FREN4432 · Romance Languages and Literatures

Classical Libertinage, Between Faith and Reason

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

Conducted in French. Fulfills a 4000-level requirement for French majors or minors. Before the triumph of Versailles and the Sun King, the French seventeenth century -- or "grand siecle" -- was a time of counter-reformation religious zeal, of a new embrace of reason and science, and, somewhere in between, of a dangerous questioning of all orthodoxies by "free-thinkers," the so-call libertins. This course will examine this period of competing ideologies first through a sampling of the writings of Descartes, Saint Francois de Sales, and Pascal, before focusing on the libertine challenge to authority found in works by well-known writers like (the real) Cyrano de Bergerac, Jean de La Fontaine and Moliere, as well as that of somewhat forgotten figures like Theophile de Vau and Pierre Gassendi.