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links to the crown were thus jeopardized by the monarch’s own straying from his constitutional and sacred duty to defend the Catholic religion of his subjects” (HoltHolt, Mack P., Renaissance 26). The Holy LeagueLeague in the 1590s, formed by Catholics wishing to enforce the Catholicity of France, both the crown and the nationnation, grew out of deeply held religious conviction and a genuine “spiritual panic” that unchecked heresy and the evils of civil war presaged God’s disfavor and imminent judgment (Crouzet 75). Hard-line French Catholics, led by the Guises, were genuinely prepared to scrap the Salic Law and accept a Spanish monarch.

      The importance of this historical backdrop for Malherbe’s royal odes has not gone unnoticed. Jean-Pierre Chauveau, in Poètes et poésie au XVIIè siècle, acknowledges their participation in the wider artistic and literary effort to restore the unity of the French nationnation in the early decades of the seventeenth century, while in Figurations of France: Literary Nation-Building in Times of Crisis (1550-1650), Marcus KellerKeller, Marcus analyzes their construction of French nationnationhood and offers an insightful, though somewhat anachronistic critique, focusing on the composition of a nationnational “nous” [we] and the key figures that define it. But neither critic examines in a comprehensive way the odes’ rhetorical constitution of the nationnation. The ideological make-over which the royal odes propose for the monarch and the monarchypolitymonarchy, in addition to repairing the vertical relationship between subject and sovereign, also requires that they redefine the complex network of horizontal relationships, among subjects, that constitute the basis of any national communitynationnational community. This unity, while remaining focused on the monarch as protector and embodiment of the nationnation, proceeds from a complex mode of address (ēthos), KellerKeller, Marcus’s national “nous” [we], but the analysis of this ethosproofēthos must push beyond the level of figuration to include the constitutive roles played by argument (logosprooflogos) and emotionemotion (pathosproofpathos). Representation is important to the extent that the odes consistently offer a choice between alternatives: the chaos and destruction of civil war versus the political utopia of Bourbon rule. But that means persuasion is even more crucial. The royal odes propose to unite the diverse subjects of France by moving them both cognitively and emotionally to make the right choice.

      The importance to the royal odes of the stoicstoicism revival of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has also been noted. One might think that Malherbe’s sustained engagement with stoicstoicism philosophy, or the image of Henri IV as HerculesHercules, would confirm Denis Crouzet’s sweeping historical argument that the propaganda campaign of royalist Politiques, infused with the tenets of Christian stoicstoicismism, enabled an ethnically French absolutismabsolutism to triumph over LeagueLeaguer demands for European Catholicity.13 But the royal odes do not make a good fit. Besides the fact that they fall back on stoicstoicismism only when disaster strikes, their stoicstoicismism is far from orthodox. Their imagery and argument certainly echo royalist pamphlets of the 1580s and 90s and, in a limited sense, arise from them. Like those Politiques who condemned religiously motivated violence as the surest way to undermine the state, Malherbe clearly places the general welfarecommonwealthgeneral welfare of the nationnation above confessional loyalties.14 However, contrary to stoicstoicism fatality, the heroism of the royal odes underscores the monarch’s power to shape the outcome of events, while their patriotismpatriotism, contrary to the stoicstoicism condemnation of the passions, seeks to move the French subject with an array of powerful feelings, including anger and hatred. Even in their darkest moments, the royal odes still offer a moral choice, using both rational and irrational means of persuasion to produce the consensual allegiance to king and commonwealthcommonwealth that is at the core of the new national communitynationnational community.

      What has escaped the attention of critics is the allegoryfigures of thoughtallegory of the ship of stateship of state that joins the royal odes into a unified sequence. Like the word “patrienationla patrie” [fatherland, nationnation, country], one cannot find anywhere in the odes such a phrase as “le navire de l’État” or “le vaisseau de l’État” [the ship of stateship of state]. Even today it is not a common syntagm in French. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, however, the analogyproofanalogy was commonplace (see QuintilianQuintilian 8.6.44). The figurative variants of this suppressed semantic nucleus appear in every ode. Such ubiquity raises the reader’s suspicion that the imagery means more than it says, a figure of thought known as emphasisfigures of thoughtemphasis or significatiofigures of thoughtsignificatio (QuintilianQuintilian 8.3.83; 9.2.64; Rhet. ad HerenCiceroRhetorica ad Herennium. 4.53.67 ff.). Provoked by the ship of stateship of state motif, the reader’s active understanding is able to weave a series of odes with loose thematic connections into a fully integrated grand tableau.

      The classical allegoryfigures of thoughtallegory, more significantly, constitutes a substantive revision of the traditional myths and symbolsnationmyths and symbols of ofmythologyunderlying myth of the sequence the nationnation. The replacement of the myth of TroyTroy with the ArgoArgo myth redefines the basis for political association in France. It is no longer blood and soil but the collective good that binds the head and members of the body politicbody politic. Such a motif also reflects a de-emphasis of religion. If Henri IV is treated as quasi-divine, it is due to his superlative virtuevirtue, which participates in the virtuevirtue that orders the universe. It is no longer the Church that confers the aura of sacrality, but rather the monarch himself that inflects the sacrality of his mystical bodymystical body (of the king), the patrianationpatria, the nationnation. In the new imagined community, modeled on the Bourbons and guided by them, the unforgiveable crime is therefore no longer heresy but sedition. Continued rebellion against the crown is seen as threatening the safety of the ship, that is, the state, whose wreck will undermine the monarchy, the last unifying thread of the nationnation. It is noteworthy that the royal odes appropriate the all-important task of forging a nationnational identity which traditionally belongs to epicepic poetry poetry. Yet they accomplish it with images and argument rather than narrative, replacing the plot of epicepic poetry fiction with metaphormetaphor and exampleexample, but creating a no less powerful nationnational mythologymythology.

      II.

      There are several good reasons why these complex poems deserve to be the focus of a book-length study. First, both supporters and detractors of Malherbe’s reputation as the father of French poetry, reformer of the French language, and founder of the Grand Siècle, have looked to the odes time and again to bolster their diametrically opposed arguments. While it is true that Malherbe’s literary preeminence was beginning to wane by mid-century, particular odes would nevertheless remain for many seventeenth-century critics unquestionable models of eloquenceeloquence, nobilitynobility, and finesse.15 Second, as I mentioned, the odes form a unified sequence composed over the course of a quarter century. David Lee RubinRubin, David Lee asserted the thematic unity of the odes, but he never posited that the odes form a unified sequence based on a recurrent intertext, a common ideological goal, and shared rhetorical tools. This books does so. It shows that the sequence as a whole fashions an overarching nationnational mythmythologyunderlying myth of the sequence that imagines the Bourbons as quasi-divine heroes commanding the ship of stateship of state and steering it through the storms of political discord to a new Golden AgeGolden Age, where peace, justicevirtuejustice, and prosperity at home are matched by French hegemony abroad. The major odes in the sequence are well over a hundred lines, and they were, by all accounts, difficult to write and long in the making. Odes were often an easy way to make a splash in the literary world, but Malherbe did not write them simply to get noticed. Rather, the odes themselves, here and there, suggest that they aspire to outdo not just contemporary rivals but ancient models as well. Indeed, and this is the third point, their public occasions, their royal addressees, and their illustrious association with HoraceHorace and Pindar (two of the great models of eloquenceeloquence handed down from antiquity) make the odes a privileged vehicle for the demonstration of la grande éloquence [the grandstylegrand style], the most elevated and powerful genus dicendi [kind of speaking]. This style was so prized by both ancients and early moderns, it was endlessly reinvented by them. Malherbe’s own formulation of the grandstylegrand style would certainly have been credited to the poet’s genius, but showing off the potentialities of the French language would have been even more valuable to the fledgling Bourbon dynasty. The

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