Bruno Roche sets himself the slippery task of tracing camouflaged Lucretian thought in three authors not traditionally associated with his strain of Epicureanism. Though not the first to study the reception of Lucretius in the seventeenth century, Roche innovates in his method and corpus. Because Cartesian dualism was challenging Epicurean materialism and Lucretius's anti-religious fervor sat ill with the Catholic renewal of post-Reformation France, sympathizers would have wanted to disguise their appreciation of his ideas. Direct citations of Lucretius therefore being few, Roche looks for mediated yet concrete proof of influence: the images and philosophemes that carried Epicurean thought through Lucretius's sixteenth-century readers into his seventeenth-century audience. Roche's approach draws attention to the process of transmutation itself and the ways that each author transformed Lucretius's ideas instead of merely citing them. Applied more broadly, this method could uncover heretofore-unrecognized Lucretian influence in many other seventeenth-century writers.
While insisting that his particular corpus matters less than how heterodox ideas gained such widespread popularity without losing their subversive character, his selection is nonetheless pointed. Willfully refusing the categories established by René Pintard that separate La Mothe Le Vayer (erudite libertine) from Molière and La Fontaine (major authors), Roche positions La Mothe Le Vayer as overlooked conduit of Lucretian thought and elevates him from minor skeptic to “essential and paradoxical” (30–31) source of the Epicureanism found in the dramaturge and the fabulist.
This carefully documented, well-organized volume is divided into five parts, each with two chapters. While the parts group thematically related Lucretian ideas, each chapter traces one idea from its expression in Lucretius, through its transmutation in La Mothe Le Vayer, to its literary expression in Molière and La Fontaine. Part 2, chapter 2, which dives directly into the major authors’ works, is the only exception to this pattern. In part 1 Roche finds echoes of Lucretius's De rerum natura, book 2, in the themes of retreat from the world (whether spatial or mental) and pursuit of pleasure (necessarily physical) found in the corpus. Part 2, devoted to corporality, claims in chapter 1 that a Lucretian defense of adventitious knowledge undergirds the prevalent plot device of misreading physical evidence. For Roche, these errors should be understood in terms of applying faulty opinions (usually love or fear) to otherwise infallible sensory perceptions. Against the backdrop of the Descartes-Gassendi epistemological debate, chapter 2 explores explicitly anti-Cartesian stances in Les Précieuses ridicules, Les femmes savants, and several fables.
The spiritual ills of love and fear of death occupy part 3. La Mothe Le Vayer tempers Lucretius's advocacy for free pursuit of carnal pleasure and disregard of marriage. La Fontaine is able to make light of marital infidelity and spousal jealousy by echoing the more moderate injunction to enjoy the sexual privileges of matrimony without attaching illusory notions such as honor and virtue to a state that could never be monogamous. Molière's engagement with the Lucretian ideal is more nuanced—even ambiguous—yet decidedly present. Regarding fear of death, the seventeenth-century authors confront more than they adopt a purely Epicurean indifference to the end of life. La Fontaine and Molière, in particular, opt for a strategy of diversion as more effective than philosophy in facing the grave. Part 4 documents how La Mothe Le Vayer, Molière, and La Fontaine imitate Lucretius's own defense strategies to combat accusations of atheism (considered a logical consequence of philosophical skepticism) and immorality (its supposed synonym). Part 5 finds Epicurean anti-providentialism throughout the corpus, noting that La Mothe Le Vayer, Molière, and La Fontaine all couch critiques of Christian theology in their treatment of Jupiter.
Original argumentation, insightful close readings, and fluid prose make this book an excellent read. The admirable audacity of Roche's project is also its primary difficulty. As what may once have been explicit references to Lucretius seep subtly into his readers’ texts, they sometimes become so diffuse as to be indistinguishable from ideas gleaned from other sources. Roche certainly proves the presence and compatibility of many Lucretian ideas in his seventeenth-century readers. His tracing of their provenance is quite convincing, if necessarily inconclusive in some instances.
