Eustache Deschamps

Eustache Deschamps (* around 1345 in Vertus / Champagne ; † 1404 ), also called Eustache Morel , was a French poet . He is considered the most important French poet of the second half of the 14th century.

Life and work

Deschamps was perhaps a nephew of Guillaume de Machaut , but at least he was his pupil at the cathedral school in Reims for a while . He studied law in Orléans and, thanks to his talents as a poet and entertainer, received the protection of King Charles V in 1368 and, after his death (1380), that of Charles VI. and above all from his art-loving and ambitious younger brother, Duke Louis d'Orléans , whom he served from 1390. He received several smaller royal offices from his patrons, from which he and his children (his wife died young in 1376 after the birth of the third child) could live reasonably well, even if he complained frequently. In 1389 he was raised to the rank of seigneur de Barbonval and thus ennobled. He stayed mostly at court in Paris, but was also often out and about with and for his princes. In 1384/85 he was a member of a diplomatic mission to Hungary and Croatia, and in 1397 he traveled to Moravia as the ambassador of Louis d'Orléans . Around 1400 he withdrew more and more, ill health and dissatisfied with the power struggle at the court, where various cliques, not least that of his patron Louis, tried to manipulate the intermittently deranged king.

As a poet, Deschamps succeeded Guillaume de Machaut. With around 1,500 poems in all the genera common at the time, including a good 1,100 ballads and around 200 rondeaus on various subjects, he was one of the most productive and thematically, formally and stylistically innovative poets of the French Middle Ages. His influence on the authors next to him, for example on Geoffrey Chaucer , and after him was great and lasted well into the 15th century, e.g. B. to Christine de Pizan and François Villon .

While his poems devoted to the subject of love are mostly conventional, his moral and social problems, e.g. For example, texts (mostly ballads) dedicated to court life are very personal. His philosophical, didactic and satirical ballads were also highly regarded by his contemporaries. But his work also reflects weariness with the world and the general fear of life of the time. The world is a childish old man, he says, innocent at first, then wise, just and brave, and finally cowardly, pathetic and limp.

A central theme of Deschamps is the downfall of France due to the Hundred Years War that flared up again after Charles V's death . In a ballad he complains about how (1380) his own country estate near his birthplace Vertus was looted and burned down by English soldiers. In the fragmentary allegorical poem La Fiction du lion , where he depicts France as an impotent lion and England as an agile leopard, he laments the notorious weakness of France under Charles VI. Another political topic, namely the great schism in the Catholic Church, he deals with in La Complainte de l'Eglise desolee ("Lament of the desolate Church", 1393).

In his last years he worked on the unfinished satirical poem Le Miroir du mariage ("Marriage mirror"), where he discussed the advantages and disadvantages (mostly these) of marriage.

Deschamps is also interesting as the author of the first poetics (doctrine of poetry) written in French, L'art de dictier et de fere chançons, ballades, virelais et rondeaux (1392), a compilation of rules and recipes for writing metrically bound texts. Here, the "musique naturelle" of the language is more important to him than the "musique artificial" of the melody, because he was one of the first to largely dispense with setting and musical accompaniment of their lyrical texts.

Web links

Commons : Eustache Deschamps  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Eustache Deschamps in the catalog of the German National Library
• Article in "Names, Titles and Dates of French Literature" (source)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Johan Huizinga: Autumn of the Middle Ages. Stuttgart 1987, p. 33.