À hauteur humaine: la fortune dans l’écriture de l’histoire (1560–1600) . Par Alicia Viaud
2022; Oxford University Press; Volume: 77; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/fs/knac208
ISSN1468-2931
Autores Tópico(s)Renaissance Literature and Culture
ResumoFortune — a concept invoked so frequently in sixteenth-century French literature as to be almost banal for the modern reader — nevertheless prompted prolonged meditation by the era’s intellects. Montaigne above all repeatedly returns to the idea of fortune, for whom it is the guiding force of human history. In this book, Alicia Viaud aims to recover the meaning of fortune as used and understood by Montaigne: as a force moulding human history. To this end, the author has assembled a corpus of late-sixteenth-century historiographical texts in which fortune plays a significant role: either as a force in universal history (such as Loys Le Roy’s De la vicissitude ou Varieté des choses en l’univers (1575)); in French national history (e.g. François de Belleforest’s Histoire des neuf roys Charles de France (1569) or La Vraye et Entiere histoire des troubles (1572) and Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière’s Histoire de France (1581)); or in the personal accounts of current events such as Monluc’s Commentaires or the private Mémoires of Henri de Mesmes and Marguerite de Valois. In order to corral the specificity of fortune conceived as a historical force, Viaud asks how it relates to other such forces, such as individual free will and divine providence. In addition, Viaud is intrigued by the parameters of fortune’s force field, since for Montaigne at least, while fortune is a law of macro-history, it plays no part in the daily experience of private life, which he believed to be regulated instead by our own ‘conduicte’ (cited p. 15). After an ample prologue exploring the tradition inherited by sixteenth-century historiographical discourse and the concept of fortune (a tangled skein of classical pagan and medieval Christian elements), the rest of the book is divided into three sections. Part One focuses on the concept of vicissitude (Chapter 3), in other words the changeability of fortune, epitomized in the sudden falls of great men and women of history (Chapter 4). It also considers the role awareness of such changeability plays in the dramatization of military narratives of the period (Chapter 5), and the way in which narratives of personal encounters with vicissitude served to create heroic personas in the private memoirs of the period (Chapters 5 and 6). Part Two, ‘Le Calcul et le pari’, is concerned with strategies employed by historical actors to attain their goals in the face of the variability of fortune. Here the Machiavellian concept of virtù (translated by Viaud as ‘la valeur individuelle’, p. 278) is found to play an important role in the crafting of triumphant narratives of self (an example is that of Monluc, discussed in Chapter 8). The confrontation between the history of the French nation and of its monarchy with the forces of fortune as represented in the work of prominent historiographers of the period forms the overarching focus of Part Three. Viaud’s vast and detailed survey will surely remain the first word in studies of fortune in the French Renaissance for a long time to come.
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