La Figure du pédant de Montaigne à Molière (review)

Jocelyn Royé claims to have written the first large-scale study of the early modern French literary pedant, and it is with this global approach that the book’s strengths and weaknesses both lie. Royé traces the history of the pedant back to its scholastic prototypes in the late medieval period, and devotes considerable space to charting the evolution of this type up to the late seventeenth century and, briefly, into the eighteenth, when his popularity dwindled owing partly to the emerging figure of the philosophe, who, we are told, lends himself less well to comic satire. But, as the title suggests, Royé is primarily interested in the pedant figure as he emerged in the mid-sixteenth century and then flourished in the seventeenth, when his purview was extended to encompass female characters, notably in the plays of Molière. Drawing on a range of sources, including drama, satirical poems, and novels, Royé sets down the pedant’s defining characteristics, but here the author’s structure is often plodding and his analysis marred by generalization. A feature of the pedant is put forward: for instance, he is an intellectual, or he comes from a modest social background that he is keen to eschew, he is tight-fisted, wears a black robe, or has a tendency to spit in public, and each point is scrupulously backed up by an apposite example (or examples) from one of the source texts. But almost no attempt is made to take into account the diverse literary, historical, or generic contexts from which Royé’s examples have sprung, so what is otherwise a sensible and measured analysis is thus devalued. Similarly, the examples are used only to support the point being made, leaving many worthwhile opportunities for further analysis dangling on the page. The anti-Semitism inherent in the repeated comparisons made between the pedant and the usurer, for instance, seem ripe for comment. A more serious oversight is Royé’s failure to pin down what exactly distinguishes caricature, parody, and satire, and how they all function in relation to real-life models and, more fundamentally, to comedy and the comic. It makes for a dry read. Where Royé does offer welcome precision is in his analysis of the pedant’s use of language, ranging from his abuse of Latin (classical, archaic, and macaronic) to his eccentric application of the vernacular (including a predilection for neologisms and hyperbole). Towards the end of the book, Royé puts forward an interesting hypothesis whereby the exclusively male, university-based savant, who spoke Latin and led a solitary existence, came to be opposed, during the course of the seventeenth century, to the sometimes female mondain (based at court or in the salons), who relied on the vernacular and on a group setting. Intriguingly, the latter, while offering an alternative, modern intellectual aesthetic in opposition to traditional pedantry, also came to be accused of pedantry by his or her rivals. This explains how, in the ‘Querelle des anciens et des modernes’, both Boileau and Perrault would accuse each other of pedantry.