The Poet and the King - Jean de La Fontaine and His Century

Marc Fumaroli

University of Notre Dame

2002

542 páginas

18h 4m

ISBN-10: 0268038775

La Fontaine is generally regarded as the greatest French lyric poet of the seventeenth century, his art and his life intimately intertwined with the political and cultural milieu fostered by the "Sun King," Louis XIV. Despite the purported cultural brilliance of seventeenth-century France, an intense resistance to free expression generally characterized the attitude of the royal court toward literature and art. Instead, artists were constantly pressured to promote the interests and "glory" of the regime. It is La Fontaine's struggle to maintain his artistic intensity against omniscient oppression that forms the core of this narrative. Fumaroli, a professor of Rhetoric and Society in Europe at the College de France and a member of the Academie francaise, is a gifted writer who deftly weaves La Fontaine's personal history with the broader cultural and political events in France. Readers will greatly benefit if they have a solid grounding in the history of the period; however, even those without such grounding will appreciate this engrossing account of the struggles of a creative man against a smothering tyranny.