Table Of ContentThe Invention of Memoirs in Renaissance France
Nicolae-Alexandru Virastau
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor in Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2015
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ABSTRACT
The Invention of Memoirs in Renaissance France
Nicolae-Alexandru Virastau
This dissertation investigates the emergence of the memoir genre in France. Commynes, the author
generally regarded as the first memoirist, initially conceived his memoirs as a collection of
personal notes to be used by the Latinist Angelo Cato for a more elaborate history of Louis XI’s
reign, but gradually came to consider it an independent, firsthand account. The second half of the
sixteenth century witnessed the appearance of an unprecedented and closely-knit group of
firsthand historical narratives, circulating in manuscript form or published as memoirs. These texts
were responding to the standards set by a new Renaissance historiography, which sought to
transform traditional history into a science with political applications. As the early modern
paradigm of historiography based on firsthand narrative sources faded away in modern times,
memoirs lost their historiographical status and became part of French literature. Most scholars
deem Renaissance memoirs rudimentary forms of autobiography that only fully matured in the age
of Louis XIV. It is within and against this teleological literary scholarship that my thesis is situated.
By re-placing Renaissance memoirs within their original rhetorical context, I argue that the
author’s quest for individual self-expression, which has been considered a defining characteristic
of memoirs, is an anachronistic and retrospective projection. My dissertation shows that memoirs
were originally a collective enterprise and that communal values prevailed in Renaissance self-
memorialization. The first formal group of memoirs appeared in the wake of civil and religious
wars that endangered traditional forms of social and political representation. Their authors
addressed relatively new topics such as the court favorite, reason of state, and national unity.
However, all the evidence suggests that their life-writings did not mark a watershed between
medieval corporatism and Renaissance individualism, as has been previously thought
Introduction 1
Chapter I. A Genealogy of Memoirs 12
Chapter II. The Court and Its Discontents 59
Chapter III. Reason of State 100
Chapter IV. Memory, Lineage, and Nation 141
Conclusion 183
Bibliography 191
Appendix 206
i
Acknowledgments
The writing of this dissertation would have been impossible without the invaluable help
and patience of a large number of people. First of all, I would like to express my gratitude towards
my dissertation committee for encouraging and supporting me throughout this process. I owe my
biggest debt to my main adviser Professor Sylvie Lefèvre who first opened my eyes to questions
of codicology, paleography, and iconography in literary analysis, during the several graduate
classes she taught at Columbia University. She has patiently read and corrected all of my papers,
and she walked with me through the many avenues of research I have undertaken in my graduate
years. Professor Pierre Force introduced me to the history of ideas and oriented my interest in the
early modern conception of history, which eventually led me to my dissertation subject. My thesis
would have been much more imperfect without Professor Phillip John Usher’s judicious criticism
and knowledge of Renaissance culture and scholarship. I am particularly honored and grateful to
Professors Anthony Grafton and Alan Stewart for agreeing to join my dissertation committee on
such short notice.
Several friends helped improve the form and contents of this dissertation. I should like to
express my gratitude towards Andrea Herskowitz, Razvan Pop, Paul Wimmer, and Eugen Wohl.
ii
Introduction
François de la Rochefoucauld’s Mémoires of the rebellion known as the Fronde (1648-
1653), in which he had been one of the leaders, were printed allegedly without his consent
officially in Cologne, but in reality in Amsterdam, in 1662. The memoirs bore his acronym
(M.D.L.R.) and contained a mixture of authentic and inauthentic narratives (“relations”) and
documents (“pieces”), inserted therein as if he had effectively written them (“comme si
effectivement il les avait composées”); displeased that one should abuse his distinguished name
(“parce qu’il n’est pas a souffrir qu’on abuse du nom d’une personne de sa qualité”), La
Rochefoucauld himself sent a letter to the Parisian Parliament asking for the book to be censored,
a decision which became effective in September the same year (La Rochefoucauld 771; “Extrait
des Registres du Parlement”; ed. Martin-Chauffier).
His contemporaries were outraged. Saint-Simon, the most famous memoirist of the
following generation, recounted how his father had suffered a fit of pique when reading that he
had broken his promise to the prince of Condé:
Mon père sentit si vivement l’atrocité de la calomnie, qu’il se jeta sur une plume et
mit à la marge [of La Rochefoucauld’s apocryphal Mémoires]: L’auteur en a menti.
Non content de ce qu’il venoit de faire, il s’en alla chez le libraire, qu’il découvrit,
parce que cet ouvrage ne se débitoit pas publiquement dans cette première
nouveauté. Il voulut voir ses exemplaires, pria, promit, menaça et fit bien qu’il se
les fit montrer. Il prit aussitôt une plume et mit à tous la même note marginale. On
peut juger de l’étonnement du libraire, et qu’il ne fut pas longtemps sans faire
avertir M. de La Rochefoucauld . . . (1: 83-84).
1
Besides the request of censorship sent to the Parliament, La Rochefoucauld dispatched letters to
friends, wherein he tried to assure his contemporaries that the memoirs he had actually written
originally contained no injurious remarks. When nineteenth-century scholars finally established
more authentic manuscripts and editions of La Rochefoucauld’s memoirs, they managed to prove
that more than half of the clandestine edition, printed in 1662, was not authored by La
Rochefoucauld; nonetheless, in the parts that were authentic, the duke was quite outspoken (La
Rochefoucauld 2: I-XXVII; ed. Gourdault). Indeed, there was nothing more offensive to a
gentleman than the accusation of perfidy and disloyalty. The third person masculine pronoun in
the subordinate clause (“qu’il ne fut pas longtemps sans faire avertir M. de La Rochefoucauld”)
must refer to the bookseller from the main clause. If my interpretation is correct, the bookseller
himself informed La Rochefoucauld about the incident involving Saint-Simon’s father vandalizing
these memoirs. The bookseller was probably displeased at having the value of his book diminished.
Why would he report that to La Rochefoucauld, who, according to the letter he had sent to the
Parliament, was outraged that somebody would abuse his distinguished name? Did Saint-Simon
fabricate this story? And why would Saint-Simon do such a thing? In order to answer these
questions one needs to explore the cultural parameters surrounding the memoir genre within which
La Rochefoucauld and his co-writers worked.
The Parliament’s interdiction to sell and publish La Rochefoucauld’s pirated memoirs had
no effect, and they continued to be reproduced from 1662 to 1672. However, the apocryphal edition
of 1662 was not the first time somebody had tried to publish La Rochefoucauld’s memoirs during
the author’s lifetime, and again, allegedly without his consent. Other more “authentic” editions
appeared, in fact, only posthumously, in 1689.
2
La Rochefoucauld had first given the manuscript of his memoirs to Arnauld d’Andilly,
brother to the more famous Antoine Arnauld, so that he could correct it specifically with regards
to “purity of language,” in the words of Jean Renault de Segrais, La Rochefoucauld’s friend and
Madame de La Fayette’s secretary (La Rochefoucauld 2: VII; ed. Gourdault). Arnauld d’Andilly
then sent the memoirs to the count of Brienne, who wanted to print them in Rouen; but La
Rochefoucauld, who in the meantime brought changes to his initial project, managed to prevent
their clandestine printing by buying back (!) the furtive copies of these memoirs from the printer
based in Rouen, as Segrais informs us. This initial lost edition was not, according to the same
Segrais, entirely faithful to La Rochefoucauld’s manuscript; nor was this first edition identical to
the other supposedly nonconsensual edition printed in 1662, in Amsterdam/Cologne.
In short, La Rochefoucauld himself sent multiple versions and fragments of his memoirs
to his friends so that they could help him with questions of style; these friends and their friends
made both stylistic and content-based modifications, and did not shy away from printing the
memoirs without respecting the exact letter of the manuscripts entrusted to them. La
Rochefoucauld publicly denied being the author of the pirated editions, although, in private, he
seems to have been perfectly aware of their modifications and printing. If Saint-Simon’s version
is correct, La Rochefoucauld himself oversaw the distribution of his inauthentic memoirs in Paris.
In 1804, Renouard published a manuscript containing La Rochefoucauld’s autograph
corrections and Segrais’s notes; multiple critical editions, refining the quest for an ideal
handwritten document reflective of the author’s mind, followed in the nineteenth century. The
nineteenth century is also the most prolific moment in the history of the memoir genre;
monumental collections of memorial writings appeared in France differing from previous memoir
collections in size and method. Pierre Nora counts more than five-hundred volumes (359).
3
Especially during the Restauration (1814-1830), the vogue of memoirs was so high that both
apocryphal and completely fabricated life-writings were published in France (Zanone 21-60).
Nineteenth-century ghostwriters of memoirs exploited the Romantic sensibility to local color,
confessions, and scandal that still informs our own mass culture of life-writing. Alongside the mass
publication, fabrication, and consumption of memoirs, there was also a new impulse to edit
memoirs critically in accordance to modern philological standards.
Collections of memoirs existed in the early seventeenth century as well, but there was no
preoccupation with the establishment of an authentic text based on an ideal, autograph manuscript.
Ghostwriting was also a widespread practice in this time, but it had very little to do with mass
culture. Seventeenth-century sellers of rare and dangerous books notwithstanding, La
Rochefaucauld, Arnauld d’Andilly and whoever actively helped write La Rochefoucauld’s
memoirs, at the author’s explicit request or not, were not necessarily interested in mass printing
these memoirs for profit.
If questions of authorship in the Renaissance have been amply studied and some of its
assumptions challenged most notably in disciplines such as book history and the sociology of texts,
the origins of the memoir genre has received, at least in France, little scholarly attention thus far.
The stakes are high, however, because all modern critical editions of early modern memoirs
assume that authors of autobiographies strictly controlled their manuscripts and publications. The
scholarly assumption is grounded in a grand narrative of the Renaissance man discovering his
subjectivity and asserting his unique individuality. According to this view, one of the most
privileged forms of individual self-discovery was the birth of autobiographical genres such as
memoirs. Another aspect of self-awakening was the affirmation of authorship and intellectual
property.
4
