maira argues, for Romantic authors across the ideological spectrum, from ultra-royalists to more moderate libéraux to die-hard republicans. All were in some sense responding to the weight of 1789 by exploring issues of revolt, national identity, and innovation during the turbulent period between the Middle Ages and the Great Century. This subject covers some familiar ground. François Rigolot long ago drew attention to Romanticism's fascination with the sixteenth century (see for example his "The invention of the Renaissance" in Hollier's New History of French Literature). The value of Renaissance romantique lies in how deeply Maira delves into the minutiae of nineteenth-century texts as he traces their authors' ideological aversions or attractions. Some of his observations are familiar; others are new and surprising. Maira reads the early Romantic taste for the Gothic as an expression of counter-revolutionary nostalgia for the Catholic, monarchic France of old (this is not news). He also contends that authors of all political stripes tended to view the Protestant Reformation as an event leading to a new spirit of questioning rather than obeying: a direct precursor to the French Revolution (whether they deplored or celebrated the event). Among Maira's most interesting observations: Henri IV, first of the Bourbons, was a popular figure in nineteenth-century royalist propaganda; while in contrast, his mother-in-law Catherine de Medici was reviled by more liberal writers who represented her authority as illegitimate because she was female, foreign, and of bourgeois origin. She is figured as a "queer" character in opposition to the virile heteronormativity of "le bon Henri," Maira argues, in a nod to Judith Butler. Another trouvaille; ultra-royalist art critics tended to shun the dangerously pagan and foreign painters of the Italian Renaissance. They even nuanced their admiration for pious subjects by Raphael, preferring his earlier work to his later, more "decadent" period (402). Readers of Stendhal's 1827 Armance may appreciate Maira's insight into this "querelle sur Raphaël" for making intelligible Octave's finicky preference for Raphael's Madone de San Sisto (1512) over the Mariage de la Madone (1504): one more way in which the gloomy Octave is out of step with his ultra-conservative milieu. Renaissance romantique ends with an annex compiling fictional works about the sixteenth century published between 1814 and 1848, from the famous to the obscure. In short, this work is a solid, detailed, and often exciting resource for dix-neuvièmistes.