. The term “Grands Rhétoriqueurs” is a misnomer, originally used to designate “minor” poets who wrote between Villon and Clément Marot. It has now been more narrowly and fruitfully applied to three closely linked generations of poets from the several duchies and royal territories whose verses appeared between 1470 and 1520, many of whom addressed their works to the others. As a group, they are an important and often neglected link between medieval and Renaissance culture, and their poems reveal important continuity in rhetorical education between the 15th and 16th centuries. They are distinct in their techniques and attitudes from many of their contemporaries.
The list of Grands Rhétoriqueurs has been most recently revised by Paul Zumthor to include the anonymous author of the Abuzé en court, Jean Meschinot, Henri Baude, Jean Molinet, Jean Robertet, the anonymous author of the Lyon couronné, André de la Vigne, Octavien de Saint-Gelays, Guillaume Crétin, Jean Lemaire de Belges, Jean Bouchet, Destrées, Pierre Gringore, and Jean Marot, of whom the most important are Meschinot, Molinet, Crétin, Lemaire, and Marot.
Artifice is the most obvious feature of these authors’ works, and their major difficulty. Favorite techniques include alliteration, annominatio, amplificatio, anaphora, and puns. (For example, every one of the thirty-five lines in a ballade by Meschinot begins with plus.) Given the politically subordinate positions of most of these poets at court, they were forced to rely on frozen, ritualized, highly oratorical forms that highlight figures of speech and wordplay. Most works seem written for a ducal court and are openly moralizing and didactic. Favored genres include the doctrinal, débat, epistle in prose, and ballade and rondeau in verse. Their works frequently rely on praise, ornament, and hyperbole and are replete with allegorical figures borrowed from the Roman de la Rose. This situation was guaranteed, as Zumthor has shown, to alienate the writer from his subject, so that the playfulness of the works often masks an attempt to “repersonalize” the writer’s relationship to writing. Yet beneath this brittle and gilded surface, one finds some stunningly “original” compositions that go far beyond courtly games.
In one ballade, Meschinot presents a dialogue between France and Louis XI, in which the following exchange takes place after France identifies herself as “La destruicte France./—Par qui?—Par vous.” Tiring of France’s reproaches, the king urges her three times to speak more beautifully: “Parle plus beau,” to which he must, again three times, hear the same answer, “Je ne puis, bonnement.” This skillful use of a refrain can hardly be construed as art for art’s sake. The opening of Molinet’s Ressource du petit peuple (1481–82), from his Faictz et dictz, is another striking example of highly rhetorical, moralizing social commentary. Molinet describes the appearance of the fille de perdicion, listing her attributes in a classic example of amplificatio. Then are listed her companions, both allegorical and historical villains, followed by an enumeration of the afflictions of the people, “et tant exploitèrent de détestables et excécrables faix que l’hystoire au loing récitée donroit piteuses lermes aux yeulx des escoutans.” These two typical examples deploy rhetoric to convey a political message rather than to shore up political hierarchies.
The use of allegory reveals similar subtlety. Traditionally, scholars have stressed the indebtedness of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs to the allegory of the Roman de la Rose, but this conclusion seems premature. In Meschinot’s Lunettes des princes, a work typical of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, Reason appears to the author in a dream. After he addresses Reason, she recollects her thoughts, which had been devastated by Despair, “Lors elle entra dans son endendement,/Qui vuyde estoit et pillé grandement/Par Désespoir.” There, she finds only the bread of faith. Meschinot’s somber Reason is a far cry from Jean de Meun’s Reason, who had expatiated on the ambiguity of language. This difference, moreover, must be stressed in light of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs’ frequent exploitation of linguistic ambiguity itself.
A prime example of how ambiguity was manipulated for moralizing ends is found in Octavien de Saint-Gelays’s Epistre en équivoques, au roy Charles (1493). Homophonic rhymes bring out a political message as unambiguous as the sounds themselves are the opposite:
Pour contempler vostre immense justice, Faites, pour Dieu, que le fleuve juste ysse Çà bas sur nous, vos trèshumbles subjectz! Tenuz nous ont, ainsi qu’oiseaulx sus getz, Division, simes, discorde, envye: Remettez nous, noble seigneur, en vye!
This interest in linguistic play can be traced back to the fabliaux, and Molinet, for example, composed an entire ballade whose rhymes are exclusively based on -vis/t, -cu(l), and—c/çon. The Art et science de rhétorique vulgaire (1524–25) provides examples of double and triple verbal ambiguities.
Perhaps due to their penchant for moralizing, the Grands Rhétoriqueurs did not celebrate chivalric ritual and convention with the wholehearted endorsement of Olivier de La Marche, their contemporary at the court of Burgundy. Generally silent on explicitly political topics, they tend to side implicitly with the Burgundian position in the struggle between Louis XI and Charles the Bold. The condemnation of the ravages of war, as found in the Ressource du petitpeuple, for example, makes its point allusively. By comparison, when Jean Lemaire de Belges celebrates the advantages of French over Italian, his “patriotism” remains largely literary and is not transferred to the French royal house that was invading northern Italy at the time.
Among lyrical genres, the Grands Rhétoriqueurs particularly cultivated funeral laments, whose models were the elegy and planctus. They do not stress the same subjects as the contemporary and widely popular danse macabre. Crétin’s Translation du chant de misere, for example, points out that rhetoric has never saved its practictioners from death:
Les belles fleurs de Tulle et rhétorique N’ont point rendu exemptz d’exil mortel Ceulx qu’ont instruitz.
This reserve regarding death, so different from contemporary popular accounts, shows that the Grands Rhétor-iqueurs, with their rhetorical self-consciousness, could steer between thematic commonplaces and popular stereotypes and still achieve an “original” effect.
The Arts de seconde rhétorique, composed in the wake of the poetic works of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, formalize many of their practices and provide valuable evidence for the intersection of literary theory and practice.
Zumthor, Paul, ed. Anthologie des grands rhétoriqueurs. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1978.
James, Laurence. “L’objet poétique des grands rhétoriqueurs.” In Mélanges de langue et de littérature médiévales offerts à Alice Planche, ed. Maurice Accarie and Ambroise Queffelec. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984, pp. 225–34.
Martineau-Génieys, Christine. Le thème de la mort dans la poésie française de 1450 à 1550. Paris: Champion, 1978, pp. 319–51, 429–37.
Zumthor, Paul. Le masque et la lumière: la poétique des grands rhétoriqueurs. Paris: Seuil, 1978.
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