Performative Polemic: Anti-Absolutist Pamphlets and Their Readers in Late Seventeenth-Century France

Abstract

In Huguenot writer Anne de La Roche Guilhem’s 1697 historical nouvelle “Marie de Beauvilliers, Abbesse de Montmartre, sous Henri IV, Roi de France,” the first Bourbon monarch is still Protestant, and the debate over the Reformation is a matter of conversation. Convents are compared to “purgatories,” and the mother superior jocularly calls one of her charges a “Huguenot.” Such overt polemic is surprising even to seasoned readers of seventeenth-century literature. We are used to critique of any kind appearing in far more subtle ways, if at all. In other stories included in the same collection, L’Histoire des Favorites (translated as The History of Female Favorites), theologians are said to have no other purpose than to echo the king’s wishes, and papal machinations are indistinguishable from monarchical excesses. Was La Roche Guilhem an anti-absolutist? Was she a novelist or a propagandist? Twenty years ago, I would have answered the first question in the affirmative, but also have argued that as a novelist she couldn’t also be a propagandist. Now I am not so sure. New research on seventeenth-century French cultures of dissent has rethought the idea of anti-absolutism and questioned the very constitution of absolutism itself. It is not coincidental that so much of this research also insists on new archives and methodologies, compelling readers to rethink taxonomies that treat novels and political tracts as generically distinct. Kathrina Ann LaPorta’s Performative Polemics is part of this new research focus and contributes to a general call among scholars of the French seventeenth century to explore a much less starkly defined “Grand Siècle” by expanding the sources from which we draw our analyses. The re-exploration in question includes many forms of “decentering:” Anna Rosensweig’s Subjects of Affection (2021) uncouples tragedy, the most codified and structured of literary genres, from its traditional role as a confirmation of absolutist esthetics and instead embeds it in the aftermath of political debates over the Wars of Religion. Ellen Welch’s Theater of Diplomacy (2018) explores court archives both French and foreign in order to return the performing arts to their role as agents of diplomatic efficacity, while Hall Bjørnstad’s Dream of Absolutism (2022) dismantles from within by showing how the esthetic and political imaginary we call “absolutism” was and remains a constructed, affectively driven fantasy that continues to wield enormous power today. These and other recent works of scholarship compel us to consider a cultural and political landscape that was not nearly as monolithic as that on which the abiding myth of absolutism has insisted for far too long. Performative Polemics joins these reconsiderations of absolutism, following a distinct approach by exploring the ways in which anti-absolutist writers used rhetorical strategies drawn from legal, literary, and philosophical discourse to counter the official discourse Notes on contributor