Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes [ kəˈʀɛl dezɑ̃ˈsjɛ̃ edemɔˈdɛʀn ] ( French for controversy between the old and the new ) refers to a debate on intellectual history ( literary controversy ) in France at the turn of the 17th to the 18th century. The question was to what extent antiquity could still be the model for contemporary literature and art.

history

The debate was triggered on January 27, 1687 in the Académie française , when Charles Perrault - on the occasion of the convalescence of Louis XIV  - read his poem Le siècle de Louis le Grand , in which he praised the age of Louis XIV as an ideal and at the same time with reference questioned the role model function of antiquity on the Augustan age :

La belle Antiquité fut toujours vénérable; The beautiful antiquity always deserved admiration,
Corn je ne crus jamais qu'elle fût adorable. But never, I believed, worship.
Je voy les Anciens sans plier les genoux, I see the ancient people without bowing my knees
Ils sont grands, il est vray, mais hommes comme nous; They are great, that's true, but people like us;
Et l'on peut comparer sans craindre d'estre injuste, And you can make the comparison without being unfair
Le Siecle de LOUIS au beau Siecle d'Auguste. Between the age of LOUIS and the beautiful one of Augustus.
Charles Perrault: Parallèle des anciens et des modern en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences .

This immediately aroused the protest of the academician Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux . The dispute intensified when Perrault published the four volumes of his Parallèle des anciens et des modern from 1688 , in which he repeated his attacks on the ancients by, in a fictional dialogue, their supposedly weak achievements with - in almost all areas of human life superior - confronted achievements of modern times. In the end, however, he had to concede that the achievements of the ancients in art and literature obviously cannot be offset against general social developments and can therefore represent a value in themselves.

As a result, two camps formed, which fought each other with numerous publications. In addition to the aforementioned, the "old" included Jean Racine , Jean de La Fontaine and Jean de La Bruyère , and the "modern" especially Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle and Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin . The dispute was basically about two opposing aesthetic models: on the one hand, the principle of imitation, which was based on antiquity as the absolute ideal of beauty, and on the other, the principle of the free imagination of genius , who draws from himself.

On the mediation of Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), Boileau finally wrote a conciliatory letter to Perrault and, on August 30, 1694, even gave them a public hug in the Académie française. Looking at the reaction of the contemporary public, Perrault and his party got the upper hand. Naturally, the "Querelle" did not lead to a clear victory, but gradually fizzled out.

However, the debate flared up again in the second decade of the 18th century: In 1713 Antoine Houdar de La Motte (1672–1731) - at this point Perrault and Boileau were already dead - published a transcription of the Iliad that was significantly shortened compared to the original and changed in several places with the aim of eradicating Homer's "mistakes" . La Motte preceded the actual text with a Discours sur Homère , in which he justified his approach. Nevertheless, he aroused the opposition of Anne Dacier (1654-1720), who reacted in 1714 with her book Des causes de la corruption du goût . In extension of a discussion from the third dialogue in Perrault's Parallèle , a debate arose about the preference of the original or the translation. This dispute, in which other authors, in particular François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715), the Abbé Jean Terrasson (1670-1750) and Jean Boivin (1663-1725) intervened, ended in 1716 again with a personal reconciliation the main opponent and went down in literary history under the name " Querelle d'Homère ".

Even if the dispute was essentially exhausted, the impetus given by the “Querelle” had an impact on the discussion among the Enlightenmentists and beyond that into the Romantic era . The ancient influence in French literature, meanwhile, remained strong and can even be traced back to Baudelaire .

Historical background

The foundations of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes were laid in France at least 25 years earlier. After Louis XIV came to power personally, the question arose as to what the appropriate cultural decor would be to illustrate this rule. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin took the view in numerous polemical writings that modern French literature only meets the requirements of the present if it is also Christian. A modern and Christian monarchy could not bear to be praised with the means of ancient art and literature, because the ancient pantheon could not produce true literature, especially since the gods of antiquity were all unbelievable gods of a pagan religion. Only literature shaped by Christian sources, legends of saints, battles between heaven and hell, the use of angels, etc. is worthy of a Christian king. In this context, it must be noted that the Turkish wars in the 1660s gave rise to new ideas about crusades, which Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin himself formulated in an Avis du Saint Esprit au Roy (1662): At the head of a Christian army, Louis XIV should die Defeat heretical states like Holland and England in order to then embark on a new crusade against the Turks in Eastern Europe with massive support from Europe. The Christian turn of the rule of Louis XIV, who presented himself quite secularly, was above all a question of the political perspective offered to the king for his further work.

In contrast, Nicolas Boileau took to the field in his Art poétique (1674), in which he ridiculed Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin's conception and extolled the use of the ancient world of gods. Previously, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, who was already near death, had appointed Charles Perrault as his intellectual heir and the trustee of a literature that was modern in the Christian sense.

It was less about the role model of antiquity than about the question of whether current French literature should demonstrate the alliance with the Catholic Church on the symbolic level of poetic forms or, in the sense of a relative autonomy of artistic forms, continue to use the means of ancient cultures could produce a modern French literature. The model for this was provided by Jean de La Fontaine , for example, in his Fables, in which storylines from ancient stories were processed into texts of the 17th century. Since Charles Perrault also found that a literature determined by the Christian apparatus was unsuccessful, he increasingly relied on the wonder of fairy-tale stories and in this way provided his own answer to the dispute between the Anciens and the Modernes by talking to each other withdrew from this line and produced a secular merveilleux that was neither committed to antiquity nor to Christianity.

International impact

Since the French "Querelle" was already part of a longer European tradition of disputes with similar structures (especially during the Renaissance ), the dispute between Perrault and Boileau quickly became known beyond the borders of France and adapted in various forms to the respective circumstances.

During the discussions in the Académie française, Sir William Temple (1628–1699 ) published his essay upon the ancient and modern learning (1690) in response to Fontenelle's Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes (1688 ). William Wotton (1666–1727) reacted to this with his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694). So a dispute developed in England, in which Richard Bentley (1662–1742) and Alexander Pope (1688–1744) also intervened. The English debate got its common name Battle of the Books from Temple's secretary Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), who in 1704, albeit anonymously, made a contribution under the title Full and True Account of the Battle fought last Friday between the Ancient and the Modern Books published in St. James's Library .

The dispute between Johann Christoph Gottsched , Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger about the “wonderful” can be seen as a German variant of the French “Querelle” . Johann Joachim Winckelmann made an important contribution to the transfer of the French dispute to the German-speaking area with his thoughts on the imitation of the Greek works in the Mahlerey and sculptural art of 1755. The "Querelle" theme appeared around the middle of the 18th century again with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and then towards the end of the century in the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder , Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel .

See also

Literature (selected primary texts)

  • Paul Pellisson : Relation contenant l'histoire de l'Académie Françoise. Augmentée de divers ouvrages du mesme auteur . Pierre le Petit, Paris 1672.
  • Charles Perrault : Parallèle des anciens et des modern en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences (Theory and history of literature and the fine arts, 2). Eidos Verlag, Munich 1964 (facsimile print of the four-volume original edition Paris 1688–1696).
  • Hermann Josef Real: Jonathan Swift, the battle of the books. A historical-critical edition with a literary-historical introduction and commentary (sources and research on the linguistic and cultural history of the Germanic peoples, NF 71 = 195). De Gruyter, Berlin 1978, ISBN 3-11-006985-7 (also habilitation thesis, University of Münster 1976).
  • François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon (ed. By Barbara Warnick): Fenelon's Letter to the French Academy. With an introduction and commentary . University Press of America, Lanham MD 1984, ISBN 0-8191-3651-4 (commented and annotated translation by François Fénelon's Lettre à l'Académie ).
  • Charles Perrault: Mémoires de ma vie . Éditions Macula, Paris 1993, ISBN 2-86589-041-4 .
  • Anne-Marie Lecoq: La querelle des anciens et des modern. XVIIe – XVIIIe siècles . Gallimard, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-07-038752-6 .

Research contributions

Monographs

  • Gyula Alpár: The dispute between the ancient and the modern in German literature up to around 1750 (A Német Intézet értekezései; 16). Mayer, Pécs 1939 (also dissertation, University of Pécs 1939).
  • August Buck : The “Querelle des anciens et des modern” in the Italian self-image of the Renaissance and the Baroque (meeting reports of the scientific society at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Volume 11, No. 1). Steiner, Wiesbaden 1973.
  • Joan E. DeJean: Ancients against moderns. Culture wars and the making of a fin de siècle . University Press, Chicago, Ill. 1997, ISBN 0-226-14137-3 .
  • Hubert Gillot: La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes en France. De la “Defense et Illustration de la Langue française” and “Parallèles des anciens et des Moderne” . Slatkine, Geneva 1968 (reprint of the Paris 1914 edition).
  • Achim Hölter: The book battle. A satirical concept in European literature (Aisthesis Essay; 5). Aisthesis-Verlag, Bielefeld 1995, ISBN 3-89528-115-8 .
  • August S. Irailh: Querelles littéraires, ou Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des révolutions de la république des Lettres, depuis Homère jusqu'à nos jours . Slatkine, Geneva 1967 (4 volumes, reprint of the Paris 1761 edition).
  • Hans R. Jauß: History of literature as a provocation (edition suhrkamp; 418). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1997, ISBN 3-518-10418-7 .
  • Peter K. Kapitza: A civil war in the learned world. On the history of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes in Germany . Fink, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-7705-1927-2 (also habilitation, University of Erlangen 1981).
  • Hans Kortum: Charles Perrault and Nicolas Boileau. The antiquity dispute in the age of classical French literature (New contributions to literary studies; 22). Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1966.
  • Werner Krauss , Hans Kortum (Ed.): Ancient and Modern in the Literary Discussion of the 18th Century (Series of publications of the working group on the history of the German and French Enlightenment; 7). Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1966.
  • Reinhard Krüger: Between miracles and probability. The crisis of the French verse epic in the 17th century (Marburg Romanistic Works; 1). Hitzeroth-Verlag, Marburg 1986.
  • Joseph M. Levine: The battle of the books. History and literature in the Augustan Age . Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY 1991, ISBN 0-8014-2537-9 .
  • Christoph Oliver Mayer: Institutional mechanisms of canon formation in the Académie française. The Querelle des Aciens et des Modernes in 17th century France . Peter Lang, Frankfurt / M. 2012.
  • Urs Müller: field contacts, cultural transfer, cultural participation. Winckelmann's contribution to the establishment of the German intellectual field (Transfer. The German-French cultural library; 24). Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 2005, ISBN 3-86583-035-8 (2 volumes).
  • Thomas Pago: Gottsched and the reception of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes in Germany. Investigation of the significance of the preferential dispute for the poetry theory of the Enlightenment . Meidenbauer Verlag, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-89975-032-2 (also dissertation, University of Munich 1988).
  • Hippolyte Rigault: Histoire de la querelle des anciens et des modern . Franklin Books, New York 1965 (reprinted Paris 1856 edition).
  • Hans G. Rötzer: Traditionality and Modernity in European Literature. An overview from the Atticism-Asianism dispute to the “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1979, ISBN 3-534-07611-7 .
  • Jochen Schlobach: cycle theory and epoch metaphor. Studies on the visual language of historical reflection in France from the Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment (Humanist Library / Series I; 7). Fink, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-7705-1282-0 (also habilitation thesis, Saarbrücken University 1974).
  • Marie-Luise Spieckermann: William Wotton's “Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning” in the context of the English “Querelle des anciens et des modern” (European University Writings / 3; 153). Lang, Frankfurt / M. 1981, ISBN 3-8204-5885-9 .
  • Péter Szondi : Ancient and Modern in the Aesthetics of Goethe's Time. Hegel's Doctrine of Poetry In: ders. Poetics and Philosophy of History . Edited by Senta Metz u. a. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 2001. (Suhrkamp Wissenschaft; 40). ISBN 3-518-27640-9 .
  • Péter Szondi : From normative to speculative genre poetics. Schelling's genre poetics . In: ders. Poetics and Philosophy of History . Edited by Wolfgang Fietkau u. a. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 2001 (Suhrkamp Wissenschaft; 72). ISBN 3-518-27672-7 .

Essays

  • Manfred Fuhrmann : The “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes”, nationalism and German classical music . In: Bernhard Fabian u. a. (Ed.): Germany's cultural development. The redefinition of man (studies of the eighteenth century; 2/3). Kraus, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-601-00014-8 , pp. 49-67.
  • Hans R. Jauß: Antiqui / moderni. Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes . In: Joachim Ritter (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of philosophy . Schwabe, Basel 2007, ISBN 978-3-7965-0115-9 (1 CD-ROM; here: Volume 1, Sp. 410-414).
  • Hans R. Jauß: Aesthetic norms and historical reflection in the "Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes" . In: Charles Perrault : Parallèle des anciens et des modern en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences (theory and history of literature and the fine arts; 2). Eidos-Verlag, Munich 1964, pp. 8–64 (reprint of the Paris edition 1688–1696).
  • Peter K. Kapitza: Seal as a beekeeping. Traditional imagery in the doctrine of imitation . In: Yearbook of the Jean Paul Society . Volume 9 (1974), pp. 79-101.
  • Peter K. Kapitza: The dwarf on the giant's shoulders . In: Rhetoric . Vol. 2 (1981), pp. 49-58.
  • Till R. Kuhnle: Querelle . In: Gert Ueding (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of rhetoric . Niemeyer, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 3-484-68100-4 , Volume 7, Sp. 503-523.
  • Fritz Martini : Modern, The Modern . In: Paul Merker (greeting), Werner Kohlschmidt u. a. (Ed.): Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte . DeGruyter, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-11-017252-6 (5 volumes, here volume 2, 391-415).
  • Karl Menges: Herder and the “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes”. A historical replica . In: Walter Haug, Wilfried Barner (Ed.): Ethical versus aesthetic legitimation of literature. Traditionalism and modernism. Controversies around avant-gardism (controversies, old and new; 8). Niemeyer, Tübingen 1986, ISBN 3-484-10532-1 , pp. 154-160.
  • Alain Niderst: Les "Gens de Paris" et les "Gens de Versailles" . In: Louis Godard de Donville (ed.): D'un siècle à l'autre. Anciens et modern (XVIe colloque, Janvier 1986; Center Méridional de Rencontres sur le XVIIe siècle; 17). Édition du CNRS, Paris 1987, ISBN 2-902135-04-1 , pp. 159-165 [Disk. 166-169].
  • Maike Oergel: End of the “Querelle”? German and British definitions of modern identity in the cultural shadow of antiquity 1750–1870 . In: Horst Turk, Gesa von Essen (ed.): Unfinished stories. The literary handling of nationality and internationality (publication from the Göttingen Collaborative Research Center 529 “Internationality of national literatures”, Series B: European literatures and international processes; 3). Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2000, ISBN 3-89244-368-8 , pp. 72-99.
  • Volker Roloff (Ed.): Tradition and Modernity. Aspects of the conflict between the anciens and the modern (culture and knowledge; 6). Hobbing Verlag, Essen 1989, ISBN 3-920460-25-1 , pp. 1-12.
  • Jürgen von Stackelberg: The parable of bees. A contribution to the history of literary imitation . In: Romanische Forschungen , Volume 68 (1956), pp. 271-293.
  • Jürgen von Stackelberg: The "Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes". New reflections on an old argument . In: Wolfenbütteler Studies for Enlightenment . Volume 6 (1980), pp. 35-51.
  • Jürgen Wilke: The German-Swiss literary dispute . In: Franz J. Worstbrock, Helmut Koopmann (Hrsg.): Forms and form history of argument. The literary dispute (controversies, old and new; 2). Niemeyer, Tübingen 1986, ISBN 3-484-10526-7 , pp. 140-151.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Charles Perrault: Parallèle des anciens et des modern en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences . Facsimile print of the four-volume original edition Paris 1688–1696. Edited by HR Jauß. Eidos, Munich 1964, p. 165.