Performative Polemic: Anti-Absolutist Pamphlets and Their Readers in Late Seventeenth-Century France. By Kathrina Ann LaPorta

Abstract

This book makes a welcome contribution to the burgeoning study of early modern pamphlet literature and seventeenth-century news and media culture. Combining book history and rhetorical analysis, Kathrina Ann LaPorta reconstructs ‘a literary history’ of the ‘French-language pamphlets that denounced Louis XIV’s absolute monarchy between 1667 and 1715’ (p. 6). Each of the five chapters performs a close reading of a single pamphlet. Together, they demonstrate not only the evolution of anti-absolutist polemic over this period but also the formal diversity of this mode of writing and its multiple approaches to imagining and addressing the audience for such critical discourse. Habsburg diplomat François-Paul de Lisola’s Bouclier d’état et de justice (1667) wields the language of law to refute the French monarch’s dubious legitimation of war, figuring its reader as arbiter and judge of affairs of state. Le Miroir des princes (1667) and Soupirs de la France esclave (1689–90) make use of ‘emotional modes of persuasion’ (p. 69) to portray the Sun King’s expansionist wars as a tragedy of historic proportions and his overreach as a threat to the institution of monarchy itself. Other pamphlets employ satire and burlesque to undermine the king and his government, as in the case of the dialogue of the dead between Innocent XI and Mazarin in L’Alcoran de Louis XIV (1695) and the comic fictional unveiling of the king’s marital life in Le Conseil privé de Louis le Grand (1696). Through these attentive close readings, LaPorta makes three central arguments about the pamphlets of this period. First and most successfully, she illustrates that, before ‘literature’ existed as an independent category, pamphlet-writing exhibited a high level of craft and creativity, often drawing on the resources of theatre and narrative as well as polemic. Second, LaPorta persuasively challenges the traditional characterization of pamphlets as ‘ephemera’ by showing how their writers positioned them in relation to longer histories of dissent. This could entail intertextual references to older pamphlets, such as the echoing of Fronde-era mazarinades found in L’Alcoran de Louis XIV. Other examples, such as Le Miroir des princes, invite their readers to look back on contemporary events from the vantage point of an imagined posterity. Observing that pamphlets offered up ‘citable’ criticisms which could (in modern parlance) ‘go viral’ or have a legacy in future times (p. 20), LaPorta finally suggests that we read pamphlets as ‘performative’ texts, rhetorically effective counterweights to the official representations of monarchical splendour that elsewhere performatively reinforced kingly power. This key insight about the historical perspective represented in pamphlet-writing could be explored further in a future project examining a chronologically broader corpus, attending more thoroughly to the significant links between mazarinades, these late-seventeenth-century works, and even eighteenth-century anti-monarchist polemic. In the meantime, LaPorta’s first book extends an enticing invitation to read early modern pamphlets with a keener eye.