4 - Corneille: heroes and kings

Summary

Do your duty, and leave the rest to the gods

– Corneille, Horace

In April 1655 the young Louis XIV made a speech to the parlement of Paris in which he was reputed to have used the phrase ‘L’État, c'est moi' (I am the State). It was during Louis's long reign (1643–1715) that France moved decisively towards a centralized, ‘absolutist’ form of government. A key figure in this process was Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), chief minister to Louis XIII. Richelieu's central aim was unity under the Crown – a prerequisite, in his view, for prosperity. The turbulent feudal nobility was not finally quelled, however, until the victory of the monarchy in the ‘Fronde’, the organized resistance to monarchical authority which developed into civil war in the early 1650s. This movement towards the reinforcement of royal authority is the vital background to the plays of Pierre Corneille (1606–84), in which questions of government become increasingly the focus of interest. At the heart of Corneille's theatre is a concern with power relations. His most celebrated plays – Le Cid (1637), Horace (1640), Cinna (1641) and Polyeucte (1642) – dramatize the tensions between the individual subject and the institutions of state.

Le Cid

Le Cid is generally regarded as the most significant play in the history of French theatre. Set in medieval Spain at a time of transition between feudal custom and royal power, its dramatic conflict centres on two young lovers, Rodrigo and Chimène. The drama is initiated when the father of Chimène, Don Gomez, insults the father of Rodrigo, Don Diego. The two old nobles, representing a disappearing generation, feel bound to uphold their ‘gloire’: that is, their reputation and status, in the eyes of their peers, as honourable men. Don Diego commands his son to seek revenge. In Act I, Scene 6, Rodrigo is seen confronting his tragic dilemma.