Abstract

Reviews L art de parler: Anthologie de manuels d'éloquence, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, ed., Paris, Klincksieck, 2003. xxi+362 pp. In his introduction, Salazar points with envy to the United States for the liveliness of our rhetorical tradition and practice compared with France, especially the continuous place of rhetoric in higher education. Looking with corresponding envy from this side of the Atlantic, one advantage I see in this anthology over comparable American anthologies: greater apparent continu­ ity. Greece and Rome—I was glad to see an excerpt from Tacitus, an unjustly neglected source for the history of rhetoric—lead seamlessly into the Middle Ages; Erasmus and Calvin lead to French renaissance authors such as Ramus and Amyot. We see rhetoric employed in the education of princes (Amyot, la Motte le Vayer), and diplomacy (Lancelot). The rhetoric of the academy (Patru), of lawyers (Dubois de Bretteville), of literary studies (Rollin), of bu­ reaucratic reports (Andrieux), and even how bourgeois mothers should talk and their children listen (Mme. Dufrenoy) all have their place. The continuity of French rhetoric is also nicely emphasized by selections from the rhetoric of preaching not only from medieval and renaissance authors but writers up to the 20th century (Augustine, de Basevorn, Erasmus, Calvin, Maury, Bouchage, Morice). The diversity of places where rhetoric is exercised leads to interesting insights and surprises. For example, the short excerpt from Lancelot's Le Parfait Amassadeur is entitled, "one cannot be a good ambassador without being a good orator," and draws interesting connections between, as Salazar puts it, the art of speaking and the art of speaking in the name of someone. As he says in his introduction, rhetoric from the time of Gorgias has connected the art of speaking with the art of speaking in the name of someone. We only get three pages of Lancelot (1642), and that is a translation of a work of Zuniga (1620), but the treatment of the ambassador as the complete orator is enough to raise stimulating questions about personification, representation, and disguise. It would be worth connecting this handbook for speaking in the name of someone with current rhetorical problems of how to be a representative and how to be an advocate. Similarly, the selection from Olivier Patrus' Discours de reception (1640) introduces the peculiarly French rhetorical genre of the academic oration. Intellectuals occupy a different place in French culture from their role in Rhetorica, Vol. XXII, Issue 4, pp. 401-407, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2004 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. 401 402 RHETORICA Anglophone culture, and proficiency in this genre should be part of the accounting of the difference. Unusually, this anthology does not neglect the last part of rhetoricaction or delivery—and so we see excerpts from texts on pronunciation and self-presentation. This is the first time I have ever found the art of delivery interesting. Instead of looking to politics, where rhetoric should flourish, Salazar wisely looks at where rhetoric has flourished, and produced a fascinating anthology. Some of the selections will be as unfamiliar to French readers as they are to this American one. (The editor reports that the selection from Basevorn is here translated into French for the first time.) This anthology is exciting reading not only for readers interested in learning about rhetoric in a distinct tradition, but for anyone interested in the diversity of appearances that rhetoric has taken over the ages. The theme of his introduction is, I think, at odds with this ecumenical approach to the selections themselves. Rhetoric, Salazar notes, had a demo­ cratic birth. He claims that the persuasive tradition and practical politics of the west are fused with rhetoric, eloquence, the art of speaking, the art of oratory (vii). "Democracy gives each citizen the right to defend himself, by speech, if he sees himself injured, but which imposes on others, between equal citizens, to judge the case....Speech replaces violence" (ix-x). Conse­ quently, Salazar argues, rhetoric is a phenomenon unique...