Literary and linguistic movement generated in mid-17th-c. Parisian salons. From 1653 to 1661 preciosity was a major force in the development of French culture. Subsequently it went into decline, although the preoccupations and the activities characteristic of preciosity remained vital throughout the history of the salon tradition.
Women had been gathering in the salons for nearly four decades before anyone spoke of preciosity. The new vocabulary was the creation of hostile outsiders: salon women do not seem to have spoken of themselves as précieuses. From its earliest appearances, précieuse has two clear connotations. First, these women were portrayed as modern-day Amazons, intent on creating a state within the state, ‘the kingdom of the précieuses’, as it was known. Secondly, it was implied that this separatist tendency resulted from a fear of sexuality. ‘Jansenists of love’, Ninon de Lenclos called them, as if their behaviour imitated the moral severity of Port-Royal's disciples. Others called them simply prudes.
The word ‘précieuse’ alone said this much. The fiction of preciosity, of what these prudes did in their separate world, was elaborated by a rash of contemporary satires, of which Molière's Les Précieuses ridicules (1659) is the best-known. These often devastating parodies of the movement's manners and its goals, published when it was most celebrated, were so successful that they have almost entirely obscured preciosity's actual history. Preciosity is thus widely associated with linguistic excess. Its practitioners' efforts to do away with words they considered vulgar (they attempted to have ‘poitrine’ replaced with ‘cœur’, for example) and their abuse of affected expressions such as ‘furieusement’ and ‘ravissant’ are consistently documented. Preciosity provides a rare example of a literary movement whose accomplishments have always proved less interesting than its negative image: it is hard not to see this willingness to remember preciosity only as ridiculous as indicative of a long-standing prejudice against learned women, especially those who work together for common goals.
The précieuses were committed above all to literature. This distinguishes them from the first salon women, who were more concerned with creating a model of elegant conduct in the hope of refining the still-rustic French court. Preciosity is best known for its poetry. Numerous poets practised the light verse that, because it is almost exclusively occasional, does not hold up well outside the salon context. Malherbe, Voiture, Racan, and Mainard are the best known of a largely male group. Although their production received its share of criticism, these poets were never ridiculed and the masculine form précieux was almost never used. Malherbe's well-known reform of French prosody respects the key tenets of preciosity: the preference for the artificial and distrust of the authentic, the predilection for perfect technique and formal constraint.
During the reign of preciosity the salons also encouraged formal innovation, in particular through collective literary ventures. Through discussion and the circulation of manuscripts, new literary forms were invented. Three of these stand out—the portrait, the conversation, and the maxim. All share a collective origin—so much so that those who eventually signed individual works often admitted privately that they could not tell who had played the principal role in their composition—and all first appeared in collaborative volumes. The maxim won its place in literary history when La Rochefoucauld gathered together collectively produced texts under his signature. However, the maxim's most decisive influence on the development of French literature may be due to its having been adopted, along with the portrait and the conversation, by the early French novelists, who made these forms the foundation of their attempt to increase the novel's psychological range. Preciosity's most important contribution to French literature is the new emphasis on interiority that it inspired. Because early novelists followed the example of précieux salons, in which the motivations for human conduct, especially amorous conduct, were endlessly debated, psychological realism became a major force in French literature during the second half of the 17th c.
Preciosity's influence on the development of the French language was also noteworthy. The invention of numerous expressions still widely used is but the most tangible evidence of the précieuses' passion for language—for correct usage, new metaphorical expressions, linguistic purity. Vaugelas in his Remarques sur la langue française, declares that ‘in cases of doubt about language, it is ordinarily best to consult women’. The language which he thus codified and made into the standard against which usage would be measured for generations was the French spoken and analysed in the précieux salons.
Despite this eventual recuperation of its linguistic values, the original movement can hardly be seen as a politically conservative force. The assemblies sub-sumed under the name ‘preciosity’ were feminist in the full sense of this modern term. They worked to change women's lives, to promote reforms, in particular in marital and family law, designed to give women greater control over their fates. The practical message of preciosity can best be appreciated in the conversations, maxims, and portraits of a vast (10, 000-page) window onto women's concerns in that optimistic era, Madeleine de Scudéry's Clélie, histoire romaine (1654-60). Scudéry's characters often express radical beliefs. For example, her heroines argue that, until marriage is redefined so that the institution can no longer be used to enslave women, women should only enter into unofficial unions, sealed with private contracts under which they can guarantee their personal freedom and financial independence.
At the time such radical goals were Utopian. However, preciosity's constructive optimism inspired French women, in numbers unheard of before or since, to become writers. Some won greater independence in their private lives than they would have dared to do without the movement's encouragement. And, long after the multiform French literature of sociability lapsed into the cynicism that dominates its history, waves of new preciosity, each as feminist and as self-confident as the first, were launched from the salons and the writing of women such as Lambert, Riccoboni, and Genlis. [See also Women Writers.
[Joan Dejean]
Bibliography
- R. Lathuillère, La Préciosité (1969)
- D. Backer, Precious Women (1974)
