François de Malherbe

French poet

• Born: 1555
• Birthplace: Caen, France
• Died: October 16, 1628
• Place of death: Paris, France

Malherbe’s neoclassicist literary principles had a decisive impact on seventeenth century literature in France and on the development of an elegant and codified version of the French language. His doctrine on poetic composition argued for form, order, purity, simplicity, clarity, and restraint and against the baroque and mannerist tendencies of his time, establishing a standard for French classical literature.

Early Life

François de Malherbe (frahn-swah deh mah-lehrb) was born in 1555 in the region of Normandy. His father was a nobleman, municipal councilman in Caen, and had Protestant leanings. Malherbe was educated mostly in Caen, except for a year spent in Paris and stays at the universities of Basle and Heidelberg (1571-1573). He quickly was introduced to Caen’s Reformed circles, especially during his time in boarding school, before his prolonged stay abroad.

Upon his return to Caen, however, he preferred the city’s Catholic circles, above all a group that included the eminent literary figures Jean Vauquelin de La Fresnaye and Guy Le Fèvre de La Boderie. Malherbe’s first poems date from that period (1575) but were not published until 1872. After this introduction to literary and intellectual life, Malherbe decided to leave his parents’ home in 1576 to try to establish himself in Paris.

The next thirty years were marked by his struggles to gain the royal recognition that he thought he deserved, struggles that were exacerbated by constant personal and financial problems. His protector, Henri d’Angoulême, an illegitimate son of King Henry II, was appointed royal governor of Provence in 1577, where Malherbe followed him as his secretary and became a member of the court society of Aix-en-Provence. His marriage to Madeleine de Coriolis (1581) would result in four children, who all died young. D’Angoulême was killed in 1586 in a duel, which left Malherbe without a protector. He soon returned to Caen and tried to regain Henry III’s favor by presenting him with his first published poem, Les Larmes de Saint Pierre (1587; the tears of Saint Peter), whose baroque style is in stark contradiction to his later teachings.

In 1590, he composed his best-known poem, Consolation à Monsieur du Périer sur la mort de sa fille (pb. c. 1600; consolation to Mr. du Périer on the death of his daughter). In 1594, Malherbe was elected municipal magistrate of Caen, but he decided nonetheless to return to Aix in 1595, where he stayed until 1605 (in 1598-1599, he was in Caen).

Near the end of the century, his poetry had gained some public recognition: His writings were included in a number of collections published between 1597 and 1603. Malherbe’s reputation as a teacher was also increasing. Playwright and economist Antoine de Montchrestien sought his advice for his tragedy Sophonisbe, whose numerous corrections between 1596 and 1601 illustrate Malherbe’s fledgling doctrine.

Life’s Work

A turning point in Malherbe’s life came in 1605. After being recommended to King Henry IV, he left Aix in the company of the eminent moralist Guillaume du Vair, president of the parlement of Provence, and Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc , one of the era’s foremost scholars. Henry IV finally awarded Malherbe the coveted royal appointment, and he held the position of court poet until his death.

Very quickly, Malherbe tried to strengthen his position by discrediting his rival, poet Philippe Desportes, a favorite of King Henry III and his court poet. Malherbe believed that Desportes’s “disorderly” baroque poetry was a symbol of an obsolete aesthetics. He annotated a copy of Desportes’s poetry with very severe criticism in Commentaire sur Desportes (wr. 1605-1606), a project that was not published until the nineteenth century because the critic abandoned it after his rival’s death in 1606. Because Malherbe never published a formal treatise laying out his famous doctrine, this text remains its most complete illustration.

As Malherbe became increasingly interested in prose, he would refer to his translation of Livy’s twenty-third book as a model for writing in French. Moreover, Vair’s 1594 treatise De l’Éloquence française contains the nucleus of Malherbe’s formal and linguistic demands, which also shows that Malherbe cannot be considered the inventor of a revolutionary set of new rules but rather the most adamant advocate and teacher of guidelines that corresponded to the changing literary tastes of an era still recovering from the turmoil of the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598). Even Desportes had adopted a more sober style of writing toward the end of his life.

Three things set Malherbe apart from his contemporaries: his influential position at court, his sternness, and his pedagogical activities. In Paris, he intensified his mentoring efforts and held nightly meetings in his apartment, where he counseled his disciples on matters of style, versification, and grammar. His most devoted admirers include poet François Maynard, who was Marguerite de Valois’s secretary and one of the founding members of the Académie Française (1635), as well as poet Honorat du Bueil, seigneur de Racan. Another follower, Pierre de Deimier, published Académie de l’art poétique (1610), which contained the bulk of Malherbe’s doctrine.

In essence, Malherbe’s doctrine was a reaction against the predominant poetic currents of the second half of the sixteenth century, marked by the poetry of La Pléiade and by baroque and mannerist tendencies in literature. His theory amounted to the purification and simplification of the French language, whose submission to logic and reason would constitute, in his opinion, a major step toward the restoration of order in a country tormented by decades of civil strife.

Malherbe’s doctrine prescribed the outright suppression of archaisms, regional expressions, neologisms, involuntary repetitions, and other stylistic devices such as hiatus, inversion, and enjambment. The use of metaphors and images was to be restricted, and the rules of etiquette (les bienséances) were to be respected. The exclusive use of simple rhyme schemes and basic vocabulary completed a project whose overarching objective was clarity, expressiveness, and visual and aural beauty. Governed by such principles, poetry would be accessible to everyone. As laudable as this process of democratization of poetry seemed, however, it constituted—by its neglect of the genre’s lyrical qualities—in many ways a return to the late medieval concept of poetry as an “art of second rhetoric,” utilitarian writing meant to expose and logically develop ideas, a discourse in verse form, so to speak. This strict set of rules stood in stark contrast to Malherbe’s personal life: He was nicknamed Father Lust, mostly because of his turbulent love life and the circulation of a number of his obscene poems. Moreover, many admirers of La Pléiade poets, admirers such as, above all, Mathurin Régnier, Desportes’s nephew, continued to criticize Malherbe’s poetry for its lack of inspiration.

The regency (1610-1614) marked Malherbe’s most influential time at court. Marie de Médicis liked his work, and the poet kept flattering her in his official poetry, which resulted in several monetary awards and a raise of his pension. He frequently complained about difficulties collecting his pay, however, which contributed, along with several trials, to his continuing financial difficulties. Such preoccupations might explain his diminished poetic production during the remainder of his career. He returned to religious poetry, celebrated official court events, and resumed his translation projects. His poetry was published mostly in collections, which attested to his unbroken popularity, the most important works being the two-volume Délices de la poésie française (1615, 1620), the Dernier recueil (1621), and the Recueil des plus beaux vers (1627).

The end of Malherbe’s life was marked by the problems of his son Marc-Antoine, who had killed a man in a duel in Aix in 1624 and then sought refuge in Normandy. After two years of lobbying, Malherbe obtained an official pardon, but his son was killed the following year (in 1627). Despite his influence at court and a trip to La Rochelle to implore King Louis XIII (he was still appreciated by the king and by Cardinal de Richelieu), Malherbe was unable to obtain the issuance of the death sentence against his son’s murderers. Upon his return to Paris, Malherbe became ill and died on October 6, 1628.

Significance

Malherbe’s influence on neoclassicist poetry was tremendous, even though Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux’s hyperbolic praise of Malherbe’s impact was integral in ensuring this prominent position. Malherbe’s rules were generally accepted in a seventeenth century that is still widely considered the peak of France’s literary production, especially in the dramatic genre. Malherbe’s doctrine also led to a neglect of Renaissance poetry for about two hundred years, until its “rediscovery” by the Romantics.

Even though his poetry had been largely forgotten, contradicting thus his confident self-assessment that whatever he wrote would be eternal, Malherbe’s doctrine has proven to be pivotal for the development of French language and letters. Many of its principles remain indispensable for “good” writing.

Bibliography

Abraham, Claude K. Enfin Malherbe: The Influence of Malherbe on French Lyric Prosody, 1606-1674. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1971. This is still the most solid book-length study of Malherbe’s life and work in the English language. The author strives to avoid the usual polemical discussion between unconditional admirers and opponents to determine Malherbe’s actual influence on French letters.

Randall, Catherine. “Possessed Personae in Early Modern France: Du Bellay, d’Aubigné, and Malherbe.” In Seventeenth Century and Beyond, Vol. 2 in Signs of the Early Modern, edited by David Lee Rubin. Charlottesville, Va.: Rockwood Press, 1997. A refreshing look, from the equally refreshing perspective of the “possessed persona,” at Malherbe’s work as the endpoint of a literary development rather than its starting point.

Sweetser, Marie-Odile. “The Art of Praise from Malherbe to La Fontaine.” In The Shape of Change, edited by Anne Birberick and Russell Ganim. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. This book takes up a topic that was predominant in the late medieval grands rhétoriqueurs (great rhetoricians) tradition and examines its seventeenth century development.

Winegarten, Renée. French Lyric Poetry in the Age of Malherbe. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1954. This thoughtful study examines Malherbe and his work as integral to seventeenth century, French lyric poetry.