François de Malherbe

François de Malherbe

François de Malherbe (* 1555 in Caen ; † October 16, 1628 in Paris ) was a French writer . He was mainly active as a poet and is considered a pioneer of French classical music .

Malherbe grew up in a Protestant family of judges, then studied law at the University of Caen , where he frequented humanist circles and wrote his first poems, as well as in Basel and Heidelberg , Calvinist strongholds of the time. In 1577 he converted to Catholicism and became secretary of the royal governor of Provence , the literary bastard of King Henry II , Henri bâtard d'Angoulême , who was also Grand Prieur, ie head of the French branch of the Order of Malta .

In 1581 Malherbe married in Aix-en-Provence the daughter of one of the presiding judges of the highest court of justice ( Parlement ) of Provence. His works from these years (shorter and longer lyric texts) are shaped by Italian models such as Luigi Tansillo and the poems of the Pléiade School, ie the generation of poets before him. He was also influenced by his friend, the humanist Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc . When his protector Henri d'Angoulême was murdered in 1586 in one of the hot phases of the French wars of religion , the eighth Huguenot war , Malherbe returned to Caen and became the city judge there.

However, from 1595 he lived and wrote again in Aix and his name gradually became known. Nevertheless, for a long time he did not succeed in finding a high-ranking patron again or even gaining a foothold at the court (which he tried, for example, in 1600 by sending an ode to the second wife of King Henry IV , Maria de Medici ). In 1605 he was finally introduced to Heinrich, but then even appointed as squire (écuyer) and royal chamberlain (gentilhomme de la Chambre) and thus ennobled.

For the next 20 years Malherbe was a recognized court poet, because even after Henry's murder in 1610 he retained the favor of the queen and later won that of the powerful Cardinal Richelieu .

In his role as court poet, he wrote countless occasional poems (poésies de circonstance) for a wide variety of occasions. At the same time, as a critic, he dominated the Parisian literary scene with his judgment and surrounded himself with younger writers as students. As his creativity waned, his style became more sober, clearer, more sophisticated, more perfectly formed; and while most of his poetic contemporaries followed the typically baroque tendency towards the artificial and thus often towards hermeticism, that is, deliberate difficulty, Malherbe was of the opinion that poetry should be understandable. He condemned the supposedly inspirational writing and advocated the principle of patient work and filing on the text. He also fought against the influences of the Gascon language .

With the strict formal and linguistic standards that he set, he became one of the most influential pioneers of French classical music. The half-verse "Enfin Malherbe vint!" ("Finally came Malherbe!"), With which the later classic Nicolas Boileau paid tribute to him around 1670, has become famous. For the romantics of the early 19th century, however, who tried to free themselves from the literary norms of the classical period, Malherbe was the prototype of the uninspired versesmith - a cliché that subsequently determined its image in literary history - sometimes until today.

Work edition

• François de Malherbe: Les Poésies. Lavaud, Paris 1999, Société des Textes Français Modernes.

Web links

Commons : François de Malherbe  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Gert Pinkernell: Malherbe in the names, titles and dates of French literature (main source)
• François de Malherbe in Encyclopaedia Britannica

Individual evidence

1. ^ Karl Voss: Ways of the French literature. Berlin 1965, p. 85.