Less Rightly Said by Szabari Antónia;

Author:Szabari, Antónia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 547322
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

Ronsard wishes that the bones of Coligny (who has been defeated by the Duke of Anjou but not in fact killed) will be scattered in the wind and disappear without any trace. This wish may be seen as a desire to forget the memory of the wars, erasing the story (histoire) of Coligny’s life from the history of France. It may thus echo a watchword in the royal edicts, trying to promote reconciliation through destroying the traces of Catholic-Huguenot conflict, oubliance (“oblivion”). However, denying proper burial and thus a public monument that marks the place of the body, beyond being an interventionist attempt to rewrite history, means also to deny renown and historical memory in the space of the French monarchy, a double disgrace from the pen of a poet.

What may be called wishful poetic imagination in Ronsard’s mythopoetic universe actually prefigures Coligny’s fate during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. For many Catholic royalists, the massacre was tantamount to the armed intervention, even revenge, that Ronsard, in the 1560s, encouraged the king to carry out. Ronsard famously refrained from celebrating the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and Daniel Ménager suggests that he remained silent out of “prudence.”78 Ronsard is also careful not to publish his Les Elemens ennemis de l’Hydre, celebrating the military success of the duke Henri and calling for the public forgetting of Coligny, until a much later date.79 However, the poem probably circulated in manuscript form in the broader circles of those poets who followed Ronsard’s encouragement to compose polemical poetry on behalf of the monarchy.80

Proof of such circulation is the anonymous Catholic poem printed in brochure form entitled Discovrs sur la mort de Gaspar de Coligny (1572), one of the many Catholic poems to be printed and sold in the aftermath of the massacre to celebrate Catholic victory along with the defeat, death, and disgrace of the reformed population. This poem is a gross vulgarization of the Ronsardian rhetoric of praise and disgrace. It imitates heavy-handedly Ronsard’s mythologizing poetry, borrowing its argument in particular from Les Elemens. The poem begins with Jupiter (Charles IX) appearing, carrying a pistol, in the council of gods and declaring his decision to exterminate the reformed population. This design of “divine vengeance” is quickly intercepted by smart Minerva (Catherine de Médicis), who suggests that he enlist the Catholic princes instead. This mythological scene is a (distant) echo of the scene in Ronsard’s L’Hymne de la justice, in which Jupiter, who plans to drown the people of the iron age in a deluge, is persuaded by Justice to send her down instead to found a new golden age. In the Catholic militant poem, this mythological setting allegorizes the meeting of the actual royal council, where, according to the account of many post–Saint Bartholomew’s Day libelles, the extermination of the reformed population was decided upon with the participation of King Charles IX and Catherine de Médicis. In this obvious effort to “immortalize” the eve of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which steals Ronsard’s style,

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