Pamphlet Literature
A pamphlet is a short piece of writing, often of an apparently ephemeral nature (though some of the greatest examples have had a lasting literary impact). The most famous pamphlets have tended to be polemical, but pamphlets have also at times been used purely for the dissemination of information (taking the place, in early 17th-c. France, for example, of the modern newspaper), and have served for the communication of reasoned political or religious ideas.
With the advent of printing, the possibility of conveying one's ideas to a very large audience by means of the printed word soon became clear to those with an axe to grind. In 16th-c. France the religious and political ferment that surrounded the Wars of Religion produced a plethora of printed pamphlets. Though most were in prose, a number, by established ‘literary’ writers, were in verse. Ronsard's various Discours, for example, are typical of similar writings by poets such as Grévin and
The political upheavals of the first half of the 17th c. were an equally fertile ground for polemical pamphlets, culminating at the time of the Fronde with the mazarinades, a series of attacks, from divers hands, upon Cardinal Mazarin and others.
The greatest literary example of pamphleteering in France in the 17th c. is Pascal's Lettres provinciales (1656-7), written in defence of Arnauld against the Jesuits. The subtlety and irony of these attacks, later collected in book form, are polemic at its highest. The main thrust of pamphlet literature, as the 17th c. progressed, was to lie in the area of literary debate. The various querelles, from those surrounding Corneille's plays to the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes later in the century, gave rise to a vast amount of ephemeral literature. Religious argument, too, continued to flourish in pamphlet form, from the Jansenist controversies of mid-century to the bitter debate on the Quietist question in the 1690s. In the aftermath of the Fronde, however, and with the centralizing monarchy of Louis XIV's adulthood, the scope for political pamphleteering had become reduced.
This situation was to change in the 18th c. In the plethora of political and social pamphlet literature in that century, the contributions of Voltaire stand out for their fire and mordant irony. Many political tracts by other hands, however, are equally distinguished. Outstanding examples are Siéyès's four famous tracts produced in the run-up to the convocation of the États Généraux in 1789, and particularly the famous Qu'est-ce que le Tiers État?, in which his compressed, nervous, terse style conveys his ideas with the maximum of effect.
Most of the famous pamphlets of the 18th c. had been, even when violent in tone, bound by the constraints of literary language. The later years of the century, however, saw the increasingly massive production of scurrilous libelles, generally directed against the alleged corruption and immorality of those in power, and this style of pamphleteering continued to flourish under the Revolution. With the advent of the mass-publication daily press in the 19th c., this popular violence and vulgarity found its place on a far broader platform, particularly in the polemics which surrounded the major political events of the century, from Napoleon III's coup d'état in 1851 to the Dreyfus Affair in 1897-9. Locutions from popular language, vicious invective based on physical traits, animal similarities, sexual innuendo, etc., dominate this polemic; and whole families of stock images create ‘tribal languages’ for the various political factions. Not since the 16th and early 17th c. had the language and tactics of the streets dominated in this way the printed writings of controversialists.
In one sense, the newspaper article had become the new form of the pamphlet. The daily outpourings of such masters of polemic as Rochefort, Veuillot, Gohier, Tailhade, and Cassagnac hit the public in the same way that the pamphlets of the past had. Both the violent and the more moderate press could produce writings which, if ephemeral in intention, have at times lasted as works of art in their own right. Among the best-known articles from the Dreyfus Affair, for example, are Maurras's ‘Le Premier Sang’ and Zola's ‘J'accuse’, both of which have lasted to our own day as examples of the consummate use of the French language for a polemical purpose. True pamphlets, as opposed to articles, still abounded, however. Zola's Lettre à la jeunesse and Lettre à la France were both produced as brochures; and a large number of such brochures and broadsheets were issued by both sides in the Affair.
In the 20th c. the pamphlet tradition was to continue strongly, particularly among the journalists of the extreme Left and Right. Most such writers were equally famed for their pamphlets and their newspaper articles.
The événements of May 1968 bore witness to the continuing power of the political pamphlet, as the collections of the ephemera of those months have shown. Pamphlet literature lies at the boundary between ‘literature’, as it used to be conceived, and popular culture. The fact that certain great writers have produced pamphlets of outstanding ‘literary’ value should not hide from us the fact that the vitality of the genre, particularly in the 16th and 17th c., and from the mid-19th c. onwards, has lain in its capacity to express mass emotions, often through ‘unliterary’ language and procedures. At its heights, it reaches capabilities of expression which are peculiar to itself, and which are now seen to be as worthy of consideration as the more conventional output of the traditional literary genres.
[Richard Griffiths]
Bibliography
- C. Moreau, Choix de mazarinades, 2 vols. (1853)
- R. Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Régime (1982)
- R. M. Griffiths, The Use of Abuse: The Polemics of the Dreyfus Affair and its Aftermath (1992)
