The aim of this article is to examine handbooks of rhetoric produced for the purpose of the teaching and training of French preachers in the second half of the seventeenth century - as of today such handbooks have rarely been studied by the scholars. I will endeavour to assess their role in a history of rhetoric considered less as a theory or a pedagogy than as an art of producing oral speeches. After having explained the circumstances of their production, I will study their attempt to modernize the principles and techniques inherited from classical treatises on a specific topic, namely the usage of passions, when it comes to talking from the pulpit.