XVIIth Century
XVIIth Century
The Rise of a powerful State
First of all, the seventeenth century marked the end—or near end—of the Wars of Religion in France. Thanks to the Edict of Nantes, families stopped killing each other over questions of religion. War did continue elsewhere, especially in Central Europe and the German states, where it had devastating consequences and lasted until the middle of the century.
In France, royal authority weighed heavily on the nobility, who were either pushed into rural marginalization or tightly controlled by the king at the court of Versailles.
As always, the peasants were burdened with taxes and had virtually no rights, despite making up around 90% of the population. The literature of the time largely ignores them, with rare exceptions such as La Fontaine’s fable Death and the Woodman.
Yet culturally, politically, and militarily, France stood as the leading power in Europe—and knew it. Western nations adopted French fashion, taste, and customs. Descartes gave philosophy new direction, French became the language of diplomacy, and miniature “Versailles” sprang up across the continent.
Mastery and refinement
But such immense power could not be exercised without control and the concept of bienséance took over, regulating eveything from courtly behavior to art, architecture and even the look of the palace garden. After the exuberance of a bold, uninhibited Renaissance, the seventeenth century distinguished itself by its impulse to regulate, forbid, condemn, and reshape nature into carefully designed gardens. Society invested great effort in distinguishing what was proper from what was not, good taste from bad taste. In short, it was a century of refinement.
An age of light and shadow
This refinement sometimes seemed excessive and was mocked, as in the social comedies that had delighted La Bruyère and Molière.
Yet the writers of that age also revealed a darker side. Perhaps all this liveliness was, in truth, only a way of keeping death at bay.
Seventeenth-century authors could be deeply unsettling—Pascal and La Rochefoucauld among them. Like the popular painters of the era, they often conveyed reality in a sharp chiaroscuro, much like this painting by Trophime Bigot.
That strange, contrasting light also haunted the lives of the century’s great figures. Louis XIV, Racine, Pascal, Rancé, and even La Fontaine—after lives of pleasure, festivities, and fine dining—eventually renounced worldly delights, extinguished the lamps, withdrew from society, and turned toward God.
The french language in the 17th century
The seventeenth century was a rigorous age, governed by control and constraint. The French language gained in precision, but at the cost of a certain semantic richness. Whereas the Renaissance had been marked by abundance and excess, the seventeenth century sought to regulate usage and prune what was considered an overly luxuriant vocabulary. The creation of the Académie Française was part of this broader movement toward linguistic regulation.
As their expressive resources became more restricted, writers turned their efforts toward finding the most precise wording and cultivating the musicality of their prose.
This discipline corresponded to an ideal of clarity and elegance, which many writers of the time (rightly or wrongly) believed to be the distinctive genius of the French language. By the end of the century, the prevailing belief was that the language had reached its pinnacle—an attitude of self-satisfaction that also characterized the reign of Louis XIV. And in a sense, this was true, if one accepts clarity and elegance as the supreme literary ideals of the period.
But does the insistence on absolute clarity in expression not also imply the assumption that nothing fundamentally obscure, troubled, or contradictory exists in human nature? Is that not, perhaps, somewhat naïve—or optimistic? Much later, Romanticism would lead the French language into the mists of ambiguity, passion, and inner turmoil that the seventeenth century had largely refused to explore.
17th-Century Literature
Between Baroque Exuberance and Classical Restraint
The Exuberance of the Baroque
Most of the writers now regarded as 17th-century “classics” lived or published their works in the second half of the century. Those from the earlier decades, broadly speaking, are not considered classical in style or spirit. In fact, many of them have almost vanished from collective memory. While Racine, Corneille, La Fontaine, Molière, and Blaise Pascal remain widely known, who now remembers Agrippa d’Aubigné, Scarron, Tristan L’Hermite, or Théophile de Viau?
These early 17th-century authors were later placed into a rather broad, catch-all category: Baroque literature, by analogy with Baroque architecture, defined by a kind of exuberance in opposition to the classical ideals that would emerge later. Their work is characterized by emotional intensity and a preference for vivid, concrete, often brash—and at times even gory—imagery.
Baroque architecture, which emerged in Italy in the early 17th century, aimed to affirm the renewed power of the Catholic Church after the crises of the Renaissance.
In the same spirit, and as a reaction against Protestant austerity, Baroque painting sought to dazzle the eye.
By contrast, what came to be called “Baroque music” in the 1950s refers to a much broader period—spanning the 17th and 18th centuries—and encompasses a wide range of styles.
Pity and transcendence:
Excerpt from Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere (circa 1638).
“Disheveled, horrified, she bellows,
Like a hind that has lost her fawn…
O desolate France! O blood-stained land!”
Agrippa d’Aubigné, Les Tragiques
Blood and tears
Shaken by France’s religious civil war, Agrippa d’Aubigné unfolds terrifying visions in Les Tragiques (1616). No litotes, no coy periphrasis: d’Aubigné writes of flesh, entrails, death-rattles—even intrafamilial cannibalism. It is, frankly, brutal.
“The burning entrails, jolted by the blood’s convulsions,
Sense, humanity, the shuddering, shaken heart—
All of it twists and unravels together.”
Not every work of the period is so violent, but many share a certain exaltation. Thus Tristan L’Hermite celebrates love with fever and transport:
“Will you, as a sweet privilege,
Raise me above humankind?
Let me drink from your cupped hands,
If the water melt not their snow.”
Small wonder the Romantics felt great sympathy for this first half of the seventeenth century.
The heroic-sentimental novel
At the same time, extremely long novels were being written, such as L’Astrée, a labyrinth of sentimental adventures in which the most heroic exploits punctuate idealised love stories. It was one of the great successes of its time. This abundant narrative trend later merged with the wave of “precious” novels in the middle of the century: Le Grand Cyrus by Madeleine and Georges de Scudéry, Cassandre, and Cléopâtre by Gautier de Costes.
Baroque exuberance and abundance
Marin Marais, Couplet des folies.
Lucie Horsch (flûte), Thomas Dunford (théorbe).
The emergence of classical art
Emotion in conciseness
Fluid, natural, and restrained, this largo by Johann Sebastian Bach perfectly illustrates the classical ideal in literature.
(Maria João Pires / Riccardo Chailly – excerpt from Concerto No. 5, BWV 1056)
Moderation and conciseness
The new generations were nourished by this early 17th-century literature, but they rejected what they perceived as excess: the idealisation of love, implausible heroism, constant plot twists, and a taste for blood. Racine, Madame de Lafayette, La Rochefoucauld, and Molière adopted a much more realistic and psychologically nuanced approach than their predecessors. Form became more concise.
Delicacy and fluidity
Although emotional, economic, and social violence remained omnipresent in 17th-century literature, its vocabulary gradually became more refined, at the expense of concrete, visceral language. The lexicon became increasingly exclusive. Literature embraced modesty and restraint, though it avoided falling into affected preciosity.
In the theatre, physical violence was banished from the stage (whereas, for example, Shakespeare delighted in it). In Pierre Corneille’s Horace, the murder of Camille by her fanatical brother takes place offstage; we hear only a cry of agony (“Ah, traitor!”).
Such modesty did not prevent writers from sharply criticising those in power, as La Fontaine does in his Fables or La Bruyère in certain character portraits. Yet their attacks are marked by great subtlety. At its height, the classical period developed a supple, precise, and nuanced language that remains a model of clarity and fluidity.
Racine’s marginal note in the Odyssey.
The classical writer laments being unable to speak of cows and swineherds:
“Homer describes the joy they felt at that moment, likening it to that of young calves reunited with their mothers after grazing. This comparison is expressed with great delicacy, for the words ‘calf’ and ‘cow’ are not shocking in Greek as they are in our language, which tolerates almost nothing, and would not permit praise of cowherds, as in Theocritus, or allow Ulysses’ swineherd to be treated as a heroic figure. But such refinements are, in truth, real weaknesses.”
From hero to honest man
By the second half of the 17th century, belief in heroes had waned. Amadis of Gaul and the ideals of chivalry belonged to the past. Jansenism, a highly influential religious movement from the 1640s onward, denied humanity any inherent greatness and rejected the idea that individuals could determine their own salvation.
Through introspection, one of its leading thinkers, Pierre Nicole, arrived at something close to the concept of the unconscious:
There is always within us a certain depth, a certain root that remains unknown and impenetrable to us throughout our lives.
This idea is further developed by La Rochefoucauld in his Maxims, where man appears blind to the true motives behind his actions. According to this disillusioned observer of human nature, the only way to become an honest man is to abandon illusions of omnipotence and accept one’s weaknesses and often contradictory desires.
In the same vein, the honest man in Molière’s The Misanthrope is not Alceste—the uncompromising champion of sincerity—but is the character who knows how to navigate social hypocrisy without losing his integrity.
The darkness of the heart
Marin Marais, Les Voix humaines, second book of viola pieces, 1701
A century in tension
Like many eras, the 17th century witnessed a quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns. The Ancients (Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, Molière, etc.) insisted on the superiority of classical antiquity. The Moderns (Charles Perrault, Fontenelle, Quinault, etc.) declared, “Enough of Antiquity!”, believing Louis XIV’s France to be great enough to serve as its own model. Ironically, it was not the self-proclaimed progressives who left the deepest mark on history.
Another major tension of the century opposed baroque passion and freedom to classical restraint and balance. Yet it would be too simplistic to establish a strict boundary between the two. For many writers, these were internal forces in dialogue with one another. Corneille’s works, for example, are shaped by both impulses. Similarly, Pascal’s Pensées perfectly embody the classical ideal while expressing the existential vertigo of the human condition:
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
Inner vertigo
J.S. Bach, excerpt from the organ concerto BWV 594, Allegro
Birth of a state cultural policy
In 1635, Richelieu founded the Académie Française, assigning it the task of “establishing rules for our language, and making it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and sciences.” The Académie des Sciences, the Académie des Inscriptions, and the Académie de Musique were later established by Colbert and Louis XIV.
Provincial academies, authorized by royal letters patent in the second half of the century, also played a major role in the cultural life of cities throughout the kingdom. It was, for instance, by entering a competition organized by the Académie de Dijon that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was able to present his ideas and achieve fame.
