ABSTRACT
In their lyric verse, the Pléiade poets had little difficulty in finding models for imitation. Having made their theoretical position abundantly clear in the Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, their poetic manifesto of 1549, they engaged in a long and enriching dialogue with the classical poets whom they revered. In poetry arising out of the political and religious affairs of their time, we might expect them to have turned to the same classical sources. The situation here, however, is more complex. Although they would have been familiar with classical works on the nature of the state,1 these play little part in their poetic production, at least in the years before 1560. To a considerable extent, the poets share the outlook of writers like Erasmus and Rabelais, for whom politics was still conceived in ethical terms, and for whom the priority was for the prince to set an example of right Christian conduct for his people to follow. Moreover, Frenchmen of Du Bellay's generation would have been aware of the differences between the theories of antiquity on the one hand and the reality of sixteenth-century France on the other. The French monarchy, they are proud to claim, owes its strength to the male, legitimate descent of its Catholic kings. Even partial parallels with the ancient world would have been hard to establish. Support among the ancients for oligarchy, to say nothing of democracy, would have been particularly difficult to reconcile with praise for the monarchy of Francis I and Henry II. Earlier in the century, Claude de Seyssel, in the influential La Grand monarchie de France (1519), had adopted a pragmatic approach in his treatment of forms of government. He admits that aristocracy might appear superior in theory,
but insists that since government is a practical matter his preference has to go to the French system, because it works well.2
