Name generally given to a group of poets active from approximately 1450 to 1530, between Villon and Marot (principally Chastellain, Meschinot, Molinet, Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Gringore, Crétin, Jean Lemaire de Belges, Jean Marot, and Jean Bouchet, who was still writing in 1550). Although they did not call themselves ‘Rhétoriqueurs’, they shared an intense preoccupation with rhetoric—it was as ‘l'art de seconde rhétorique’ that late medieval tradition classified poetry.
They were mostly bourgeois, attached to royal or ducal households in France and Burgundy and paid to espouse the interests and celebrate the exploits of their patrons. They were specialists in chroniques and occasional verse or prose for propagandist purposes, hence the proliferation of pieces on births, marriages, and deaths, politics and wars (e.g. Jean Marot, Le Voyage de Venise).
Their shorter poems make extensive use of the formes fixes: ballades, chants-royaux, rondeaux, virelais; longer pieces, such as déplorations or complaintes, often use mixed forms, combining Latin and French, prose and verse. The Rhétoriqueurs continue the traditions of the Roman de la Rose, with an extensive use of allegory and abstraction and an overwhelming tendency to didacticism and moralizing. They have a certain, and in some cases (e.g. Lemaire de Belges, Octovien de Saint-Gelais) considerable, knowledge of the literature of antiquity, and an eagerness to display it, and this sometimes leads to an excessive use of Latinisms in pursuit of a high style. Their works show a concentration on purely formal devices, such as elaborate rhyme schemes (rimes léonines, couronnées, enchaînées, équivoquées), alliteration, puns, rebus, and other types of puzzles. All this is sometimes (inevitably) at the expense of clarity.
Their influence on Renaissance poetry, with all its formal experimentation, was considerable, though the Pléiade poets denied this vigorously. Rabelais too, with his love of puns and lists, can be seen as a direct heir of the Rhétoriqueur tradition. Late 19th-c and early 20th-c. criticism, with its emphasis on sincerity and spontaneity, tended to be contemptuous of the Rhétoriqueurs (see Henri Guy's L'École des Rhétoriqueurs, 1910). A major re-evaluation has been undertaken in recent years in the wake of Zumthor's important book Le Masque et la lumière (1978).
[Christine Scollen-Jimack]
