Satires by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

First published:Les Satires, 1666-1711 (English translation, 1711-1713)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

The name of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, is often linked only to L’Art poétique (1674; The Art of Poetry, 1683), his critical treatise setting down the rules and unities of French classicism. He received the mantle of prophet and lawgiver for that movement, which is something of a false emphasis. The Art of Poetry was a summary and compendium of standard poetic practices, of the rules French literature had been operating under for the entire century.

The modern student of literature may not realize the importance of Boileau-Despréaux in the development of literary taste. The subjects of Boileau-Despréaux’s satires resemble those of his classical predecessors and of his contemporaries in seventeenth century France. Modeling his work on the giants of the past, most noticeably Juvenal, Boileau-Despréaux attacks contemporary fashion and its excesses with a vitriol exceeding that of many less perceptive and less daring satirists. While only a dozen of his writings are formally designated satires, the satiric point of view colors all his writings, including The Art of Poetry.

The influence of Boileau-Despréaux on the development of literature should not be underestimated. For more than a hundred years Boileau-Despréaux was upheld as something like a literary dictator of Europe. His influence extended over England during the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth centuries. His work established on the Continent and in England a feeling of reverence for the authors of Greece and Rome. His support of the ancients over the moderns in his discussion of literary merit may seem strange, since on numerous occasions he expressed great admiration for his contemporaries Jean Racine and Molière. He was nevertheless a vigorous defender of the classical methods of balance and restraint, contrasting their reserve with what he found to be the silly exuberances of most contemporary writing (especially the multivolume romances that were exceptionally popular in France). His pronouncements on the necessity to “follow nature”—which, in turn, meant to follow the practices of the great classical writers whose works mirrored nature—became dogma for authors both in France and abroad for the next century.

Despite his great influence on European ideas of what literature should be, Boileau-Despréaux may be best remembered as a practitioner, not a theoretician, of French verse. His Satires are a notable example of the skill with which he returned French poetry to a character of imitation of nature. Seventeenth century poetry had turned chiefly to the burlesque and the heroic styles, which were highly conceited and artificial. With Satires, written with common sense as a norm and the expression of truth as a goal, Boileau-Despréaux did much to purify his medium.

He had a genius for satire and ample opportunity to find subjects for his verse in the brilliant and sophisticated court of Louis XIV, the Sun King. The monarchy had become absolute in France, and the ideal of the courtier—the aristocratic, gracious, elegant, witty, refined, accomplished man—afforded ideal occasion for a satirist to comment upon the vanity, ambition, intrigue, and posturings that invariably accompany competition for royal favor.

Boileau-Despréaux was presented to the king in 1669. Despite his trenchant criticisms of the vices and foibles of society, he remained in favor at the court for thirty years. His frank and courageous outspokenness was notable as well as his benevolence, generosity, and kindliness. Accordingly, his satirical writings are not stinging lashes of vice, as with Juvenal, but a gentler ridiculing of humanity’s failings. His twelve satires touch on many facets of the fashionable life of his times and give a lively indication of what it was like to live in seventeenth century Parisian society.

The second, seventh and ninth satires are concerned with the art and craft of the satirist and with Boileau-Despréaux’s own fortunes in that calling. Boileau-Despréaux liberally criticizes his fellow poets and makes no pretense of acceding to public opinion about the merit of any writer. However high a poet’s fashionable reputation may be, if he cannot rhyme Boileau-Despréaux says so. He attacks many of his contemporaries, but seldom drops into ad hominem criticism. Moreover, time has proven his opinions to be remarkably just: The names that receive most of Boileau-Despréaux’s scorn have become as obscure to the present day as their poetry is mediocre. Likewise, those whom he praised remain as the outstanding seventeenth century French authors.

Satire 2, addressed to Molière, laments the difficulties of finding rhymes without having them tyrannize over the sense in a poem. In mock despair, and in perfectly rhymed Alexandrines, Boileau-Despréaux rehearses the poet’s plight, the necessity of either glib and vapid epithets to match a rhyme or else wrenched syntax and broken phrases. In the seventh satire, Boileau-Despréaux discusses a tentative plan to banish satire from his writing, saying it is a malicious style that makes the author many enemies. He would much prefer to write poems of praise. Alas, however, all his poetic powers desert him at such an attempt; his talent, he concludes, lies in the exposure of folly, and a satirical poet he will have to remain. The ninth satire has a similar tone: The author affects to scold himself for his feeble efforts to reform the city by his verse. He points out the vanity of any hope for esteem of his work and says that the fools he castigates are not even worth spilling ink over. As the poem develops, it shifts subtly into an ironic ridicule of all the people who are the just subjects of the satirist’s pen and becomes a triumph, not a reproach, to Boileau-Despréaux.

Another group of satires is directed toward the life of the city, with its would-be aristocrats and pseudosophisticates. Satire 1 demonstrates how the poet is abused and neglected in the city, while the lackey, the toady, the pedant are all exalted, and all vices flourish. Satire 6 continues this theme with an account of the noise, dirt, confusion, and crime that surround the city dweller. These two were originally composed as one poem, in imitation of Juvenal’s Satire 3. Boileau-Despréaux’s third satire tells the uproarious tale of a feast given by a gourmand who pretends to be a gourmet and of the ridiculous pretensions to elegance and erudition of the host and his country-bumpkin guests. The execrable repast is reduced to shambles by a hair-pulling scuffle between the guests: one an absurdly aspiring poet, the other an absurdly aspiring literary critic.

Satires 5 and 6 catalog the excesses of the town by an inquiry into what constitutes true nobility and true honor. In Satire 5, hereditary nobility is ridiculed, along with its trappings of heraldry and elaborate equipage. Boileau-Despréaux shows how the bearer of a name famous of old for courage and daring may be an arrogant coward, retaining nothing of the virtue of his ancestors. On the other hand, a truly valorous man who is of humble descent ought to be able to adopt Achilles, Alexander, or Caesar for his ancestors, the author says, since he behaves like them. Ancient days, when nobility was a valid indication of virtue, are contrasted to the present, whose wretched aristocrats are so deep in debt that they must barter their titles for enough gold to maintain the ostentation considered essential for a peer. Satire 11 exposes similar abuses of the ideal of honor. This was written considerably later than the preceding poems, in 1698, at a time when Boileau-Despréaux’s family was engaged in a lawsuit over the validity of their own hereditary title to the nobility (which was finally proven to be false). Various erroneous ideas about honor are shown: ambition, avarice, vanity. For Boileau-Despréaux, honor resides ultimately only in justice, and he castigates the inability of the self-interested and contentious to understand or to practice justice.

To this point, the satires have all been directed against the specific personal failings and vices of people. In Satires 4 and 8, Boileau-Despréaux takes a broader view and attacks the condition of being human. Satire 4 argues that all people are mad, but all believe that they are sane. The theme developed is a perennial: one’s ability to see the mote in another’s eye but not the beam in one’s own. All are mad in their attachment to something: learning, refined manners, religion, atheism, wisdom, money, gambling, poetry. He concludes that it is probably better for people to be mad and happy than coldly reasonable with nothing to give them joy. Satire 8 takes a sharper tone on the same subject, the universal folly of humanity. Boileau-Despréaux adopts a mordant disdain for all human accomplishments, comparing people to beasts and finding the latter more humane in their activities. Depravity and corruption are everywhere, and even one’s capacity for reason is so abused and ignored as to set one beneath the irrational animals. These two broader-ranging satires approach a kind of misanthropy not seen in the witty ridicule of foppery and the vanities of the others. All the poems, however, are in the traditional voice of the satirist, who is the gadfly of society, attempting to correct humanity’s faults by turning on them the bright clear light of reason and common sense.

Another time-honored subject for the satirist is woman, and she has her place in the Boileau-Despréaux canon. His Satire 10 on women is the longest of the twelve. Not published until 1693, it is prefaced by an apology to the fair sex for the unkind portraits drawn therein, suggesting that since they are such near-perfect creatures, they cannot surely resent a well-meaning attempt to refine them a trifle more. The poem is a dialogue between Boileau-Despréaux and a friend, Alcippes, who has decided to take a wife. Boileau-Despréaux depicts the consequences of marrying various kinds of women: the adulterer, the coquette, the card-player, the penny-pincher, the shrew, the hypochondriac, the pedant, the falsely pious. All these character vignettes are artfully and vividly portrayed and have a devastating effect upon the poor lover, Alcippes. When he vows his lady is none of these, the poet declares that he has not told a quarter of the vices women can have. The confused would-be bridegroom protests that in any case he can always divorce her if she should be so bad. Boileau-Despréaux then triumphantly adduces woman’s final villainy: Once her claws are in a man, she will never let him go.

The twelfth and last of Boileau-Despréaux’s satires is quite different from the others. The satire is a serious attack on the problem of ambiguity in language deliberately used for evil ends. The meaning of equivoque (ambiguity, duplicity) expands through the poem, to indicate not only verbal ambiguity but also confusion of intentions, thoughts, expressions—all sorts of misconceptions of the human mind and, most seriously, the way these have altered and corrupted Christianity from its original purity and holiness. As a theological argument, the poem attacks everything that Boileau-Despréaux considered heresies, particularly Jansenism and Jesuitism. The sincerity of this piece is beyond doubt, for Boileau-Despréaux was all his life a good Catholic; but its poetic power is perhaps less than in some of the earlier pieces. For several years after its composition, the poem was not permitted publication.

Taken as a whole, the satires of Boileau-Despréaux are characterized more by a genial gaiety than any deep bitterness or spite toward their victims. There is malicious wit but no indignant rage, and the butt of the joke is ridiculed rather than condemned. In all, Satires is a delightful account of one person’s view of a fascinating and glamorous era of French civilization.

Bibliography

Colton, Robert E. Studies of Classical Influence on Boileau and La Fontaine. Hildesheim, Germany: G. Olms, 1996. Assesses the influence of Horace on Boileau-Despréaux’s sixth, seventh, and eighth satires and some of his other work.

Corum, Robert T. Reading Boileau: An Integrative Study of the Early “Satires.” West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1998. An analysis of the first nine satires, discussing their sources, genesis, relation to each other, coherence, and continuity. Corum argues that Boileau-Despréaux was a gifted poet and not a mere “versifier.”

Haight, Jeanne. The Concept of Reason in French Classical Literature: 1635-1690. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Examines Boileau-Despréaux’s efforts to associate reason with socially accepted behavior in seventeenth century France. Describes the connection between aesthetics and sociology in Boileau-Despréaux’s writing.

Moriarty, Michael. Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Explores the connection between Boileau-Despréaux’s literary taste and his political ideology. Explains why Boileau-Despréaux’s association of taste with an admiration for high culture caused him to reject representations of popular culture.

Pocock, Gordon. Boileau and the Nature of Neo-Classicism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Examines the general themes and structures in the satires. Stresses Boileau-Despréaux’s creative imitation of Horace and other classical Roman satirists.

White, Julian E. Nicolas Boileau. New York: Twayne, 1969. Introduction to Boileau-Despréaux’s literary career and a fine annotated bibliography of important critical studies on his work. Examines his satires within the classical tradition of comedy of manners and describes Boileau-Despréaux’s originality as a satiric poet.

Yarrow, P. J. The Seventeenth Century: 1600-1715. Vol. 2 in A Literary History of France. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967. Traces the general evolution of French neoclassical literature during the seventeenth century. The chapter on Boileau-Despréaux describes the unity of his aesthetic and moral vision as expressed in his satires and in his theoretical writings.