The Clovisiade of Jean-Marie Gabriel Darrodes de Lillebonne 

Background

By the 1800s, zeal for Christian epics had burned up all its fuel: though long narrative poems were still quite popular (as seen, in English, in Southey, Scott, Tennyson, Longfellow, etc.), the epic style was now outré.  Even by the 1700s, few were hits, besides Klopstock's Der Messias (1748-1773).  The quest to craft a Christian epic was quixotic in the 1800s: even more delusional was the hope that readers would pay for it.

Yet such material considerations did not stop Jean-Marie-Gabriel d'Arodes de Lillebonne (1781-1838).  He wrote a few shorter poetic works—some Diverse Little Works (1805), and a book of Odes to the Emperor Napoleon (1806)—but his chief-work was the The Clovisiade, or, The Triumph of Christianity in France.  It was intended as a monumental work of 24 cantos, matching the Iliad or the Odyssey (though still short of Nonnos of Panopolis' 48-canto Dionysiaca); to support such an endeavour, Darrodes de Lillebonne decided to publish it serially, not in a periodical, as was common at the time, but as a subscription.  A franc a month for a single canto, or half that for someone who promised to pay for the whole work: not too steep a price, equivalent to about 20¢ a month, at the time.  And so Darrodes de Lillebonne found subscribers, for a time, but they eventually trickled away, and only 18 cantos (chants) were ever completed.

(Here I should note that, perhaps as a means of advertisement, every morning Darrodes de Lillebonne would walk two kilometers to Mass in his hometown, Mézin, where he would "give the public the spectacle of an ecstatic attitude.  The rest of his days were invariably consecrated to poetry."  So reports Jules Andrieu.) 

 

Text and History

As a subscription work, each installment (livraison) was mailed to subscribers, with various groups of livraisons later gathered into volumes.  The three volumes listed below constitute one way to read the entire poem:

 

Chants I-XII: Darode de Lilebonne, La Clovisiade ou le Triomphe du Christianisme en France: Poëme Héroïque, Tome Premier (Paris: Imprimerie Ecclèsiastique de Béthune, 1826) 

Chants XIII-XV: Darodes de Lillebonne, La Clovisiade: Poëme Épique, Deuxième Édition, Tome Second (8th Livraison) (Paris: Imprimerie de Béthune, 1830)

Chants XVI-XVIII: Darodes Lilebonne, La Clovisiade: Poëme Épique, Deuxième Édition, Tome Second (9th Livraison) (Paris: Imprimerie de Béthune, 1830) 

 

Darrodes de Lillebonne was slightly unusual in drawing on his country's history, rather than the Scriptures, for the source material of the Christian epic, though not completely new: there were epics about recent history (Juan Latino's Austrias Carmen (1572), about the Battle of Lepanto), or older history (Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (1581), about the First Crusade).  There was even an older Clovisiade, by Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin (1596-1676).  It was poorly received: an Encyclopedia of the 19th Century says of it, "This poem resembles all those which were attempted in that epoch, and, save a very small number of morsels, it merited the complete oblivion into which it has fallen."

As Boileau skewered Saint-Sorlin's Clovisiade, so critics treated Darrodes de Lillebonne's poorly as well. On the whole, it was treated not even with hate, but simply with indifference: Christian Jensen says that it "resembles more a manual of Christian doctrine than an epic poem"; a reviewer in the journal The Friend of Religion and the King said that its poetry "has more pomp than grace and elegance: it is also not exempt from monotony."  

 

Invocations

 The "ecstatic attitude" mentioned above can be seen even in the poem's prose introduction, an invocation to Mary, the Mother of God, she "whose ravishing and marvelous smile dissipates the somber clouds and spreads calm and serenity in the heavens."  There, he pleads

In favor of the purity of my intentions, bless this poem which I consecrate to you; smile on my fierce accents, encourage my noble efforts, spread over my writings that indefinable charm which nothing resists.  May my fictions, far from injuring truth, serve to raise its splendor again!  May the ardent pantings of divine love in it triumph over the lascivious ardors of profane love!  May they seize, transport the soul of the reader, warm, embrace the coldest hearts, touch, tenderize the hardest, and force the impious to abandon his oblique and torturous ways!  May justice and innocence, those lovable daughters of the heavens, draw from it new forces against their proud enemies! may they begin, in it, to combat the ruses of the ancient serpent of that unseizable Proteus, who, each day, under the form of a frisky child, presents to us, smiling and under mats of flowers, the beverage of death in the cup of lust, and, sometimes growing large in our eyes, raises, an appalling colossus, his head into the clouds, embraces, in his furor, the columns of the world, and threatens, in shaking it, to bury us under its debris!

 
    May virtue, in my verses, take up again the sweet scepter of her power, her divine attractions, her irresistible ascendance! may all cede to her vanquishing charms, to her sovereign influence!  May unmasked vice fall and disappear before her like the lie before the truth, the night before the star of day! may he purge the air of his pestilent breath! may he re-enter, forever, into the abysses of dark chaos! may he, letting the earth breathe again, go to hide, in the foundation of hell, his horrible and shadowy deformity!

    Harken, O divine Mary, to the vows of your faithful servant! and may my homage, like an incense of agreeable odor, rise, under your eyes, to the throne of your divine Son, and be lost within the rays of His infinite glory!

And though the author claims, in his foreword, that his "sole and unique goal" is to aid morality and religion and to contribute "to the greater glory of God," he also has an unabashedly jingoistic aim.  For he has a second invocation, after the one to Mary, this time "To Catholic and Warrior France," that "first-born of the immortal Spouse, without wrinkle and without spot."  To his country, he declares,

Savage lion, couched near the cradle of the Monarchy, you see it grow, rise up, and overshadow, with its scepter, your majestic head; you lived, for a long time, happy under this tutelary shadow.  But since, having been led astray over the debris of the altar and of the throne by blind and ferocious guides, your wrath is enkindled like a rapid fire, you have devoured them, and their trace has disappeared from the earth!  In the face of your desolate beaches, your long roars have been heard from North to South, and from the barriers of the day unto the gates of the East.  You have dashed towards your prey, the nations have trembled, and kings have paled upon their thrones!  Having come back under the rule of your ancient mothers, you now caress the miraculous child who will lead you! he smiles upon you and rejoices in the flows of your thick mane.  However, overwhelmed by the weight of your glory, you rest in the shadow of your trophies, proud lion!  Who will dare to wake you? will it be your enemies?  They tremble before you!  Will it be the torches of Discord, the revolutionary torches?  You despise them!  Who will dare, then, to interrupt your sleep?  The nine muses, whose enchanting voice enchains the waking upon a bed of roses, the songs of the ancient Bard, the hymns of Tyrteaus and the canticles of Sion.

 

Chant I

So, having invoked Mary and France, he begins in a typical epic fashion:

I sing the benefit which universe attests,
The combats of a hero, his heavenly change,
That power by which dear splendor of our fathers
Dissipated prestige and error of false gods,
And who, eclipsing the power of Lucifer,
United France to Heaven and Heaven to France.

(I should note that, despite the title of his work and its opening, the author's foreword clarifies that the true subject of his poem will be Queen Clotilde, since it is through her that Clovis was converted—and, through Clovis, France.) 

After Clovis leads the Gauls against the Romans, putting them to flight, he falls from God, and Satan swoops in to take advantage, in order to permanently ensnare Clovis in error.

The French sun weeps.  The shadowy sojourn 
Threatens to obscure the light of day.

So Satan gives a rousing speech to his soldiers:

Banish, henceforth, your terror profound;
Let us not cease to brave the world’s fierce tyrant.
Man, you see, is worthy of his ills:
Become the vilest of all the animals,
He wants to bind his front with royal crown
And pretend to glory, even to wisdom.
He cherishes the lie and hates the truth;
Let us, today, profit from his perversity.

Satan knows that Clotilde keeps the faith and will endeavor to convert her husband, so the demon and his pagan priests must keep on guard against her.  Thus one of these priests twists his words to make a French Catholic appeal into a Frankish pagan one:

Who despises the gods rebels against his king:
The scepter has its base upon the law divine.
The censer affirms, the crown consecrates:
Who strikes down the altar, destroys the throne.

But if the pagans have Satan on their side, Clotilde has God, "the master of thunder," she whose "soul is in the heavens, her body upon earth."  And she is aided by the hermit Vast, to whom God declares,

Suspended over hell’s abyssal chasm,
Gaul resists Me; let us break its chains.

Chant I ends with the archangel Gabriel carrying this hermit out of his forest retreat to meet Clovis, that he might "dare to instruct [his] king," so that "a single word of [his] mouth / might soften the heart of that ferocious lion."

I will admit that this is, so far, as much as I have read, and it is certainly no lost masterpiece.  French poetry in general (at least, before the Romantics and Symbolists) is often described as simply "prose set in rhyme"; Darrodes de Lillebonne's attempt at an epic tone might raise his poetry slightly, but he is no Milton.  Perhaps someday I will read more and be able to provide further English documentation of this poem (of which there is little, if any).  But now, at least, the tongue that France conquered can speak a bit about he who conquered France for God.

 

Background Sources:

Christian A.E. Jensen, L’Évolution du Romantisme: L’Année 1826 (Paris/Genève, 1959; reprinted Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1986), 210.

Encyclopédie du Dix-Neuvième Siècle, 2nd ed, Tome X (Paris: Bureau de l’Encyclopédie du XIXe Siècle, 1858), 65-66.  

L’Ami de la Religion et Du Roi, Journal Ecclésiastique, Politique et Littéraire, Tome XLIX (Paris: Adr. Le Clere et compagnie, 1826), 303-304.

Jules Andrieu, Bibliographie Générale de L’Agenais…, Tome Premier (Paris: Alphonse Picard / Agen: J. Michel & Medan, 1886), 213.

 

Text and Translation ©2025 Brandon P. Otto.  Licensed via CC BY-NC.  Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the translator.