LE HAUSSE-COU ROMPU: HISTORY AS AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL LITERATURE IN RETZ'S 'MEMOIRES

At the three-quarter mark of the seventeenth century in France, memoirs were an unstable genre existing in the encounter of history, the story of an individual destiny, and literature. Analysis of the Memoires of the Cardinal de Retz as historical narrative, in the manner of structuralists such as Hayden White, reveals a richly varied blend of emplotments, arguments, ideologies, and prefigurations. The tensions within the text involve both the juxtaposition of events of the Fronde years with the author's perspective some twenty-five years later and the acceptance or rejection of certain historical and autobiographical ironies.;A basic autobiographical prefiguration within the text is Retz's acceptance, on repeated occasions in varying circumstances, of the irony that this "least ecclesiastical soul in the world" has a church vocation. His view of written history is also ironic; the attempts of historians to impose order and structure on the inexplicables and the contradictions of what "really happened" are folly. The vraisemblance of historical narrative, as promoted by theorists like Pere Rapin, Pere Le Moyne, and the Abbe de Saint-Real, who stressed the importance of the literary element in historical accounts, did not reveal, to Retz's eyes, what was vrai. In major passages of his text he demonstrates by his own historical narrative what the surface and the structure of historical "truth" really are. It is necessary to his auto-biographical purposes that he do so, for only if we as readers understand how contradictory and complex events truly were can we understand how his own actions during the Fronde supported the valid authority of the monarch.;In terms of history, there is a major rejected irony within the Memoires as well. Retz writes into his account of Frondeur policy setting his rejection of the parallel of the sixteenth-century Sainte Ligue. He demonstrates repeatedly that the Fronde was not the Ligue; the tactics of that earlier faction had erred in bypassing and attacking Parlement as well as in depending so heavily on Spanish aid. Writing the Memoires, Retz portrays a younger self of the Fronde years who acted forcefully to prevent any ironical development of Ligue tactics on the part of the Fronde and who espoused the need to work with the Paris Parlement. Whether this rejection of Ligue tactics was as strong during the Fronde as when he wrote the Memoires is problematical, however, not to say doubtful.;Retz is unusual among seventeenth-century French memorialists in utilizing the metaphor of the Ligue in this manner. While many of them make some references to the troubles of the sixteenth century, it is usually to express their distance from the religious excesses of that period or to trace precedent there in a sort of historical exemple; only Retz in his text makes of it an exemple problematise, where the practices of the Ligue are examined--and rejected--as a basis for policy setting. This use of history becomes part of his own autobiographical justification.;Retz, in his Memoires, restructures not his own self but rather the surface of the historical field he is examining. His active rejection of historical irony in his narrative becomes the legitimate life of the Fronde.