Framing the Police: Scudery's Secret Critique of Louis XIV by Margaret

Framing the Police: Scudery's Secret Critique of Louis XIV by Margaret Anne Trotzke "Si vous jugez sur les apparences en ce lieu-ci, repondit Mme de Chartes, vous serez souvent trompee: ce qui parait n'est presque jamais la veritS." Madame de La Fayette La Princesse de Cleves Madeleine de Scudery's La Promenade de Versailles (1669) appears to be a glorifying description of Louis XIV's palace, followed by a courtly romance. However, the mystification of Versailles and of Louis' court serves as a cloaking device for the political debate in the text, which raises daring questions about the concept of the hereditary monarchy. The novel that ostensibly champions Louis XIV contains subversive passages hidden within the romanesque story, a secret critique designed to fool the police. The reaction of the 17th-century French absolutist monarchy to political commentary mandated that Scudery's critique be secret. By associating Louis XIV and his splendid court with the Sun, the most powerful source in the Universe, the spectacle of Versailles was brilliantly conceived to empower the Sun-King, absolutely. As Conley states in the foreword to the translation of Marin's Le Portrait du Roi: Whoever institutes a collectively imaginary order monitors the desires and dreams of multitudes. Power is therefore enabled as much or more from control of ideas about life as from that of military forces or other visibly repressive agencies...The king's means of control are not those of a repressive agency, but rather as multifariously 170 MARGARET TROTZKE autonomous but homologous styles of aura...The king's effect produced it consciously...(vii, xii) The court of Versailles is, par excellence, a "collectively imaginary order," with its concomitant control of ideas and therefore its pervasive power. For Conley, Le Portrait du Roi "demonstrates that the West since the seventeenth century has its beginnings...in the 'hidden' persuasions of public medias" (vii). The spectacle of Versailles transfixed and controlled its spectators, and its power was awesome. However, since the dazzling illusion of the King's divinely ordained grandeur could be dispelled by dissent, the absolutist monarchy policed the borders of political commentary to fend off dissenters and established limits of expression beyond which it was dangerous to venture. Thus the "hidden persuaders" of Louis' court, the designers of this influential power display, did not rely solely on their media image to ward off criticism. During the Fronde, as Martin indicates, the monarchy reacted to what it considered subversive political commentary by limiting the number of publishing houses, printers, and apprenticeships (678-85). The Privilege was used as a "censure preventive" (690). In Paris, Monsieur le Lieutenant de Police La Reynie led searches of publishing houses and foreign book importers (696-997) and seized texts (Martin 758, Sauvy 16, 197), and in the early 1700's, dissenting pamphleteers were imprisoned (Klaits 52-53). Despite the fact that the Fronde was successfully suppressed by the mid-1650's, vigorous policing of the press did not lessen during Louis XIV's reign (Martin 689). Particularly sensitive to the power of well conceived texts-written, painted or staged-Louis and his ministers elaborated several more subtle and ingenious ways of policing the Arts and Letters, for instance, by enlisting potential enemies in their own ranks. According to Martin, Louis'ministers established royal pensions for writers who would celebrate the King, and used the Academie Francaise to put writers in his service (668-669). Madeleine de Scudery was given a royal pension and was FRAMING THE POLICE:... 171 the first writer to receive the Prize of Eloquence from the Academie in 1671. The nature of Scudery's relation to the monarchy's enemies during the Fronde is viewed differently by DeJean and Aronson. Scudery remained friends with Mme de Longueville and dedicated Le Grand Cyrus to her. DeJean reads Cyrus as a fictionalized version of the Fronde's activities and sees Scudery as "the official novelist of the rebel camp" (Hollier 301). However, Aronson sees Scudery as a devoted royalist, citing the dedication of Clelie to Mile de Longueville, an enemy of Mme de Longueville and the Fronde (165). If true, Madeleine de Scudery played both sides of the fence to her advantage. In contrast to Le Grand Cyrus and Clelie, La Promenade de Versailles appears to be safely within the borders of political decorum. The novel is dedicated to Louis XIV himself, bears the necessary privilege du roi, and begins with a description of Versailles and.by metonymic association, of Louis XIV and his court. This description is catalyzed by the arrival of the Beautiful Stranger from a far-off land, who does not dare reveal her identity or her native country, because it could be dangerous. The text describes the palace mirrors, the reflecting ponds and vistas, returning the reader's gaze from the spectacle to the spectator, especially to and from the eyes of the Beautiful Stranger, as she strolls around Versailles This descriptive walk through Versailles is also the pretext for conversations between the Beautiful Stranger, her host narrator, her relative and companion, Glicere, and various courtiers, especially Telamon. The text, which is supposed to describe Versailles, turns into a discussion of the importance of description and centers around historic sovereigns-the Kings of Egypt, Medea, and Spain, and the Emperor-Caesar. Louis XIV is metonymically implicated in these discussion of mighty and powerful monarchs, and occasionally, is mentioned explicitly. Glicere is astonished "qu'un Prince qui a tant de plaisirs a choisir pendant la paix, les puisse quiter facilement pour aller a la guerre" 172 MARGARET TROTZKE (81). Her astonishment can be interpreted as a mild indictment of Louis' propensity for war. Explaining that the King's private pleasure palace is the seat of his public, belligerent enterprises, the narrator says that, at Versailles, "pendant qu'il [the King] ne sembloit songer qu'a divertir toute sa Cour, & qu'a se divertir luy-mesme, formoit ces grandes entreprises...c'est la encore qu'il concut 1'heroique dessein de faire la guerre en une saison destinee au repos..." (12-13). Can a war plan in a season of rest be heroic? An ironic reading subverts the eulogistic praise, and opposition between the idealizing mystification and the subversive demystification is created. Further, the interplay of the spectacle and the spectator in the introduction suggests that only a close inspection of Versailles will reveal its secrets, and by extension, those of Louis XIV himself. As the "Belle Etrangere" indicates to her friend at the conclusion of the first half of the novel: Et pour moi...je ferai aujourd'hui ce que vous disiez tantost que vous faites toujours; car bien qu'il n'y ait rien de plus charmant que Versailles, les loiianges du Roi sont encore demeurees plus avant dans mon coeur que toutes les beautez de son magnifique Palais. (100-101) The Beautiful Stranger insists she will remember the praises of the King more than the beauties of his palace, which suggests by analogy that reading behind the description of the palace in this text will reveal an assessment of the monarch. The frontispiece of the novel is the first demystifying sign. Facing the title page with the dedication to Louis XIV is a reproduction of an engraving depicting Cupidon standing before a Versailles-like chateau, casually leaning against a column bearing the words La Promenade de Versailles dediee au Roi. He coyly smiles, finger pointing to his lips as if to say, "I've got a secret." Thus, the engraving inaugurates the text's insistence on Versaille's secrets and further indicates that it is both as playful as the tambourine player and as serious as the dark-eyed FRAMING THE POLICE:... 173 figure centered in the picture. The posturing figures of the foreground convey a sense of movement in opposition to the monumental stability of the palace, and their haunting eyes capture the gaze of the viewer before it is directed to the palace. In short, it is not the palace which is the focus of the engraving, nor is a simple description of Versailles the point of La Promenade de Versailles. After the introductory valorization of description, the narrative shifts to the secret and private machinations of an "imaginary" court beyond the borders of Versailles in "L'Histoire de Celanire". The description, which has been central, becomes peripheral and the story appears to take center stage, only to become the frame for a hidden message. The stage is set for the frame-up. Scudery's text debates the virtues and constraints of various forms of government, including a hereditary monarchy, in the security of the Beautiful Stranger's distant, exotic, and secret homeland. Glicere begins the story of the Beautiful Stranger, to whom she gives the pseudonym of Celanire, by insisting that all the names and places in her narrative are invented. This effort to distance the allegory from France and Louis XIV's police may be explained by the title itself. "L'Histoire de Celanire" is a story which can be damaging, "cela peut nuke." To be sure, as Hodgson has written, the "baroque" novel "presupposait 1'evocation d'un cadre exotique, eloigne autant que possible de la realite contemporaine et dans I'espace et dans le temps" (336). But Scudery's text draws attention to its play with the border between the real and the fictional, and thus signals that an exotic adventure can be the fiction for a political critique of Versailles. La Promenade de Versailles, encourages the reader to extrapolate from the real and the fictional to the truth and the lie of the spectacle of Louis XIV, especially as it is manifested in Versailles.

Load more