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The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924009758297 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
HELPS FOR STUDENTS OF HISTORY. No. 13 
 
 THE 
 FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR TILLEY, M.A. 
 
 LONDON : 
 SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING 
 CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE 
 
 NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 I919 
 
PySZoSS*] 
 
THE 
 FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 It is very difficult, if not impossible, to detect 
 the first manifestations of any intellectual move- 
 ment. There were premonitions of the French 
 Renaissance as far back as the days of Philip VI. 
 (1328-1349), the first prince of the Valois line, 
 but these early blossoms were blighted before they 
 had time to bear fniit, by the era of foreign con- 
 quest, civil war, and anarchy which began early 
 in the fifteenth century, and it is customary and 
 convenient to take the expedition of Charles VIII. 
 to Italy in 1494 as marking the real beginning of 
 the French Renaissance. We may even go further 
 and, for the purpose of historical study, divide 
 the whole movement into four sub-periods, termi- 
 nating respectively at the death of Louis XII. 
 (1515), the death of Francis I. (1547), the Massacre 
 of St. Bartholomew (1572), and the peace of Vervins 
 (1598). It will be an additional help if we also 
 make a cross-division into Learning, Literature, 
 
 5 
 
6 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 and Art. As for Science, though the Renaissance 
 with its encouragement of free inquiry awakened 
 the scientific spirit, this spirit hardly found ex- 
 pression in Science itself before the beginning of 
 the last sub-period. 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 1494-1515. 
 
 The growth of the Modern State is intimately 
 connected with the Renaissance, and when fully 
 developed, as it was in France under Francis I., 
 it tended greatly to the furtherance of Learning, 
 Literature, and Art. Its two leading characteristics 
 are territorial unity and absolute monarchy, but 
 neither characteristic became universal in Western 
 Europe during the Renaissance. The second was 
 absent from Switzerland and Poland, the first 
 from Germany and Italy. In Italy, however, 
 where autocracy was firmly established in the 
 separate states, the idea of unity, which is the 
 underlying principle of Machiavelli's Prince, came 
 near to realisation in the hands of Caesar Borgia. 
 In France both unity and autocracy were the work 
 of Louis XL Under his astute and far-seeing 
 rule the loosely-knit aggregate of French provinces, 
 inspired with the new spirit of patriotism which 
 was the legacy of Jeanne d'Arc, was welded into 
 a great homogeneous kingdom, and the whole 
 nation, weary of war and anarchy, readily wel- 
 
8 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 corned an absolute government which gave them 
 peace and order. The unsuccessful" war waged by 
 the Dukes of Brittany and other feudal lords 
 after the death of Louis XI. only served to 
 strengthen the royal power, and the marriage of 
 the heiress of Brittany with Charles VIII. was 
 a further step towards the complete unity of the 
 kingdom. 
 
 The government of Charles VIII. and Louis XII. 
 was patriarchal rather than despotic, but the 
 essential absolutism of both monarchs is shown 
 by the fact that their Italian expeditions were 
 undertaken against the real interests of the nation, 
 and at the prompting of favourite ministers. 
 
 The pretext of Charles VIII. for the invasion of 
 Italy was his claim to Naples as the representative 
 of Ren6 of Anjou. At Naples he remained for 
 nearly three months, but in no other city did he 
 spend more than eleven days, and his whole stay in 
 Italy amounted to barely fourteen months. The 
 impressions, therefore, that he and his nobles 
 received of the Italian Renaissance were of a hasty 
 and general character. Judging from the com- 
 missions which they gave on their return, they were 
 chiefly impressed by the spacious palaces with 
 their stately fronts, the beautiful sepulchral monu- 
 ments, and the increasing fashion of portraiture. 
 Much of the spoil which Charles had collected in 
 " his kingdom of Naples " was lost at Fornovo, 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 9 
 
 but a considerable amount reached France, and, 
 what was much more important, a small colony of 
 Italian artists and workmen was established at 
 Amboise. It included Fra Giocondo, the dis- 
 tinguished architect and humanist; Domenico of 
 Cortona, surnamed II Boccadoro, who later 
 achieved considerable distinction as an architect; 
 and Guido Mazzoni of Modena, whose realistic 
 style of portraiture had greatly impressed the 
 King. A year later the renowned Hellenist, Janus 
 Lascaris, also entered his service. 
 
 The expedition of Louis XII. which was based 
 on his claim to the Duchy of Milan, as the grand- 
 son of Valentina Visconti, was very different in 
 character to that of his predecessor. Instead 
 of fourteen months he remained in Italy for twelve 
 years and a half, and the prolonged influence of 
 a single city, Milan, second only to Florence as a 
 centre of art and culture, was substituted for the 
 hurried impressions of the former expedition. 
 
 A. Learning. 
 That revival of learning which was perhaps the 
 most striking manifestation of the Renaissance, 
 and which we call Humanism, began in France 
 about the year 1460, but for the next third of a 
 century its progress was slow. The leader of the 
 movement throughout the greater part of its 
 first stage was Robert Gaguin, General of the 
 
 2 
 
10 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 Order of the Trinitarians or Mathurins, a man of 
 considerable influence owing to his high character, 
 his capacity for affairs, and his reputation as a 
 diplomatist. Though not himself a great scholar, 
 he did much for the study of Latin, and especially 
 for Latin composition, or, as it was then called, 
 rhetoric. After his death in 1501 his work was 
 taken up by a native of Ghent who had settled 
 at Paris as a printer, Josse Radius Ascensius. 
 A better scholar than Gaguin, he rendered great 
 service to humanistic education as an editor of 
 Latin classics, as a reformer of textbooks, and 
 above all as a printer of humanistic literature. 
 
 Retter known than either of these two is Jacques 
 Lef^vre (Faber Stapulensis), of Staples in Picardy, 
 who devoted himself to the. task of reforming the 
 study of Aristotle. Proceeding in a cautious and 
 conservative spirit, he carried out his task by 
 means of new Latin translations, made by Italian 
 humanists, and improved textbooks. After 1507 
 he began to turn his attention more and more to 
 theological studies and to make Greek Christian 
 literature similarly accessible. He also worked at 
 Riblical criticism, and in a commentaxy which 
 accompanied his Latin version of St. Paul's 
 Epistles (1512) he anticipated two of the cardinal 
 doctrines of Luther's theology. Later he became 
 the leader of the Evangelical party in France, 
 but he never left the Catholic Church. A searcher 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 11 
 
 after truth, he " preached Christ," as he had 
 lectured on Aristotle, " from the sources." But 
 to forms and ceremonies and all the outward pomp 
 of ritual he was indifferent, for he was at heart 
 a mystic. 
 
 But there was still a serious gap in Pi-ench 
 humanism. Gaguin Icnew no Greek; Lef^vre 
 d'Etaples had merely a working knowledge of it. 
 The first real impulse to Greek studies in France 
 came in 1508, when the Italian scholar, Girolamo 
 Aleandro (Aleander), arrived in Paris, and began to 
 teach in private, and then to lecture. By 1511 he 
 had become famous, and at his opening lecture on 
 Ausonius his audience was estimated at two 
 thousand. But as soon as he demanded a fee the 
 crowds vanished. They had come less from a 
 desire for real study than drawn by the spell of 
 the Italian Renaissance. However, when he de- 
 parted from France towards the close of 1514, 
 he left behind him pupils trained to carry on his 
 work, and a Frenchman who in solid learning and 
 critical judgment was the equal of any Italian. 
 This was Guillaume Bude (Budseus), now a man of 
 forty-six; but as the work which raised him to the 
 first rank of European humanists was not published 
 till 1515, mention of him may be deferred till 
 we come to the next period. His friend and 
 rival the Dutchman Erasmus, the greatest figure 
 of the Northern Renaissance, had not resided 
 
12 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 at Paris for any length of time since 1506, 
 but both his Moriae Encomium, which -was pub- 
 Hshed there in 1511 and the new and greatly en- 
 larged edition of his Adagia', printed at Venice in 
 1508, had a direct and immediate influence upon 
 French humanism. 
 
 B. Literature. 
 
 There is little to be said under this head. It 
 was the age of the grands rMtoriqueurs, a detest- 
 able school, upon which the spirit of the Renais- 
 sance had never breathed. There was, however, 
 one exception, Jean Lemaire de Beiges (1472 or 3- 
 c. 1515), who was for eight years in the service of 
 Margaret of Austria, Governor of the Netherlands. 
 In the course of two visits to Italy, he made him- 
 self acquainted with her language and literature, 
 and delighted in the masterpieces of her painters. 
 Marot and Ronsard profited by his verse, and even 
 the great Rabelais did not disdain to study his 
 prose. 
 
 C. Art. 
 
 The influence of the Renaissance upon French 
 art is most visible in architecture. Some years 
 before the Expedition to Italy the new spirit of 
 freedom and expansion had shewn itself in the 
 gradual transformation of the chateau from fortress 
 to country-house. For the invention of gun- 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 13 
 
 powder had made fortresses useless for defence, 
 except against casual raids, and the crushing of 
 feudalism and the pacification of the kingdom 
 had made them unnecessary. Thus it had become 
 possible to satisfy the natural desire for greater 
 comfort and convenience, for more light and air. 
 Then had come the revelation of the stately and 
 attractive palaces of Florence and Rome, of Naples 
 and Siena, and finally of Milan. The French 
 nobles returned to France with a desire to enfUlate 
 the symmetrical planning, the airy loggias, and 
 the tasteful decoration of these fine examples of 
 domestic architecture. 
 
 But it was no easy task to get their wishes 
 executed. If Gothic architecture had ceased to 
 be progressive, it was still magnificent and still 
 powerful in the possession of a long-established 
 tradition and highly competent workmen. Thus 
 in the few buildings erected before 1508 which 
 show the influence of the Renaissance the new 
 element is comparatively small. The best example 
 is the wing added by Louis XII. to his ancestral 
 chateau of Blois (completed in 1503). During the 
 last seven years of his reign the progress was more 
 rapid. Unfortunately the chateau of Gaillon 
 which his powerful minister. Cardinal Georges 
 d'Amboise, the chief promoter of Renaissance art 
 in France, rebuilt as the country residence of the 
 Archbishops of Rouen, was destroyed at the 
 
14 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 Revolution and exists only in fragments. From 
 these, however, and from old drawings we know 
 that its south-eastern wing was Renaissance 
 in character, the greater part of the decora- 
 tive details being executed by Italians and the 
 design being probably by Fra Giocondo. Italian, 
 too, with hardly a doubt, is the Renaissance portion 
 of the Hotel d'AIluye at Blois, the town-house of 
 the Cardinal d'Amboise's successor, Florimond 
 Robertet, which was completed before 1515. 
 
 The influence of the Renaissance upon the 
 sculpture and painting of the period is more dififi- 
 cult to estimate because more intangible. In sculp- 
 ture we find that the Renaissance element is 
 practically confined to decorative details. Cer- 
 tainly in the admirable work of the chief French 
 sculptor of the period, Michel Colombe, who was 
 nearer fifty than sixty, and possibly older, when 
 Charles VIII. returned from Italy, there is no 
 trace of Italian influence, and little, if any, of the 
 Renaissance spirit. His masterpiece, the great 
 tomb of the last Duke of Brittany, Franfois II., 
 at Nantes, is the mature flower of an art which 
 is at once mediaeval and purely national. 
 
 The chief painter of the period is an anonymous 
 master known as the Maitre de Moulins, so-called 
 from his principal work, which hangs in the sacristy 
 of the Collegiate Church of Moulins, and which 
 must have been painted about 1501 or 1502. Alike 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 15 
 
 in the unity of its composition and in its imagina- 
 tive idealism it reveals the inspiration of Italian 
 models. On the other hand, the fine picture in 
 the Glasgow Gallery of St. Maurice with a donor, 
 which art-critics ascribe to the same painter, is 
 pre-Renaissance.^-^ 
 
16 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 II. 
 
 1515-1547. 
 
 Francis I., who succeeded his cousin, Louis XII. 
 on January 1, 1515, was born on September 12, 
 1494, when Charles VJII. was at Asti in Piedmont, 
 making the momentous decision to march on 
 Naples. He thus may be said to have been born 
 and bred under the Renaissance, and he had 
 many chatacteristics of the Renaissance spirit, 
 curiosity, versatility, restlessness, a real love of 
 art, and sympathetic interest in learning and 
 letters. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, 
 he had a kingly presence, but his character was no 
 stronger than theirs. He was unstable, inconse- 
 quent, and easily led. In two things only he 
 showed persistence — ^the development of monar- 
 chical power and the patronage of art. 
 
 A. Learning. 
 Francis I. did much to encourage the new 
 learning. He established a fine library at Fon- 
 tainebleau, formed a collection of Greek manu- 
 scripts, and after many delays, due to the opposi- 
 tion of the obscurantist party in the University, 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 17 
 
 founded Royal Professorships — At fust five in 
 number — for Hebrew, Greek, and Mathematics 
 (1530). To this he was urged by Guillaume Bude 
 (1468-1540), the leading humanist of the reign, 
 which he had inaugurated by his De Asse and had 
 recently glorified by his Commentaries on the 
 Greek Tongue. He was a man of wide interests, 
 and profound and multifarious learning. For 
 it was characteristic of the humanists of this period 
 that they did not confine themselves to some 
 one special department, but ranged over the whole 
 field of ancient learning. For instance, Jacques 
 Toussain, a pupil of Bude and one of the first 
 Royal Professors of Greek, was nicknamed " the 
 living library." 
 
 Like their Italian predecessors the French 
 humanists realised that the spread of humanism 
 could only be effected through education. Ac- 
 cordingly new Universities and Colleges were 
 founded in the interests of the new learning. 
 Trinity College at Lyons, the College of Guienne 
 at Bordeaux, where Montaigne was educated, 
 and the University of Nismes, all adopted the new 
 methods of study, and all proved highly successfu 
 An essential help to this reformed education was 
 the printing of classical texts, in which Lyons vied 
 with Paris, and by translations from Greek and 
 Latin authors. Of those who took part in the 
 latter workthe best known is the printer and scholar 
 
 3 
 
18 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 ;6tienne Dolet, who was burnt on a doubtful charge 
 of heresy in 1540. His enthusiasm for learning 
 and the services that he rendered to scholarship by 
 his Commentaries on the Latin Tongue make him 
 not undeserving of the title which his biographer, 
 R. C. Christie, has conferred on him, that of the 
 Martyr of the Renaissance. 
 
 B. Literature. 
 It is a sign of the close alliance that existed 
 at this time between learning and literature, that 
 at a dinner given at Paris in honour of Dolet in 
 1537 Marot and Rabelais, the chief poet and the 
 chief prose-writer of the period, took their places 
 beside Bude and Toussain and Danfes. It was only 
 five years earlier (1532), when the reign of Francis I. 
 was more than half over, that Marot had published 
 the fii'st collected edition of his poems, and Rabelais 
 the first instalment, Panto^rjteZ, of his great romance. 
 In both writers we find the same blending of 
 mediaeval and Renaissance elements. Marot clung 
 to the ballades and rondeaux of old French verse, 
 but by their side he introduced epigrams on the 
 model of Martial, elegies after Ovid, eclogues after 
 Virgil, and epistles, his most successful work, 
 which were largely inspired by Horace. Another 
 influence, which helped to form him, was that of 
 the Court, in which from the time of Anne of 
 Brittany, the wife first of Charles VIII, and then 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 19 
 
 of Louis XII., women had played a refining and 
 civilising part. To these influences Marot added 
 the natural gifts of self-restraint and concentration, 
 of tact and esprit. He was, moreover, a con- 
 scientious artist, and he was capable of deeper 
 feeling than he is sometimes credited with. He 
 raised no standard of revolt, he issued no mani- 
 festos, but he quietly, undermined the pretentious 
 shams of the rhetoriqueur school, and recalled 
 French poetry to the paths of sincerity and good 
 sense. 
 
 , Like Marot, Rabelais made no violent break 
 with medisevalism. Like Marot, he appreciated 
 the older writers who savoured most richly of the 
 native soil, such as Villon and Coquillart, and the 
 author of the immortal farce of Patelin. He began 
 his romance as a giant-story, and it is not till he 
 came to his Third Book, published in 1546, that 
 he definitively abandoned this popular form. 
 The grossness of some of his chapters, chiefly to 
 be found in his earliest book, Pantagruel, and the 
 cruelty which sometimes disflgures his humour, is 
 largely due to his adherence to mediaeval literary 
 tradition. But the best part of Rabelais is pure 
 Renaissance. In the first place he was an enthu- 
 siastic humanist, of the encyclopaedic type. He 
 had not indeed the profound knowledge of a 
 Bude or a Toussain, but he was an omnivorous 
 reader of Greek and Latin literature, and he 
 
20 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 shared to the full the reverence of his contem- 
 poraries for the knowledge and wisdom of the 
 ancients. Further, he realised, as the Italian 
 humanists had done, the importance of educa- 
 tional reform. The chapters in Gargantua, in 
 which he contrasts the old education (chap, xiv.) 
 with the new (chaps, xxiii. and xxiv.) are among 
 the best known in the whole book. Taken literally, 
 Rabelais' s scheme is the education of a giant in 
 intellect, as well as in stature, but in its broad 
 outlines it is modelled on the practical experience 
 of Vittorino da Feltre and his successors in Italy, 
 and on the system which was being carried out in 
 Paris at this very time by the famous German 
 humanist, Jean Sturm. 
 
 Another side of the Renaissance is represented 
 by the Abbey of Thelema, the account of which 
 occupies the last seven chapters of Gargantua. 
 Like Gargantua's education, it is an ideal picture, 
 but it is inspired by Castiglione's Courtier, that 
 charming record of humanistic society as it 
 flourished at the Court of Urbino. It expresses, 
 too, Rabelais's abhorrence of that monasticism 
 from which he had himself escaped. The one rule 
 by which the society is governed, *' Do what 
 thou wilt " {Fay ce que vouldras), is the expression 
 not of an ignoble Epicureanism, but of an en- 
 lightened individualism regarded as the true basis 
 of common action. 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 21 
 
 Gargantua, which was pubhshed in 1534, is the 
 most Protestant in tone of Rabelais's five books. 
 Like most of his fellow-humanists he was keenly 
 alive to the abuses of the Church, and to the 
 crying need for reform. He welcomed, too, the 
 new religious teachers as purgers of the primitive 
 text of the gospel from the interpretations of the 
 canonists. But the iconoclastic and other violent 
 tendencies of the Protestants, which came to a 
 head in the very year of the publication of Gar- 
 gantiui, and the publication of Calvin's Institution 
 (1536), with its insistance on the natural corrup- 
 tion of man and its virtual negation of the Renais- 
 sance principles of free inquiry and individualism, 
 wholly alienated his sympathies from Protestanism 
 as a creed. 
 
 Rabelais's eager curiosity was far from being 
 confined to humanistic learning and to French 
 and Italian vernacular literature. He was keenly 
 interested in architecture and music, but it was in 
 the domain of science that his acquirements were 
 the most remarkable. He was a skilful physician, 
 and he had a considerable knowledge of anatomy, 
 physiology, zoology, and botany. He had not, 
 indeed, the thorough scientific spirit of Leonardo 
 da Vinci, who recognised no authority save that of 
 experiment, for much of Rabelais's scientific know- 
 ledge was based on the authority, which he seldom 
 questioned, of the ancients. But in an age when 
 
22 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 the dissection of the human body was still a rare 
 event in France, and professors of anatomy seldom, 
 if ever, handled the knife, it was a notable thing 
 that Rabelais should have given demonstrations 
 on the human body, even though he may have 
 left the actual work of dissection to a barber- 
 surgeon. Lastly, we may note, as a final instance 
 of the working in him of the Renaissance spirit, 
 that he took a lively interest in geographical 
 discovery. 
 
 In Margaret of Navarre, the sister of Francis I. 
 and the wife of the King of Navarre, there was 
 less of the mediaeval element than in Marot or 
 Rabelais. A Latin and Italian scholar, she had 
 assimilated what was best in the Italian Renais- 
 sance, and she imparted it to her cotintrymen as 
 a refining and purifying leaven. To poets and 
 scholars she was a firm friend, and they found her 
 Court a home of refuge in hours of stress. Loving 
 serious conversation and the commerce of honour- 
 able men and women, she was worthy to have 
 sojourned in the Abbey of Thelema or to have 
 formed one of that select company whose sayings 
 are recorded in the Cortegiano. Her own book, 
 the Heptameron, modelled on Boccaccio's Deca- 
 meron, is remarkable, not for its tales, which arc 
 not particularly well told — if they are sometimes 
 coarse and sometimes indelicate they are never 
 licentious — but for the discussions which follow 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 23 
 
 the tales, and which throw an interesting light 
 on the thought and society of the day, and especi- 
 ally on the relations between men and women. 
 There is a strong bias in favour of the new religious 
 doctrines, but Margaret never became a Protestant. 
 Like Lefevre d'Etaples she was a true mystic. 
 Her religion was an adoring love for her God and 
 Saviour, and it is this which at times gives dignity 
 and passion to her too facile poetry. 
 
 C. Art. 
 Francis I. was an indefatigable patron of art, never 
 counting the cost, and showing on the whole a dis- 
 cerning taste, though he has been blamed for giving 
 too great encouragement to Italian artists at the ex- 
 pense of native talent. Neither Leonardo da Vinci, 
 who died near Amboise in 1519, nor Benvenuto 
 Cellini left traces of their influence, but the 
 Florentine Rosso, who came to France in 1531, 
 and bhe Bolognese Primaticcio, who followed a 
 year later, founded the famous " School of Fon- 
 tainebleau." Both were accomplished decorators, 
 working in stucco as well as paint, facile in exe- 
 cution and distinguished in design, but both, in 
 their different ways, had the mannerisms of deca- 
 dent art. Rosso died in 1540, but Primaticcio 
 lived till 1570, and his influence was great. 
 Throughout the length and breadth of France 
 the chateaux of the nobles were decorated, in 
 
24 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 imitation of Fontainebleau, with mjiihological 
 scenes and other stories of classical antiquity. 
 ^ In architecture the native builders held their 
 own, and the result was a composite style of 
 Gothic and Renaissance, French and Italian. 
 The finest bmlding of the reign, the Hotel de Ville 
 at Paris (destroyed by the Commune), and possibly 
 also the new wing at Blois with its great spiral 
 staircase and Chambord with its round towers 
 and steep roofs, were designed by II Boccadoro, 
 but that artist had lived long enough in France 
 to respect French traditions. All these buildings 
 are French in their general planning, and Italian 
 only in their rich decoration. The vanished 
 chateau of Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne was the 
 joint work of a French and an Italian architect, 
 but Fontainebleau with its classical peristyle, 
 which became the favourite residence of Francis I., 
 and Saint-Germain with its balustrated galleries 
 were due entirely to French master-masons. 
 
 The artistic tastes of the royal patron were shared 
 by his nobles, his ecclesiastics, and his bourgeois 
 financiers. It was for one of the latter, Gilles 
 Berth el ot, that was built the most perfect example 
 of the domestic architecture of the reign, Azay- 
 le-Rideau. 
 
 In sculpture in spite of the inroad of Italianism 
 the school of Michel Colombe still carried on his 
 traditions, and it is to that school that critics are 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 25 
 
 disposed to assign the noble kneeling figures of 
 Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany on their tomb 
 in Saint -Denis, which served as a model for all 
 the sculptors of the sixteenth century. The tomb 
 itself, especially the decorative ornament, was in 
 part the work of the Florentine Giusti. So with 
 the tomb of the two Cardinals of Amboise in 
 Rouen Cathedral, which has another admirable 
 kneeling figure, that of the elder Cardinal. The 
 principal sculptor, Pierre des Aubeaux, was a 
 Frenchman, but he had several Italians among 
 his fellow-workers, and the influence of Italian 
 models is clearly visible. 
 
 Historical painting in this period was chiefly 
 represented by Rosso and Primaticcio, but in 
 portrait painting Jean Clouet, probably of Flemish 
 origin, achieved at the Court a celebrity which was 
 continued by his greater son Fran§ois. The studies 
 in coloured chalk, which they made for their por- 
 traits, are masterpieces of their kind, and had an 
 enormous vogue, but very few of their portraits 
 in oils have been identified with any certainty. 
 
26 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 III. 
 
 1547-1572. 
 
 This period represents the full flower of the 
 French Renaissance. In humanistic studies France 
 easily surpassed all her rivals; in literature and 
 art she showed astonishing productivity and a 
 high degree of achievement. Though the policy 
 of Henry II., whose character, if more stable, 
 was no stronger than his father's, was alternately 
 swayed by the Constable de Montmorency and the 
 Guises, the absolutism of the crown remained 
 in his hands undiminished. But the fact that 
 his two immediate successors Francis II. and 
 Charles IX. were feeble boys, coupled with the 
 unpopularity of those who governed in their name 
 — ^the Guises in the first case and Catherine de' 
 Medici in the second — tended greatly to weaken 
 the absolutist idea. 
 
 A. Learning. 
 The encyclopaedic humanist of the age of 
 Francis I. was now succeeded by the specialist, 
 and in two departments of knowledge, classical 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 27 
 
 scholarship and jurisprudence, France speedily 
 took the lead. In Greek scholarship the chief 
 names were Turn^be, Dorat, and Henri Estienne, 
 in Latin scholarship Lambin and Muret, in juris- 
 prudence Cujas and Doneau. Turn^be and Dorat 
 were both notable editors of Aeschylus; Turn^be 
 also edited Sophocles and (for the first time) 
 Philo. The output of Henri Estienne, whose 
 home was at Geneva but who was always on the 
 Aving, was enormous. He issued from his press 
 eighteen first editions of Greek authors, nearly 
 all of his own editing, and his work was as careful 
 and scrupulous as it was rapid. Lambin was a 
 brilliant editor of Plautus, Lucretius, Cicero and 
 Horace, and Muret was the foremost Latin stylist 
 in Europe. Cujas, " the pearl of jurists," edited 
 the Corpus luris in the true spirit of humanism, 
 while Doneau aimed at a philosophic conception 
 of the Roman law as a whole. Of greater impor- 
 tance than any of these in the history of thought 
 is Pierre de la Ramee, better known as Ramus, a 
 brilliant lecturer and a many-sided and original 
 thinker, but chiefly famous as leader of the revolt 
 against Aristotelian logic. 
 
 B. Literature. 
 The humanistic impulse made itself stronglj'- 
 felt in literature, and the work of the Pleiad was 
 begun in Dorat's lecture-room, where Ronsard 
 
28 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 and Baif and Joachim Du Bellay learnt to appre- 
 ciate the perfection of classical form. The leader 
 of the new movement was Ronsard; its herald 
 was Du Bellay, and he proclaimed their doctrines 
 in his Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Fran^oise. 
 In m-ging Frenchmen to take for their models the 
 Greek and Latin poets, or the modern Italians, he 
 was urging them to do what Marot had done already ; 
 but far more clearly than Marot, he recognised the 
 virtue of a poetic style based upon heightened- and 
 imaginative language, and together with Ronsard 
 and his other friends he put this creed into practice. 
 Ronsard is not only a great artist in verse, worthy 
 to be named with La Fontaine and Victor Hugo, 
 but he is a true poet. If he is wanting in passion 
 and high poetic vision, he has warmth of feeling 
 and true creative imagination. Though he essayed 
 epic and eclogues and other forms of impersonal 
 verse, he was essentially an elegiac poet. He is 
 at best not only in his regular elegies, but in those 
 of his odes and sonnets which express tender and 
 reflective emotion, and he has to the full that feeling 
 for nature which characterises so many elegiac 
 poets. 
 
 Du Bellay's poetical endowment was slighter 
 than his friend's, but in his Regrets, an intimate 
 journal in the form of sonnets of his Roman life, 
 he struck a really original note. Without any 
 attempt to vie with Petrarch or other masters of 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 29 
 
 style, he records simply and naturally his personal 
 experiences and feelings. The earlier sonnets are 
 elegiac in tone, but in the later ones he passes to 
 satire, for which he had a marked capacity. His 
 later poem, Le poete courtisan, is one of the first 
 regular or classical satires in the French language. 
 Another slender volume, which immediately fol- 
 lowed Les Regrets, reveals him as endowed to a 
 higher degree even than Ronsard with that delicacy 
 of perception and that sense of form which arc 
 the heritage of the French genius. D'un vanneur 
 de bU is as perfect in its way as Ronsard's impec- 
 cable sonnet, Quand vous serez bien vieille. 
 
 Ronsard attracted many disciples, whom he 
 dubbed the Brigade; but there was an inner and 
 more select circle, which from its numbering 
 at one time seven members, though the number 
 was never strictly defined by Ronsard, was called 
 the Pleiad, after the Alexandrian Pleiad of the 
 third century b.c. It was composed of Ronsard, 
 Du Bellay, Baif, Pontus de Tyard, Jodelle, Belleau, 
 and another, who is traditionally said to be Dorat, 
 but who was more probably Peletier. 
 
 Outside this inner circle, the most interesting 
 poets are the Lyonnese Louise Labe, whose best 
 sonnets are instinct with sincerity and passion, 
 and Olivier de Magny, who died young, a year 
 before his friend Du Bellay. In his joy in life, 
 tempered by the thought of its transitoriness, and 
 
30 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 in his pagan sympathies, he is a true type of the 
 Renaissance spirit. But we must guard against 
 exaggerating the paganism of the Renaissance, 
 and we must not be deceived by the pagan 
 mythology and symbolism which was the fashion 
 in French poetry, as in French art, throughout 
 this period. The tomb of Guillaume Du Bellay, 
 in the cathedral of Le Mans, which was completed 
 in 1557, the year after the publication of Ronsard's 
 second book of Hymns — so-called after the Homeric 
 Hymns — is, at least in its present somewhat 
 mutilated condition, without a single Christian 
 symbol. But this does not imply a purely pagan 
 conception of death. Ronsard's Hymn to Death, in 
 spite of its classical allusions and pagan mythology, 
 is thoroughly Christian in tone. 
 
 Humanism also had its effect on French prose. 
 In the last year of the reign of Henri II., Amyot 
 published a complete translation of the Lives of 
 Plutarch, which took its place in French literature 
 as an original work. Plutarch's examples of lofty 
 patriotism became an encouragement to many 
 generations of Frenchmen, and Amyot's style, 
 orderly and artistic, yet full of savour, not only 
 inspired Montaigne, but served as a model to later 
 writers. 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 31 
 
 C. Art. 
 
 The humanist ideal found expression in art as 
 well as in literature. In architecture the compro- 
 mise between Gothic and Renaissance, and the 
 sharing of the work between Frenchman and 
 Italian, came to an end. The French architects — 
 architects in the modern sense of the term — ^learnt 
 the principles of classical construction from books 
 of engravings and architectural treatises by French- 
 men and Italians. The one most in repute was by a 
 Frenchman, Du Cerceau. Moreover, two of the 
 three chief architects of the period, De I'Orme 
 and Bullant, had visited Italy. Of Diane de 
 Poitiers's chateau' at Anet, which De I'Orme re- 
 garded as his masterpiece, only a fragment remains, 
 and the Tuileries which he and Bullant began 
 to build for Catherine de' Medici has suffered the 
 same fate as the Hotel de Ville. Bullant, however, 
 can be judged by the work which he did at Ecouen 
 and Chantilly for his first patron, the Constable 
 de Montmorency. 
 
 Lescot, the third great architect of the reign, 
 had not the advantage of Italian travel, but he- 
 was a man of good birth and high culture, and if 
 he lacked the learning of De I'Orme and the 
 imagination of Bullant, he had a stronger feeling 
 than either for harmony and artistic perfection. 
 His share of the Louvre, the southernmost part 
 
82 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 of the western wing, in which he had the collabora- 
 tion of the sculptor Jean Goujon, is the richest 
 and most wholly satisfactory monument of the 
 reign of Henry II. 
 
 Of all these artists Goujon is the most thoroughly 
 imbued with the classical spirit. He is wanting 
 in virility and creative energy, but he is grace 
 personified, witness the Cariatides of the Louvre, 
 the Diana from Anet, and above all the Fontaine 
 des Innocents. Germain Pilon, a considerably 
 younger man than any of the above, has two 
 sides to his genius. He is sometimes a classicist 
 of a more or less conventional type, in which 
 mood he produced his overrated Three Graces, 
 but he is also a realist of originality, the precursor 
 of a truly national art. Such he appears in the 
 sepulchral figures — both kneeling and recumbent — 
 of Henry II. and Catherine, and with even more 
 convincing effect in the superb kneeling figure 
 of the Chancellor Birague. Another sculptor of 
 this period, the object of recent investigation, is 
 Pierre Bontemps, who collaborated with De I'Orme 
 in the tomb of Francis I., and to whom has been 
 attributed with some probability the famous 
 statue of Admiral de Chabot. 
 
 In painting, Primaticcio still continued his work 
 at Fontainebleau, where he was joined, in 1551, 
 by his principal collaborator, Niccolo dell'Abbate. 
 He found great favour with the Guises, and after 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 33 
 
 the death of Henry II. was appointed superinten- 
 dent of the royal buildings, which gave him a 
 general supervising power over French art. 
 Fran§ois Clouet also continued his successful 
 career; of the few portraits in oils that can be 
 ascribed to him with certainty the best is that of 
 Elizabeth of Austria, the wife of Charles IX. 
 He had a rival in Corneille de Lyon, a native of 
 the Hague, who settled at Lyons, began to paint 
 portraits for the Court in 1536 and had a great 
 vogue for many years. But his chalk drawings 
 show that he has had few equals as an interpreter 
 of human physiognomy. 
 
 The enumeration of the masterpieces of the 
 principal arts gives a very inadequate idea of the 
 artistic activity of the age, and of the amazing 
 fertility and high excellence that was shown in 
 every branch of art. Glass-painting was especially 
 flourishing. The amount of sixteenth-century glass 
 still preserved in France is enormous. Among the 
 most famous windows are those of Champigny-sur- 
 Veude in Touraine; of Conches, La Grand And^ly, 
 and the churches of Saint-Patrice and Saint- 
 Vincent at Rouen in Normandy ; and of Vincennes 
 (completed in 1558 and attributed without suffi- 
 cient evidence to Jean Cousin), ficouen, and 
 Montmorency (1523-1535, the last a veritable 
 portrait-gallery of the period) in the neighbourhood 
 at Paris. Richest of all is the province of Cham- 
 
34 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 pagne, which can show admirable examples at 
 Chalons-sur-Marne, Sens, Saint-Florentin, and in 
 several churches at Troyes. Among the artists 
 whose names have come down to us are Jean 
 Lescuyer, who worked at Bourges, Robert Pinai- 
 grier, and Engrand Le Prince and his two sons 
 from Beauvais. On the whole the best Renaissance 
 glass belongs to the first half of the sixteenth 
 century. Soon after 1550, it begins to decline, 
 and after 1572 it shows decided marks of deca- 
 dence, as in the windows of Montfort-l'Amaury. 
 
 The medallist's art during this period was well 
 represented by Delaulne and Pilon; engraving on 
 copper by Delaulne, Boyvin, and Duvet; wood- 
 engraving, chiefly in the form of illustrated books, 
 by Geofroy Tory and Le petit Bernard; ceramics 
 by Palissy and the faience of Saint-Porchaire; 
 enamelling by the P^nicauds, Leonard Limousin, 
 and Jean Reymond. Tapestry had an enormous 
 vogue. In the earlier part of the century Flemish 
 work* was largely imported, but Francis I. estab- 
 lished an atelier at Fontainebleau, and Henry II. 
 one in the hospital of the Trinity at Paris, where 
 probably Catherine de' Medici had executed the 
 Tapisserie d'Artemise in the Italian style. The 
 taste of the period is also shown in its furniture; 
 in cabinets, dressers, coffers, wardrobes, tables, 
 bedsteads. The designs for these were largely 
 inspired by the architect Du Cerceau in the severer 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 35 
 
 style, and Hugues Sambin of Dijon in the more 
 exuberant. 
 
 In all these arts the influence of the Italian 
 Renaissance is very apparent. In glass-painting 
 this takes the form, partly of the substitution of 
 Renaissance for Gothic forms in the architectural 
 back-grounds, paitly in the increased striving 
 after pictorial effect. In the enamels mythological 
 subjects become more and more frequent, and even 
 religious scenes, such as the Life of Jesus by 
 Leonard Limousin (1557), assume a pagan 
 character. Palissy, also, close student of nature 
 though he was, borrowed classical subjects from 
 the painters and engravers, and his larger medal- 
 lions of Galba and Vespasian in the Louvre are 
 inspired by antique gems. The influence of the 
 school of Fontainebleau with its note of elegant 
 distinction is especially visible in the work of 
 Delaulne and Reymond, and in the faience of 
 Saint-Porchaire; it is only Palissy and Duvet, 
 the latter especially in his series of the Apocalj^se, 
 who show striking originality and vigorous creative 
 genius. 
 
 In the sixteenth century music flourished in 
 France under the various forms of dance-music, 
 the setting of songs and lyrics, and Catholic 
 and Protestant church-music. But during the 
 first half of the century the leading musicians 
 were either Flemings or at least belonged to the 
 
36 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 Netherlands school. Clement Jannequin, who died 
 an old man in 1559 or soon after, with a great 
 reputation as a writer of songs and descrip- 
 tive secular music, was, according to tradition, a 
 Frenchman, but he is connected with the Nether- 
 lands school through Josquin des Pi-ez. It is 
 Claude Goudimel, born in the Spanish town of 
 Besan9on but settled in Paris by 1549, who has 
 the best claim to be regarded as representative 
 of French Renaissance music. He set to music 
 the Odes of Horace and four Odes of Ronsard, 
 but he is known mainly as a writer of motets and 
 masses, and above all as the composer of the music 
 for the Protestant Psalter of Marot and Beza. 
 Whether he himself was a Protestant is uncertain, 
 but he was among the victims who were massacred 
 at Lyons in the days following St. Bartholomew. 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 37 
 
 IV. 
 
 1572-1598. 
 
 Before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew the 
 wars of rehgion had no marked effect upon 
 the intellectual activities of France. But after 
 St. Bartholomew learning and art received a 
 sudden check, while literature was turned into 
 new channels. Ramus, hunted down by a rival 
 professor, was one of the victims; Lambin died 
 of shock; Doneau, Hotman, and the younger 
 Scaliger fled to Geneva, Delaulne to Strassburg; 
 Jean Goujon had already died in exile; Fran9ois 
 Clouet died in the same year; Ronsard retired from 
 the Court, having practically done his work, two 
 years later. In 1575 Cujas was driven from 
 Bourges by religious disturbances. By 1578 the 
 three great architects, BuUant, De I'Orme, and 
 Lescot, were all dead, 
 
 Primaticcio died in 1570, but even before his 
 death he had gone out of favour. This was largely 
 due to a general reaction against the predominating 
 Italian influence. Henri Estienne had sounded 
 the attack in 1565 in the first of three treatises 
 
38 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 directed against the Italianate fashions of the 
 Court. After the Massacre it was remembered 
 that at the fateful conference which decided on 
 its execution the only person present of pure 
 French blood was Tavannes, and that the majority 
 were Italians. 
 
 But antagonistic to this patriotic anti-Italian 
 movement there were forces at work, which were 
 dangerous to national unity, and to the unifying 
 power, already much weakened, of the Crown. The 
 r^ ^,,, Protestants instea^jrf being cowed, .as Catherine 
 xC^had anticipated, by the Massacre, were hardened 
 ^ in their resistanpe. They felt that they could no 
 longer trust the Government, and on the first 
 anniversary of St. Bartholomew they addressed 
 a petition to the King, in which they assumed the 
 tone of a quasi-independent power. At the same 
 time, the Politiques, or moderate Catholics, who 
 were for the State first and for religion afterwards, 
 began to ally themselves with the Protestants. 
 On the other side, the ardent Catholics formed 
 leagues and associations, which looked rather to 
 Guise than to the King as their head, and ultimately 
 to Spain. The most important of these was the 
 League of Paris, constituted in 1585, with the 
 avowed aim of establishing Catholicism as the one 
 and only religion in France, and of excluding from 
 the succession the heretic, Henry of Navarre, 
 who by the death of Alengon, the King's only 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 39 
 
 surviving brother, had become the rightful heir 
 to the throne. 
 
 Ever since the Massacre the question whether 
 it was lawful to resist an unjust magistrate or 
 rebel against a tyrannical King had been discussed 
 in pamphlets. The Protestants said Yes, and the 
 Catholics No, but they now changed weapons, and 
 while the Protestants maintained the divine right 
 of Bangs, the Catholics appeared as the champions 
 of revolution. All this, combined with the intense 
 unpopularity of Henry III., who by his un- 
 natural debaucheries and grovelling superstition 
 had brought the royal dignity into contempt, tended 
 greatly to undermine the power of the Crown. 
 Moreover, the dynastic aims of Guise, and the 
 ambition of Henry's favourites to restore the 
 provinces of which they were governors to their 
 former condition of quasi-independent states, 
 threatened to disintegrate the kingdom, and to 
 plunge it once more into the disunion and anarchy 
 of the feudal period. 
 
 A. Learning. 
 There is one great name in this period, the 
 greatest in the history of French classical scholar- 
 ship, that of Joseph Scaliger. He returned from 
 Geneva to France in 1574, and lived there till 
 1593. A naaster of Greek and Latin, he had a 
 critical sense, a sureness of method, and a construe- 
 
40 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 tive power that have never been surpassed. His 
 great work was the creation of a scientific systenx 
 of ancient chronology, but when his masterpiece, the 
 Thesaurus temporum, was pubUshed, he was living 
 out of France, a professor in the new Protestant 
 University of Leyden. After his departure the 
 most learned scholar in France was Pierre Pithou, 
 and it was significant of the fact that the study 
 of Greek had not taken deep root in France, that 
 his scholarship was mainly Latin, and that the 
 original editions that we owe to his enterprise 
 were all of Latin authors. 
 
 If classical scholarship suffered grievously from 
 the Massacre, it gave a certain indirect impetus 
 to historical research. Protestants were moved 
 not only to write political pamphlets, but seriously 
 to investigate the origin and limits of the royal 
 power. Thus Hotman in the Franco - Gallia 
 initiated the critical study of French history, 
 and his republican theories provoked Bodin, a 
 distinguished and active member of the Politique 
 party, to write his Six Livres de la Repuhliqus, 
 which laid the foundations of modern political 
 science. In the same historical spirit Pasquier 
 wrote his Becherches de la France, which contains 
 much valuable iiiformation on the history of French 
 institutions and French poetry. In all these 
 works we see a double source of inspiration, the 
 critical spirit which was inherent in the Renais- 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 41 
 
 sance, and a spirit of patriotism which was leading 
 thoughtful men away from Italy and classical 
 antiquity to the early history of their own country. 
 It was still humanism, but it was humanism 
 turned into a national channel, and nourished 
 on national traditions. 
 
 B. Literature. 
 
 After Ronsard's retirement the poetical stream, 
 divided into two channels — ^the one represented 
 by the Catholic courtier and ecclesiastic, Desportes, 
 and the other by the Protestant country gentle- 
 man and soldier, Du Bartas. Desportes inherited 
 a share of Ronsard's art without his imagination; 
 Du Bartas had all Ronsard's imagination and 
 more, but he had no art, and not even taste. The 
 same inability to control his inspiration by self- 
 criticism and a sense of artistic form is shown by 
 a greater Huguenot soldier, Agrippa- d'Aubigne. 
 Les Tragiques, his chief poetical work, is an epic 
 in intention, but its merit lies chiefly in its satirical 
 parts. Like Du Bartas's rival epic, Les Semaines, it 
 is a poem of fine passages and still finer single lines. 
 
 The poet of this second generation of the Pleiad 
 who inherited the largest share of Ronsard's genius 
 was the dramatist Gamier. But the poetical 
 language of his tragedies, of which the best is 
 Les Juives, does not atone for their lack of 
 action, a defect common to all Renaissance tragedy. 
 
42 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 It was due to two causes — ^the influence of Seneca 
 and the want of stage experience. The Renais- 
 sance comedy had its chief representative in 
 Larivey, who contented himself with translating 
 or adapting Italian originals. As with Garnier, 
 his chief merit is in his language, which is collo- 
 quial, expressive, and amusing, the prose of true 
 comedy. But his best play, Les Esprits, is inferior 
 to Les Contents of Odet de Turn^be (a son of the 
 great Hellenist), which has not only the merit 
 of easy and natural language, and of two characters 
 who are alive, but is even to some extent a serious 
 study of manners. 
 
 The intensity of life which is so marked a feature 
 of the Renaissance is admirably reflected in the 
 Commentaries of the ruthless Catholic leader 
 Monluc, in which he records with racy and pic- 
 turesque charm his experiences as a soldier, and 
 in the Vies de grands Capitaines, Dames illustres, 
 and Dames galantes of the Abbe de Brantome, 
 which, though biographical in form, are full of 
 personal reminiscences. The whole courtly society 
 of the later French Renaissance is mirrored in 
 his volumes. Vice and virtue have no meaning 
 for him; he cares only for intensity of life. He 
 applauds from his stall, but he never criticises. 
 
 A third Gascon, Montaigne, found life equally 
 interesting, but he was a critic as well as a spectator, 
 and it was impossible for any one seriously to 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 43 
 
 contemplate the condition of France during the 
 twenty years from 1572 to Montaigne's death in 
 1592, the period covered by his Essays, without 
 forming a very sober estimate of human nature. 
 " Man is a wonderfujiy vain, diverse, and waver- 
 ing subject," he wrote in the essay which he 
 placed at the head of his book. This is far 
 removed ivorS Pico della Mirandola's treatise On 
 the Dignity of Man and even from Rabelais's 
 Abbey of Thelema. So too his attitude towards 
 that classical literature which had so impressed 
 the humanists with the sense of man's dignity was 
 very different from theirs. Though he had been 
 educated on strictly humanistic lines, though his 
 favourite authors were Seneca and Plutarch, though 
 his essays are stuffed with passages " pillaged " from 
 ancient literature, and though no story told by an 
 ancient historian is too absurd for his credulity, 
 yet for all this he has not the superstitious reverence 
 for antiquity that we find in the earlier humanists, 
 or even in some of his contemporaries. The 
 ancients were not the only great writers, and their 
 opinions, like those of everyone else, had to be 
 brought to the bar of criticism. " Greek and 
 Latin," he wrote in one of his two famous essays 
 on education, " are fine accomplishments, but 
 we pay too high a price for them." And a com- 
 parison of his educational views with those of 
 Rabelais's gives us a measure of the change that 
 
44 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 had taken place during the interval of forty years 
 which separates them. Rabelais's ideal is a highly- 
 trained all-accomplished prince of the Italian 
 Renaissance; Montaigne's is a shrewd and open- 
 minded man of the world, the honnete homme or 
 well-bred gentleman of the seventeenth century. 
 
 But if in his attitude- towards humanism Mon- 
 taigne is a herald of the age of Rea^n, he is in two 
 respects a true representative of the Renaissance. 
 Firstly he is so thorough an individualist, that 
 he can say of his book that he himself is the 
 subject of it. Secondly that book is written in a 
 style which in its disorderly genius is the exact 
 antithesis of the balanced prose of the classical 
 age, and in its rich imagination is a true off- 
 spring of the Renaissance. 
 
 With Montaigne the literature of the French 
 Renaissance may be said to close. The Satire 
 Minippie, which dates from two years later, is an 
 admirable piece of work, but it has no Renaissance 
 characteristics. It initiates the work of reconstruc- 
 tion which awaited Henry IV. and which he carried 
 out with astonishing success. There is more of the 
 Renaissance in Regnier, the first great French 
 satirist, whose earliest satires were not published 
 till 1608. He stands between two ages. If in his 
 close and sincere observation of life and in his firm 
 and manly versification he is a forerunner of 
 Moli^re, he is also the last poet of the Pleiad. 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 45 
 
 C. AH. 
 During this period of civil warfare and economic 
 disaster all the arts languished. The building of 
 the Louvre and the Tuileri«s came to a standstill, 
 and in no department of art was there any activity. 
 It was not till the return of Henry IV. to Paris 
 that, thanks to his wise encouragement, the arts 
 again revived. 
 
 D. Science. 
 If during the years which followed St. Bar- 
 tholomew, art, poetry, and philology languished, 
 on the other hand the scientific spirit began to 
 show itself not merely in a quickening of the 
 critical faculty, but in a deliberate application 
 of the methods of observation and experiment. 
 The new movement was chiefly illustrated by two 
 men who died in the same year, 1590, and who 
 both left writings which have won for them an 
 honourable name in literature as well as in science — 
 Ambroise Par6, the surgeon, and Bernard Palissy, 
 the potter. Fare's Method of Treating Gun-shot 
 Wounds (1545), the first scientific treatise ever 
 written in French, revolutionised practical surgery; 
 Palissy's Discours admirdbles (1580), the substance 
 of lectures which he had delivered at Paris, stamp 
 him as a pioneer in physics, chemistry, mineralogy, 
 and geology. On the formation of rocks and 
 
46 THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 
 
 fossils, on crystallisation, and on the origin of 
 springs and action of running water, he made real 
 contributions to knowledge. " His only book," 
 he says, " was the sky and the earth," but he 
 mentions with honour two contemporary natura- 
 lists, Pierre Belon, who wrote a remarkable book 
 of travels in the East (1553) and important works 
 on Fishes, Birds and Coniferous Trees, and Pierre 
 Rondelet, the author of another treatise on Fishes. 
 
THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE 47 
 
 AUTHORITIES. 
 
 There is no book which deals with the French 
 Renaissance as a whole either in French or English. 
 The best general account is that by H. Lemonnier in ' 
 the Histoire de France, edited by E. Lavisse, vol. v., 
 pt. i., pp. 149-184 and 287-338, and pt. ii, pp. 267- 
 375. See also L. Batiffol, Le SUcle de la Benais- " 
 sance, 1909, cc. iii. and ix. (English translation by 
 Miss E. F. Buckley); A. Tilley, The Dawn oj The 
 French Renaissance, 1918. For the special branches 
 of the subject the following may be consulted: 
 Learning — R. C. Christie, Etienne Dolet, 2nd ed., 
 1899; J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholar- 
 sMp,ii.(1908),pp. 165-210. Literature — A. Tilley, 
 The Literature of the French Renaissance, 2 vols. 
 1904; F. Bruneti^re, Histoire de' la Litter ature 
 franfaise classique, vol. i. Art — A. Michel, His- 
 toire de VArt, vol. iv., pt. ii., pp. 491-814; R. Blom- 
 field, Studies in Architecture, 1905; and A History 
 of French Architecture from the Reign of Charles VIII. 
 till the Death of Mazarin, 2 vols., 1911 ; W. H. Ward, 
 Architecture of the Renaissance in France, 2 vols., 
 1911, vol. i.; P. Vitry, Michel Colombe, 1901; 
 L. Dimier, French Painting in the Sixteenth Cen- 
 tury, 1904. 
 
 BILLIKO AND 30NS, LTD., FRlNIEBfi, OUILDFOBD, ESOLANS. 
 
Cornell University Library 
 
 DC 111.3.T57 
 
 The French renaissance, 
 
 3 1924 009 758 297 
 
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