Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac

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Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac.

Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (born May 31, 1597 in Angoulême , † February 8, 1654 ibid) was a French writer of the early classical period .

Life

Origin and rank

Balzac's mother belonged to the old Nesmond family. His father, Guillaume Guez (1550–1650), was secretary to the Duke of Épernon (1554–1642), one of the most powerful men in France and this during the reign of three kings ( Henry III , Henry IV and Louis XIII ). Jean-Louis Guez, who had the duke's godfather, was a man from southwestern France, Gascon , and especially the city of Angoulême , where his father, who was mayor for a short time, had the most beautiful house in the area and, in 1619, Queen Mother Maria de Medici for six months housed.

education

Balzac was a student of the Jesuits , first in Angoulême, then in Poitiers , where he had François Garasse (1585–1631) as a teacher. He studied in Paris with the Latinist Nicolas Bourbon (1574–1644) and in Leiden with Daniel Heinsius and Dominicus Baudius . Justus Lipsius and the wisdom book of Pierre Charron had a decisive influence on his worldview . From 1616 to 1618 Balzac was in Paris and met François de Malherbe , John Barclay and other great intellectuals of his time.

Trip to Rome. Lord of the castle at Angoulême

From September 1620 to April 1622 Balzac stayed in the company of Cardinal La Valette (1593–1639), son of the Duke of Épernon, in Rome , where Barclay also stayed. Then he settled as a sickly Hagestolz in his castle in Balzac near Angoulême until the end of his life (only interrupted by a few stays in Paris) and led a hermit existence.

A literary sensation. Balzac's letters

In 1624 Balzac achieved a veritable literary coup with the publication of letters (based on the model of Cicero and Pliny ). His Lettres had a tremendous success with the public, on the one hand because of a certain modernism of thought, which was expressed in it in an informal form, but even more because of their language, which brought Balzac the reputation of the most eloquent author of his time. It was agreed that Balzac did for prose what Malherbe had achieved in poetry, namely the cleansing of the dross of the 16th century and an ideal of intelligibility (he also wanted to be understood by women and children) that he knew how to combine it with the most elegant rhythms. His successor as king of the letter style was later Vincent Voiture . Balzac was rhetorically overtaken by Bossuet in the second half of the 17th century . Not least because of the overwhelming success, however, critics came on the scene, above all the Feuillant Jean Goulu , and there was an unpleasant polemic that lasted six years, which helped to remove Balzac from Paris.

The Prince (1631)

In 1631 Balzac emerged with his book Le Prince (The Prince), a kind of anti- Macchiavelli , with which he wanted to intervene in French contemporary history in an explanatory and directing manner, probably hoping for a leading role in politics or in the church. He was disappointed, however, as the circumstances in the reign of Richelieu (1624-1642) were not conducive to a follower of the Queen Mother. Especially Louis XIII. was not suited to him. This practical (if not literary) failure strengthened his hermit ideal far from the capital. On the one hand, he was by nature too proud for the necessary creepiness of being a courtier and, on the other hand, bitter and resigned at an early age. In his Bibliothèque française (p. 135), published in 1664, the critic Charles Sorel saw in Balzac's book a continuous power of language ("force de langage"), which was not encountered before.

Academician

Balzac did not belong to the core group around Chapelain and Conrart , from which the Académie française arose in 1634 (his absence from Paris prevented that), but when it came time to increase the society to 40 members, he was a more or less natural member. He gave in to the invitation to apply in March 1634 from a distance and in 1636 had an excerpt from one of his works read aloud (on armchair No. 28) (here by Aristippe , which was only to appear posthumously). Shortly before his death, he donated the Academy's Eloquence Prize, which was awarded from 1671 to 1931. From 1642 Balzac was officially a royal historian and later a councilor of state, but he made little profit from it.

Other works

In the solitude of his castle in Angoumois (today: Département Charente ), Balzac worked for decades on his work, which was increasingly influenced by Roman literature. In 1648 he published Le Barbon (1648), a pamphlet directed against the "Pedanten" (scholars without taste and morals, counter-image to the " Honnête Homme "). In 1652 he glorified the Catholic religion under the title Socrate Chrétien . Aristippe, ou De la Cour , appeared posthumously in 1658 , in which he discussed the conflict between personal and political morality based on life at court. In addition to French, Balzac wrote neo-Latin texts.

Death, oblivion and late reception

In 1652 Balzac moved from his castle to the Capuchin monastery of Angoulême. There he died two years later at the age of 56. In 1665 his friend Conrart organized an edition of his collected works (with a foreword by Jacques Cassagne ), but by this point developments had already passed over him. The French high class from 1660 onwards made his work disappear. The architect Paul Abadie installed a tomb for him in the Hôtel-Dieu in Angoulême in the mid-19th century , but this notoriety remained regional. In 1872 Philippe Tamizey de Larroque organized a new edition of the Lettres . French literary studies (Beugnot, Zuber, Jehasse) only began to deal with him more intensively after the Second World War, after the first impulses had come from outside (Butler, Sutcliffe). A grammar school in Angoulême has been named after him since 1962.

Works (selection)

  • Les premières lettres 1618–1627 , ed. by H. Bibas (= Kathleen Theresa Butler, 1883–1950). 2 vols. Droz, Paris 1933–1934.
  • Les Entretiens 1657 . 2 vols., Ed. by Bernard Beugnot, Paris, Librairie Marcel Didier, Paris 1972.
  • Livre unique d'épîtres latines , ed. by Jean Jehasse and Bernard Yon. Université, Saint-Etienne 1982.
  • Epistolae selectae = Epîtres latines choisies . 1650, ed. by Jean Jehasse and Bernard Yon. Université, Saint-Etienne 1990.
  • Oeuvres diverse (1644) , ed. by Roger Zuber. Champion, Paris 1995.
  • Le Prince . Table ronde, Paris 1996.
  • Socrate chrestien , ed. by Jean Jehasse (1923–). Champion, Paris 2008.

literature

  • Bernard Beugnot (ed.): Fortunes de Guez de Balzac. Actes du colloque de Balzac (September 16-19, 1997) . Honoré Champion, Paris 1998.
  • Jean Jehasse: Guez de Balzac et le génie romain . Publications de l'Université de Saint-Etienne, Saint-Etienne 1977.
  • Edmund Sutcliffe: Guez de Balzac et son temps. Literature et politique . Nizet, Paris 1959.
  • Roger Zuber: Les Belles Infidèles et la formation du goût classique. Perrot d'Ablancourt and Guez de Balzac . Albin Michel, Paris 1968.

Manual and lexicon information

  • Pierre-Georges Castex and Paul Surer , Manuel des études littéraires françaises , Paris, Hachette, 1954, p. 198.
  • Klaus Engelhardt, "Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac", in: Major works of French literature. Individual presentations and interpretations , ed. by Irene Schwendemann, Munich, Kindler, 1976, pp. 109-110.
  • Robert Horville, Le XVIIe Siècle. Les ambiguïtés du baroque et du classicisme, in: Histoire de la littérature française , ed. by Henri Mitterand, Paris 1988, pp. 235–407 (here: p. 262).
  • André Lagarde and Laurent Michard , XVIIe siècle. Les grands auteurs français. Anthologie et histoire littéraire , Paris, Bordas, 1985 (first 1951), pp. 369-372.
  • Gustave Lanson and Paul Tuffrau, Manuel illustré d'histoire de la littérature française , Paris 1953, p. 167.
  • Roland Purnal, "Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac", in: Laffont-Bompiani. Le nouveau dictionnaire des auteurs de tous les temps et de tous les pays , Paris 1994, pp. 229-230 (Bouquins series).
  • Alain Viala, "Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac", in: Dictionnaire des écrivains de langue française , ed. by Jean-Pierre Beaumarchais, Daniel Couty and Alain Rey, Paris, Larousse, 2001, p. 82.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Balzac, Jean-Louis Guez de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Guez de Balzac, Jean-Louis
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer of the early classical period
DATE OF BIRTH May 31, 1597
PLACE OF BIRTH Angoulême
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 1654
Place of death Angoulême