Francois Rabelais' France | The Classical Tradition #16

Hello, let's talk about one particular figure in the Renaissance that we're going to focus on. We're going to start focusing on particular figures to round off the Renaissance and then we'll wrap up with the style of the ode which coalesces to the halfway mark in Haydn's classical tradition. Before then, let's go through these singular characters. The first one is François Rabaillet, who's famous for his Gargantua and Partagruel. You can see here it's a thick beast of a thing. It runs to about a thousand pages. The dazzling and exuberant comic chronicles of Rabaillet, 1483-1552, are a feast of wisdom and laughter. Realism intertwines with carnivalesque fantasy, Renaissance learning with obscene humour to make readers look at the world afresh. Partagruel, a tale of comic chivalry, satirises lawyers, theologians and academic buffoons. So you get the sense of what we're going on here. Gargantua then mocks and rash generals, idiotic monarchs and uncouth professors. It is ultimately not a serious work. And why is Rabaillet delivering this, almost a very Fableau-like, non-serious, non-stern, it's kind of the last great French middle-age work, but it's happening in the 16th century France. So let's talk a little bit about that. Renaissance France is a time of extreme strife. Even though during the middle ages, after Romance of the Rose, the 14th century of France was quite quiet because she had the Hundred Years' War, it still churns up quite drastically as the 16th century wears on to be another time of great strife. But now we have the printing press and we have a great flurry of activity. We're not going to go as quiet as we did in the middle ages. We're still going to have strange reactions to it, one of which is Rabaillet. So the evidence of the printing press, the dramatists, coincides with the Reformation. And in France, there's this great twin dialogue of whether they'd be Protestant or Catholic. England, we kind of know the path she's going to go on. I've discussed that in some of my other videos. Look at, for instance, what Spengler did not get about England or things such as this. You get to see my take on the whole English trajectory. But let's think about the French one for a while. We had conflict between Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity. Now it did affect England, as we said. Shakespeare, John Donne was a Catholic convert, pseudo-Martis, and he wrote his Ignatius, his Conclave, were aimed at converting others. Beothanathus shows a more conflicted man, though. His defense of suicide therein had odds with Catholicism. But there's that conflict between the two is at the heart of who's going to reign France, with Henry IV of Navarre going up against certain factions who want him ousted because he associated himself with Protestantism. And during the 1590s, this all comes to a head. 1572, you have the St. Bartholomew Davis Massacre, well-known reference to Carlyle and the French Revolution. So the conflict with the Roman Church between liberals and then the conservatives. So even Catholicism itself has different ideas about how they're going to react to the Reformation. Liberals were unwilling to leave Catholic communion entirely, but refused to subscribe to all the doctrines. Notables within this are people like Rabiel. He kind of sees himself as a humanist, along with an Erasmus, for instance. He refused some of the sacraments, and he refused them on his deathbed, did Erasmus, although he was an ordained priest as well. So that's the sort of conflict we're thinking of, and Rabiel is right in that sort of conflict. The next one is between the upper classes and the class of the self, sort of middle. It's not quite at the same extent that we're going to get to with 19th century industrial expansion, but we still have there. There's still a new bourgeois. You know, they could know how to seize power for themselves, brimmed with ambition to infiltrate it, brimming them with many liberal ideas that caused the other two sort of conflicts that we saw. And Marlow's tragedy is seethed with this sort of lust for power, which he goes back to. He has his Tamburlaine, and even his Edward II. Think of Pierce Gaveston, his favourite, sort of this great clamour for power. And again we have it later with the reign of Richard II, and Shakespeare gives a take on that. So these are all meant to have, whilst looking at middle-aged power monarchy struggles, meant to have plays with the sort of ambitious rising people who want to usurp the old guard. I mean, Shakespeare deals with it in Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear the most. You know, three key tragedies all sort of take on this theme of the lust for power. We also have the conflict between science and its two enemies, superstition and authoritative theology. Galileo was around this time. Engineering and architecture works had improved. They'd gone through the models of Vitruvius in the classical sense, and Rabia himself lectured on Hippocrates and Galen. So yet again, Rabia is in the mind of thinking about this, these sort of ways. They're going beyond Vitruvius, they're going beyond Hippocrates and Galen. And we have the conflict between authority and individuality, which is coming up through this time. This is the time of Descartes, I think therefore I am, the beginning of the self, in a much more different phase than what we had had previously in the Middle Ages. Machiavelli's The Prince begins to look at this conflict of authority in a more pragmatic sense, and all of this is feeding into the mind of Rabia as he creates the Gargantuan Pantagruel. Montaigne, we'll look at later, is the sort of individual who then reflects upon this from his vineyard retreat. So as we stated earlier, from the Italian Wars of Francis I to the Saint Bartholomew Day's Massacre of 1572, to the assassination of Henry IV, Henri IV in 1610, France is in a struggle or a strife, a civil war almost, on which both sides were strong and determined. Often that civil war was waged within one man's own soul, as we've said earlier. There are struggles within Rabia. France was still a foremost place for writers, and Paris will always be a cultural centre in that regard. So why is he so full of sort of humour and poking fun? Well, he's latching on to what he believes to be what is missing from life, that is the jollity and frivolity, and it can be seen as an escape for Rabia from these torments, from these conflicts, but it's underlined also by an erratic insecurity. That's what, if I think of Rabia, I think of erratic insecurity more than anything else. He eschews instability, his writing eschews it. Difficult to understand, possible to find consistence. He's a figure then of his place and time, isn't he? He's very far removed from the French of a Moliere or a scene that we're gonna see later in the Baroque under Louis XIV, this very pure, formulaic, rigid interpretation of the classics as an art form. The Greco-Roman world had resurfaced for Rabia, but in so doing, there was still new energy to it. They hadn't really sort of, they hadn't fitted all the new modes into how post-Reformation life would work. Therefore, you get works which are just an explosion, which is, again, erratic insecurity. Rabia had entered a monastery in early life, but he found that the ignorance and simplicity of the people that he was surrounded by, joined by St. Francis, rather irksome, and he took it on himself to learn the classics as a means to escape that life. Having experienced seizure of books and constraint of his friends, he managed to obtain a special license from Pope Clement VII, so he's well connected, and he obtained this in 1524, that would make him a Benedict, in order more in line with the scholarly interests. But even this did not tame him. He emerged eventually as a physician, as we said, he lectured on Hippocrates and Galen, around Leon, and then he was at Leon Hospital, fell sour with them, he was in the Sorbonne before he would die in 1553, fighting and laughing for almost most of his life in this sort of deranged manner. The idea of Gargantua, if we look at the book in particular he's thinking of two giant kings, one Gargantua, one Pantagruel. Gargantua comes from the great inestimable chronicles of the great and enormous giant Gargantua, originally published in Leon in 1532. Sort of superman of the age, Pantagruel is Rabiel, then Pantagruel, Rabiel makes his son. So his son's better educated and more modern than his father. Exploits are contained to have their own inspiration for the comics, you know, think of Italian epics of medieval prowess such as Luigi Pulci's Morgante, which came out in 1483. This would have had an impression on why he goes for these sort of characters of Gargantua and Pantagruel. There's dirty jokes, there's medieval mannerisms, that happens throughout, and he wants to just embrace that absurdity. It's very difficult to fit Rabiel comfortably into this timeline, as I've said, but I've tried to outline where he's coming from. And you kind of have to include him, he's such a learned man in the classics, for the renaissance, for the time it is. His Greek, all his characters are, their names are in Greek and describe certain personality. Let's look at a few. The reader, Anagnostich, the good natured courtier, Eudemon, the nimble squire, Gymnast, the tutor, Epistemon, to name but a few. He does have the giants try and engage in this humanistic learning, certainly Pantagruel, and the curriculum that he has in it is partly inspired by Vittorino de' Feltra, an essential document for anyone who wishes to study the re-emergence of classical ideals in the renaissance. He did want to take Plato's idea of the Republic, and it's referenced like the Guardsman's Republic, his letter in Pantagruel 2.8, littered with antithesis and rhetorical phraseology to showcase his ability as a writer. Ultimately, Pantagruel is constantly rehabilitating himself in terms of education, and that reflects Rabiel's life himself. If I was to think about other books that this should really be twinned with, you should think about Thomas More's Utopia, and you should think about Erasmus' Praesophalia. Erasmus' Praesophalia, don't have it with me, but it's much thinner, and perhaps is a better introduction than if you want to take on this beast of Rabiel. The adages from Erasmus as well are worth stating some 3,000 lines from the classics with explanations about them. So, was Rabiel a great artist? Certainly not. He was too rough, too silly. The serious conflicts of the time could only be resolved by strong will or great art. He instead dove into boundless education and didn't really constrain that to make something that sort of perfect novel or that perfect work, and it's why a Rabiel, though brilliantly learned, is never seen in the light of a Shakespeare or even of a Montagne, and we'll see next time.