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The Invention of Memoirs in Renaissance France Nicolae-Alexandru Virastau

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The Invention of Memoirs in Renaissance France Nicolae-Alexandru Virastau The Invention of Memoirs in Renaissance France Nicolae-Alexandru Virastau Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2015 Nicolae-Alexandru Virastau All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Invention of Memoirs in Renaissance France Nicolae-Alexandru Virastau This dissertation investigates the emergence of the memoir genre in France. Commynes, the author generally regarded as the first memoirist, initially conceived his memoirs as a collection of personal notes to be used by the Latinist Angelo Cato for a more elaborate history of Louis XI’s reign, but gradually came to consider it an independent, firsthand account. The second half of the sixteenth century witnessed the appearance of an unprecedented and closely-knit group of firsthand historical narratives, circulating in manuscript form or published as memoirs. These texts were responding to the standards set by a new Renaissance historiography, which sought to transform traditional history into a science with political applications. As the early modern paradigm of historiography based on firsthand narrative sources faded away in modern times, memoirs lost their historiographical status and became part of French literature. Most scholars deem Renaissance memoirs rudimentary forms of autobiography that only fully matured in the age of Louis XIV. It is within and against this teleological literary scholarship that my thesis is situated. By re-placing Renaissance memoirs within their original rhetorical context, I argue that the author’s quest for individual self-expression, which has been considered a defining characteristic of memoirs, is an anachronistic and retrospective projection. My dissertation shows that memoirs were originally a collective enterprise and that communal values prevailed in Renaissance self- memorialization. The first formal group of memoirs appeared in the wake of civil and religious wars that endangered traditional forms of social and political representation. Their authors addressed relatively new topics such as the court favorite, reason of state, and national unity. However, all the evidence suggests that their life-writings did not mark a watershed between medieval corporatism and Renaissance individualism, as has been previously thought Introduction 1 Chapter I. A Genealogy of Memoirs 12 Chapter II. The Court and Its Discontents 59 Chapter III. Reason of State 100 Chapter IV. Memory, Lineage, and Nation 141 Conclusion 183 Bibliography 191 Appendix 206 i Acknowledgments The writing of this dissertation would have been impossible without the invaluable help and patience of a large number of people. First of all, I would like to express my gratitude towards my dissertation committee for encouraging and supporting me throughout this process. I owe my biggest debt to my main adviser Professor Sylvie Lefèvre who first opened my eyes to questions of codicology, paleography, and iconography in literary analysis, during the several graduate classes she taught at Columbia University. She has patiently read and corrected all of my papers, and she walked with me through the many avenues of research I have undertaken in my graduate years. Professor Pierre Force introduced me to the history of ideas and oriented my interest in the early modern conception of history, which eventually led me to my dissertation subject. My thesis would have been much more imperfect without Professor Phillip John Usher’s judicious criticism and knowledge of Renaissance culture and scholarship. I am particularly honored and grateful to Professors Anthony Grafton and Alan Stewart for agreeing to join my dissertation committee on such short notice. Several friends helped improve the form and contents of this dissertation. I should like to express my gratitude towards Andrea Herskowitz, Razvan Pop, Paul Wimmer, and Eugen Wohl. ii Introduction François de la Rochefoucauld’s Mémoires of the rebellion known as the Fronde (1648- 1653), in which he had been one of the leaders, were printed allegedly without his consent officially in Cologne, but in reality in Amsterdam, in 1662. The memoirs bore his acronym (M.D.L.R.) and contained a mixture of authentic and inauthentic narratives (“relations”) and documents (“pieces”), inserted therein as if he had effectively written them (“comme si effectivement il les avait composées”); displeased that one should abuse his distinguished name (“parce qu’il n’est pas a souffrir qu’on abuse du nom d’une personne de sa qualité”), La Rochefoucauld himself sent a letter to the Parisian Parliament asking for the book to be censored, a decision which became effective in September the same year (La Rochefoucauld 771; “Extrait des Registres du Parlement”; ed. Martin-Chauffier). His contemporaries were outraged. Saint-Simon, the most famous memoirist of the following generation, recounted how his father had suffered a fit of pique when reading that he had broken his promise to the prince of Condé: Mon père sentit si vivement l’atrocité de la calomnie, qu’il se jeta sur une plume et mit à la marge [of La Rochefoucauld’s apocryphal Mémoires]: L’auteur en a menti. Non content de ce qu’il venoit de faire, il s’en alla chez le libraire, qu’il découvrit, parce que cet ouvrage ne se débitoit pas publiquement dans cette première nouveauté. Il voulut voir ses exemplaires, pria, promit, menaça et fit bien qu’il se les fit montrer. Il prit aussitôt une plume et mit à tous la même note marginale. On peut juger de l’étonnement du libraire, et qu’il ne fut pas longtemps sans faire avertir M. de La Rochefoucauld . (1: 83-84). 1 Besides the request of censorship sent to the Parliament, La Rochefoucauld dispatched letters to friends, wherein he tried to assure his contemporaries that the memoirs he had actually written originally contained no injurious remarks. When nineteenth-century scholars finally established more authentic manuscripts and editions of La Rochefoucauld’s memoirs, they managed to prove that more than half of the clandestine edition, printed in 1662, was not authored by La Rochefoucauld; nonetheless, in the parts that were authentic, the duke was quite outspoken (La Rochefoucauld 2: I-XXVII; ed. Gourdault). Indeed, there was nothing more offensive to a gentleman than the accusation of perfidy and disloyalty. The third person masculine pronoun in the subordinate clause (“qu’il ne fut pas longtemps sans faire avertir M. de La Rochefoucauld”) must refer to the bookseller from the main clause. If my interpretation is correct, the bookseller himself informed La Rochefoucauld about the incident involving Saint-Simon’s father vandalizing these memoirs. The bookseller was probably displeased at having the value of his book diminished. Why would he report that to La Rochefoucauld, who, according to the letter he had sent to the Parliament, was outraged that somebody would abuse his distinguished name? Did Saint-Simon fabricate this story? And why would Saint-Simon do such a thing? In order to answer these questions one needs to explore the cultural parameters surrounding the memoir genre within which La Rochefoucauld and his co-writers worked. The Parliament’s interdiction to sell and publish La Rochefoucauld’s pirated memoirs had no effect, and they continued to be reproduced from 1662 to 1672. However, the apocryphal edition of 1662 was not the first time somebody had tried to publish La Rochefoucauld’s memoirs during the author’s lifetime, and again, allegedly without his consent. Other more “authentic” editions appeared, in fact, only posthumously, in 1689. 2 La Rochefoucauld had first given the manuscript of his memoirs to Arnauld d’Andilly, brother to the more famous Antoine Arnauld, so that he could correct it specifically with regards to “purity of language,” in the words of Jean Renault de Segrais, La Rochefoucauld’s friend and Madame de La Fayette’s secretary (La Rochefoucauld 2: VII; ed. Gourdault). Arnauld d’Andilly then sent the memoirs to the count of Brienne, who wanted to print them in Rouen; but La Rochefoucauld, who in the meantime brought changes to his initial project, managed to prevent their clandestine printing by buying back (!) the furtive copies of these memoirs from the printer based in Rouen, as Segrais informs us. This initial lost edition was not, according to the same Segrais, entirely faithful to La Rochefoucauld’s manuscript; nor was this first edition identical to the other supposedly nonconsensual edition printed in 1662, in Amsterdam/Cologne. In short, La Rochefoucauld himself sent multiple versions and fragments of his memoirs to his friends so that they could help him with questions of style; these friends and their friends made both stylistic and content-based modifications, and did not shy away from printing the memoirs without respecting the exact letter of the manuscripts entrusted to them. La Rochefoucauld publicly denied being the author of the pirated editions, although, in private, he seems to have been perfectly aware of their modifications and printing. If Saint-Simon’s version is correct, La Rochefoucauld himself oversaw the distribution of his inauthentic memoirs in Paris. In 1804, Renouard published a manuscript containing La Rochefoucauld’s autograph corrections and Segrais’s notes; multiple critical editions, refining the quest for an ideal handwritten document reflective of the author’s mind, followed in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century is also the most prolific moment in the history of
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