Voltaire (1756)

Sade (1764)

Romet (1765)

Onde claire, Bords aimables & chéris ou la seule Beauté que je trouve dans la Nature vint souvent se délasser; tendre arbrisseau, qui lui servis d'appui, quand elle venoit se reposer sous ton ombrage (avec quelle émotion je m'en souviens encore!) herbes fraîches; brillantes fleurs, qui couvriez sa robbe & son sein d'albâtte; air pur & sacré; lieu cher, ou l'Amour a frappé mes sens; entendez tous mes derniers accens, recevez tous mes derniers pleurs.

WAS PETRARCH FRENCH? This controversial question has been at the heart of this book. In the Introduction, I drew on passages from Piot and Cochin, at either end of the nineteenth century, to the effect that Petrarch was French through his upbringing, education, residence, and love for Laura. The same point had already been made earlier and more forcibly by the abbé de Sade in his Mémoires pour la vie de François Pétrarque, first in the polemical prefatory letter to his Italian readers (also cited in the Introduction) and more generally in his claim for the Avignonese—and indeed specifically Sadean—identity of Petrarch's beloved, Laure de Sade, née de Noves. In Part I, Petrarch's Frenchness was found to have been further asserted and promoted in the translation into French of his Italian poetry as well as carefully chosen parts of his Latin works across the nineteenth century, with the 1840s and 1870s particularly productive periods. Here the question concerned not only the Frenchness of Petrarch, but more especially which parts of Petrarch's corpus had to be ignored or privileged in order to support this identification. In contrast, Chapter 4 also acknowledged the regional claims on Petrarch, which posed a more local counter-narrative to the nationalistic story of a French Petrarch. Such local claims often boasted of Petrarch's connections with Avignon and Vaucluse particularly around key Petrarchan anniversary dates (1804, 1874, 1904), and were most explicitly expressed in the act of translating Petrarch not into French, but rather into Provençal, an act in which the Provençal group of poets known as the Félibrige were especially implicated.

In Part II, we saw how nineteenth-century French Petrarchism was manifested not only in the act of translation but also in two different modes of rewriting, poetry and prose. The former uncovered translators as poets in their own rights, interrogated the motivations for the production of Petrarchan poetry around particular anniversary dates, and traced Petrarch as a touchstone for Lamartine and as a figure of more transitory but still keen attention for Hugo, Musset, and Gautier. The latter, finally, followed Petrarch as a key influence on the French novel from Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloise to Sand's Adriani.

THE MEDIEVAL ITALIAN poet Francesco Petrarca (known in English as Petrarch, in French as Pétrarque) is a chameleon-like, nomadic figure. Temporally, his life spanned the end of the Middle Ages and the start of the Renaissance, and he has accordingly been hailed both as ‘the last troubadour’ and ‘the first modern man’. Geographically, he was a wanderer, ‘a restless tourist’, born in exile in Arezzo on 20 July 1304, raised in Carpentras, educated at Montpellier and Bologna, and a frequent presence alternately at the papal court of Avignon and in the rural idyll of Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, this last known to Petrarch simply as Vaucluse. In September 1340, Petrarch received invitations to receive the laurel crown from both Rome and Paris, a sign of his growing reputation even in his life- time. In later life he made a home for himself in a variety of northern Italian cities, particularly Milan, Padua, Parma, Pavia, and Venice. He spent his final years in Arqua, a village in the Euganean Hills, where he died on 19 July 1374, on the eve of his seventieth birthday, and where he was also laid to rest. In his writings, similarly, Petrarch crossed boundaries of both language and genre, producing work in Italian and Latin, in poetry and prose, with regard to matters in turn religious, historical, poetic, and moral.The editor and translator of Petrarch's Bucolicum carmen (Bucolic Poem), a series of twelve allegorical poems in Latin, wrote that in these texts ‘there is something for everyone’, and we might well extend this statement to the whole of Petrarch's varied oeuvre, thanks to its breadth of scope and interest. Yet despite this variety and richness, the Petrarch that has been handed down by tradition is Petrarch the love poet, author of celebrated sonnets in Italian. It is the Petrarchan sonnet, more than any other part of his work, which has entranced and seduced readers, writers, and translators over the centuries.

The aims of this volume are to explore the specifically French motivation behind the reception of Petrarch in the nineteenth century and to investigate the different forms that this reception took. Within the field of reception studies, this book takes a twofold methodological approach.

BESIDES THE CANZONIERE, Petrarch's other significant poetic work in the vernacular was his six-part Triumphi, written in formal imitation of Dante's Commedia, that is, borrowing the earlier poet's interlocking tripartite rhyme scheme known as terza rima. Each Triumph depicts the victory of a particular abstract concept, although the trappings of chariots and processions fade away as the work proceeds. The Triumphi are in ascending order of potency, with Latin titles as follows: the Triumphus Cupidinis, Triumphus Pudicitie, Triumphus Mortis, Triumphus Fame, Triumphus Temporis, and the Triumphus Eternitatis. Essentially, the poem thus follows a sequence of encounters with and meditations on each concept, namely Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity, with each in turn defeating and overturning the former. Moreover, the final triumph is in direct conflict with the close of the Canzoniere. The Canzoniere concludes in RVF 366 with a repudiation of Laura as Medusa (a petrifying, spiritually deadening figure) and an invocation of the Virgin Mary, suggesting the possibility of some sort of conversion on the part of the poet–protagonist at the end of the work from Eros to Caritas. In contrast, the Triumphus Eternitatis reinstates Laura, ending with the whole of Paradise desiring to see Laura's resurrected body. The relationship between the Canzoniere and the Triumphi can be further refined through attention to late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French translators of the Triumphi. Again, decisions as to what to include where and under what title reveal more deep-rooted attitudes towards the Triumphi deducible from such material.

As with the Triumphi, no Latin work by Petrarch comes close to rivalling the number of translations of and from the Canzoniere into French produced in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the choice of texts from the Latin works often reflects similar motivations to the selections made by translators faced with Petrarch's vernacular poetry. That is, the choice of Latin works, like the decisions made in producing incomplete translations of the Canzoniere and/or the Triumphi, typically reveals an overriding interest in understanding and presenting Petrarch above all as an autobiographical love poet.

Complete Translations of the Triumphi

Perhaps surprisingly, there are marginally more complete translations of the Triumphi in this period than there are of the Canzoniere: seven of the first, and only five of the latter (six, if Godefroy's intentions rather than actions are taken into consideration).

INCOMPLETE TRANSLATIONS of Petrarch's Canzoniere suggest a process of selection and preference that is largely absent from the projects of complete translations of the Canzoniere discussed in the previous chapter. Incomplete translations bear witness to choices and decisions made by translators faced with a collection that they do not wish to replicate in its entirety, revealing varying levels of familiarity, preferential treatment, and avoidance. Incomplete translations often also create a new order and narrative which are potentially at odds with the structure desired by the original poet. This type of disorder is particularly visible in translations which do not maintain the Canzoniere's macro-narrative penitential frame, from RVF 1 (an introductory sonnet addressed to readers and expressing repentance for past, youthful error) to RVF 366 (a canzone addressed to the Virgin Mary and a rejection of Laura). Critics have argued about whether the end of the Canzoniere represents a true conversion from earthly to divine love or, instead, a desire for conversion that is suspended, interrupted, and incomplete. This type of argument does not seem to have detained French translators of Petrarch, who most often dismantled this penitential frame entirely, either by omitting RVF 366 (a common choice), by reordering the poems according to different priorities, or, in extreme cases, by translating only a few sonnets in isolation and entirely out of context. This last example calls into question the broader relationship between incompletion and meaning. In the case of highly selective translations, the burden of distilling the essence of Petrarch is placed on a mere few poems. The choice of appropriate poems for this task is, in such cases, highly charged, but was helped in the nineteenth century by an already more narrow understanding of who Petrarch was and what his poetry represented. Petrarch, for most translators, was and was to remain a love poet and author of sonnets. From this perspective RVF 366, a canzone ostensibly rejecting both earthly love and Laura explicitly, was predictably unwelcome and all too easily sidelined, while one or two sonnets could, conversely, be celebrated as the essence of his art.

THIS CHAPTER DRAWS on and develops the discovery, in the Introduction, of prose texts that tell stories about Petrarch's life, and in particular about Petrarch's love for a specific historical individual named Laura. While these texts were typically works of criticism, history, and biography, in this chapter the texts under discussion are, instead, novels. Here, the Petrarchan novel is considered to pursue to its logical limit the desire of both critics and certain translators to embed the Canzoniere into a prose narrative, that is, to a point where prose has all but pushed poetry out of the picture entirely. Petrarchan novels represent a surprising product of nineteenth-century French Petrarchism, in contrast to the formally contiguous influence of Petrarch on French poetry delineated in the previous chapter. The increasing popularity of the novel in nineteenth-century France, conjoined with Romantic medievalism, enables a true transformation of Petrarch from poetry to prose.

Reading Petrarch's Canzoniere explicitly as a novel perhaps begins with the German poet, critic, and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, who asserted that ‘Petrarch's poems are classical fragments of a novel’. This comment adopts Petrarch as an avatar of the new (and admittedly ill-defined) genre of the novel, even as it acknowledges the discontinuous, fragmentary, and therefore rather un-novelistic form of Petrarch's aptly named Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. In the middle of the century, Ernest and Edmond Lafond reiterated and developed this statement, praising Petrarch's novelistic insight into human emotions: ‘His Canzoniere is the true source of the modern novel, which has taken as its aim the metaphysical analysis of love in its battle with duty.’ Such novelistic readings of Petrarch's poetry went hand-inhand with the sporadic transformation of Petrarch's story into material for a novel, a process to which a number of seminal French novels of the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries are, in various ways, committed. In 1902, Henri Hauvette exhorted readers of Petrarch to beware of ‘seeking in the Canzoniere what it does not contain, by which I mean analysis of the female heart or even a romantic novel [un roman d'amour]’. This warning, however, came far too late.

Theoretical Framework

Two theoretical models are at work in this chapter, stemming from Mikhail Bakhtin and Eve Duperray respectively.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY is doubtless not a very important century for the translation of Petrarch in France’: so declared a comprehensive study of translations and translators in nineteenth-century France published in 2012. Such a view requires reconsideration, given the wealth of translations discussed throughout Part I and listed fully, as regards the Canzoniere and Triumphi, in Appendix 1. There are admittedly only a handful of complete translations into French of Petrarch's Canzoniere dating from the long nineteenth century. However, many more incomplete translations, often of isolated poems, were also published in this same period, as detailed in Chapter 2, not to mention translations of Petrarch's Triumphi and Latin works, the subject of Chapter 3. Nineteenth-century French translators of Petrarch are divided between a desire for completion (Chapter 1) and the enthrallment of incompletion (Chapters 2 and 3). The latter approach ultimately proves more popular, likely because it is more manageable in practical terms, whilst also giving the translator much freedom in deciding which poems to include. Throughout Part I, I focus on which works and which specific poems by Petrarch translators chose to translate, what version of Petrarch these choices privilege or construct, and what translators’ prefaces and other paratextual material reveal about attitudes towards Petrarch's writings during this period. The construction of a nineteenth-century French Petrarch was typically not achieved through a wholesale importation of the poet's writings into French, but rather through a process of refinement, curation, and selection for a specifically French public.

My analyses in Part I are less concerned with directly comparing original and translated text, an approach which typically runs the risk of treating the translation as inferior to or a failed version of the original, that is, as inherently ‘defective’. Instead, I privilege translations as worthy of interest in their own right, especially bearing in mind that only rarely were any of these translations published alongside the original texts, meaning that direct comparison of original and translation was typically neither encouraged nor facilitated. Before turning to specific translators and translations, it is useful first to highlight some general editorial problems relating to Petrarch's Canzoniere in this period, in particular as regards choice of title and the numbering and order of the work's constituent poems.

THIS CHAPTER ARGUES for the Petrarchan inspiration of a number of nineteenth-century French poets, both canonical and less well-known. In the latter camp, we encounter several translators discussed in Part I, who were also poets in their own right. The question here is whether their experience of translating Petrarch might have discernibly influenced their own poetry, and in what ways. This question is the subject of the first part of this chapter (‘Translators as Poets’), while the second part—‘Anniversary Celebrations and Poetry Competitions’— treats the allied topic of poems written for the Petrarchan centenary festivities which span this century (in particular, those of 1874 and 1904). These anniversary poems were at times written by some of the same translators of Petrarch, as well as being the product of poetry competitions with Petrarchan themes.

The second half of this chapter is devoted to the Petrarchan inspiration of canonical French poets, beginning with Lamartine, whence a distinctively Romantic Petrarch emerges. As already noted in the Introduction, Lamartine had a special relationship with Petrarch, both genealogical—via his mother and the abbé de Sade's family tree—and intellectual, leading him to write passionately about Petrarch in his Cours familier de littérature (1856–69). Lamartine's affinity with Petrarch extended, as I demonstrate in this chapter, to his activity as a poet, with a number of his poems having been written in the margins of various editions of Petrarch which he owned (hence the title of this section, ‘In the Margins’). The final part of this chapter, ‘In the Canon’, continues the exploration of a canonical Petrarch, by considering the attitudes towards Petrarch expressed in the poetry and prose of Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, and Théophile Gautier. In particular, the latter two share a fascination with Petrarch's coronation on the Capitol, inspired by Louis Boulanger's depiction of this same scene in Le Triomphe de Pétrarque (The Triumph of Petrarch), a large-scale painting commissioned by the marquis de Custine and exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1836. Despite Hugo's eventual preference for Dante, all three poets, along with Lamartine, confirm and consolidate Petrarch's place in French Romanticism. As for the later part of the nineteenth century, it is primarily up to Petrarch's translators, in combination with the organizers of the 1874 and 1904 celebrations held in Avignon, to perpetuate this newly re-established French poetic Petrarchan tradition.

These translations are listed in date order, with RVF numbering following that of modern editions, specifically the reference edition: Petrarch, Canzoniere, ed. Marco Santagata, 4th edn (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2010). Also included at the end of Appendix 1 is the listing of the order of poems in Antonio Marsand's influential edition, Le rime del Petrarca, 2 vols (Padua: Nella tipografia del seminario, 1819–20).

1764–7. abbé de Sade, Mémoires pour la vie de François Pétrarque, tirés de ses oeuvres et des auteurs contemporains, avec des notes ou dissertations, & les pieces justificatives, 3 vols (Amsterdam: Arskée & Mercus).

Includes many translations from Petrarch's Italian poetry into French verse often with Italian in parallel columns and French prose paraphrases of sonnets identified in the margins by number, as well as French prose translations from various Latin letters. The poems translated are, in order, as they appear interspersed throughout the prose narrative of volumes one and two (but not three): RVF 1, 211 (partial), 54 (partial), 181, 144, 159, 2–3, 62 (partial), 10, 6, 34, 148 (partial), 12–13, 8 (partial), 9, 7, 15–16, 176–7, 103, 98, 35–6, 32, 31, 33, 27–8, 53, 39, 47–9, 59, 63, 56–7, 64, 54–5, 65, 68, 67 (partial), 82–3, 89, 85, 84, 96–7, 71–3 (amalgamated into one), 77–8, 81, 109, 108, 110–12, 90, 213, 91, 115–16, 199–202 (also in one), 114, 259, 118, 128, 194, 113, 126, 125, 123, 180, 209, 266, 129, 139, 208, 140–1, 147, 240, 134, 132, 155–8 (in one), 238, 143, 150, 153, 168–70, 183, 172, 174, 184, 218, 231, 233, 203, 206, 229–30 (230 partial), 231+230+174 (in one), 212, 216–17, 221, 234–5, 225, 257, 249+250 (in one), 253, 250–2+254 (in one), 160, 192, 263, 154, 262, 261, 167, 222, 45–6, 100, 219+255 (in one), two sonnets not in the Canzoniere, 162, and 247.

1765. Nicolas Antoine Romet, Lettre de Pétrarque a Laure, suivie de remarques sur ce Poëte, & de traduction de quelques-unes de ses plus jolies pieces (Paris: Sébastien Jorry).

Fictional letter (pp. 9–26) from Petrarch to Laura in rhyming verse, followed by ‘Remarques sur le Pétrarque’ (pp. 27–9) and ‘Essai d'une traduction libre de quelques pieces de Pétrarque’ (pp. 30–40).

AS WE HAVE SEEN in the Introduction, late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French readers and translators of Petrarch sought to highlight his association with France, and with Avignon and the surrounding countryside in particular. In this chapter, further manifestations of this locally motivated interest in Petrarch are explored in relation to celebrations of Petrarch held in Avignon and Fontaine-de-Vaucluse at key moments throughout the nineteenth century. These celebrations of Petrarch and Avignon had a fatal, often thinly veiled flaw: Petrarch's own dislike of Avignon, which I have heretofore, much like most French nineteenth-century readers of Petrarch, set deliberately to one side. This dislike is most intensely expressed in three sonnets in the Canzoniere, RVF 136–8, as well as in a collection of nineteen Latin letters, enigmatically entitled the Sine nomine (Without Name). The various ways in which French translators deal with these two sets of texts forms the second part of this chapter. The first part of this chapter sets the festal stage over which these two sets of texts stubbornly and intermittently cast their awkward shadows.

Petrarchan Festivities in Nineteenth-Century Avignon

Nineteenth-century Avignon was a key ‘site of Petrarchism’ and a vital ‘Petrarchan place’.From the days of the Avignon papacy until the French Revolution, Avignon had remained a papal annexe governed by the Vatican. At the French Revolution, after a series of revolts and not inconsiderable local and papal resistance, Avignon was officially recognized as part of France by the Assemblée nationale on 14 September 1791. When Avignon became part of the French Republic, both therefore had a newly vested interest in recovering Avignon's medieval past as French, and the ensuing acts of recuperation were expressed in part through a variety of Petrarch-inspired celebrations, often around key anniversary dates, beginning with 1804, peaking in 1874, and continuing into the early twentieth century with 1904.

The first anniversary celebrations dedicated to Petrarch and organized in Avignon were those of 1804, Petrarch's five hundredth birthday, although the poet's various homes in Arezzo, Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, and Arqua (some more historically verifiable than others) had long been important sites of literary pilgrimage and devotion. The 1804 festivities were modest affairs compared to later events, although they were an early success for the only recently established Avignon-based institution responsible for promoting Petrarch throughout the nineteenth century, the Athénée de Vaucluse, later rebranded the Académie de Vaucluse.