Michael Taormina - Amphion Orator

3. Heroic virtue virtue. This predicate is likely due to the historical role that Henri played as the savior of the nationnation. Myriam YardeniYardeni, Myriam writes: “Henri IV is the most national king which France had known up to that period. Never had any king been so obligated to base his reign on his French characterethoscharacter. His victory marks the triumph of a reinvigorated national sentimentnationnational sentiment that enters upon its full maturity” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 317). However, any careful reading of the royal odes that takes into account their classical and biblical intertexts is bound to acknowledge that Henri, Marie, and Louis are all portrayed as heroes in the mythological sense of the term. “The hero,” writes Joseph CampbellCampbell, Joseph, “is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms. Such a one’s visions, ideas, and inspirations come pristine from the primary springs of human life and thought. Hence they are eloquent, not of the present, disintegrating society and psyche, but of the unquenched source through which society is reborn” (CampbellCampbell, Joseph 14).

When Malherbe’s poetic sequence opens, Henri IV, the HerculesHercules of France, has saved the kingdom from destruction and set sail aboard the ship of stateship of state on a political questhero cyclequest to usher in a utopia of peace, justicevirtuejustice and prosperity at home and French hegemony abroad. As royal consort, Marie de Médicis incarnates the dual aspect of love and justicevirtuejustice—VenusVenus and AstraeaAstraea, respectively—as she will secure the regime by providing a legitimate heir and facilitate the transition from war to peace, from disorder to governance. In the language of CampbellCampbell, Joseph, either she herself is the boon which the hero seeks on his adventurehero cycleadventure and brings back to renew society, or the birth of her son is the magic gift, or both (CampbellCampbell, Joseph 29, 148-165, 211). Later in the sequence, when the hero dies and Marie becomes queen regent, the odes depict her displaying the same magnanimitymagnanimity as Henri in service to the nationnation. Louis XIII, the son, for his part, will be portrayed as completing the unfinished labors of the father, fulfilling the conditions for the return of the Golden AgeGolden Age.

From a mythological perspective, although such heroes maintain contact with the nationnation’s supernatural powers (i.e. God, the fates, and the daemondaemon of France), they do not personify the grand cosmic forces of creation and destruction. Nor do they resemble the archetypal religious hero—like Moses, JesusJesus, or Muhammed—who, as CampbellCampbell, Joseph writes, “found and opened the road to the light beyond the dark” (Campbell 222). Rather, through an act of repetition, that is, by re-founding the monarchy and re-uniting the nationnation, the Bourbons reincarnate the greatest heroes of antiquity, who were also the first kings. In his analysis of the politypolity, and of monarchypolitymonarchy in particular, AristotleAristotle acknowledges such mythological founders and benefactors, situating their kingships in what he calls the “Heroic Age” ( Politics AristotlePolitics 1.2 1253a30; 3.14 1285b5-15).

The heroism found in Malherbe’s royal odes does not fit the evolution of the conception charted by Mark Bannister in the heroic novels of the 1640s and 1650s. Banister shows quite well how the notion evolves from an emphasis on physical prowessprowess and moral autonomy (underscoring the sort of personal glory that elevates the hero to a realm beyond the human community) toward a more altruistic understanding of these concepts with an emphasis on service to the community (Bannister, Privileged Mortals 36-49). In the royal odes, both poles are already present. On the one hand, Henri’s quasi-divine attributes raise him above the nationnation, as though he were a demi-god or a special being chosen by God or destiny. On the other, despite this glory, he voluntarily serves the nationnation, pursuing the common goodcommonwealthcommon good and conferring the greatest benefits on the national communitynationnational community, while his exampleexample is intended to encourage all his subjects, both greater and lesser, to do the same.

At the same time, independent of the internal design of the royal odes, these three attributes of magnanimitymagnanimity also conform to Henri’s absolutist political agenda. J. Russell Major has argued that Henri’s and Sully’s suppression of the estates of Guyenne in 1603, and their imposition of royal officials who levied and collected taxes directly for the king, should be interpreted as a failed attempt to undermine the traditional rights and privileges of the provincial estates throughout France. Royal finances badly needed reform in the first decade of the century, having been strained to the breaking point. However, “by preventing the provincial estates and towns from taxing as they pleased, an important source of revenue that had been finding its way into the hands of the great nobles would be removed. With less wealth the great nobles could afford fewer clients to do their bidding; with fewer clients they would be less dangerous to the king” (Major, “Henri IV and Guyenne,” 364). Henri’s intention “to transform the Renaissance monarchypolitymonarchy into a more absolute state” (Major, “Henri IV and Guyenne,” 363) goes hand in hand with the ideological efforts of propagandists and political theorists to revise the traditional images of the monarchyimageof the monarchy in France.9 Specifically, the superhuman proportions that magnanimitymagnanimity assumes in Malherbe’s royal odes remodel the traditional image of the king as “the eldest and most favored son of the church” (Keohane 55). Given Henri’s confessional flip-flopping and the still smoldering resentments of France’s sectarian conflict, this traditional image urgently needed revision. Henri’s necessary appeal to the Salic Law deemphasized the traditional reliance on the sacral aura of the monarchy “to reconstruct a sense of national communitynationnational community” (HoltHolt, Mack P., Renaissance 204).10 “Henry realized that his royal person was still the only acceptable focus for national unitynationnational unity” (HoltHolt, Mack P., Renaissance 204). This shift of emphasis accords with Malherbe’s use of supercharged attributes to transform Henri into a “super-man, gifted with all the attributes of an anthropomorphic God” (Keohane 56-57).

It should be noted, however, that the conception of absolutismabsolutism which these attributes represent is qualitatively different from the sort of absolutismabsolutism that took hold after the Fronde. Mark Bannister, having charted this ideological transformation, distinguishes the later absolutismabsolutism by its “new relationship between monarch and subject, in which all gloire [glory] was vested in the king and in which systems of patronage and fidélité [loyalty] could work only in the same direction as the interests of the centralized state” (Bannister, Condé 155). By contrast, in the early seventeenth century, the class myth of the sword nobilitynobilityof the sword, with its emphasis on the moral autonomy and personal glory of the individual noble, still dominated the French imagination. The royal odes project this myth on the new monarch, so that Henri, a former great noble, appears to have won the crown thanks to his superhuman virtuevirtue, working the will of God for the sake of the nationnation. If the image of a superhuman, great-souled monarch exemplifies the class myth of the sword nobilitynobilityof the sword, it at the same time closes off any legitimate challenge to the new monarch’s authority, redirecting all noble aspirations pro rege et patria pro rege et patria. To the extent, moreover, that the royal odes fashion a new image of the French monarch, underscoring the capacity of Henri to see and to represent the goodcommonwealththe good of all (Keohane 54), the superhuman monarch thus “incarnates and represents all the interests of the patrie nationla patrie [fatherland]” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 317). “He is a king who symbolizes not only the greatness of France but also the love which must henceforth unite all the members of the French nationnation” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 329).