La Pensée religieuse d'Agrippa d'Aubigné et son expression

By Marie-Madeleine Fragonard. Paris, Champion, 2004. 876 pp. Hb €119.00. This book is a second edition of a doctoral thesis defended in 1981 and first published in 1986. For those who have read the first edition, it is only in the new postface that we might find an answer to the question: how does this work stand in the light of the scholarship of the last twenty years? Willing to accept that as a literary critic she belongs to the older prophets, Fragonard is unapolegetic about updating only the bibliographical material in the footnotes. Welcoming the new light that has been and is constantly being shed on the work of d'Aubigné, Fragonard asserts that her work still stands as part of an inclusive academic process and has not been damaged by time. In part, this is due to her striving not to oversimplify complex religious issues and avoiding the somewhat dogmatic assertions which today might seem dated. Her sensitive introduction to the issues of religious representation and expression in literature is as pertinent today as it was then. But the goldmine quality of the book lies in the fact that it is one of the only two books to date (the other being Fanlo's, almost a decade later) that synthetize the whole œuvre of d'Aubigné. By bringing to academic attention the fact that d'Aubigné's œuvre was a lot more than just Les Tragiques, this book has served and will continue to serve as a fecund source for scholarship which has blossomed in the last twenty years. More and more scholars are turning their attention to what were once dismissed as d'Aubigné's minor works, including Avantures du Baron de Feaneste and Confession catholique du Sieur de Sancy. The continued yearly publication of the Cahiers d'Aubigné since 1988 and the selection, yet again, of Les Tragiques for the ‘agrégation’ of 2004, when d'Aubigné was studied by thousands of students, testifies to the fascination that his œuvre continues to exercise upon scholars. The timely reedition of Fragonard's book is proof that it has become a classic. Its encyclopaedic nature means that it will remain an important work of reference for those who seek to understand a man who was himself seeking through religion an explanation for evil and suffering but also hope and reassurance. Our understanding of d'Aubigné is further accrued through Fragonard's meticulous scholarship. She applied the study of the recurrences of words as a research tool, at a time when technology provided no convenient short-cuts, showing for instance that one of the words traditionnally associated with Satan, ‘Prince de ce monde’ is surprisingly absent in Les Tragiques, a significant gap in a text of this nature, as by taking away Satan's royalty, it also demotes his importance. The detailed study of vocabulory reveals d'Aubigné's critical approach to the subtleties inherent in the meanings of sensitive words like God, Devil and so on. With a nod to the now somewhat dated structuralist movement, the illusion of the presence of the author in his œuvre is nowhere stronger than in d'Aubigné's texts. As Fragonard's work proves, d'Aubigné constitutes a kind of archetypal hero and modern man, one of those rare authors capable of speaking across centuries. As for Victor Hugo, as for Stendhal, d'Aubigné was for Fragonard the inspiration to a major undertaking. She concludes her postface with a meditation on what it is about the man that has commanded her attention for almost thirty years.

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