Portal:Poetry/Selected article archive/September 2006

Oil painting of Louis XIV of France.

French literature of the 17th century spans the reigns of Henry IV of France, the Regency of Marie de Medici, Louis XIII of France, the Regency of Anne of Austria (and the civil war called the Fronde) and the reign of Louis XIV of France. The literature of this period (the "Grand siècle") is often equated with the Classicism of Louis XIV's long reign during which France was beyond question the leading country in Europe (both politically and culturally) and the classical ideals of order, clarity, sense of proportion, and good taste were expounded -- but the century produced in fact far more than just the classicist masterpieces of Jean Racine and Madame de Lafayette.

In Renaissance France, literature (in the broadest sense of the term) was largely the product of encyclopedic humanism (works produced by an educated class of writers (both noble and bourgeois) from religious and legal backgrounds), although a new conception of nobility, modeled on the Italian Renaissance courts and their concept of the perfect courtier, began to take hold.