La « maniera » de Montaigne : quelques traits, et leur sens

• Main Author: Géralde Nakam
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institut du Monde Anglophone 2006-04-01
• Series: Etudes Epistémè
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/episteme/2555

« Boom against » Mannerism? Surely not! The author of this essay got into trouble, back in the 1970s, because she presented and defined Montaigne’s Mannerism as part of the artistic Mannerism of his time, and even more for showing that French Mannerist poetry climaxed with Maurice Scève’s Délie. Then the label was held as infamous; and it is true that it went against many preconceptions about the period. France, an heir to a Calvinistic anti-Italian movement and reacting against all the Valois, has remained to this day suspicious of the aesthetic notion of « Mannerism », contrary to many other European countries, in part because of its adhesion to the reductive concept of a seventeenth-century « Classicism ». It would be interesting to wonder why the « Baroque » has, on the contrary, been such an immediate, raging success, inundating France for the last half a century like a all-engulfing wave. Jean Rousset’s very beautiful study, Circé et le Paon, which was read as very innovating when it first came out, cannot explain everything. It did go against the narrow framework of the literary criticism of the period, especially against the very doctrinaire notion of « Classicism ». But it might also be that this « Baroque », supplanting a hated « Mannerism » (even though in Jean Rousset’s Baroque overlaps with a large portion of the latter), gave France, « the eldest daughter of the Church », new reasons to feel at peace with its Catholicism — perhaps even unconsciously. The seduction of the « Baroque » and the fad to which it led would deserve to be studied as a sociological phenomenon. The author of this essay refuses to abide by the all-purpose « Baroque » which has now for too long dominated literary studies in France, where it has virtually replaced the imperialistic « Classicism ». This study will show how a few traits of Montaigne’s « manner » — which in fact correspond to characteristics of the great Mannerism of the time, in particular Italian — can illustrate through their specificity the very specificity of the writer and his thought.