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Jennifer Rushworth Jennifer Rushworth PETRARCH’S FRENCH FORTUNES: negotiating the relationship between poet, place, and identity in the six- teenth and nineteenth centuries RELIEF – Revue électronique de littérature française 12 (2), 2018, p. 23-37. DOI: doi.org/10.18352/relief.1006 ISSN: 1873-5045 – URL: www.revue-relief.org This article is published under a CC-BY 4.0 license This article reconsiders Petrarch’s French afterlife by juxtaposing a time of long-recognised Petrarchism — the sixteenth century — with a less familiar and more modern Petrarchist age, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Of particular interest is how French writers from both periods understand and represent Petrarch’s associations with place. This variously proposed, geographically defined identity is in turn regional (Tuscan/Provençal) and national (Italian/French), located by river (Arno/Sorgue) and city (Florence/Avignon). I argue that six- teenth-century poets stress Petrarch’s foreignness, thereby keeping him at a safe distance, whereas later writers embrace Petrarch as French, drawing the poet closer to (their) home. The medieval Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (known in English as Petrarch, in French as Pétrarque) is the author of many works in Latin and in Italian, in poetry and in prose (for the most complete and accessible account, see Kirkham and Maggi). Since the sixteenth century, however, his fame has resided in one particular vernacular form: the sonnet. In his poetic collection Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, more commonly and simply known as the Canzoniere, 317 of the total 366 are sonnets. These poems reflect on the experience of love and later of grief, centred on the poet’s beloved Laura, and have been so often imitated by later poets as to have given rise to a poetic movement named after the poet: Petrarch- ism. In the words of Jonathan Culler, “Petrarch’s Canzoniere established a gram- mar for the European love lyric: a set of tropes, images, oppositions (fire and ice), and typical scenarios that permitted generations of poets throughout Eu- rope to exercise their ingenuity in the construction of love sonnets” (69). Petrarch crossed geographical and linguistic borders in his life and has continued to do so posthumously through the reception of his work. The most important border for Petrarch’s life — and, arguably, his work — is that be- 23 tween Italy and France. As Theodore Cachey has commented, “the contrast be- tween France and Italy [was] like a hinge […] around which Petrarch’s career turned” (6). Critics have already analysed this “hinge” or turning point from a variety of perspectives, beginning with Petrarch’s debt to the troubadours (Pe- rugi; Paden) and his relationship to Avignon (Falkeid), and proceeding to stud- ies of Petrarch’s later reception. Most wide-ranging and ambitious in this last regard is Ève Duperray’s assessment of the myths of Petrarch and Vaucluse in French literature throughout the centuries. There is unanimity that the sixteenth century is the most rich and fertile period of Petrarchism, principally in France (Balsamo 2004; Vianey), but also in England (Kennedy), Spain (Navarrete), Portugal (Marnoto), and the colonial Americas (Greene). Yet a handful of critics (Bertoli; Hoffmeister; Zuccato) have also begun to argue for the presence of a distinct Petrarchan thread in the nine- teenth century. I count myself in this latter group, having studied Petrarch’s nineteenth-century French reception in terms of both translations and rewrit- ings (Rushworth). In what follows, this more modern Petrarchism is set in a wider temporal context, with a particular focus on how French readers and writers have understood Petrarch’s relationship to place. Placing Petrarch is an interesting challenge, because of his associations with many different sites: birth in Arezzo; childhood in Carpentras; education at Montpellier and Bologna; adulthood in Avignon and Vaucluse; later life in various cities in northern Italy, ending with his death in Arquà. The reception of Petrarch has typically been less attentive to these plural and contradictory claims, preferring instead to reduce Petrarch to one single place-derived iden- tity. Petrarch himself encourages such an approach by defining himself most often not in relation to any of the aforementioned places, but rather as Floren- tine, based on his family connections to that city before his father’s exile and occluding his lack of lived familiarity with the city. As Marco Santagata high- lights: A Firenze fa solo due rapide soste, di pochi giorni ciascuna, durante l’andata e il ritorno del pellegrinaggio compiuto a Roma in occasione del Giubileo del 1350. [...] Petrarca ama firmarsi “florentinus” e ama ricordare le sue origini “in su la riva d’Arno” (RVF 366, 82), ma è un fiorentino che quasi non ha messo piede nella sua città. (xxviii–xxix) (He only stayed twice briefly in Florence, each time for a few days, during his journey to and from Rome on a pilgrimage undertaken on the occasion of the 1350 Jubilee. [...] Petrarch liked to put “florentinus” in his signature and liked to recall his birth “by the banks of the Arno” (RVF 366, 82), but he was a Florentine who almost never set foot in his city.) 24 Reflecting on this same paradoxical situation, Gianfranco Contini has sug- gested in a felicitous phrase that Petrarch’s connection to Florence is a sort of “transcendental Florentine-ness” (“Fiorentinità […] trascendentale”, 175), based on language and affection rather than on birth or residence therein. In the final poem of the Canzoniere, as Santagata recalls, Petrarch offers his readers a belated birth certificate: “i’ nacqui in su la riva d’Arno” (I was born by the banks of the Arno; RVF 366, v. 82; citing throughout from Santagata’s edition, with translation my own). This deliberately obfuscatory phrase implies Florence whilst eschewing anything more specific and therefore outright false. The example of Petrarch suggests the striking extent to which identity can be self-fashioned, rendering even typically factual biographical aspects such as birthplace open to interpretation and manipulation. Moreover, Petrarch’s self- definition as Florentine has been remarkably successful in terms of its pro- lungation by later readers. Emblematically, the very title of Boccaccio’s biog- raphy of Petrarch describes the poet as “de Florentia” (of Florence), while it is further asserted within the text that, despite Petrarch’s birth in Arezzo, “post- modum aput Florentiam […] a Musarum, ut puto, fuit uberibus educatus” (it was later in Florence […] that, I believe, he was raised by the Muses; Boccaccio, 898, with English translation from Houston, 58). In this way Boccaccio reiterates and supplements Petrarch’s claims on Florence. The geographical placement of Petrarch by later writers both within and outside Italy is a rich topic. In this essay I explore Petrarch’s placement by French writers, focussing on two different periods: on the one hand, the mid- sixteenth century; on the other hand, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first is a well-known period of French Petrarchism, the second little known, and these two periods are chosen precisely for the purposes of contrast. Writers from each period take advantage of the ambiguous nature of Petrarch’s geographical identity in order to propose markedly different spa- tially orientated versions of the poet and his poetry. The Florentine Petrarch Sixteenth-century French culture witnessed many literary and Petrarchan ‘firsts’: the first published sonnet in French, by Clément Marot (1538); the first translations of Petrarch’s sonnets, by the same Marot (1539); the first sonnet se- quence in French, Joachim Du Bellay’s L’Olive (1549–50); the first complete translation of the Canzoniere, by Vasquin Philieul (1555). This obsession with Petrarch resonated well with, and indeed was partly fuelled by, the political context of the time. François Ier (reg. 1515–1547) was a significant patron of the arts and bestowed both his blessing and even his own poetry on key Petrarchist 25 events such as the claimed discovery of Laura’s grave in a church in Avignon in 1533 (Millet; Giudici). His successor Henri II (reg. 1547–1559) married the Florentine Catherine de’ Medici, further consolidating the Italo-philia of the time. Yet both reigns were also characterized by Italo-French wars, a political backdrop which suggests potentially aggressive and conflictual undercurrents in the French adoption of Petrarchist modes at this time. In short, sixteenth- century Petrarchism is shot through with contradictory emotions, ranging from admiration to rivalry. Consequently, we must be attentive not only to differences between Pet- rarch and Petrarchism, but also to the co-presence, in this period, of anti-Pet- rarchism and Petrarchism (Forster, 57) as, more broadly, of anti-italianisme and italianisme (Balsamo 1992). To take but one example: in La Deffence, et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549), Du Bellay specifically recommends Petrarch as a model and in particular imitation of his signature sonnet form: “Sonne moy ces beaux Sonnetz [...] plaisante Invention Italienne […]. Pour le Sonnet donques tu as Petrarque, & quelques modernes Italiens” (Book 2, Ch. IV, 2003, I, 55). None- theless, the poetic collection accompanying this theoretical treatise begins in a polemical fashion rejecting the Petrarchan laurel — “Je ne quiers pas la fameuse couronne” — and seeking to establish in its place Du Bellay’s own olive tree, which he hopes to render “Egal un jour au laurier immortel” (L’Olive I, vv. 1 and 14, 2003, II, 163). These examples of rivalry with Petrarch and of anti-Petrarchism within Petrarchism might be multiplied, but what interests me specifically is how these contradictory attitudes are manifested in the way French poets situate Petrarch in relation to place. Already in the Deffence, in the passage cited above, Petrarch and the sonnet are stressed as Italian and therefore foreign. Yet it is more typical in the sixteenth century for French poets to refer to Petrarch in their poetry with greater specificity, that is, through mention of Florence.
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