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This collection of twenty essays, of which five are in French,
written by leading English and French literary and historical
scholars, deconstructs the ethical and political framework
supporting and circumscribing the actions of a powerful elite in
France between the early 1600s and the final years of Louis XIV's
reign. Reflecting a diversity of individual concerns, the essays
are divided into two interrelated parts in acknowledgement of the
complex tensions between codes of behaviour and political practice
in the different theatrical spaces of government in the real and
imaginary world. Together these contributions offer a radical
double questioning of the absolute values in which were founded the
authority of Church, King and nobility. The dual political and
moral theme of this study is not new, but it is one that has always
been highly regarded by historians and literary specialists alike.
It is in fact one of the classic preoccupations of
seventeenth-century studies, to which critics must always return,
and to which students must always address themselves, if they are
to comprehend the intellectual core of seventeenth-century French
studies.
Louis II de Bourbon (1621-86), known as Le Grand Conde, stood
alongside Richelieu and Mazarin as one of the key figures who
shaped the reign of Louis XIV. In response to profound upheavals in
their world, his contemporaries looked to him to satisfy their need
for a hero. Originally the warrior-hero par excellence, Conde was
redefined by successive generations as the ideal subject of the
absolutist state, as the epitome of civilized behaviour and,
finally, as the exemplar of the triumph of faith over reason. In
this first detailed study in English of Le Grand Conde's
significance for his contemporaries, Mark Bannister reveals the
complexity of the ideological patterns forming and reforming in
seventeenth-century France, and the perennial need to believe in
the existence of an iconic figure, incarnating new values as they
emerge.
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