Tristesses de l’engagement : l’affectivité dans le discours politique sous le règne de Charles VI

Abstract

Because it is written under the pressure of recent events and in the heat of the moment, committed literature seems a priori to be a privileged place for expressing emotion. However, during the reign of Charles vi, there were manifold authorial stances that could be adopted for confronting a reality that many authors saw as overwhelming. These vary from total self-control to emotional outpouring – from the indifference of a cleric pursuing a mainly didactic project to the discourse of a weeping woman. Different factors had a major influence on the emotional charge found in the writings of Honoré Bovet, Philippe de Mézières, Eustache Deschamps, Michel Pintoin, Alain Chartier and Christine de Pizan: the literary genre (treatise, chronicle, epistle, lyric verse), the rhetorical ethos, the presence or absence of biographical elements and finally the use of allegory (by some of these authors) also played a part in determining the importance given to markers of emotion. From these elements it is possible to construct a scale by which to measure the emotional charge in politically committed literature under Charles vi and to compare these different works with each other. Truth appears not to have been the sole prerogative of scholarly or scientific writing (which is not as hermetically sealed to emotions as one might suppose). In fact, lucidity too can be found alongside emotion in these works