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HEGEL AND THE ARTS
Topics in Historical Philosophy

General Editors David Kolb

John McCumber

Associate Editor Anthony J. Steinbock

HEGEL AND
THE ARTS

Edited by Stephen Houlgate

Northwestern University Press

Evanston, Illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu

Copyright © 2007 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2007. All rights

reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN-13: 978-0-8101-2361-8 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-8101-2361-4 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8101-2362-5 (paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8101-2362-2 (paper)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available from the

Library of Congress.

o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
In memory of Salim Kemal (1948–1999)
 Contents

List of Abbreviations ix

Introduction: An Overview of Hegel’s Aesthetics xi

Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic Art 3

Terry Pinkard

Hegel’s Architecture 29
David Kolb

Hegel on the Beauty of Sculpture 56

Stephen Houlgate

Carnation and the Eccentricity of Painting 90

John Sallis

Hegel on Music 119

Richard Eldridge

Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy 146

Stephen Houlgate

Art and History: Hegel on the End, the Beginning, and the
Future of Art 179
Martin Donougho

Freedom from Nature? Post-Hegelian Reflections on the

End(s) of Art 216
J. M. Bernstein

What Was Abstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel) 244
Robert B. Pippin
Art, Religion, and the Modernity of Hegel 271
John Walker

The “Religion of Art” 296

Rüdiger Bubner
Hegel and German Romanticism 310
Judith Norman

Index 337

Contributors 351
 Abbreviations

The following abbreviations have been used in the essays in this collection.

A G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols.

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).
Ak G. W. F. Hegel, Ästhetik, ed. Friedrich Bassenge (West Berlin: Verlag das
europäische Buch, 1985).
AT T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
ILA G. W. F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosan-
quet (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993).
KA Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler
et al. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1958–).
LPR G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. P. C. Hodgson,
trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, 3 vols. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984–87).
P Yves-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).
PG G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. E. Moldenhauer and
K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970).
PK G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst (1826), ed. A. Gethmann-Siefert,
J. I. Kwon and K. Berr (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004).
PKA G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst oder Ästhetik (1826), ed. A. Gethmann-
Siefert and B. Collenberg-Plotnikov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004).
PR G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition:
The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1988).
PRS G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, ed. E. Molden-
hauer and K. M. Michel, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1969).
PS G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977).

ix
x
ABBREVIATIONS

VA G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, ed. E. Moldenhauer and

K. M. Michel, 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970).
VAB G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesung über Ästhetik. Berlin 1820/21, ed. H. Schneider
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995).
VPK G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst (1823), ed.
A. Gethmann-Siefert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2003).
VPR G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, ed.
W. Jaeschke, 3 parts in 4 vols. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983–85).
W Arthur C. Danto, The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of
Taste (Amsterdam: G&B Arts International, 1998).
Werke G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M.
Michel, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–70).
 Introduction: An Overview of Hegel’s Aesthetics
Stephen Houlgate

In the draft introduction to his Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno credits

both Kant and Hegel with producing “the most powerful aesthetics.” 1 Few
would deny that Kant is an aesthetic theorist of enormous importance.
Hegel’s contribution to aesthetics, however, is less widely acknowledged
and appreciated. Some will be familiar with Hegel’s theory of tragedy and
his (supposed) doctrine of the “end of art,” but many philosophers and
writers on art pay little or no attention to his lectures on aesthetics. The
aim of this collection of essays—all but one of which have been written
specially for this volume—is to raise the profile of Hegel’s aesthetic theory
by showing in detail precisely why that theory is, in Adorno’s word, so
“powerful.” The contributors to this volume do not endorse every aspect
of Hegel’s position. Together, however, they demonstrate that Hegel’s lec-
tures on aesthetics constitute one of the richest reservoirs of ideas about
the arts, their history, and their future that we possess.2
Hegel’s reflections on art form part of that extraordinary tradition
of German aesthetic thought that stretches from Baumgarten’s Aesthetica,
published in the 1750s, through Winckelmann, Lessing, Kant, Schiller,
Hölderlin, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and on—after Hegel’s death in
1831—to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Adorno. Hegel read widely
in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century segment of this tradition
(ignoring only Schopenhauer), and he was particularly influenced by
Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) and Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Edu-
cation of Man, which he read on their publication in 1795.
Hegel’s own earliest extended discussion of an aesthetic topic is to
be found in an essay on “a few characteristic differences” between ancient
and modern poets, penned in 1788 when he was not quite eighteen.3 In
1796, in the wake of reading Schiller’s letters on aesthetic education, he
proceeded to give pride of place to aesthetic sensibility in an exuberant
text entitled “Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism.” In this
text Hegel—assuming that he is indeed the author, rather than Schelling
or Hölderlin—argues boldly that “the highest act of reason . . . is an aes-
thetic act” and that consequently “the philosopher must possess just as

xi
xii
INTRODUCTION

much aesthetic power as the poet.”4 Hegel’s groundbreaking Phenomenol-

ogy of Spirit (1807) does not give quite such prominence to aesthetic sen-
sibility or power, but it does contain a remarkable account of what he calls
the “religion of art” (Kunst-Religion) that was embraced in particular by
the Greeks.5 The differences between art, religion, and philosophy are
discussed in the three editions of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sci-
ences (1817, 1827, and 1830).6 The most extensive analysis of art and aes-
thetic self-consciousness is provided, however, in the lectures that Hegel
gave on aesthetics first at Heidelberg (in 1817 and 1818) and then in
Berlin (in 1820–21, 1823, 1826, and 1828–29).7 After Hegel’s death these
lectures were edited by his student, H. G. Hotho, into the text known to-
day as Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik and translated into English as Aesthetics:
Lectures on Fine Art.8 Recently, separate transcripts of Hegel’s lectures from
1820–21, 1823, and 1826 have also been published, allowing us to see for
the first time how his thoughts on art and aesthetics developed during his
years in Berlin.9
Hegel’s lectures (and the Encyclopaedia) locate aesthetics within a
comprehensive philosophical system that also includes logic, the philos-
ophy of nature, the philosophies of right and history, and the philosophy
of religion. In the eyes of some commentators, this inevitably leads Hegel
to distort the character of art and aesthetic experience because he has to
force them into the straitjacket of his a priori systematic conception of
being and of human history. “In the end,” writes Beat Wyss, “the facts are
all ordered according to the immanent necessities of logic,” so that “one
always sees only what one wants to see.”10 Similarly, Adorno—who, as we
have seen, otherwise thought highly of Hegel’s aesthetics—intimates that
Hegel was guilty of “the unwavering asceticism of conceptualization,
doggedly refusing to allow itself to be irritated by facts.” Indeed, Adorno
maintains that both “Hegel and Kant . . . were able to write major aesthet-
ics without understanding anything about art” (that is, anything about
individual works of art).11 Whether Kant understood much about art, I
leave for others to judge. It is true that the Critique of Judgment contains
very few references to concrete works of art; but then, as Kai Hammer-
meister notes, for Kant “most aesthetic judgments are not about art, but
nature.”12 Adorno’s criticism of Hegel is, however, clearly unjust. Hegel in
fact had an extensive and intimate knowledge of many of the greatest
works of art in the Western tradition.
Hegel knew the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shake-
speare, Goethe, and Schiller especially well and had very likely read
Shakespeare’s Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet in English.13 He visited
the opera in Berlin regularly and particularly loved Mozart’s Magic Flute
and the operas of Gluck. In Vienna in 1824 he saw Rossini’s Barber of Seville,
 xiii
INTRODUCTION

and he attended both performances of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Berlin

in March 1829 as an honored guest (together with Schleiermacher and
Heine) of Felix Mendelssohn, who had revived the work.14 He never vis-
ited Greece or Italy but he traveled to Munich, Dresden, Cologne, and
the Low Countries, as well as to Vienna and Paris, and was able to see at
first hand many of the greatest paintings in the world, including Raphael’s
Sistine Madonna and Correggio’s Holy Night (in Dresden), Stephan Loch-
ner’s Dombild (in Cologne), the central panel of the van Eyck altarpiece
(in Ghent), Rembrandt’s Night Watch (in Amsterdam), and “famous items
by the noblest masters one has seen a hundred times in copper engrav-
ings: Raphael, Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian” (in Paris).15 One
may sometimes wish to take issue with Hegel’s interpretation of individual
works, but in most cases his judgments are clearly based not on the “un-
wavering asceticism of conceptualization” but on detailed familiarity with
the works concerned.
It is true, however, that Hegel’s insights into individual works are
woven into a systematic account of the nature of art and of beauty. This
account is undoubtedly a priori. Yet it does not, in my view, systematically
distort Hegel’s view of art or of artworks. On the contrary, it is an account
of exemplary subtlety and intelligence that sheds remarkable light on the
phenomenon of art and allows Hegel to develop sophisticated and illu-
minating interpretations of some of the most significant artworks in his-
tory (including, perhaps most famously, Sophocles’ Antigone).

Art and Beauty

Hegel’s philosophical analysis of art and beauty is itself embedded in an

ontological account of the nature of being. Hegel understands being to be
the process of becoming conscious of itself and thereby becoming “spirit”
or Geist. Being achieves such self-consciousness in human beings. Human
beings are thus not just an accident of evolution: their existence is made
necessary by the very nature of being itself—by being’s inherent drive
toward self-consciousness. Note that, for Hegel, there is no cosmic con-
sciousness or “world spirit” apart from or outside of human existence. It
is in human beings alone (and in other finite, self-conscious beings that
may exist on other planets) that being attains consciousness of itself. We
are being-that-has-become-spiritual.
History, according to Hegel, is simply the process whereby human-
ity extends, deepens, and refines its consciousness of being and of itself
and in the process remodels its social and political world:
xiv
INTRODUCTION

All revolutions, in the sciences no less than in world history, originate

solely from the fact that Spirit, in order to understand and comprehend
itself with a view to possessing itself, has changed its categories, compre-
hending itself more truly, more deeply, more intimately, and more in
unity with itself.16

This process of historical development is structured by the dialectical ra-

tionality inherent in being itself—which Hegel calls the “Idea”—and so is
not under the control of human beings. At the same time that rationality
is actually set in motion by, and works through, human actions: it is not
a wholly separate and independent power overseeing and directing the
course of history. For Hegel, therefore, history is the sphere in which
human beings live and act in certain ways, but through their individual and
communal actions unintentionally deepen humanity’s understanding of
itself in a progressive, rational, dialectical manner.
As humanity’s understanding of itself progresses in history, we come
to appreciate more fully not only the character of the “Idea” which works
through our actions but also the fact that our vocation as human beings is
ultimately to be free. Furthermore, we learn what is required for us to be
fully free, self-conscious beings, and in so doing develop a substantial
interest in certain forms of political, social, economic, familial, and per-
sonal life that are essential to freedom. In the modern period, for ex-
ample, we realize that freedom makes necessary life in a political state in
which there is not only the right to own and exchange property and to ex-
ercise freedom of conscience and choice of occupation, but also a shared
trust that public institutions actually secure these rights.
It is important to note that, for Hegel, the purpose of human life is
both to be free in our various social, political, and familial practices and
to deepen our consciousness and understanding of ourselves and the world
we inhabit. This understanding is articulated in natural science and in
our everyday conceptions. It finds its fullest expression, however, in the
three forms of what Hegel calls “absolute spirit.” The form of absolute
spirit that presents our understanding of the truth in the clearest and
most adequate manner is philosophy (by which Hegel means speculative,
dialectical philosophy as he conceives it). Philosophy presents the truth
in dialectical concepts; religion, by contrast, is the form of absolute spirit
in which we understand the truth through feeling, faith, and imaginative
representations. Religion thus pictures as “God” what philosophy con-
ceives as the rational Idea inherent in being itself. The most adequate reli-
gious understanding of the truth, Hegel argues, is to be found in Chris-
tianity, because in the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit
 xv
INTRODUCTION

Christianity explicitly recognizes that God’s work in history is inseparable

from the actions of humanity.
It is sometimes thought that Hegel’s evident privileging of philoso-
phy over religion renders religion itself redundant. After all, if philos-
ophy gives us the truth in its clearest articulation, what need have we of
the less lucid images and stories of religion? Hegel, however, thought that
human beings could not live by concepts alone: as well as understanding
the truth through concepts, they also have to understand it through feel-
ing, imagination, and faith. Accordingly, Hegel felt no embarrassment in
acknowledging himself to be a Lutheran.17 Moreover, he maintained that
for most people philosophy actually plays little if any role in their lives and
religious faith is the primary locus of their understanding of the truth: “It
is in terms of religion that a people [Volk] defines what it considers to be
true.” Religion is thus of supreme importance, in Hegel’s view, and its dis-
appearance from the life of the state would be highly damaging.18
According to Hegel, however, we must not only understand the
truth in concepts and in faith; we must also see (or hear) it given sensuous
expression in stone, wood, colored surfaces, sounds, or words. This is be-
cause we are multilayered, concrete beings who need to relate to the truth
through our eyes and ears as much as through feeling and understanding
(VA 1:135/A 1:97–98). The sensuous expression of the “divine” Idea at
work in the world and of human freedom is beauty. Beauty, for Hegel, is
thus not just that which appeals to our taste or is formally harmonious. It
is “the sensuous appearance [Scheinen] of the Idea” (VA 1:151/A 1:111) or,
as Schiller puts it, “freedom in appearance.”19 Beauty, in other words, is “a
specific way of expressing and representing the true” (VA 1:127/A 1:91).
If beauty is truly to be the expression of human freedom, however,
it must itself be freely created by human beings rather than simply found
in nature. The objects that are specifically created by human beings in
order to bring beauty before their minds are works of art. Art, for Hegel,
is thus the third form of absolute spirit in which we become conscious of
the true character of God and humanity.
Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics explore the nature of art, the different
forms of aesthetic expression, and the distinctive character of the indi-
vidual arts. It should be noted, however, that Hegel does not take as his
starting point the various practices of fashioning stone and wood into sig-
nificant shapes, applying colors to a surface, or arranging words into
poems. He does not start with the simple activity of making works of art and
then try to work out from this what the possibilities of each art are. Hegel
begins from the idea of beauty (VA 1:39/A 1:21–22). He argues that human
beings need beauty because, as free, self-conscious, but also sensuous be-
xvi
INTRODUCTION

ings, they need to see and hear truth and freedom given concrete sensu-
ous expression; and he contends that they need art because they need to
encounter beauty that has itself been freely created by human beings.
This is not to say that art necessarily originated in some primordial desire
for beauty pulsating within primitive mankind. It is to insist, however, that
whatever its origin may have been and whatever other uses it may be put
to, art’s true purpose is to grant us the occasion to contemplate, dwell
with, and mold our minds to the contours of beauty. (Note, by the way,
that although beautiful art addresses the senses, specifically the eyes and
the ears, it does not address the senses alone. It speaks to the mind through
the senses by showing the mind its own freedom in a sensuous form
[VA 1:57/A 1:35].)
In an age when many artists regard beauty as peripheral and prefer
to concern themselves with aesthetic innovation, the unfettered explo-
ration of their chosen medium, or simply breaking taboos, Hegel’s beauty-
centered aesthetics might well seem hopelessly old-fashioned.20 It is im-
portant to recognize, however, that Hegel gives pride of place to beauty
not out of any personal conservatism, but because he regards beauty as
essential to a life lived in the full and multidimensional consciousness of
human freedom. Art and beauty are not luxuries for Hegel, but necessi-
ties. Hegel does not deny that art can do many other things apart from
present us with beauty. He recognizes that art can be decorative and en-
tertaining, that it can promote aims that are principally moral and politi-
cal rather than aesthetic, and that it can serve to refine our wilder emo-
tions (VA 1:20, 72–76/A 1:7, 47–50). It can also explore the possibilities of
the artistic medium itself or simply display the skill of the artist (VA 2:227–
28/A 1:599). If, however, besides doing these things art fails to present us
with beauty, it deprives us not just of some superfluous adornment to our
lives but of an indispensable way of bringing our own freedom and vital-
ity into view.
In the first half of his Critique of Judgment, Kant is primarily con-
cerned with the character of aesthetic judgment. He argues that we judge
an object to be beautiful when it stimulates the free play of our under-
standing and imagination. This free play leads to no definite cognition of
the object but is the source of a feeling of pleasure in the subject. “With-
out relation to the feeling of the subject,” Kant writes, “beauty is nothing
by itself.”21 Beauty is not, therefore, an independent property of the ob-
ject. Hegel, by contrast, thinks that beauty is a property of objects—in par-
ticular, of works of art—and he is interested in the objective character of
such beauty (VA 1:67/A 1:44).
It has been said that Hegel’s aesthetic theory marks a “turn from a
formal aesthetics to one of content.”22 This is true insofar as Hegel claims
 xvii
INTRODUCTION

that beauty requires the content of art to be the “divine” (whether envis-
aged in the form of the Greek gods or of Christ), to be human freedom,
liveliness, and spirit, or to be aspects of nature, such as landscapes and
animals, in which we see something of our own freedom and vitality re-
flected. Beauty, however, is not just a matter of content: it is the appropri-
ate content expressed in the appropriate sensuous form. Hegel is thus
every bit as engaged as the aesthetic formalist by the formal features of an
artwork, especially in the more obviously “formal” arts of architecture and
music but also in sculpture, painting, and poetry. (Hence his interest in
the shape of the most beautiful profile in sculpture or in the beauty cre-
ated by the play of colors in painting.)23
The important thing, for Hegel, is that beauty is not just in the eye
(or taste or judgment) of the beholder, but in the object itself—in its own
content and form. This means that our taste need not always coincide with
objective beauty. Many beautiful works of art may speak to us directly. We
may need to learn to appreciate others, however, by discovering more
about the historical context in which they were produced (VA 1:30/
A 1:14). In the case of the sculptures of fifth-century Greece—works that
for Hegel are objectively the most beautiful and “ideal”—some in moder-
nity may find it impossible to take unalloyed delight in their beauty be-
cause they lack the inner depth of character and emotion that we have
come to expect of a work of art.24 Of course, if taste and beauty can diverge
in this way, it is possible that human beings could lose the taste for beauty
altogether (as they could lose interest in religion). But to do so, if we are
to believe Hegel, would be like losing our taste for the very food that sus-
tains and nourishes us. It would not constitute any “liberation” or “eman-
cipation” of art or of human beings.

Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic Art

Hegel notes that not every conception of the divine and the human is ca-
pable of giving rise to beauty. This is because only certain conceptions of
the divine and the human can be given clear sensuous expression in art.
To be capable of such expression, Hegel argues, divine reason and human
freedom must themselves be conceived as taking the shape of concrete,
embodied individuality (VA 1:104/A 1:73). If the divine is conceived too ab-
stractly as “simply one, the supreme being as such” (as Hegel thinks occurs
in Judaism and Islam [VA 1:101/A 1:70]), art will not be able to present it
in the form of visible individuals and thereby bring it directly before our
eyes and minds. Art will thus be “sublime” (erhaben) rather than beautiful,
xviii
INTRODUCTION

since it will point beyond itself to a God who remains invisible: “The inner
does not appear in it but so transcends it that nothing comes into the
representation except as this transcendence and transcending” (VA 1:479/
A 1:372).
Hegel includes sublime art under the general category of “symbolic”
art. The quintessential symbolic art, he tells us, was created by the ancient
Egyptians. Unlike the Jews, the Egyptians conceived of the divine as dif-
ferentiated into individual gods. Yet these gods were shadowy figures as-
sociated with death and mystery and so remained elusive. Consequently,
for the Egyptians, “the individual shape, as this individual animal, or this
human personification, or event, or action, cannot bring before contem-
plation an immediate adequate existence of the Absolute” (VA 1:451/
A 1:349). The visible images of the gods in Egyptian art thus do no more
than symbolize gods who can never come fully into view. Since such sym-
bolic art is not the clear sensuous manifestation of the divine, it lacks gen-
uine beauty just as sublime art does.
Hegel’s aesthetic theory will no doubt be regarded by many as nar-
rowly “Eurocentric,” since it clearly gives pride of place to the art and
poetry of Greece, Italy, England, the Netherlands, and Germany. In fact,
however, Hegel was one of the first to acknowledge and appreciate the art
of non-European cultures, such as India and Egypt. He draws special
attention to the fact that the “abandonment and distortion of natural for-
mations” found in such art stems not from “unintentional lack of techni-
cal skill or practice, but intentional alteration which proceeds from and is
demanded by what is in the artist’s mind” (VA 1:106/A 1:74). Neverthe-
less, Hegel argues that symbolic art clearly falls short of objective beauty.
This, in his view, is because the underlying conception of the divine is still
too indeterminate or abstract: the divine is not understood to be fully
incarnated in the concrete gestures, expressions, and actions of individu-
als. “The Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians,” he argues, “in their artistic
shapes, images of gods, and idols, never get beyond formlessness or a bad
and untrue definiteness of form.” He continues: “They could not master
true beauty because their mythological ideas, the content and thought of
their works of art, were still indeterminate, or determined badly, and so
did not consist of the content which is absolute in itself” (VA 1:105/A 1:74).
Hegel’s aesthetic objection to symbolic art is thus based on a more funda-
mental religious objection.
Hegel goes on to note that “works of art are all the more excellent
in expressing true beauty, the deeper is the inner truth of their content
and thought.” That deeper truth, he claims, is first to be found in the
religion and art of the ancient Greeks. The Greek gods, for Hegel, are
neither abstract nor mysterious and elusive, but are concrete, self-
 xix
INTRODUCTION

determining individuals whose multifaceted freedom and vitality are fully

embodied in gesture and action. These gods can thus be brought fully
into view in art, above all in sculpture. Human freedom is also conceived
by the Greeks as the freedom of embodied action and finds direct ex-
pression in both sculpture and poetry (epic as well as dramatic). Unlike
symbolic art, therefore, Greek art at its best is able to render divine and
human freedom fully visible to the eye and the mind. And since it is the
unclouded sensuous manifestation of freedom, such art is objectively
beautiful. Indeed, Greek art, in Hegel’s view, is “the consummation of the
realm of beauty”: “nothing can be or become more beautiful” (VA 2:127–
28/A 1:517).
The beauty of Greek or “classical” art does not lie purely in the fact
that it is pleasing to the eye or ear. It resides in the fact that the sensuous
material—the stone or poetic language—is thoroughly imbued with, and
animated by, divine or human freedom. Greek beauty, in other words, con-
sists in the perfect fusion of the sensuous and the spiritual. Hegel notes
that, whether the freedom expressed is that of the gods or of human
beings, in art it must be given the form of the free human body and of free
human action. This is because it is only in the posture and action of human
beings that free “spirit” becomes visible: “Insofar as art’s task is to bring the
spiritual before our eyes in a sensuous manner, it must proceed to this an-
thropomorphism [Vermenschlichung], since spirit appears sensuously in a
satisfying way only in its body” (VA 1:110/A 1:78). Note that the task of
beautiful art in Greece is not simply to imitate or accurately represent the
human body (or any other aspect of nature) in all its mundane detail. Such
art presents images of human beings because its task is to render concrete
freedom visible. Since this, and not simple naturalism, is the aim of Greek
art, it idealizes the body. Greek art, in Hegel’s view, is thus paradoxical: for
it shows us our own true freedom in the idealized images and shapes of art.
It is clear that such art cannot be appreciated by the literal-minded.
Greek art achieves the purest beauty, or the “Ideal,” because the
Greek conception of divinity and human freedom as embodied in con-
crete, living individuals is perfectly suited to aesthetic expression. Indeed,
Hegel claims that Greek religion needs art like no other religion. This is
because it was Greek artists and poets, such as Homer, who actually “gave
the nation a definite idea of the activity, life, and work of the Divine, or,
in other words, the definite content of religion.” It was in art that the in-
choate religious ideas fermenting within the Greeks were rendered prop-
erly determinate. Poets and artists were thus for the Greeks the effective
“creators of their gods” (VA 1:141/A 1:102).
Beauty, for Hegel, is an aesthetic phenomenon, not a moral or reli-
gious one. Nonetheless, the most beautiful art, in his view, was produced
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INTRODUCTION

when art was the servant of religion and mythology. Such art was not
merely decorative or entertaining but gave expression to “the Divine, the
deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of
the spirit” (VA 1:21/A 1:7). In so doing it fulfilled what Hegel regarded as
the highest vocation of which art is capable: for art cannot be any more im-
portant in our lives than when it brings directly before our minds the reli-
gious (and associated ethical) principles and values that we hold most dear.
In contrast to Greek polytheism, Christianity conceives of the divine
as pure “spirit,” as the single, invisible God whose Holy Spirit inwardly an-
imates and transforms believers and through such believers is at work in
history. This God, according to Hegel, does not need to be given aesthetic
expression in order to become determinate and intelligible for us, but can
be fully comprehended within religious feeling and faith (VA 1:112–13/
A 1:80). Christianity is thus independent of art in a way that Greek reli-
gion is not. Yet Christianity also holds that God’s love is incarnated and
made visible to believers in the life and death of Christ (and of the Virgin
Mary and the other saints). Christian love and spirituality thus remain
capable of being given sensuous, visible expression in art.
In Greek art—in particular, sculpture—spiritual freedom is wholly
immersed in and identical with visible bodily shape. In Christian or “ro-
mantic” art, by contrast, what must be presented in the sensuous medium
of stone, color, or language is a spirituality that has withdrawn from the
externality of the body into the profound inwardness of love. Romantic
beauty will thus take the form not just of idealized bodily shape as such
but of harmonious human form that is clearly suffused with inner feeling
and love. Such beauty is not pure beauty, but the “beauty of inwardness
[Schönheit der Innigkeit]” (VA 2:144/A 1:531). It is found supremely in the
painted images of the Virgin and Child and of Christ and his disciples
created by artists such as Jan van Eyck, Raphael, and Correggio. In the
“golden age of the later Middle Ages” (VA 1:24/A 1:10) and in the Re-
naissance, art thus continues to give expression to the divine and to “the
most comprehensive truths of the spirit,” and so continues to fulfill its
highest vocation.
With the Reformation the relation between art and religion alters
and the possibilities for art itself change. The defining characteristic of
the Reformation for Hegel is that divine love is understood to be fully
present only within faith. The implications for art are clear: for if God is
fully present only within the inwardness of faith, he cannot be regarded
as fully present in the human artifacts we see before us. As Hegel puts it,
“to the Lutherans truth is not a made object.”25 Through the Reformation,
“religious ideas were [thus] drawn away from their wrapping in the ele-
ment of sense and brought back to the inwardness of heart and thinking”
(VA 1:142/A 1:103). This does not mean that Protestantism abandons all
 xxi
INTRODUCTION

interest in visualizing the incarnate God: there is great Protestant reli-

gious art, for example by Rembrandt. But it does mean that art ceases to
play the prominent role in religious life that it played in the Middle Ages
and makes way more and more for the inner witness of faith itself. It also
means that to the extent that Protestant religious spirituality continues to
find aesthetic expression, it is less in the painted images of Christ and the
Virgin Mary and more in music, hymns, and lyric poems.26
As Protestant religious sensibility withdraws into the inwardness of
faith, therefore, it frees art from subservience to religion. In so doing it al-
lows art to become fully secular. There was, of course, secular art, especially
portrait painting, before the Reformation. But for Hegel, the Reforma-
tion gave a new and powerful impetus to secular art by acknowledging
the distinctive value of the worldly and the everyday. “To Protestantism
alone,” Hegel claims, “does it fall to get a sure footing in the prose of life,
to make it absolutely valid in itself independently of religious associations,
and to let it develop in unrestricted freedom” (VA 2:225–26/A 1:598).
Protestantism thus frees a people such as the Dutch to explore in their
paintings everyday scenes and objects which might otherwise have been
deemed unworthy of artistic portrayal. The most beautiful art had previ-
ously been religious art. In seventeenth-century Dutch painting, however,
we discover the subtle beauty of the everyday: for what we see given sen-
suous expression in their delightful pictures of bourgeois domestic life
and of peasant merrymaking is the profound cheerfulness, vitality, and
freedom of ordinary people. Such robust, down-to-earth freedom is, of
course, combined with grander, more heroic energy and freedom in the
plays of Shakespeare.
With Protestantism, in Hegel’s view, art gains its autonomy from re-
ligion. Its distinctive vocation thus ceases to be that of rendering the di-
vine visible. Art is no longer the space in which “the Divine, the deepest in-
terests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit” find
their adequate expression; those interests and truths are now fully articu-
lated in religion (and philosophy) alone. In being emancipated, there-
fore, art loses its ability to fulfill its own highest calling. As Hegel puts it,
“Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the
past” because it “no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs
which earlier ages and nations sought in it” (VA 1:24–25/A 1:10–11). This
means, for Hegel, that modern, post-Reformation art fails to provide us
with the same religious satisfaction that earlier ages were afforded by their
art. Nevertheless, such art is still able to carry out a task that comes close
to its highest vocation, because it is still able to create secular beauty by giv-
ing sensuous expression to concrete human freedom and life.
Hegel also contends that we (modern Protestants) no longer de-
rive—or at least should no longer derive—the same religious satisfaction
xxii
INTRODUCTION

from Greek and medieval art as did their original audiences: “No matter
how excellent we find the statues of the Greek gods, no matter how we see
God the Father, Christ, and Mary so estimably and perfectly portrayed, it
is no help: we bow the knee no longer [before these artistic portrayals]”
(VA 1:142/A 1:103). This does not prevent us from appreciating the beauty
of those older works of art: we can still see in them the magnificent and
moving sensuous expression of human freedom or of Christian love. We
(modern Protestants) do not, however, look upon those works with true
religious veneration and worship the divine in them, because we know
that they are “only” works of art and that divine freedom and love are truly
present in faith alone.

The So-Called End of Art

Hegel is sometimes said to have claimed that art comes to an end or “dies”
in the modern world.27 In fact, however, he never makes any such claim.
He declares that the modern world witnesses the end or “dissolution” of
the romantic form of art, and he notes that the epic has died out to be re-
placed by the novel and the short story.28 He also proclaims, as we have
just seen, that art for us is no longer able to fulfill its highest—that is,
aesthetico-religious—vocation. Nowhere, however, does he say that art as
such comes to an end. On the contrary, he insists that art remains a fun-
damental (though not the supreme) need in the modern world and will
always continue to do so. Indeed, he expresses the “hope that art will al-
ways rise higher and come to perfection” (VA 1:142/A 1:103). For Hegel,
then, art clearly had a future. This future—which in Hegel’s own time was
already becoming a reality—would be one in which artists are no longer
restricted to a particular style or content but can draw freely on all styles,
from the classical, romantic, or even symbolic art forms, to present what
engages their interest:

Bondage to a particular subject-matter and a mode of portrayal suitable

for this material alone are for artists today something past, and art there-
fore has become a free instrument which the artist can wield in propor-
tion to his subjective skill in relation to any material of whatever kind.
(VA 2:235/A 1:605)

The modern age, viewed through Hegel’s eyes, is thus one in

which artists can create works in a Neoclassical, a neo-Gothic (or “Pre-
Raphaelite”), or even—within limits—an “Orientalizing” style: Hegel
 xxiii
INTRODUCTION

remarks that Persian and Arab poetry afford an especially “brilliant

example . . . for the present . . . in the free bliss of their imagination”
(VA 2:241/A 1:610). The content of such art is equally unrestricted. It does
not have to be the idealized humanity beloved of the Greeks or the cheer-
ful domesticity of much seventeenth-century Dutch art. It encompasses,
rather, all “the depths and heights of the human heart as such, the uni-
versally human in its joys and sorrows, its strivings, deeds, and fates”—
what Hegel, following Goethe, calls Humanus.29
Yet with all its freedom, Hegel maintains that the art of the present
and the future should still aim to fulfill the proper task of art and bring
us into the presence of beauty: the artist may present any content in any
form “if only it does not contradict the formal law of being simply beau-
tiful [überhaupt schön] and capable of artistic treatment” (VA 2:235/
A 1:605). This means that art must continue to portray the freedom and
vitality of human beings. It should present whatever is “living [lebendig ] in
the human breast,” that is, “everything in which man as such is capable of
being at home [heimisch].”30 All that is to be avoided, therefore, is that in
which human beings cannot find themselves at home—that which seeks
to alienate or disorient the viewer—or that which in the human breast or
nature is itself dead—that which is abstract, sterile, or purely negative.
Hegel clearly did not regard the requirement that contemporary art
be beautiful as imposing any significant restriction on artists. Nor did he
appear to think that painters would feel inhibited by the requirement that
their exploration of abstract relations of color—their exploration of what
Hegel calls the “objective music” of colors—be integrated into the depic-
tion of concrete human freedom, as it was in the work of Jan van Eyck or
Hans Memling (VA 2:228/A 1:599–600). These requirements, however,
would be regarded by many artists after Hegel’s death as among the very
ones that need to be resisted most strongly in the name of artistic freedom.
The aim of philosophical aesthetics, for Hegel, is not to dictate to
artists a series of detailed “rules” that they should follow—especially not in
the modern age of aesthetic freedom. It is the task of such aesthetics, how-
ever, to understand the nature of art and its distinctive role and function
in human life. In Hegel’s judgment, the function of art is to enable us to
encounter our own complex freedom, humanity, and vitality in the form
of beauty. As we have seen, Hegel believes that art no longer satisfies the
deepest religious needs of humanity in the modern Western world.
Nonetheless, he thinks that we still have a profound and abiding need for
beautiful art because we are sensuous, imaginative beings who require a sen-
suous, imaginative vision, not just a conceptual or felt understanding, of
what it is to be truly free and human. Without such a vision, we lack an im-
portant dimension of self-awareness and so lead an impoverished life. The
xxiv
INTRODUCTION

challenge posed to students of post-Hegelian art by Hegel’s powerful

theory is to determine whether the unprecedented burgeoning of new aes-
thetic possibilities in such art has genuinely enriched our aesthetic experi-
ence or deprived us of the very thing that art is above all meant to afford
us: a sense of our freedom and humanity in the contemplation of beauty.

The Essays

This introduction has done no more than provide an overview of Hegel’s

aesthetic theory. It ignores far too many of the subtle complexities of
Hegel’s views on art in general, its history, the different arts, and the myr-
iad of individual works of art that he considers. Such subtle complexities
are explored in the essays that follow.
Terry Pinkard first examines Hegel’s hugely important distinction
between the symbolic, classical, and romantic art forms. Pinkard notes
that Hegel’s identification of only these three art forms may initially seem
implausible, but he argues that they are made necessary by the fact that
they give expression to three fundamental conceptions of “what it means
to be a ‘minded,’ geistig, spiritual agent.”
The following five essays focus on what Hegel considers to be the
principal arts. David Kolb analyzes Hegel’s intricate and problematic ac-
count of architecture. He argues that although architecture is understood
by Hegel to be an essentially symbolic art, it is actually held to achieve per-
fection in the classical architecture of the Greeks. My first essay considers
Hegel’s conception of sculptural beauty. It argues that Hegel understands
sculpture to become more dramatic and more painterly as it develops, but
that he would probably criticize twentieth-century sculpture for regress-
ing to the condition of “symbolic architecture.” John Sallis points to the
central role played by color in Hegel’s theory of painting. He discusses the
differences Hegel discerns between painting and sculpture and high-
lights the strikingly “eccentric,” off-center position that painting occupies
in relation to all the other arts in Hegel’s theory. Richard Eldridge relates
Hegel’s all too neglected account of music to other nineteenth- and
twentieth-century theories. In particular, he examines Hegel’s claim that
purely instrumental music significantly embodies our inner life through
“cadenced interjection,” and he argues that this claim provides an impor-
tant way of understanding the achievements of many twentieth-century
composers. My second essay endeavors to shed some fresh light on Hegel’s
more familiar but often misinterpreted theory of tragedy. I suggest that
tragedy, for Hegel, is rooted not in fate but in an unwillingness to yield,
for which we ourselves are ultimately responsible.
 xxv
INTRODUCTION

Martin Donougho unravels with exemplary subtlety the multiple

strands of Hegel’s account of the “end” and the future of art and draws at-
tention to significant parallels between Hegel’s views and those of Arthur
Danto. Jay Bernstein then further explores “the twentieth-century replays
of Hegel’s end of art doctrine” in the writings of Danto, Yves-Alain Bois,
and Adorno. He comes to the conclusion that art’s function now is less to
aid the mind to know itself (Hegel’s view) and more to serve as a place-
holder for the claims of sensuous particularity and nature against “self-
authorizing mindedness.”
In this introduction (and elsewhere) I have argued that, for Hegel,
the function of art is to give sensuous expression to human freedom.31
This commits Hegel, as I understand it, to the view that painting should
offer concrete images of free human beings. By contrast, Robert Pippin—
in an essay first published in a slightly different version in Critical
Inquiry—makes a strong Hegelian case for the appropriateness of ab-
stract, non-image-based art in modernity. Pippin argues that it is precisely
in the experiments of abstraction that we see what modern, self-
authorizing freedom, which has emancipated itself from the authority of
nature, looks like when expressed in art. John Walker also considers the
significance of Hegel’s aesthetic theory in the distinctive conditions of
modernity. He contends that, for Hegel, even though art and religion in
modernity prove to be cognitively deficient in comparison with philos-
ophy, they nonetheless keep us mindful of the claims of particularity, dif-
ference, and otherness. Hegel’s philosophy is thus more complex than is
often assumed, for it contains within itself a principle of aesthetic and reli-
gious resistance to its own “totalising claims.”
As I remarked earlier, Hegel’s thoughts about art are to be found not
only in the lectures on aesthetics but also in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Rüdiger Bubner examines the place of the “religion of art” in Hegel’s
most famous text and concludes that in his discussion of that phenome-
non, Hegel is not just looking back nostalgically at a bygone culture but is
presenting a model for present-day (and future) religious, aesthetic, and
social life. Finally, Judith Norman scrutinizes Hegel’s relation to a group
of writers whose views on art and poetry perhaps represent the most im-
portant alternative to Hegel’s own views in the early nineteenth century:
the German Romantics. Norman argues that Hegel’s criticisms of the
Romantics were overexaggerated and overly anxious, but that there never-
theless is a real difference between them: whereas, for Hegel, philosophy
takes over and completes art’s task of presenting the Absolute, for the Ro-
mantics, poetry “incompletes” philosophy by reminding it of its elusive,
“incomprehensible” poetic conditions.
The authors included in this collection do not all agree with the
views outlined in this introduction; nor, indeed, do they all agree with one
xxvi
INTRODUCTION

another. They are, however, all convinced of the continuing importance

of Hegel’s complex, subtle, and powerful aesthetic theory. Together their
essays offer an outstanding, comprehensive analysis of Hegel’s aesthetics
for both the scholar and the newcomer.
The original idea for this volume came from Salim Kemal, who was
to coedit it with me and to contribute an essay of his own. Sadly, Salim
died in 1999 in the early stages of planning the project. In gratitude and
friendship I dedicate this collection to his memory.

Notes

1. T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone,

1997), 353.
2. Other English-language secondary texts on Hegel’s aesthetics that readers
might wish to consult include J. Kaminsky, Hegel on Art: An Interpretation of Hegel’s
Aesthetics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1962); Art and Logic in Hegel’s Philosophy, ed. W. E.
Steinkraus and K. L. Schmitz (New Jersey: Humanities, 1980); S. Bungay, Beauty
and Truth: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984);
W. Desmond, Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: SUNY Press,
1986); R. D. Winfield, Stylistics: Rethinking the Artforms After Hegel (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1996); M. Roche, Tragedy and Comedy: A Systematic Study and a Critique of
Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998); and Hegel and Aesthetics, ed. W. Maker (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2000).
3. G. W. F. Hegel, “Über einige charakteristische Unterschiede der alten
Dichter [und der neueren],” in Dokumente zu Hegels Entwicklung, ed. J. Hoffmeister
(1936; Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1974), 48–51.
4. G. W. F. Hegel, “Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism,” in H. S.
Harris, Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight, 1770–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon,
1972), 511.
5. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), 424–53.
6. See, for example, G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of the
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 292–315 (sections 553–77).
7. See G. W. F. Hegel, Briefe von und an Hegel, ed. J. Hoffmeister, 4 vols. (Ham-
burg: Felix Meiner, 1977), 4/1:111, 120–24.
8. See G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, ed. E. Moldenhauer and
K. M. Michel, 3 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970). This was translated
into English as G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2
vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). Further references to these texts will be given in
the following form: VA 1:145/A 1:106 (with the German text cited first). I have oc-
casionally altered Knox’s translation. (Note that the pagination for Knox’s transla-
tion is continuous through the two volumes. It should also be noted that the three-
volume Moldenhauer-Michel edition of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics comprises
 xxvii
INTRODUCTION

volumes 13, 14, and 15 of G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. E. Molden-
hauer and K. M. Michel, 20 vols. [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–70]).
9. See G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesung über Ästhetik: Berlin 1820/21, ed. H. Schneider
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995); G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philoso-
phie der Kunst (1823), ed. A. Gethmann-Siefert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2003);
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie der Kunst (1826), ed. A. Gethmann-Siefert, J. I. Kwon,
and K. Berr (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004); and G. W. F. Hegel, Philoso-
phie der Kunst oder Ästhetik (1826), ed. A. Gethmann-Siefert and B. Collenberg-
Plotnikov (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2004).
10. B. Wyss, Hegel’s Art History and the Critique of Modernity (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1999), 106.
11. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 334.
12. K. Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2002), 21, 24.
13. O. Pöggeler, ed., Hegel in Berlin: Preussische Kulturpolitik und idealistische
Ästhetik: Zum 150. Todestag des Philosophen (Berlin: Staatsbibliothek Preussischer
Kulturbesitz, 1981), 247.
14. Hegel in Berlin, 87–88, 91.
15. See G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: The Letters, trans. C. Butler and C. Seiler (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 654; and S. Houlgate, “Hegel and the Art
of Painting,” in Hegel and Aesthetics, 62, 77–78.
16. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of
the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 11
(section 246 Addition).
17. G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans.
T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 133.
18. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Rea-
son in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975),
105, 108.
19. F. Schiller, “Kallias, or Concerning Beauty: Letters to Gottfried Körner”
(1793), in Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 160 (February 23, 1793). Schiller’s phrase neatly
encapsulates Hegel’s conception of beauty. Strictly speaking, however, Schiller’s
conception of beauty in the “Kallias” letters is somewhat different from that of
Hegel. For Schiller, beauty is sensible form that is merely analogous to freedom,
that merely appears to be free, whereas for Hegel beauty is the sensuous expression
or manifestation of freedom itself.
20. See A. Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2002), 102.
21. I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 103 (section 9).
22. Hammermeister, German Aesthetic Tradition, 88. See also Hegel, VA 1:28/
A 1:13.
23. Hegel, VA 2:228, 383–96/A 1:599–600, 2:727–38.
24. Hegel, VA 2:86, 92/A 1:485, 490. On the relativity of personal and national
taste in art, see Hegel, VA 1:68/A 1:44–45.
xxviii
INTRODUCTION

25. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover,
1956), 416 (translation altered).
26. Hegel, VA 2:159, 3:211, 459/A 1:542–43, 2:949–50, 1145. Even after the
Reformation, of course, Catholic religious art also continues to be produced (for
example, by Rubens).
27. See S. Houlgate, “Hegel and the ‘End’ of Art,” Owl of Minerva 29, no. 1
(fall 1997): 1.
28. Hegel, VA 2:220, 231, 3:415, 457/A 1:593, 602, 2:1110, 1143.
29. Hegel, VA 2:237/A 1:607. See J. W. Goethe, “Die Geheimnisse,” in Goethe’s
Gedichte, ed. F. Strehlke, 2 vols. (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1887), 2:48 (line 245: “Hu-
manus heisst der Heilige, der Weise”).
30. Hegel, VA 2:238/A 1:607. Later in the lectures on aesthetics, Hegel also
adds that art should never lack “reconciliation”; see Hegel, VA 3:494/A 2:1173.
31. See Houlgate, “Hegel and the ‘End’ of Art,” 15–19; and “Hegel and the
Art of Painting,” 71–75.
HEGEL AND THE ARTS
Symbolic, Classical, and
Romantic Art
Terry Pinkard

From his first published philosophical monograph in 1801 on the Differ-

ence Between Schelling’s and Fichte’s Philosophies to the end of his life, Hegel
characterized modern life as “estranged from itself” (entzweit ), as con-
taining a “reflective” distance between itself and its practices. In his lec-
tures on aesthetics in the 1820s, Hegel spoke of our modern, reflective
culture as “Kantian” and noted that it had in effect made us into what he
called “amphibious animals,” caught between a disenchanted natural
world and a world in which we legislated the moral law for ourselves and
secured for ourselves a “dignity” not to be found in nature.1 Hegel went
on to claim that the oppositions to be found in modern life encompassed
not merely the apparent incompatibility between freedom and nature but
also those between “duty” and the “warmth of heart,” between “inner free-
dom and nature’s external necessity,” and even (strangely, coming from
Hegel himself) between “the dead concept, empty within itself, and the
full concreteness of life.”2 The goal of his own “speculative philosophy,”
Hegel declared, was to supersede those oppositions within a philosophy
that would contribute to bringing about a modern reconciliation in our
own self-understandings; whereas it has come to seem to us moderns that
we must metaphorically live in two opposed worlds, in fact the better view
is that there is just one world (with certain tensions inherent in it), that we
need not be “amphibians” to live in that world, and that this world, ten-
sions and all, is more rational.
These are rather heavy burdens to be placed on any philosophy, cer-
tainly on aesthetics. It is not surprising, therefore, that Hegel’s lectures on
aesthetics open with some rather striking claims, most of which seem at
first glance to be completely implausible unless one buys into the entire
Hegelian system. He claims, for example, that there are three and only
three art forms (symbolic, classical, and romantic), that each of them de-
velops systematically out of the other in that order, and that they succeed
each other historically in that order. 3 Moreover, art is said to exhibit or to

3
4
TERRY PINKARD

present “the divine,” the truth (and sometimes the “genuinely true,” or
perhaps “the real,” both of which are connoted by Hegel’s use of the term
das Wahrhaftige), the “deepest” and “highest” interests of mankind, the
“most comprehensive truths of spirit,” our “highest needs,” mankind’s
“true interests,” and so forth.4 Likewise, Hegel is often portrayed as hav-
ing proclaimed the “end of art” in the third, romantic form of art. Finally,
Hegel claims that art (like philosophy and Christian religion) seeks to of-
fer us a kind of “reconciliation” in its intimations that it can heal a kind
of self-inflicted alienation of Geist, spirit, from itself, or at least to point to
the way that religion and philosophy, if not art itself, can perform that
healing function.
It is hard enough to sort out these claims (and from the standpoint
of modern philology, to see which of them Hegel actually entertained),
and it is equally difficult to come to some sort of evaluation of what is
really being claimed. Hegel’s own statements about Geist bring out the very
basic tension already at work in his theory. Over and over again, he tells
us that Geist makes itself, gives itself its reality, that it is only what it makes
of itself, and so forth; yet if there were no Geist already there, as it were,
how could it “give itself” reality or be a product of itself? Hegel’s own state-
ment to this effect near the beginning of his lectures on aesthetics brings
out this puzzling feature:

The universal and absolute need from which art . . . springs has its origin
in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, i.e., that man makes out
of himself for-himself what he is and what in general is. Things in nature
are only immediate and single, while man as spirit duplicates himself, in
that he exists in the way the things of nature exist, but he is to the same
extent for-himself; he intuits himself, represents himself to himself,
thinks, and only by means of this active being-for-self is he spirit.5

The typical Hegelian points of emphasis are all in play here, partic-
ularly the emphasis on the agent’s self-relation—his “being-for-self”—as
crucial to his agency. An agent is a “thing in nature” that is “immediate
and single,” that is, an organism making its way around in its environment.
An agent is also a self-conscious life whose nature as an agent is constituted
by his self-relation, by how he “takes” himself to be; or to put it another
way, as agents humans are, in Charles Taylor’s phrase, “self-interpreting
animals.” To have such a self-relation as “subjectivity” is to be Geist, or, as
we say now, to be an agent. Who we are as agents therefore depends on our
sustaining a certain interpretation of ourselves over time. Animals, as
Hegel says, live in peace with their surroundings in that no matter how
intelligent or complexly social they may be, who they are is not an issue for
 5
SYMBOLIC, CLASSICAL, AND ROMANTIC ART

them; even complexly intelligent, highly social animals such as dolphins

do not, as far as we can tell, have to raise the issue for themselves of what
it means to be a dolphin, even if they are in a certain fashion in fact ca-
pable of being responsive to reasons. Our agency as self-interpretation,
however, involves taking a stance, however implicit, on what it means to be
human, that is, on what constitutes our “true interests,” “highest needs,”
and what are the “most comprehensive truths,” on what ultimately matters
to us. Unlike the “things of nature,” what it means to be human is always
a question for us, since as self-interpreting animals it is always open to us
to interpret ourselves differently than what we have done, and this consti-
tutes part of what Hegel evocatively calls our “negativity.” In this Hegelian
conception, we come to be the kinds of agents we are; we actualize certain
self-interpretations in the ways we carry them out in practice, and this
“negative” stance toward ourselves—of our never being just what we are,
except insofar as we interpret ourselves as being that type of agent and sus-
tain that type of interpretation—inflicts a kind of “wound,” a Zerissenheit,
a manner of being internally torn apart that demands healing.6
The idea that self-consciousness in general and modern life in par-
ticular inflict on us a kind of self-estrangement in the form of attempts to
actualize our concepts of ourselves and to keep that actualization both in
existence and “in truth”—to “get it right” in such actualizations, to lead
true or genuine lives—suggests, of course, that some kind of psychologi-
cal account of human personality is at stake in agency; it suggests that
some types of pain may be too much or that there might be certain
thresholds of such grief so high that they lead to dissolutions of collective
attempts at realizing certain conceptions of agency. However, despite its
psychological overtones (and despite whatever psychological implications
it might have), Hegel’s theory is, peculiarly enough, not a psychological
account (at least in that sense) at all. Hegel aims rather at providing a
comprehensive account of the conditions under which forms of life fail
and succeed by virtue of their having committed themselves to certain de-
terminate views of what it means to be an agent—or more generally, what
it means to be human—and of having committed themselves to broadly
philosophical and religious views about the ultimate locus of intelligibil-
ity for those meanings. The goal of Hegel’s theory is a comprehensive ac-
count of how certain collective self-understandings can be said to fail or
succeed through an account of how certain collective expressions of nor-
mativity dissolve and fail because of their irrationality, not because of their
supposed conflicts with any deep-seated psychological features of hu-
mans.7 In this way, Hegel’s theory is far more tied into a Kantian (or better,
post-Kantian) conception of an agent acting according to his conception
of law and into conditions under which the agent can be said to fail in
6
TERRY PINKARD

keeping faith with the law because of certain types of contradiction or ten-
sion in that conception of law. In fact, it is part and parcel of such an ac-
count that a type of agency could be said to fail—in that it cannot achieve
what it is seeking to achieve—even though the agents themselves are un-
aware of their failure and are perhaps even happy (although nonetheless
ignorant of their failure) while being in that state.

Speculative Problems

Clearly much is packed into such a conception, and it is perhaps not sur-
prising that Hegel’s attempts to work that idea out in all its proper quali-
fications and with all the arguments necessary to sustain such a view
amount to one of the largest and densest sets of works in the history of phi-
losophy. Part of the density is powered by Hegel’s own insistence on a
“speculative” approach to these issues that supposedly avoids the dilem-
mas contained within more “one-sided” comprehensive accounts offered
by what he always called the “understanding.” The idea of such a “specu-
lative” approach rests on Hegel’s generalization of a certain “Kantian
paradox” into a more inclusive conception of normative authority.8 The
problem arises first in Kant’s practical philosophy, where he argues that
norms cannot be practically and unconditionally binding on us unless we
can regard ourselves as having instituted those norms themselves. In the
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant says: “The will is therefore
not merely subject to the law, but is so subject that it must be considered
as also giving the law to itself and precisely on this account as first of all sub-
ject to the law (which it can regard itself as instituting).”9 Indeed, as is well
known, Kant attributes the failure of all prior moral philosophy to a fail-
ure to recognize this truth.10
However, as Kant came to see when he was writing the Critique of
Practical Reason, that conception landed him in a paradoxical situation
which resulted from two commitments on his part: first, that an arbitrary
will (Willkür) could not obligate us, since only a principled, rational will
could actually bind us to its requirements; and second, that only a self-
legislated principle (or “law”) could obligate us. The paradox arises out of
the realization that prior to such self-legislation, we would have no
principles, hence we would have only “arbitrary” (willkürlich) wills whose
legislation could not therefore bind us; but if we had some rational prin-
ciple in place prior to such legislation, then since it was not itself self-
legislated, we could also not be bound by it.
In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant called this the “fact of reason,”
 7
SYMBOLIC, CLASSICAL, AND ROMANTIC ART

an insistence that we cannot but find ourselves “always, already” commit-

ted to the claims of reason in undertaking any commitment, that any act
of commitment itself “always, already” presupposed a commitment to
reason, something that we are compelled to acknowledge while simulta-
neously acknowledging that this prior commitment is self-legislated (and
not just “self-imposed”). By the time of the Critique of Judgment, Kant had
come up with the idea of “aesthetic judgment” as a paradigm of the way in
which we can be subject to norms that we institute; such aesthetic judg-
ments are “universally communicable” without at the same time invoking
concepts (general rules) for their normative import. The “genius” in art
is that person who can create the rule that others then must follow.
Hegel took the “Kantian paradox” to be at the heart of the problems
involved in almost all post-Kantian philosophy, and indeed, of the very fu-
ture of critical philosophy and the “Copernican” turn itself. Hegel’s point
was that the “paradox” was at work in all aspects of normativity, and re-
solving the paradox by appeal to any conception of reasons that were not
self-legislated simply begged all the questions that Kant’s Copernican
revolution in philosophy, with its placing of spontaneity front and center
of its conception of knowledge and action, had raised.
In his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel argued that the “paradox”
is best expressed in terms of a certain sociality of agency, of our being and
becoming agents only in and through reciprocal recognition. That is, the
status of “being an agent” is not a metaphysical or empirical fact about us;
it is a socially conferred, normative status, and becoming an agent is to be
construed as an achievement, not as a metaphysical or empirical property
we suddenly come to possess. Just as the very notions of things like my
property require recognition from others, so even seemingly bedrock
matters, such as the ascription of desires as mine, also require social recog-
nition.11 (Hegel’s arguments for this are quite drawn out, and they obvi-
ously bear similarities and differences with the now-familiar Wittgen-
steinian ideas concerning the impossibility of private languages and the
social conditions of the possibility of rule-following.) I become, in the ab-
stract, most fully an agent when the commitments which I take myself to
have undertaken are also recognized by others in the way that I take my-
self to have recognized them.12 More concretely, it has to do with others
recognizing me to be acting under the descriptions that I take myself to
be acting under. In his initial formulation, Hegel (quite famously) char-
acterized the process of such social recognition as a “struggle” for recog-
nition, namely, a struggle over who sets the standards by which such rec-
ognition itself is to be judged (for example, a struggle over whether a
putative master’s desires should count as obligatory reasons for a putative
slave). The outcome of this struggle over mastery and servitude, however,
8
TERRY PINKARD

fails at what it sets out to accomplish since it results in a collective identity

that neither the master nor the slave can sustain. The master remains sub-
ject to his own arbitrary desires taken as normative (and he thus fails to
win the freedom he thought he had achieved and, as dependent on the
slave’s recognition of him, he fails to achieve the self-sufficiency he both
sought and claimed for himself), whereas the slave comes to understand
that the master’s desires are just that—desires, not genuine reasons—
even while he comes to understand that his own liberation would come
from his subjecting himself to genuine reasons. This sets the stage for a
solution which, abstractly put, would be for each of us to be both masters
and slaves to the other, and to eschew all dreams of a world either where
freedom is gained through the domination of others or where nobody is
either master or slave—that is, where everybody would be neither lawgiver
nor subject to the law—since that would be a world beyond politics, em-
bodiment, and finitude.13 That, however, is only the abstract solution, and
it requires far more effort to bring it about (even as a philosophical solu-
tion) than it does to state it. It does, however, lead Hegel to a social and
developmental conception of agency in which, on his account, we are
agents by virtue of being socially recognized as having that status, we
become agents by being initiated into social practices, and whatever legit-
imate binding force those practices de facto seem to have for us can be
comprehended only historically, in terms of a complex narrative about how
what is required came to be required by virtue of the very determinate fail-
ures of past collective attempts at determining what it means to be human.

Truth, the Ideal, and Symbolic Art

How to sort through the issues that come up for this kind of dialectical,
speculative, and “phenomenological” aesthetic theory is difficult to state
in any economical way. The problem that Hegel sees art, religion, and phi-
losophy as trying to come to terms with is that of comprehending what it
would be to express freedom in the natural, material world (and, as part
of his developmental story, in the modern developed social world of com-
plex market economies and state bureaucracies). What drives Hegel’s
type of developmental story is a self-incurred dissatisfaction with the types
of agency constituted by collective attempts at living out particular kinds
of self-conception (in his own language, by particular shapes and con-
cretizations of the Idea). Art, like religion and philosophy, is a collective
practice of self-education about this, a way of collectively reflecting on
what it means to be human.
 9
SYMBOLIC, CLASSICAL, AND ROMANTIC ART

Or to put it differently, the outcome of this kind of story is our

gradual realization that Geist, agency itself, is not a natural kind; it is so-
cially constituted, and if it does not “give itself existence” (to use Hegel’s
phrase), it does not exist (in a manner wholly analogous to the way in
which, absent social recognition there can be no lawyers or professors—
one cannot become a lawyer in a social setting where that status is nonex-
istent). To designate that whole, or totality, of such norms that are
metaphorically striving to give themselves existence, Hegel uses one of his
key systematic terms, the Idea, which he characterizes as “the unity of con-
cept and objectivity” and “the unity of concept and reality.”14 Moreover,
this “unity of concept and reality” as “Idea” is said (metaphorically) to
strive to “realize” itself. The “Idea,” that is, is in one sense a kind of total-
ity of norms which is “nothing” until it is realized in practice, and, as nor-
mative, it tends to “make itself true” through the motivations that agents
come to have by virtue of inhabiting the social roles available to them in
a determinate form of life (by having, that is, those norms as “their own”).
The Idea, moreover, is more than just a set of norms; it also includes
within itself the ground of intelligibility of those norms, that is, some fairly
comprehensive conception of why these norms should and do matter to
us, why we should care about realizing them.
As a practice carried out within the historical development of the
Idea’s self-realization—that is, a collective attempt by humanity to articu-
late for itself just what the “whole” is within which it orients itself and
interprets itself—art matters to us as a crucial part of the developmental
narrative of humanity’s attempt to comprehend itself, a role that art plays
in its attempts to display truth in the form of beauty, the “sensuous
showing-forth of the Idea,” that is, a sensuous presentation of what ulti-
mately matters for us.15 Art strives to show us what ultimately matters to us
through a unity of concept and sense—namely, through the individual
work of art itself by providing an experience of what it is that we are try-
ing to achieve as self-relating creatures and what it would be like to have
achieved it or to be in the process of achieving it.
Art as Idea, therefore, is one way of reflecting and reassuring our-
selves about the meaning of what it is to be human; and since for “we mod-
erns” that meaning has come to be grasped as freedom, for us art is there-
fore a type of collective self-reflection on what it means to be human, in
the form of a beautiful sensuous presentation of what it would be like to
be free. Since art is the exhibition of this “Idea” in the form of beauty, the
fundamental issue with art itself must be therefore whether the full mean-
ing of freedom can be given an adequate aesthetic presentation—
whether a “beautiful” individual work of art can give us the experience
of what it would be like to be successfully free agents.
10
TERRY PINKARD

The idea that art “strives for truth” is linked with its being the Idea
in its “sensuous showing-forth.” For Hegel, truth is neither a relation of co-
herence among concepts nor is it primarily a correspondence between
representations and things external to them, and it is also not equivalent
to “warranted assertibility.” For Hegel, truth functions as a kind of “prim-
itive” which cannot be defined in terms of anything more fundamental
than itself but which nonetheless is capable of a full unfolding (an Ent-
faltung) within the proper kind of reflective activity (such as Hegel’s
own Phenomenology or Logic). Hegel’s initially puzzling statements about
truth—that truth does not have to do with the concept’s corresponding
to the object but with the object’s corresponding to the concept—is his
own provocative way of phrasing his view about normativity in general;
namely that, to use Robert Brandom’s phrase, the difference between the
normative and the nonnormative (or factual) is itself a normative dis-
tinction, a matter of how we ought to treat things, and that what seems
like the inevitable choice between correspondence, coherence, and war-
ranted assertibility conceptions of truth is itself only motivated by the ul-
timately untenable view of there being some kind of metaphysical line
that separates mind and world.16 In Hegel’s view, our concepts of ourselves
and the world embody an “ought,” a conception of what it would mean for
something to be the best exemplification of what it is. Although at the same
time both Aristotelian and Kantian in inspiration (like so many of Hegel’s
views), this view eschews any teleological conception of nature. For “we
moderns” nature is meaningless, dedivinized, devoid of spirit (geistlos, as
Hegel calls it); there is no better and worse in it.17 Indeed, that is the prob-
lem with nature; properly explained by the means of modern natural
science, nature displays itself to reflection as simply incapable on its
own of organizing itself into “better exemplifications.” (Hegel calls this
the “impotence [Ohnmacht] of nature.”)18 It is only when life appears in
nature that it makes sense to speak of “better” and “worse,” since only or-
ganisms display the kind of self-directing, functional teleological struc-
ture that makes the application of such terms meaningful. This is made
clearer when one reflects on the application of the concept of disease; it
makes sense to speak of an organism as diseased when it is in some kind
of state that is incompatible with its being the best exemplification of its
sort that it can be (when it is prevented from achieving goals proper to the
internal teleology of that organism); but it makes no sense to speak of a
diseased planetary system, a diseased mountain range, and so on. Al-
though life displays the kind of structure that makes the range of terms
having to do with “better” and “worse” applicable, as “life” nature is none-
theless still incapable of reflecting on that structure or of bringing it
about as a goal; even at the stage of life, nature is still “impotent.” When
 11
SYMBOLIC, CLASSICAL, AND ROMANTIC ART

we arrive at human beings, though, this changes, and the very idea of the
“best” human life ceases to be fixed by nature itself and comes to be com-
prehended, in Hegel’s very complex phenomenology of our own mind-
edness, by the history of our collective self-conceptions; a history grasped
in terms of how the very determinate failures of earlier self-conceptions
have led, unavoidably, to the modern self-conception not only as required
by those failures but also as having “revealed” itself as the truth.
As striving for such truth, art is always committing itself to display
what Hegel (using the terms of his day) calls the “Ideal,” that is, “the truly
concrete Idea [that] produces its true configuration [Gestalt ].”19 To say
therefore that art strives after the “Ideal” is, to put it more prosaically, to
say that it strives for a kind of embodied norm, a kind of singular sensuous
presentation in the form of beauty of what it means to be a “minded,”
geistig, spiritual agent in its most exemplary form.20 Art does not seek to
formulate universal principles (as philosophy does) but rather to display
such norms in singular works of beauty. Since art seeks to display what it
means to be “minded,” Hegel dismisses the idea that natural beauty has
any real significance for us however much “attraction” it may otherwise
have. Beauty has a meaning for us to the extent that it “shows” us some-
thing about what it means to be human; natural beauty therefore can
show us little about this, except only insofar as we can be brought to see
various natural forms as intimating our own lives or offering some fore-
shadowing of them. Thus, from the standpoint of art, certain natural
organic forms (particularly those of animals) may display to us what it is
like, for example, to be self-moving, to be seeking one’s and one’s group’s
good, or perhaps to reveal some very general and very abstract truth about
our finite, material embodiment (such as the brevity of the flower’s life
showing us something about the contingency and brevity of our own
lives—a very abstract truth indeed).
Since the Ideal is that which shows us in aesthetic form what it would
mean to exemplify humanity in a particular way, art displays the Ideal as
a unity of universal and particular, that is, the way in which the demands
of the “law” on humans are carried out by particular humans in a natural
and social world in such a way that their actions are “their own,” reflective
of them as individuals. Part of Hegel’s remarkable claim about art is that
only Greek art can manifest the Ideal in this sense, and that all modern
art necessarily falls short of the Ideal—that the “Ideal” is fundamentally
unsatisfactory for us as real flesh-and-blood humans and that the self-
incurred dissatisfaction with the “Ideal” pushes us on to a mode of art that
is, peculiarly, less like art the more modern it becomes.
This helps to understand just why Hegel would insist on the initially
implausible claim that there are only three art forms that develop out of
12
TERRY PINKARD

each other and succeed each other historically. The meaning of agency as
self-determining is itself a historical achievement, not a metaphysical or
empirical fact about us. The historical origins of this self-conception be-
gin with our simply finding ourselves already oriented to some kind of
“whole” of which we are parts and which we take to be the “origin” of our
humanity and which thereby sustains us. Thought about this “whole” is
thus always mythical at its outset; it seeks to give an account and reassur-
ance of what might otherwise look like a purely self-bootstrapping ap-
pearance of agency, in terms of some kind of mythic origin of humanity
(of mythic origins of freedom, language, or of this or that way of life). We
begin reflection on what it means to be human by finding ourselves to be
a mystery to ourselves, and in their origins, therefore, both art and reli-
gion are mixed together in the way each offers a mythic origin for human
freedom. Art is therefore at first “symbolic” art in which the space of
reasons in terms of which we justify ourselves to each other remains rela-
tively abstract (that is, the Idea is only abstractly worked out).21 Symbols,
in this Hegelian sense, “hint at” something else that the symbol itself can-
not quite fully express, and what is being hinted at is the mythically con-
ceived origin of human freedom, the divine “whole” that brings about the
existence and sustains the continued lives of the “minded” creatures we
are. Since this origin remains a “mystery,” symbolic art is necessarily ab-
stract, sometimes possessing great technical beauty, but always hinting at
more than it can actually express, and it thus tends to be an art of the sub-
lime; that is, of seeking natural phenomena that serve to remind us of
our own mindedness. And from being an art of the sublime, symbolic art
tends to become the art of pantheism, of the attempt to say the unsayable
and represent the unrepresentable, as it seeks to show the unitary divine
substance that is the one in everything.
For Hegel’s overall narrative to work, symbolic art—the art of the
ancient Egyptians, Persians, Hindus, and Jews—must be unsatisfying not
because it makes us unhappy in any sense but because the pictures of
being human which it offers cannot sustain themselves. The appeal to the
“unsayable” and the “unrepresentable” (or even to the “sublime”) is itself
so abstract that the content (what is being said) and the form, the mode
of “saying it” (through parables, poems, sculptures, or anything else),
connect with each other in only fairly arbitrary ways. Hegel often ex-
presses this as its lacking some kind of proper fit between an inner, sub-
jective sense of things and an outer, material expression of that interior-
ity; his point, though, is that symbolic art incurs a dissatisfaction with
itself, since it cannot give us the kind of comprehension of the “Idea” we
are seeking in art. The problem with symbolic art lies, in Hegel’s terms, in
its “finitude,” its conception of the intelligibility of our meaning-giving
 13
SYMBOLIC, CLASSICAL, AND ROMANTIC ART

and sustaining practices as lying on the other side of a metaphysical line

dividing consciousness from the world. Symbolic art’s failure to satisfy
spirit’s “true interests” lies in the way it sets limits to the intelligibility of
agency, denying the intelligibility of, for example, freedom by ascribing it
to something beyond the “limit,” something enigmatic that sets the limit
for us in an unintelligible way.
Hegel presents this as an opposition of content and form, and he il-
lustrates this by remarking on how symbolic works of art (of which the
greatest, he thought, were the ancient Egyptian) do not link in any clear
way to the human realities they are trying to portray. Exactly why and how
this or that statue of a cat or bird or man-beast is supposed to link to the
human reality of freedom—how it functions as “Idea,” as the ultimate
ground of intelligibility giving us a sense of where we stand in the
“whole”—is in the nature of symbolic art necessarily unclear. Symbolic art
receives what determinacy it has only from its place in a structured world-
view, as part of a religion that configures and expresses a whole way of life
(which is why contemporary “symbolic” art that tries to say the unsayable
is linked only to individuals or small subgroups, such as art critics and
gallery goers, who must interpret the work not in terms of some larger,
shared worldview but in terms of some shared theory about art).
As art (and religion) do their self-educative work in history, the
agents for whom symbolic art is appropriate and expressive of their way of
life and self-understanding find that putting the conditions of intelligi-
bility off into some “beyond,” on the other side of a “limit” that we cannot
cross, conflicts with their growing understanding that it is they who set
such limits and, moreover, it is they who are forever pushing those limits
back. Symbolic art fails to achieve the kind of agency that can be intelli-
gible to itself about what it is that it is trying to accomplish; the inadequacy
of symbolic art is really about the change in the status of agents who find
it inadequate to them as they have come to be.

From Symbolic to Classical Art

Although quite a lot of text is devoted to the nature of symbolic art, it is

also clearly not what interests Hegel; he is interested in the oppositions
and relations between what he calls “classical” art (the art of ancient
Greece) and “romantic” art (under which all Christian art is included).
The move from symbolic to classical art consists in portraying the divine
not as an unintelligible “other” lying on the far side of the supposed meta-
physical divide between mind and world; but in portraying the divine as
14
TERRY PINKARD

partially human: as embodied although immortal gods whose motivations

are sometimes unclear even to themselves. As partially intelligible, these
divine lawgivers render our own legislative activities more intelligible to
ourselves. Only classical art, Hegel argues, achieves and even can achieve
the “ideal,” which is to say that only classical art achieves a purely aesthetic
representation of what it would mean to be free. However, this very
achievement of classical art also proves to be its fundamental limitation,
since a purely aesthetic presentation of freedom must inherently fail to be
an adequate exhibition of the meaning of freedom. If it is not to be sym-
bolic (or finally merely didactic), art must present its content in the form
of beauty.22 Thus, for it to be art—for it to be beautiful—it must present
its content not as a series of arguments or principles but as something to
be experienced, as something that is not simply to be theoretically contem-
plated or reflected on.
Whereas the failure of symbolic art has to do with its denial of a cer-
tain type of free sense-making activity as ultimately intelligible to itself,
the success of classical art has to do with the way it grows out of this inad-
equacy by attempting to show what it would be like to be an agent with the
capacity for free sense-making activities in such a way that the free indi-
vidual would be a law unto himself.23 For such an individual to be ideal in
Hegel’s sense, the free subject must therefore be self-sufficient, since any
external limit to his freedom would be at odds with what it means to be
free. The self-sufficient individual must have the “law” present in him as
an individual; that is, he cannot be subject to any law given outside of his
own activities, while on the other hand, he also cannot be “lawless,” merely
acting on his own whims. Freedom as self-sufficiency is thus the para-
digmatic aesthetic interpretation of freedom; it sees the self-relation as
complete in itself, not requiring any mediation by an other. Thus, art in-
herently seeks to display the meaning of freedom in the “shape” of indi-
viduals—that is, as a project of striving for the “beautiful,” art inherently
seeks to show that freedom means to be this or that type of individual.
However, this in essence continues the mythical interpretation of
freedom: confronted with the Kantian paradox, all such purely aesthetic
attempts must locate the origin of the law in the mythical past, in some
kind of original divine law-giving activity. Classical art—the art of ancient
Greece—Hegel says, tends to have its subjects “transferred to the age of
myths, or, in general, to the bygone days of the past, as the best ground
for their actualization.”24 In the developmental story Hegel is telling, this
achieves for us an active distancing of ourselves from nature, a refusal, as
it were, to let nature (as the unintelligible “other”) determine the shape
of the norms to which we hold ourselves. The achievement of classical
art is therefore a sense of freedom as the Ideal, as an embodied norm, the
 15
SYMBOLIC, CLASSICAL, AND ROMANTIC ART

unity of universality and particularity. In its ideal form, the free agent
relies on himself alone, is the law unto himself, and is thus in “repose”
(Ruhe).25 This “Ideal,” of course, is expressed paradigmatically by the
Greek gods (as given human form) and then derivatively by mythical
“heroes” (who have some type of connection to divinity), and it offers the
“classical” meaning of freedom as a form of “self-sufficiency.” To be
human is thus taken to be (ideally) self-sufficient, which in turn is taken
to consist of a kind of self-containment.26 (One thinks, of course, of Aris-
totle’s notion of human flourishing as involving “self-sufficiency,” such
that a life of eudaimonia, “flourishing,” would be lacking in nothing, as the
most dialectically sophisticated and final expression of that Greek ideal.)
The deficiency of classical art has to do with the problems contained
in such self-sufficiency, and Hegel’s arguments for this are laid out in the
section of the Phenomenology of Spirit on “Freedom and Self-Sufficiency”
(Selbständigkeit) from which the dialectic of mastery and servitude results.
Such self-sufficiency cannot survive its confrontation with other putatively
self-sufficient agents—unless the agents in question are gods. Hegel
thought that such a “classical” conception of freedom as “repose” and self-
sufficiency was best expressed in sculpture, since the statue in particular
expresses aesthetically what it means to be in such “repose,” to be self-
contained, in that way.
The problem for Greek life (and thus for classical art) is whether
such a meaning of freedom can be lived out for humans, not just for their
gods, and, at an even deeper level, whether such an aesthetic version of
the meaning of freedom can be sustained even for the gods themselves.
The Greek gods are only projections, Hegel argues, of our own need for
an exhibition, a Darstellung, of what a distinctively free human life would
be, and although for the Greeks the gods seemed to be more alive than
even the humans who worshipped them, they turned out to be only stone
idols, lacking any effective reality.27 In an evocative passage, Hegel notes
that those statues of the gods seem to have a kind of mourning to them,
as if they already had some intimation of their fate.28 It is thus not sur-
prising that Hegel thought that such a view of what life might be like at its
highest could only be sustained with a view of nature that saw it as teleo-
logically structured and fundamentally in harmony with human desires
and needs. (Such a view seems to be front and center in a large part of
Aristotle’s writings—or at least a view that nature is neither intrinsically
hostile nor simply indifferent to human needs and desires, even if from
time to time bad fortune may befall an otherwise good, self-sufficient per-
son, whose virtue will nonetheless enable him to bear up under those cir-
cumstances and to realize that his life is nonetheless a good one.) For
actual individuals, the problems with such an aesthetic presentation of
16
TERRY PINKARD

freedom as self-sufficiency come out of the inevitable conflicts between

different “self-sufficient” individuals who each claim to be following the
demands of the law. Aesthetically, either such conflicts have to resolve
themselves in an automatic and beautiful harmony that spontaneously is-
sues from such conflicts (as is the case with stories about the gods, for
whom such harmony is possible because they are eternal and do not have
the option of staking their lives on any outcome); or it has to be shown how
there is a “beautiful” resolution of such conflicts such that the natural har-
mony of life is thereby restored.
The latter appears in Greek tragedy, which attempts to show how the
conflicts that necessarily arise within Greek life are themselves aesthetically
restored to harmony—for example, the conflict between the demand of
tradition and piety and the demands of political life, as in Hegel’s inter-
pretation of Antigone. Such tragedy emerges when there is a conflict be-
tween equally valid but incompatible norms or values, represented by in-
dividuals who embody those norms and who therefore must come into
conflict with each other without there being any way of resolving the con-
flict; each character must therefore be both in the right and in the wrong.
However, since as Hegel says, “eternal justice . . . cannot suffer the conflict
and contradiction of naturally harmonious ethical powers to be victorious
and permanent in truth and actuality,” the conflict must be reconciled so
that the contradiction is overcome.29 This is, however, only an aesthetic
solution to the contradiction; although the individual must be seen to re-
tain his nobility of character in his downfall (as is the case with Oedipus),
or both characters must be punished so that justice is done (as is the case
with Antigone and Creon), such solutions do not resolve the deeper con-
flict contained in forms of life in which agents take themselves to be free
individuals who nonetheless must keep faith with laws they have not leg-
islated for themselves and who nonetheless see these laws as expressing
who they most deeply are. When such individuals are confronted with
incompatible unconditional demands (as Hegel thinks Antigone is), the
individual is compelled to place herself in the position of being the final
judge of which of these demands is to be fulfilled, that is, of being the self-
sufficient authority who determines which law demands her allegiance.
In Antigone, the chorus in fact tells Antigone that “your self-sufficiency has
brought you down.”30 The corresponding guilt that Antigone feels (by
violating Creon’s edicts) is matched by her conviction that she is also right;
and the punishment meted out by fate (Antigone’s death by suicide and
the destruction of everything Creon holds dear) is supposed to reconcile
us to this conflict. This purely aesthetic reconciliation provides the internal
provocation—that is, one that is already there in Greek life—for Greeks
to become “reflective individuals” and thereby to distance themselves
from the harmony they had assumed existed in their social life and in the
 17
SYMBOLIC, CLASSICAL, AND ROMANTIC ART

natural order, which in turn makes that spontaneously produced har-

mony impossible to achieve. The Greek understanding of humanity as
“free individuality” required there to be a harmony between our own ac-
tivities of sense-making and nature itself (as a teleologically structured
whole), and what its art revealed to itself are the multiple ways in which
that conception of freedom is unsatisfactory, precisely in the way it can
offer only an aesthetic solution to the conflicts that necessarily lie at the
basis of its form of life.
The dissatisfaction of Greek life with itself displayed in its tragedies
and comedies is self-incurred, not the result of some fortuitous external
force, and that dissatisfaction shows not only the limits of classical art but
of art itself. Hegel says of classical art that

classical beauty has for what is internal in it the free self-sufficient

[selbständig] meaning, i.e., not a meaning of this and that but what
means itself and therefore what interprets itself. This is the spiritual,
which in general makes itself into an object to itself. In this objectivity
of itself it then has the form of externality which, as identical with what is
internal to it, is therefore on its side the meaning of its own self and, in
knowing itself, it points to itself.31

What is distinctive about Geist is that it “means itself” and “interprets

itself”—it need not postulate something “beyond” itself, on the other side
of the metaphysical divide, that “founds” its meaning. Instead, Geist is self-
authorizing. The “beautiful individual” of Greek art in the form of a di-
vinity or a mythical hero is portrayed as a law unto himself, as having it
within his power to establish the principles of conduct, not merely for
himself but for whole communities, and Antigone’s tragedy shows how
such a self-authorizing individual is at odds with the beautiful but none-
theless limited Greek conception of divinity and divine law. If the out-
comes of both Oedipus’s or Antigone’s actions display to them and to the
viewers of the tragic play the failure of their agency—failures in the way
the world in which they lived brought out meanings to their actions that
were not originally in the actions as they were carried out (or, as in the case
of Antigone, where there is a realization that as she acts she is already, nec-
essarily, guilty while still being in the right)—then the attempt to remove
those “finite” limitations provokes a “turn inward,” an attempt to carve out
an area of subjective life in which the contingencies of the world cannot
limit agency in what it means to itself. That inward realm, in Hegel’s ac-
count, turns out to involve various forms of stoicism, skepticism, Epicu-
reanism, and finally, Christian conscience (and the Christian practices of
forgiveness of and reconciliation among sinners). The gap between in-
tention and the meaning of the act—between what I took myself to be
18
TERRY PINKARD

doing and what I really did and a shift therefore in the conception of that
to which I can be held responsible—opens up in a way that is both re-
quired in Greek life (and classical art) and impossible to sustain within it.
In Hegel’s telling, the origins of Greek civilization are aesthetic, not
doctrinal; Homer and Hesiod are its founders. As it develops itself, its
conception of the whole (the Greek “Idea”), originally formulated aes-
thetically, becomes more philosophical, and as it does, the strains within
this originally aesthetic “Idea” begin to reveal themselves more clearly to
the participants in that form of life. As the intelligibility of that form of life
begins to dissolve under those pressures, it becomes clear that the transi-
tion from the dissolution of classical art to that of modern, “romantic” art
cannot therefore be itself made aesthetically. As it were, telling new and
more beautiful stories about the gods and heroes simply cannot overcome
the experienced dissatisfaction with the ancient way of life, at least as that
dissatisfaction was lived through by generations of people. Whereas the
Greeks were able to tell themselves a mythical, aesthetically satisfying story
about how their gods triumphed over the titans (and thus told themselves
an aesthetically satisfying story about what it might mean to achieve a lib-
eration from the purely natural—so that the Greeks gave themselves their
gods in a purely aesthetic manner), no such purely aesthetic story, no new
mythic tales of a “war of the gods,” can resolve the problems inherent in
Greek life itself. Hegel’s thesis is thus fairly stark: what it means for a finite,
embodied human to be free cannot be given an adequate aesthetic pres-
entation; and art, as attempting to provide a reflection on what it means
to be human, necessarily fails in its task and this failure is expressed within
art itself, not through an external reflection on art.
The internal failure of classical art on its own terms historically sig-
naled a profound shift in the meaning and social status of art itself. Hav-
ing come to a self-consciousness about itself as incapable of adequately
embodying the “Ideal,” art subordinated itself to something “beyond” it-
self, something that, metaphorically speaking, sits on the other side of the
supposed metaphysical line dividing the artistic consciousness from the
truth; namely, Christian religion, in which the inwardness and subjectiv-
ity that the failure of classical civilization itself provoked comes into its
own as a claim about the truth about humanity.

Romantic (Modern) Art

Romantic art thus begins with the conviction that what we mean by our
actions is not completely disclosed by what we do and that there is there-
fore an “inwardness” which must be discovered or uncovered if we are to
 19
SYMBOLIC, CLASSICAL, AND ROMANTIC ART

find out who we really are. Hegel’s more or less phenomenological treat-
ment of the development of romantic art rests on his view, not so much ar-
gued in the lectures on aesthetics as simply put into play there, that reli-
gion goes through a kind of dissolution similar to art’s own dissolution.
Christian religion “reveals” the meaning of humanity to be “infinite sub-
jectivity,” self-determining freedom, which itself can only be given what
Hegel calls a “representational” (relying on the term Vorstellung) treat-
ment; the mythical lawgiver at the origin of freedom is God-become-man,
who therefore mythically moves over from one side of the metaphysical
line separating consciousness from the true (what exists in-itself) and puts
himself into human form, revealing to us in the world that our “vocation”
is freedom. Christian religion, however, still remains metaphysical in that
God is represented as both immanent and transcendent at the same time;
we achieve the truth of the matter only, first, in the philosophical com-
prehension of what religion is about (itself provoked by Christian reli-
gion’s recognition that it requires a theology, which in turn provokes the
development of a modern, independent philosophy) and, second, in the
philosophical comprehension that the picture of a metaphysical line sep-
arating mind and world (or consciousness and the in-itself) itself dissolves
under the pressures it puts on itself, leaving us finally with a not only post-
Cartesian but also post-Kantian picture of ourselves as fully capable of
grasping what is in-itself—in short, capable of grasping the truth of the
world before us.
Thus romantic art begins as religious art, as the aesthetic exhibition
of religious (and eventually theological) truths; but its own dynamic
drives it to develop out of itself a conception of the truth of humanity as
individuality, as each person having a rich inner life, an “infinite subjec-
tivity” that eventually detaches itself from its religious origins and comes
to be concerned with itself in its prosaic, mundane world. Romantic art
thus becomes fully modern art—secular, fractured, in which “man wants
to see the present itself as it is—even at the cost of sacrificing beauty and
ideality of content and appearance—as a live presence recreated by art, as
his own human and spiritual work.”32
Thus, modern art is driven to a different sense of the dramatic from
that of the classical. In modern, “romantic” (and especially post-Christian)
dramatic art, the characters are not so much stating a pathos that they em-
body and then firmly setting out on their paths (as they do in classical art),
but rather are engaged in a kind of social dance in which they not only
worry about what they in fact feel, but also worry if what they feel is real,
worry about how they should feel, and constantly offer explanations to
each other about all these things in an effort to determine what it is that
is going on “within” themselves. (So many modern dramas involve lovers
who don’t know at first that they are in love, or who deny that they are, or
20
TERRY PINKARD

who are tricked into recognizing that they are, or who believe that they
love one person when they really love another, and so on. Hegel even
makes a quip about those moderns who “do not suppose themselves to ac-
tually be in love until they encounter in and around themselves the very
same feelings and situations [as those described in the romances].”)33
Although modern art at first understands itself as having cut itself
free from the limits set by religion, it soon discovers within its own devel-
opment the impossibility of a fully aesthetic comprehension of the “infi-
nite subjectivity” opened by Christianity. Shakespeare’s success at portray-
ing this, Hegel thinks, is only partial, and he accomplishes what he does
only by placing his ideal figures in civil wars, where their “self-sufficiency”
can be made plausible in modern terms. Goethe and Schiller, Hegel also
notes, attempted the same thing but were much less successful.34 Indeed,
the lack of such ideal heroes in modern, prosaic life is not something to
be lamented: “It would be inappropriate,” Hegel notes, “to set up, for our
time too, ideal figures, e.g., of judges or monarchs,” since such figures
would in fact be direct attacks on the hard-fought and still fragile achieve-
ments of the rule of law and the constitutional order.35 (One wonders what
Hegel would have made of the contemporary American “Western” film,
with its heroic lone cowboys bringing justice to town, or John Ford’s ironic
deconstructions of that myth.)
Romantic art as modern art thus loses its “vocation” as art for us, for
although it remains crucial and irreplaceable in human experience, it
cannot satisfy us on its own since it seeks something—namely, a compre-
hensive aesthetic exhibition of the meaning of freedom—that it cannot
in principle provide. This is hardly the “end of art,” at least in any sense of
finality—as if no new artworks would be created, art would become unim-
portant, or there could be no innovation in art. In an often-quoted and
memorable passage, Hegel says:

The peculiar nature of artistic production and of works of art no longer

fills our highest need. We have got beyond venerating works of art as
divine and worshiping them. The impression they make is of a more
reflective kind, and what they arouse in us needs a higher touchstone
and a different test. Thought and reflection have spread their wings
above fine art. . . . In all these respects art, considered in its highest voca-
tion, is and remains for us a thing of the past.36

Thus, despite modern art’s own self-understanding as having “secu-

larized” itself, art’s object is still the “divine,” but as Hegel puts it, in mod-
ern art’s coming to terms with its own necessary limitations as art, “in this
self-transcendence art is nevertheless a withdrawal of man into himself, a
 21
SYMBOLIC, CLASSICAL, AND ROMANTIC ART

descent into his own breast, whereby art strips away from itself all fixed
restriction to a specific range of content and treatment, and makes Hu-
manus its new holy of holies.”37 In making these two claims together, it is
clear that Hegel is shifting the meaning of “divine” from its normal usage
and redescribing it in terms of his view of the absolute as Geist, as self-
determination, as mankind’s “true” or “highest interests.” What is “divine”
in humans is exhibited or “shown” aesthetically in art, is represented
mythically in religion, and is only conceptually comprehended in thought
(that is, philosophy).38 Hegel’s bluntness about the role of religion in this
collective endeavor is quite striking: the proper understanding of free-
dom as self-determination is philosophical and conceptual, not “repre-
sentational” or mythical, as it must be for religion. Whereas art seeks to
locate the origin of freedom in aesthetically complete individuals (who
simply embody the right, or the “universal,” and the particular as unified
in themselves), and religion seeks to locate the origin of freedom in some
kind of relation to an external divinity or a revelation of some sort, the
conceptual approach to freedom seeks to understand it as a “speculative
truth” (the Kantian paradox), in which our own individual and collective
practices of self-determination are to be comprehended as social and his-
torical achievements, not as metaphysical structures. The inadequacy of art
to capture this self-understanding for us is, paradoxically, not the meta-
physical inadequacy of art itself to get at a deeper truth, but a change in
the status of “we moderns” who find it inadequate to ourselves as we have
come to be.
However, making Humanus the new “holy of holies” effectively frees
art from all particular content, since what is at stake now are the lives of
individuals, with their own passions, loves, ends, and accidental circum-
stances surrounding them.39 This itself puts into motion the dissolution
of modern art, which itself then becomes the topic of modern art, so that
“it is the effect and the progress of art itself which . . . at every step along
this road makes its own contribution to freeing art from the content rep-
resented.”40 The progress of art therefore is toward increasing reflection,
incorporation of theory into itself, and, in short, to greater abstraction.41
Moreover, if what it means to be human is to be free, and freedom is to
be understood socially and historically, then there is no longer a meta-
physical secret to freedom or to the world, no basic enigma, that only art
can hint at or intimate; art therefore loses its power to say the unsayable
or represent the unrepresentable, since what was supposedly “unrepre-
sentable” has turned out to be conceptually comprehensible, namely, the
“Kantian paradox” as involving the sociality and historicity of agency and
reason. What it means to be human, Hegel says in his lectures on the phi-
losophy of religion, has been fully revealed: its origins do not lie on some
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richement et mis sur le maistre autel de la dicte abbaie. Fos 234 vo et
235.
P. 224, l. 1: d’Armençon.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 18, 19: de Mouson. Fo 243
vo.
P. 224, l. 2: Tonnoire.—Mss. B 3, A 1 à 6, 8, 9: Tonnerre. Fo 232.—
Mss. A 18, 19: Tonneurre. Fo 251 vo.
P. 224, l. 5: plus de.—Mss. A 23 à 29: bien. Fo 256 vo.
P. 224, l. 5: trois mil.—Mss. A 20 à 22: trois cens. Fo 232.—Mss. A
30 à 33: bien trois cens. Fo 241.

§ 468. P. 224, l. 9: Li rois d’Engleterre.—Ms. d’Amiens: Li roys

englès et sen host reposèrent à Tonnoire cinq jours pour le cause
des bons vins qu’il avoient trouvés, et assalloient souvent au castiel,
mès il estoit bien garnis de bonne gent d’armes, desquelx messires
Bauduins d’Ennekins, maistres des arbalestriers, estoit cappittainne.
Quant il se furent bien rafresci et reposé en le ville de Tounnoire, il
s’en partirent et passèrent là le rivierre d’Armençon. Et laissa li roys
le chemin d’Auçoire à le droite main et prist le chemin de Noiiers; et
avoient intention que d’entrer en Bourgoingne et d’estre là tout le
quaremme. Et passa et tout sen host desous Noiiers, et ne vot
oncques conssentir que on y asaussist, car il tenoit le seigneur
prisonnier de le bataille de Poitiers.
Et vint li roys et toutte sen host à giste à une ville que on appielle
Lille desoubs Montroial, sus une rivierre que on dist Selletes. Et
quant il s’en parti, il monta celle rivierre et s’en vint logier à Agillon
sus Selletes; car uns siens escuiers, que on appelle Jehan de
Herleston, et porte d’asur à un escuchon d’agent, avoit pris le ville
de Flammegny, qui est assés priès de là, et avoit dedens trouvé de
touttes pourveanches, pour vivre le roy et toutte l’ost un mois. Se
leur vint trop bien à point, car li roys fu à Aguillon sus Sellez, de le
nuit des Cendres jusques au my quaremme. Et toudis couroient si
marescal et si coureur le pays, ardant et gastant et essillant tout, et
portoient souvent des nouvelles pourveanches. Fo 121.
P. 224, l. 10: cinq.—Mss. A 15 à 17: six. Fo 235.
 P. 224, l. 10: cause.—Mss. A 15 à 17: l’amour.
P. 224, l. 25: Montroyal.—Mss. B 3, A 18, 19: Montreal. Fo 232.—
Mss. A 8, 9, 11 à 14: Montirail. Fo 215.—Mss. A 15 à 17: Montrouail.
Fo 235.
P. 224, l. 26: Seletes.—Mss. A 18, 19: Sebletes. Fo 252.

§ 469. P. 225, l. 10: Vous devés.—Ms. d’Amiens: Vous devés

savoir que li seigneur d’Engleterre et li riche homme menoient sus
leurs chars tentes, pavillons, forges, moullins et fours pour forgier
fiers de chevaux et autre cose, pour mieure bled et pain quire, s’il
trouvaissent les forges, les moullins et les fours brisiés; et pour chou
estoffer, il menoient bien huit mil chars, tous atellés de quatre fors
cevaux qu’il avoient mis hors d’Engleterre. Et avoient sus ces kars
pluisseurs nacelles et batelès fais si soutilment de quir boulit, que
troy homme se pooient bien dedens aidier et nagier parmy un
estanlt ou un vivier, con grant qu’il fuist, et celi peschier et laissier
hors, si lor plaisoit. De quoy il eurent grant aise et plenté de
poissons en quaremme, voirs tout li seigneur et gens d’estat: mès
les communes gens se passoient de ce qu’il trouvoient. Et avoecq
chou, li roys avoit bien pour lui trente fauconniers à cheval, chargiés
d’oisiaux et bien soixante couples de fors kiens et otant de levriers,
dont il alloit chacun jour ou en cache ou en rivierre, enssi qu’il li
plaisoit. Et si y avoit pluisseurs des seigneurs et des rices hommes
qui avoient lors chiens et lors oisiaux ossi bien comme li rois. Et
estoit li grans host toudis partis en trois parties, et chevauchoit
chacuns hos par lui. Et avoit chacune host avantgarde et
arrieregarde. Et se logoit chacune host par lui une lieuwe enssus de
l’autre, dont li prinches de Galles en avoit l’un, li dus de Lancastre
l’autre, et li roys le tierche et toutte li plus grant; et enssi se maintint
il, mouvans de Calais jusques adonc qu’il vint devant Chartres. Or
revenrons à ce où nous le laissammes maintenant. Fo 121 vo.
P. 225, l. 10 à 31: Vous.... sire.—Ces 21 lignes manquent dans A
23 à 33. Fo 257.
P. 225, l. 15: huit mil.—Mss. A 1 à 7, 18 à 22: six mil. Fo 243 vo.
 P. 225, l. 15: quatre.—Le ms. A 7 ajoute: bons et. Fo 222 vo.
P. 225, l. 15 à 16: fors roncins.—Mss. A 20 à 22: bons chevaulx. Fo
330 vo.
P. 225, l. 18: boulit.—Mss. B 3, A 1 à 8, 18, 19: boullu. Fo 232 vo.
P. 225, l. 19: si.—Mss. A 20 à 22: se. Fo 330 vo.
P. 225, l. 20: aidier.—Mss. A 18, 19: estre. Fo 252.—Le ms. B 3
ajoute: l’un à l’autre. Fo 232 vo.
P. 225, l. 20: aidier pour nagier.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 8, 9, 11 à 17: pour
aidier à nagier.
P. 225, l. 27: soixante.—Mss. A 20 à 22: quarante ou soixante.
P. 226, l. 7: mouvant de.—Ms. B 3: depuis qu’ilz se partirent.—
Mss. A 8, 9, 11 à 17: dès. Fo 215.
P. 226, l. 8: le.—Les mss. A 1 à 6, 15 à 29 ajoutent: bonne.
P. 226, l. 9: Chartres.—Mss. A 20 à 22: Rains. Fo 330 vo.

§ 470. P. 226, l. 10: Nous parlerons.—Ms. d’Amiens: Entroes que li

roys englès et toutte sen host se tenoient à Aguillon sus Sellettes et
vivoient des grosses pourveanches que Jehans de Herleston avoit
trouvées à Flavegny, li jones dus de Bourgoingne et ses consseils,
par le requeste de tout le pais entirement, regardèrent que li roys
englès pooit honnir et destruire tout le pays de Bourgoingne, s’il
volloit; car il y avoit en la duché grant fuisson de bonnes villes
foiblement fremmées et qui riens ne duroient contre les Englès, par
quoy li pays estoit en aventure d’estre tous perdus. Si fu ordonné et
advisé que d’envoyer devers le roy d’Engleterre souffissans hommes
pour tretier un racat de tout le pays. Si y furent esleut et envoiiet
chil seigneur que je vous nommeray: messire Anssiaux de Sallins,
canceler de Bourgoingne, messire Jaquemes de Vianne, messire
Jehans de Rie, messire Hughes de Vianne, messires Guillaummes de
Coraisse et messire Jehans de Montmartin.
Chil seigneur vinrent deviers le roy englès et son consseil qui se
tenoit à Aguillon sus Sellettes, enssi que vous avés oy, et
commenchièrent à tretier sus le pourpos dessus dit, liquels tretiés se
porta si bien, mès ce ne fu mies si trestos, que li roys d’Engleterre
donnoit respit de lui et des siens à toutte la duché de Bourgoingne
entirement, de ce jour en trois ans, parmy deux cens mil frans de
Franche qu’il devoit avoir tous appareillés, ou si bons plèges que
nulle faulte de paiement n’y euist. Chils tretiés passa, li roys saiella,
le pays l’acorda et paiia.
Adonc se desloga li roys d’Engleterre et toutte sen host, et prist
son retour et le droit chemin de Paris. Et s’en vint logier sus le
rivièrre d’Ione, à Kou[langes] desoubs Vesselay. Et tout contremont
le rivièrre se loga sen host, qui comprendoit le pays jusques à
Clamissi, à l’entrée de le comté de Nevers. Et rentra en Gastinois et
s’en vint par ses journées tant qu’il vint devant Paris, et se loga au
Bourcq le Roine. Fo 121 vo.
P. 226, l. 11: Aguillon.—Ms. A 7: Guillon. Fo 222 vo.
P. 226, l. 23: Ansiaus.—Ms. B 4: Anseauls. Fo 219.—Mss. A 1 à 6,
18, 19: Anceaume. Fo 244.—Ms. A 7: Ansiau.—Mss. A 11 à 17:
Anceau. Fo 215 vo.—Mss. A 23 à 33: Ancelin. Fo 257.
P. 226, l. 26: Toraise.—Ms. B 3: Thoraisse. Fo 232 vo.—Mss. A 1 à
6, 18, 19: Thoroise. Fo 244.—Mss. A 8, 9, 11 à 17: Coraise. Fo 215.—
Mss. A 23 à 33: Thorarse.
P. 226, l. 29 et p. 227, l. 2: Bourgongne.... ans.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 18,
19: à non courir; et l’asseura le dit roy de lui et des siens le terme de
trois ans, parmi deux cens mille francs. Fo 244.
P. 226, l. 31: apparilliés.—Ms. B 6: à paier dedens le Saint Jehan
Babtiste qui devoit estre l’an mil trois cens soixante, et de che
livrèrent il bons ostaiges. Fo 604.
P. 227, l. 6: Kon.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 18, 19: Leon. Fo 244.—Mss. A 15 à
17: Conk. Fo 235 vo.
P. 227, l. 6: Vosselay.—Mss. A 8, 9: Vezelay. Fo 215 vo.—Mss. A 11
à 17: Vedelay. Fo 216.
P. 227, l. 9: rentrèrent.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 18, 19: entrèrent.
 § 471. P. 227, l. 13: Ensi tourniant.—Ms. d’Amiens: Enssi tourniant
tout le pays, cheminoient li roys englès et ses garnissons d’autre
part en Biauvoisis, en Pikardie, en France, en Brie, en Campaingne,
en le comté de Soissons, en l’evesquet de Noyon et de Laon,
guerioient et gastoient tout le pays. D’autre part, li roys de Navarre
se tenoit sus le marce de Normendie et faisoit moult forte guerre
ossi. Enssi estoit gueriiés li royaummes de tous costés, ne on ne
savoit auquel entendre.
Et par especial messires Ustasses d’Aubrechicourt, qui se tenoit à
Athegni sus Aisne[372], avoit là une grosse garnison de saudoiiers et
de compaignons qui gastoient, ranchonnoient et honnissoient tout le
pays; et couroient toute le comté de Retheis jusques à Doucheri,
jusques à Maisières, jusques au Kesne Pouilleux, jusques à Sethenay
en le comté de Bar. Et gissoient et logoient ou pays, quel part qu’il
volloient, deux nuis ou trois, sans destourbier de nullui; et puis s’en
revenoient logier et reposer à leur forterèche à Athegny. Bien est
voirs que tous li pays d’environ, seigneurs et autres, nobles et non
nobles, les manechoient durement et souvent, et mettoient assés de
journées pour hors yssir et pour yaux assegier; mès oncques n’en fu
riens fait.
Et advint que chil d’Athegny, qui ne faissoient fors nuit et jour
soubtillier et aviser quel part il porroient traire pou plus gaegnier,
vinrent de nuit à une forte ville et bon castiel qui siet en Laonnois,
assés priès de Montaigut, entre fors marès; et l’apelle on Pierepont.
Et avoient grant fuisson des gens dou pays, nobles et autres, mis
dedens la ditte ville leurs corps et leurs biens à sauveté sus le fiance
dou fort lieu. A l’eure que chil compagnon d’Athegny vinrent là, les
gaittes estoient endormies. Si se missent li compaignon, par le
convoitise de gaegnier, parmy ces fors marès, à grant meschief; et
vinrent jusques as murs, et puis entrèrent en le ville et le
gaegnièrent sans deffensce, et le desrobèrent toutte à leur vollenté.
Si trouvèrent dedens plus d’avoir qu’en nul lieu où il euissent estet.
Et quant il fu grans jours, il ardirent le ville; et s’empartirent et s’en
revinrent arrière à Athegny, bien fourni de grant pillage. Fo 121 vo.
P. 227, l. 24: Ategni.—Mss. A 8, 9, 11 à 17: Athigny. Fo 215 vo.
 P. 227, l. 27: conté.—Mss. A 20 à 22: cité. Fo 331.
P. 227, l. 28: Reters.—Mss. B 3, A 8, 9: Retel. Fo 233.—Mss. B 4 et
A 7: Rethers. Fo 219.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 11 à 19: Rethel. Fo 244 vo.—
Mss. A 20 à 22: Rether. Fo 331.
P. 227, l. 28: Donceri.—Ms. A 7: Doncheri. Fo 223.—Mss. A 11 à
14: Jonchery. Fo 216.
P. 227, l. 29: Kesne Poulleus.—Ms. B 3: Chesne Poulleux.—Mss. A
1 à 6, 8, 9, 11 à 14, 18, 19: Chesne Pouilleux.—Mss. A 15 à 17:
Chesne Poilleux. Fo 236.—Mss. A 20 à 22: Quesne Poulleux.
P. 227, l. 29: Sathenay.—Mss. B 4, A 1 à 7, 18 à 22: Sethenay.
P. 228, l. 2: Athegni.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 18, 19: Cheny.
P. 228, l. 14: ville.—Mss. B 3, 4, A 1 à 7, 8, 9, 11 à 17, 18 à 22:
forteresce.
P. 228, l. 20: fors.—Mss. A 11 à 17, 23 à 29: grans. Fo 216.
P. 228, l. 26: Athegni.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 18, 19: Cheny.
P. 228, l. 27: fouci.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 8, 9, 11 à 33 et B 3: fourniz. Fo
233.—Ms. A 7: fouchi. Fo 223.—Ms. B 4: sorti. Fo 219 vo.
P. 228, l. 27: grant.—Mss. A 8, 9, 11 à 17: bon. Fo 216.

§ 472. P. 228, l. 28: En ce temps.—Ms. d’Amiens: En ce tamps

avoit un Frère Menour plain de grant clergie et de grant
entendement, en Auvignon, qui s’appelloit frère Jehans de
Rechetaillade: lequel Frère Meneur pappes Ynnocens VIe faissoit
tenir em prisson ou castiel de Baignolles, pour les grandes merveilles
qu’il disoit qui devoient avenir, meysmement et princhipaument sus
les prelas et presidens de Sainte Eglise, pour les superfluiettés et
grant orgoeil qu’il demainnent, et ossi sus le royaumme de Franche
et sus les grans seigneurs de Crestienneté, pour les impresions qu’il
font sus le commun peuple. Et volloit ses parolles prouver par le
Apocalisce et par les anchiens livres des sains prophètes, qui lui
estoient ouvertes dou Saint Esperit, si qu’il disoit, dont moult en
disoit qui fortes estoient à croire. Et en veoit on avenir aucunnes
dedens le temps qu’il avoit annonchiet, et nel disoit mies si comme
prophètes; mais il le savoit par les anchiennes Escriptures et par don
Saint Esperit, enssi que dit est, qui li avoit donnet entendement de
declarer touttes ces anciiennes tourbles, prophesies et escriptures,
pour annuncier à tous crestiiens l’année et le tamps que elles
devoient avenir. Et en fist pluisseurs livres bien dités et bien fondés
de grant sienche de clergie: desquelz li ungs fu commenchiés l’an de
grasce mil trois cens quarante cinq, et li autres l’an mil trois cens
cinquante six; et avoit escript dedens tant de merveilles à avenir
entre l’an cinquante six et l’an soixante dix, qui trop seroient longhes
à escripre et trop fortes à croire, combien que on en ait pluisseurs
veut avenir dou tamps passet.
Et quant on li demandoit qu’il avenroit de le guerre des Franchois
et des Englès, il disoit que ce n’estoit riens chou que on en avoit
veut, enviers chou qui en avenroit; car il n’en seroit pais ne fins,
jusques à tant que li royaummes de France seroit essilliés et gastés
par touttes ses parties et ses regions. Et tout chou a on bien veut
avenir depuis; car li nobles royaummes de Franche a estet foullés,
gastés et essilliés l’an cinquante sept, l’an cinquante huit et l’an
cinquante neuf, par touttes ses regions, que nuls des prinches ne
des gentils hommes ne s’osoit moustrer contre ces gens de bas estat
assamblés de tous pays, venus li ungs apriès l’autre sans nul chief
de haut homme; et avoient le dit royaumme de Franche sans
deffensce à leur vollenté, enssi que vous avés oy. Et eslisoient
souverains et cappittainne entr’iaux, par diverses marches, asquels il
obeyssoient chil qui se mettoient en leur compaignie, et faisoient
certains convens li ungs as autres de lor roberie, de lor pillerie et des
raenchons des prisons; et en trouvèrent tant que les cappittainnes
en devenoient si riche qu’il ne savoient nombre ne mesure dou fier
avoir qu’il avoient. Fo 122.
P. 228, l. 29: clergie.—Ms. B 3: science. Fo 233.
P. 229, l. 1: Roce.—Ms. B 3: Roque.—Mss. A 11 à 14: de la Roche
Taillade. Fo 216.
P. 229, l. 3: Bagnolles.—Mss. A 15 à 17: Baingneulx. Fo 236.
 P. 229, l. 6: superfluités et.—Les mss. A 15 à 17 ajoutent: grans
dommaiges. Fo 236 vo.
P. 229, l. 9: oppressions.—Ms. B 4: impressions. Fo 219 vo,
P. 229, l. 9: font.—Mss. B 3, A 20 à 22: faisoient.
P. 229, l. 9: le.—Les mss. A 15 à 17 ajoutent: menu et.
P. 229, l. 12: aouvertes.—Mss. A 11 à 14: ouvers. Fo 216 vo.—Mss.
A 15 à 17: ouvers et esclarciz.
P. 229, l. 15 et 16: dedens le temps.—Mss. A 15 à 17: sur les
champs.
P. 229, l. 24: commenciés.—Mss. A 1 à 33: fait. Fo 245.
P. 229, l. 25: li aultres.—Ms. B 4: les aultres. Fo 219 vo.
P. 229, l. 29: combien que on en ait.—Mss. A 1 à 7, 18, 19: jà en
eust on.
P. 229, l. 30: dou temps passé.—Les mss. A 1 à 17, 20 à 22
omettent ces mots.—Mss. A 18, 19: depuis. Fo 253 vo.
P. 230, l. 1: demandoit.—Les mss. A 20 à 22 ajoutent: à ce dessus
dit cordelier. Fo 332.
P. 230, l. 1: qu’il avenroit.—Ces mots manquent dans A 1 à 33.
P. 230, l. 3 et 4: qui en avenroit.—Mss. A 8 à 14, 20 à 22: que on
verroit. Fo 216.
P. 230, l. 7: li.—Les mss. A 8 à 14 omettent: nobles.—Mss. A 20 à
22: très noble.
P. 230, l. 10 et 11: l’an.... neuf.—Mss. A 15 à 17: l’an quatre cens
et dix, onze et douze. Fo 236 vo.
P. 230, l. 13: ces gens.—Mss. A 15 à 17: contre les tuffes guieliers.
P. 230, l. 15: hault.—Mss. A 8, 9, 11 à 14: grant.
P. 230, l. 18: souverains et chapitains.—Mss. A 8, 9, 11 à 19:
souverains capitaines.
P. 230, l. 19: cil qui.—Mss. A 15 à 17: et tous ceulx qui.
P. 230, l. 21: couvens.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 8, 9, 11 à 19: convenans.
P. 230, l. 22: prisons.—Mss. B 4, A 1 à 7, 11 à 19: prisonniers.
 P. 230, l. 22: des raençons et des prisons.—Mss. A 20 à 22: des
raenchons des prisonniers. Fo 332.
P. 230, l. 23: tout riche.—Ms. B 3: que c’estoit merveille et
esto[ien]t si fiers de l’avoir qu’ilz assembloient qu’ilz vouloient
subjuguer tous les pais. Fo 234.
P. 230, l. 24: fier.—Mss. A 11 à 17: grant.
P. 230, l. 7 à 25: depuis.... assambloient.—Ces dix-huit lignes
manquent dans A 23 à 33. Fo 258.

§ 473. P. 230, l. 27: Li dessus.—Ms. d’Amiens: Nous revenrons au

roy englès qui estoit logiés au Bourcq le Roine, à deux lieuwes de
Paris, et toutte sen host contremont en allant deviers Montleheri. Si
envoya li roys ses hiraux dedens Paris au ducq de Normendie, qui s’i
tenoit à tout grant gens d’armes, pour demander bataille; mais li dus
ne li acorda point, ainschois retournèrent li messaige sans riens
faire.
Quant li roys d’Engleterre vit que nuls n’ysteroit de Paris pour li
combattre, s’en fu tous courouchiés. Adonc s’avancha cils bons
chevaliers messires Gautiers de Manni, et pria au roy qu’il lui volsist
laissier faire une chevauchie et envaie jusques as bailles de Paris; et
li roys li acorda, et nomma meysmement chiaux qu’i[l] volloit qui y
alaissent avoecq lui. Et fist là li roys pluisseurs chevaliers nouviaux,
dont Colars d’Aubrechicourt, fils à monseigneur Nicolle, l’ewist là
esté, s’il volsist; mès il s’escusa par consseil, pour ce qu’il se sentoit
trop jonnes, et dist qu’il ne pooit trouver son bachinet.
Li sires de Manni fist sen enprise et amena ses nouviaux chevaliers
hurter as bailles de Paris. Là eut bonne escarmuche et dure, car il y
avoit dedens Paris des bons chevaliers et escuiers qui vollentiers
fuissent issut, se li dus de Normendie ne l’ewist deffendu; toutteffois,
il gardoient le porte et le barrière là où chil Englès estoient, et
escarmucièrent de soleil levant jusques à miedi, et en y eult des
navrés des ungs et des autres. Adonc se retraist li sires de Manni, et
en ramena ses gens à leurs logeis, et se tinrent là encore che jour et
le nuit enssuiwant. Et l’endemain se deloga li roys englès et veut
aller plus avant par deviers le Montleheri.
Or vous diray quel pourpos aucuns seigneurs d’Engleterre et de
Gascoingne eurent au deslogement dou roy. Pour ce qu’il sentoient
dedens Paris tant de gentils hommes, il penssèrent assés qu’il en
wuideroient pour yaux aventurer, si comme il fissent, car messires
Raoulx de Rainneval, messires Raoulx de Couchi, li sires de
Montsaut, li castelains de Biauvès, li Bèghes de Velainne, li sires de
Wasiers, li sires de Wauvrain, messires Gauwains de Bailloel, li sires
de Vendoeil, messires Flammens de Roie, li Haselés de Cambeli,
messires Pière de Saremaise, messires Phelippes de Savoisi et bien
soixante lanches yssirent hors d’un accord pour yaux aventurer sus
les Englès.
Et tout ce penssèrent bien aucun chevalier et escuier englès et
gascons, et fissent ossi une embusche à l’aventure; et se missent
environ doi cens armures de fer, toutte gent d’eslite, en une maisson
toute wuide à trois lieuwes de Paris. Là estoit li captaus de Beus
souverains de l’enbusce, que li roys englès avoit nouvellement
remandé à Clermont, et messires Aimienions de Pumiers, li sires de
Courtons; et des Englès y estoient li sires de Noefvilles, li sires de
Montbray et messires Richars de Pont Cardon, et des autres qui se
volloient aventurer.
Si yssirent cil Franchois, si comme je vous di, bien monté et bien
armet, et chevaucièrent de premiers tout le pas sans fourhaster.
Quant il vinrent au Bourcq le Roine, il trouvèrent que li rois englès et
toutte sen host estoient deslogiet et que riens n’estoit demouret
derrière: dont chevauchièrent plus avant enssuivant les esclos des
Englès, et passèrent oultre celle maison où li embusce dou captaul
estoit. Assés tost apriès ce qu’il furent oultre, li embusce sailli hors,
les glaives abaissies, en criant leur cri. Quant li Franchois se
retournèrent pour l’effroi et le friente des chevaux qu’il oirent, il
perçurent lors ennemis derierre yaux, qui moult se hastoient. Adonc
s’arestèrent il tout à un fès et baissièrent les glaives, et ferirent
cevaux des esperons et s’en vinrent sus ces Englès.
 Là ot de première encontre forte jouste et ruet ent jus pluisseurs,
d’un lès et de l’autre; et tantost s’entremelèrent et se
commencièrent à combattre d’espées et d’espois et de ce qu’il
avoient. Mès finablement li journée ne fu point pour les Franchois;
ains fu porté à terre li sires de Cantremi. Là eut fort estor desoubs
se bannierre, qui estoit d’argent à une bende de gheulles à six
merlètes noires, trois desoubs et trois deseure; et fu là pris par
forche, et chils qui portoit se bannière, ochilx.
Quant li pluisseur et ensi que tout virent le mesaventure et que
trop durement il estoient rencontré, il se missent au retour, et Englès
et Gascons apriès; et furent cachiés bien priès de Paris. Là furent
pris li sires de Montsaut, ungs banerès de Picardie, et li Hazelé de
Cambeli et messires Pières de Saremaise et messires Rogiers de
Couloingne, qui y fu moult bon chevalier, et bien neuf des autres; et
li remains se sauvèrent et rentrèrent em Paris.
Si retournèrent li Gascon et li Englès apriès le routte de leur ost. Si
enmenèrent leurs prisounniers et trouvèrent le roy logiet au
Montleheri; car adonc le poursieuwoient doy prélat et grant traiteur
de pès, li evesques de Tierewainne, qui s’apelloit messires Gilles de
Montagut, qui estoit pour le temps canchillier de Franche, et li abbes
de Clugny. Fo 122.
P. 231, l. 3: li message.—Mss. B 3, A 1 à 6, 8 à 14, 18 à 22: les
messagiers. Fo 233 vo.—Ms. A 7: les messages. Fo 223 vo.—Mss. A 15
à 17: les messaiges. Fo 236 vo.
P. 231, l. 9: bailles.—Ms. B 3, A 8, 9, 11 à 17: barrières.
P. 231, l. 9: de.—Mss. A 30 à 33: devant. Fo 242.
P. 231, l. 13: Fil Watier.—Mss. A 15 à 17: Silvaustier. Fo 237.
P. 231, l. 14: Toursiaus.—Ms. B 3: Trouceaux.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 18,
19: Torceaux. Fo 245 vo.—Mss. A 8, 9: de Toursiaux. Fo 216 vo.—Mss.
A 11 à 14: de Trousiaulx. Fo 217.—Mss. A 15 à 17: Trousseaux.—Mss.
A 20 à 22: de Trousseaulx. Fo 332 vo.—Mss. A 23 à 33: Trousseau. Fo
258.
P. 231, l. 16: Richars.—Ms. B 3: Thomas.
 P. 231, l. 16: Sturi.—Mss. A 1, 2, 4 à 6, 18, 19: Destinoy.—Ms. A 3:
de Stury.—Mss. A 8, 9, 11 à 14: Secury.—Mss. A 15 à 17: Senry.—
Mss. A 20 à 22: Scuri.—Mss. A 23 à 33: de Scury. Fo 258.
P. 232, l. 12 et 13: Courton.—Les mss. A 1 à 7, 15 à 17, 18 à 33
ajoutent: Gascons.—Mss. A 8, 9, 11 à 14: Gascon.
P. 232, l. 23: Couci.—Ms. B 3: Roucy. Fo 234.
P. 232, l. 24: li sires de Helli.—Mss. A 15 à 17: Jehan de Helli. Fo
237.
P. 232, l. 26: Bailluel.—Mss. A 15 à 17: Gaillouel.
P. 232, l. 28: li Hazelés de Cambli.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 18, 19: Azelés de
Cavilly.—Mss. A 8, 9, 11 à 14: le Haze de Chambli.—Mss. A 15 à 17:
la Haze de Chambelly.—Mss. A 20 à 22: Gazelés de Cambly. Fo 333.
—Mss. A 23 à 33: Azele de Cambely. Fo 258 vo.
P. 232, l. 29 et 30: Saremaise.—Ms. B 3: Saremoise.—Mss. A 8, 9:
Sarmaise.—Mss. A 23 à 29: Fermoises.
P. 232, l. 29: Savoizis.—Mss. A 7, 20 à 22: Samoisis.—Mss. A 23 à
29: Fermoises.
P. 233, l. 2: tout le froais.—Mss. A 1 à 6: tout le frais. Fo 246.—
Mss. A 8, 9, 15 a 17: tout le froyé. Fo 217.—Mss. A 11 à 14: tout le
fraie. Fo 217.—Mss. A 18, 19: tout le frait. Fo 254.—Mss. A 20 à 22:
tout le frois. Fo 333.—Ms. B 4: tout les froais. Fo 220.
P. 233, l. 28: Campremi.—Mss. B 3, 4: Cantremy.—Mss. A 18, 19:
Champremi. Fo 254 vo.—Mss. A 20 à 22: Capremy.
P. 234, l. 11 et 12: empainte.—Ms. B 3: empreinte. Fo 234 vo.—
Mss. A 8, 9: emprise. Fo 217.—Mss. A 11 à 17, 20 à 22: emprinse. Fo
217 vo.
P. 234, l. 12: retournèrent.—Ms. B 6: Sy s’en retournèrent les
Gascons et Englès à tout leur prisonniers en le compaignie du roy
d’Angleterre qui s’en aloit devers Chartres. Fo 608.
P. 234, l. 17: recrurent.—Ms. B 3: creurent.—Mss. A 8, 9, 20 à 29:
receurent.
 P. 234, l. 17: legierement.—Mss. A 8, 11 à 14: courtoisement.—Cet
adverbe manque dans A 23 à 33. Fo 259.

FIN DES VARIANTES DU TOME CINQUIÈME.

 NOTES
CHAPITRE LXXVIII.
[1] Cf. Jean le Bel, Chroniques, t. II, ch. XCXIV, p. 195 à 203. Ici commence,
d’après le témoignage de Froissart lui-même (t. I de cette édition, p. 210), la
partie vraiment originale de son œuvre historique; notre chroniqueur cesse
d’emprunter la plupart des faits qu’il raconte à Jean le Bel son devancier, il les
doit désormais en grande partie à ses propres enquêtes et à ses informations
personnelles.—Nous demandons la permission d’insérer ici l’analyse de trois
documents qui nous paraissent offrir un intérêt capital au point de vue des
conséquences sociales du désastre de Poitiers. Cette défaite, comme celle de
Crécy, obligea un grand nombre de seigneurs, qui avaient été faits
prisonniers, à affranchir leurs serfs pour se procurer de l’argent. Par acte daté
de Paris en décembre 1357, Charles, aîné fils et lieutenant du roi, confirme
gratuitement les lettres d’affranchissement accordées le vendredi 27 janv.
1357 (n. st.) par Jean de Champlay écuyer, seigneur de Charmoy, à divers
hommes et femmes, y dénommés, ses serfs, demeurant à Charmoy et à
Bassou (Yonne, arr. et c. Joigny) moyennant une certaine somme d’argent
une fois payée et une rente annuelle de 12 deniers parisis, lesquelles lettres
d’affranchissement avaient été ratifiées par messire Gui de Valery, chevalier,
seigneur de Champlay, frère du dit Jean: «Comme il soit ainsi que le dit
suppliant et le dit seigneur de Chanloy son frère, qui tous jours ont servi
nostre dit seigneur et nous ès guerres et derrenierement à Poitiers, où il ont
touz deux esté pris et mis à très grant et excessive raençon par les ennemis,
si comme il nous a esté souffisamment relaté, ne puissent paier la ditte
raençon, et aussi plusieurs creanciers à qui il est tenuz et obligiez, sanz faire
vile distraccion de ses biens; et pour ce ycellui escuier ait fait certain traittié et
acort aveucques ses diz hommes et femmes de la condicion dessus ditte....»
Arch. nat., sect. hist., JJ89, no 43.—Le 4 mars 1358 (n. st.), Ancel, sire de
Pommolain (auj. Pont-Molin, hameau de Coulommiers, Seine-et-Marne), fait
prisonnier ainsi qu’un de ses fils à la bataille de Poitiers et n’ayant pas de quoi
payer sa rançon sans déshériter lui et ses dix ou onze enfants, affranchit ou
esbonna (abonna), moyennant 120 florins d’or à l’écu du coing et aloi du roi
Jean, Guiot du Vivier, dit du Bois, son serf, Marguerite, femme de Guiot, et
leurs enfants. JJ114, no 98.—Par acte daté de Fontaine-du-Houx (auj. château
de Bézu-la-Forêt, Eure, arr. les Andelys, c. Lyons-la-Forêt), en juin 1357,
Charles, aîné fils du roi de France et son lieutenant, duc de Normandie,
autorise Normand de Beauvilliers, écuyer, fils aîné de Jouin de Beauvilliers, à
mettre en liberté moyennant finance, tant en son nom qu’au nom de ses
frères et sœurs, cinq de ses serfs taillables «.... cum ipse, in ultimo exercitu
domini genitoris nostri prope Pictavis existente, tanquam fidelis serviens ipsi
genitori nostro per suos et nostros inimicos captus et magne pecunie summe,
causa redempcionis, positus extiterit, quam quidem pecunie summam de
omnibus bonis suis mobilibus solvere non posset.» JJ85, no 139, fo 64.
[2] Le roi Jean séjourna à Chartres depuis le dimanche 28 août jusqu’aux
premiers jours de septembre 1356. De Chartres sont datés divers priviléges
accordés le 28 août aux habitants de Castelnaudary (JJ89, no 93), d’Avignonet
(JJ89, no 131), de Carbonne (JJ89, no 94), de Fanjeaux (JJ89, no 95), de
Montgiscard (JJ89, no 96), du Mas-Saintes-Puelles (JJ89, no 298), localités
que les Anglais avaient ravagées et en partie brûlées à la fin de 1355 et au
commencement de 1356. (t. IV de cette édition, sommaire, p. LIX à LXIV).
D’autres actes sont datés de Chartres le mardi 30 août (JJ84, nos 673 et 699)
et en septembre (JJ89, no 316).
[3] Les Anglais avaient pris de nuit et par escalade la cité de Périgueux au
commencement de 1356 (Ordonn., t. III, p. 55). Voilà pourquoi la chronique
anonyme d’un moine de Malmesbury, qui nous a conservé l’itinéraire jour par
jour de l’armée anglaise, donne Brantôme comme première étape. D’après
cette chronique, le prince de Galles était à Brantôme (Dordogne, arr.
Périgueux) le 9 août; le 12, à Rochechouart; le 13, à la Péruze (Charente, arr.
Confolens, c. Chabanais); le 14 et le 15 à Lesterps (Charente, arr. et c.
Confolens); le 16, à Bellac; le 19, à Lussac (Lussac-les-Églises, Haute-Vienne,
arr. Bellac, c. Saint-Sulpice-les-Feuilles); le 20, à Saint-Benoît-du-Sault (Indre,
arr. le Blanc); le 21, à Argenton (Argenton-sur-Creuse, Indre, arr.
Châteauroux); le 21 et le 22, à Châteauroux et au Bourg-Dieu (auj. Déols,
Indre, arr. et c. Châteauroux).—Le prince de Galles dit, dans une lettre
adressée de Bordeaux le 20 octobre 1356 à l’évêque de Worcester (publiée
par Buchon, Froissart, éd. du Panthéon, t. I, p. 354, en note), qu’il commença
à chevaucher vers les parties de France «la veille de la translation saint
Thomas de Canterbire», c’est-à-dire le mercredi 6 juillet 1356. D’un autre
côté, Barthélemi de Burghersh, dans sa lettre à Jean Montagu, publiée par M.
Coxe (The life of black prince, notes, p. 369 et 370), raconte que «le prince se
parti de Burdeux l’endemayn de saynt Johan en auguste l’an de Nostre
Seignur M.CCC.LVI.»
[4] Par acte daté de Paris en février 1358 (n. st.), Charles, aîné fils et
lieutenant du roi de France, accorda des lettres d’amortissement pour 30
livres de rente annuelle sises à Dampierre et achetées de son amé et féal
messire Philippe de Prie, cher, à ses amés et féaux les doyen et chapitre de
l’église de Bourges «attentis dampnis et gravaminibus in ipsorum ecclesie
terra ac eorum hominibus factis et illatis tam per exercitum principis Wallie
quam per alios Anglicos, qui eciam nonnulla castra seu fortalicia in diocesi et
partibus Bituricensibus et circumvicinis de facto occuparunt, attentis eciam
miseriis et expensis per eosdem decanum et capitulum pro dictorum
castrorum seu fortaliciorum redemptione et alias pro guerris presentibus
multipliciter factis....» JJ89, no 57.
[5] D’après la chronique anonyme d’un moine de Malmesbury, le prince de
Galles fut devant Issoudun du 24 au 26 août.
[6] Cher, arr. Bourges. D’après la chronique déjà citée, le prince de Galles
fut le 28 août devant le château de la Ferté appartenant au vicomte de
Thouars et devant Vierzon, le jour même où Jean Chandos et James Audley
mirent le feu à Aubigny (Cher, arr. Sancerre). Le samedi 19 octobre 1359,
Jean Chabot, bourgeois de Vierzon, affranchit, avec l’agrément de Hutin de
Vermeilles, chevalier, seigneur de Vierzon, Martin Prevostel, homme serf et de
condition servile, taillable haut et bas à la volonté du dit bourgeois, qui
demeurait à Vierzon «tempore quo princeps Vallie et alii inimici domini regis et
regni Francie incurrerunt et invaserunt Biturriam et maxime dictam villam
Virsionis, in qua quidem villa predicta et terra predictus Martinus habebat
omnia bona sua et ipsa ibidem amiserit....» JJ90, no 406.
[7] Romorantin, aujourd’hui chef-lieu d’arrondissement du département de
Loir-et-Cher, est situé sur la Saudre, affluent de la rive droite du Cher, un peu
au nord-ouest de Vierzon, qui est sur le Cher. D’après la chronique du moine
de Malmesbury, le siége fut mis devant Romorantin les mardi 30 et mercredi
31 août à la suite d’un combat victorieux livré le lundi 29 au sire de Craon et à
Boucicaut. Le jeudi 1er septembre, trois assauts furent donnés par le comte de
Suffolk, Barthélemi de Burghersh et un baron de Gascogne. Les vendredi 2 et
samedi 3 septembre, le feu grégeois fut mis au donjon. Les assiégés,
manquant de vin et d’eau pour éteindre l’incendie, capitulèrent. Le prince de
Galles se reposa le dimanche 4 à Romorantin. Robert de Avesbury dit (éd.
d’Oxford, 1720, p. 255) que la ville et le château de Romorantin furent
emportés d’assaut quinze jours avant la bataille de Poitiers et qu’on fit
prisonniers environ 80 gens d’armes, entre autres le sire de Craon et
Boucicaut; le chroniqueur anglais ajoute que près de 120 hommes d’armes
français s’étaient fait prendre dans l’escarmouche qui avait précédé le siége
de Romorantin.
[8] Le 5 juillet 1356, Jean le Maingre, dit Boucicaut, était à Poitiers où il
donnait quittance des gages à lui dus pour la défense du château. Catalogue
Joursanvault, t. I, p. 5, no 27.
[9] Le roi Jean était à Meung-sur-Loire (Loiret, arr. Orléans, un peu au sud-
ouest de cette ville) le jeudi 8 septembre: Datum Magduni super Ligerim
octava die mensis septembris anno Domini 1356. Per regem, presente domino
marescallo d’Odeneham. P. Blanchet. JJ84, no 598. Tandis que le roi de France
était encore sur la rive droite de la Loire, son adversaire le prince de Galles se
tenait sur la rive gauche de ce fleuve, qu’il essayait en vain de franchir, à
Chaumont-sur-Loire (Loir-et-Cher, arr. Blois, c. Montrichard, un peu en aval de
Blois) où, d’après la chronique déjà citée du moine de Malmesbury, il séjourna
du mercredi 7 au samedi 10 septembre. Le roi de France qui, comme nous
l’avons établi plus haut, était à Meung le 9, arriva sans doute à Blois le 10
pour y passer la Loire, car le 11 le prince de Galles franchit précipitamment le
Cher ainsi que l’Indre et vint coucher à Montbazon (Indre-et-Loire, arr. Tours,
sur la rive gauche de l’Indre); il y reçut le 12 la visite du cardinal de Périgord,
qui venait s’interposer comme médiateur entre les belligérants; il apprit en
même temps que le roi de France s’avançait à marches forcées et que le
dauphin était à Tours.
[10] Il faut dire, à l’honneur du roi Jean, que des mesures avaient été
prises, dès les premiers mois de 1356, pour mettre Tours en état de défense.
En mars de cette année, Jean mandait à son bailli de Tours de nommer, après
en avoir délibéré avec le conseil de la ville, 6 élus chargés de pourvoir aux
travaux des fortifications, en leur donnant pouvoir de lever des tailles,
impositions et collectes sur tous les habitants de la ville et de la châtellenie,
de quelque condition qu’ils soient, et de frapper les réfractaires d’une amende
qui ne dépassera pas 60 sous. JJ118, no 176.
[11] Jean était le mardi 13 septembre à Loches sur Indre, où il rendit deux
ordonnances sur les monnaies (Ordonn., t. III, p. 84 et 85). Nous apprenons
par la chronique du moine de Malmeslmry que le même jour le prince de
Galles, menacé d’être débordé par son aile gauche et enveloppé, traversa
Sainte-Maure (Sainte-Maure-de-Touraine, Indre-et-Loire, arr. Chinon, à l’ouest
de Loches) et vint coucher à la Haye-sur-Creuse (auj. la Haye-Descartes,
Indre-et-Loire, arr. Loches, sur la rive droite de la Creuse, un peu en amont de
son confluent avec la Vienne).
[12] Jean, qui était à Loches le mardi 13, dut arriver le lendemain soir
mercredi 14 à la Haye, où le prince de Galles l’avait précédé seulement de 24
heures. La Haye est sur la Creuse, et non sur la Vienne, comme le dit par
erreur Froissart (p. 246).
[13] Vienne, arr. Montmorillon, sur la rive droite de la Vienne, à 10 lieues
au sud de la Haye, à 7 lieues au sud de Châtellerault, à 5 lieues à l’est de
Poitiers.
[14] Lorsque Jean arriva à Chauvigny le jeudi soir 15 septembre, il laissait
en effet les Anglais derrière lui sur sa droite, puisque nous savons par le
moine de Malmesbury que le prince de Galles séjourna à Châtellerault du
mercredi 14 au vendredi 16 septembre. Comment Jean, dont l’armée dut
suivre la vallée de la Vienne en remontant par la rive droite le cours de cette
rivière, pour se rendre de la Haye à Chauvigny, put-il passer si près de
Châtellerault sans apercevoir les Anglais? Craignit-il de tenter le passage de la
Vienne en présence de l’ennemi campé sur la rive gauche?
[15] L’immobilité du prince de Galles à Châtellerault pendant trois jours, du
mercredi 14 au vendredi soir 16 septembre, prouve qu’il se savait devancé et
débordé sur sa gauche par l’armée française à laquelle il voulut laisser le
temps de s’écouler avant de reprendre lui-même sa marche en avant. Le
mouvement de l’armée française dans la journée du vendredi prouvait que le
roi Jean, croyant Poitiers menacé par les Anglais, avait voulu le couvrir. Le
prince de Galles prit aussitôt ses mesures pour mettre cette erreur à profit en
essayant de s’échapper par la gauche de son adversaire. Dans la nuit du
vendredi 16 au samedi 17, il fit passer tout son charroi, et le samedi 17, dès la
pointe du jour, il se porta lui-même en avant dans la direction de Chauvigny
en remontant la Vienne par la rive gauche. C’est alors que ses éclaireurs
rencontrèrent l’arrière-garde française sur la route qui va de Chauvigny à
Poitiers, en un lieu dit la Chaboterie marqué sur la carte de Cassini. Les
Français eurent le dessous dans cette escarmouche où, selon Robert de
Avesbury (p. 255), environ 240 hommes d’armes furent tués ou pris et où les
comtes d’Auxerre, de Joigny et le maréchal de Bourgogne restèrent entre les
mains des vainqueurs; mais cet engagement, en révélant au roi Jean la
véritable position des Anglais, rendait la bataille inévitable. Les Grandes
Chroniques disent (t. VI, p. 31) que ce fut le comte de Sancerre, et non le
comte d’Auxerre, qui fut pris avec le comte de Joigny.
[16] L’endroit, dit Maupertuis jusqu’à la fin du quinzième siècle, qui
s’appelle aujourd’hui la Cardinerie, est situé dans la commune de Nouaillé
(Vienne, arr. Poitiers, c. la Villedieu, à deux lieues au sud-est de Poitiers). Ce
changement de nom, d’après les renseignements qu’a bien voulu nous fournir
notre savant confrère M. Redet, provient de la concession faite par le
commandeur de Beauvoir à Richard Delyé, dit Cardin, le 31 janvier 1495 (n.
st.) de terres sises au lieu appelé Maupertuis (Archives de la Vienne, fonds de
la commanderie de Beauvoir). De nombreux lieux-dits rappellent encore la
bataille de 1356. Tout près de la Cardinerie (Maupertuis), un endroit dit
Champ-de-la-Bataille fait partie de la pièce des Grimaudières sise sur la
commune de Saint-Benoît (Vienne, arr. et c. Poitiers). Le prince de Galles
campé sur des hauteurs alors couvertes de vignes et hérissées de haies
épaisses, ayant derrière lui et à sa gauche le ravin assez profond du Miausson,
appuyait sa droite aux bois et à l’abbaye de Nouaillé; il avait devant lui la
plaine qui s’étend de la Cardinerie (Maupertuis) vers Beauvoir et que traverse
une voie romaine. «Commissum est prælium, disaient en 1720 les auteurs du
Gallia Christiana (t. II, col. 1243) in extrema parte saltus Nobiliacensis (bois
de Nouaillé), ubi etiamnum Anglorum castra fossis munita cernere est.» V. la
dissertation, accompagnée d’une carte, publiée par le capitaine F. Vinet à la
suite de l’ouvrage intitulé Bertrand du Guesclin et son époque, de Jamison,
traduit par J. Baissac, in-8o, 1866, p. 575 à 578. On peut consulter encore les
ouvrages suivants:
Annales d’Aquitaine, par Jean Bouchet, Poitiers, Abraham Monnin, 1644, in-
4o,p. 200.
—Essai de dissertation touchant la situation du Campus vocladensis, dans
Dissertations sur l’histoire ecclésiastique et civile de Paris, par l’abbé Lebeuf,
1739-1743, 3 vol. in-12, t. I, p. 304 à 338.
—Archæologia britannica, vol. I, p. 213; mémoire lu le 24 janvier 1754 à la
Société des Antiquaires de Londres, par le docteur Lyttleton, doyen d’Exeter.
—Affiches du Poitou, feuille hebdomadaire publiée de 1773 à 1790, in-4o,
1774, p. 187.
—Abrégé de l’histoire du Poitou, par Thibaudeau, Poitiers, 1783, 6 vol. in-
12, t. II, p. 247.
—Vies des grands capitaines, par Mazas, t. III, p. 112 à 141.
—Revue anglo-française, publiée à Poitiers par M. de la Fontenelle de
Vaudoré, de 1833 à 1841, 7 vol. in-8o; t. V, p. 99, 106, 108, 194, 204, 206.
—Essai sur l’ancien Poitou, par Joseph Guérinière, Poitiers, 1836, 2 vol. gr.
in-8o, t. I, p. 534.
—Campagne du prince de Galles dans le Languedoc, l’Aquitaine et la
France, terminée par la bataille de Poitiers; dans les Mémoires de la Société
des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, t. VIII, 1841, p. 75.
—Life of Edward the black prince; chronique rimée du héraut Chandos sur
les faits d’armes du prince de Galles, publiée par M. Coxe pour le Roxburgh-
Club; in-4o de I-XII et 1-399 pages. M. Francisque Michel a bien voulu nous
communiquer un exemplaire de cette importante publication, fort rare, même
en Angleterre; cet exemplaire est probablement le seul qui existe en France.
—Bataille de Maupertuis, par M. Saint-Hippolyte; dans les Mémoires de la
Société des Antiquaires de l’Ouest, t. XI (1844), avec carte.
—Bulletin de la Société d’Agriculture de Poitiers, in-8o, t. I, p. 27 et t. II, p.
361.
—Chroniques de Froissart publiées par M. Kervyn de Lettenhove, t. V, p.
526.
[17] Le dimanche 18 juillet, l’armée française était campée près de Poitiers,
comme l’atteste la date suivante d’un acte émané du roi Jean: «Datum in
exercitu nostro prope Pictavis die decima octava septembris, anno Domini
1356. Per regem, episcopo Lingonensi (Guillaume de Poitiers) presente.»
JJ84, no 635.
[18] Le rédacteur des Grandes Chroniques (t. VI, p. 32) et le héraut
Chandos, dans son poëme sur la bataille de Poitiers publié par M. Coxe (p. 72
à 82, vers 1046 à 1189), indiquent aussi cet ordre de bataille.
[19] Eustache de Ribemont est ce chevalier auquel Édouard III avait
décerné le chapelet de bravoure à la suite du combat livré sous les murs de
Calais, dans la nuit du 31 décembre 1349 au 1er janvier 1350. (t. IV de cette
édition, sommaire, p. XXXIII et XXXIV). Il fut tué à Poitiers ainsi que Jean de
Landas et Guichard de Beaujeu; Guichard d’Angle fut grièvement blessé.
[20] L’incontestable supériorité militaire des Anglais au quatorzième siècle
résidait surtout dans l’adresse, le bon outillage et la proportion numérique de
leurs archers par rapport au reste de leurs troupes. Dès le 30 janvier 1356,
Édouard III mandait à ses vicomtes de faire fabriquer 5600 arcs blancs et
11400 gerbes de flèches dont moitié devra être prête et rendue à la Tour de
Londres à Pâques (24 avril) et l’autre moitié dans la quinzaine de la Trinité
(1re quinzaine de juin) 1356. Rymer, vol. III, p. 322.
[21] Le héraut Chandos passe sous silence cet incident, mais il rapporte (p.
88, v. 1280 à 1299) l’altercation qui s’éleva entre Jean de Clermont, partisan
de l’immobilité, et Arnoul d’Audrehem qui assurait que les Anglais essayaient
de fuir et voulait les attaquer. «La pointe de votre lance ne viendra pas au cul
de mon cheval,» avait dit Jean de Clermont impatienté. Le brave maréchal se
fit tuer, en effet, au premier choc.
[22] En février 1361, le châtelain d’Emposte (Amposta, Catalogne, prov.
Lerida) était Jean Ferdinand de Heredia, grand prieur de Saint-Gilles, qui fut
chargé par le pape Innocent VI de traiter avec les brigands des Compagnies
maîtres du Pont-Saint-Esprit. Dom Vaissette, Hist. du Languedoc, t. IV, p. 311,
576 et 577.
[23] Le témoignage du héraut Chandos vient confirmer celui de Froissart
relativement à l’ordre de bataille de l’armée anglaise (p. 82 à 86, v. 1200 à
1259). Seulement, d’après Chandos, cette armée fut attaquée sur ses
derrières au moment même où elle se mettait en mesure de passer le
Miausson et où l’avant-garde, commandée par le comte de Warwick, était déjà
de l’autre côté de cette rivière. Les passages suivants, qui mettent ce fait hors
de doute, doivent être cités textuellement. Le prince de Galles dit au comte de
Warwick:

Primers, passerés le passage

Et garderés nostre cariage,
Je chevacherai après vous (v. 1222 à 1224).
 Et plus loin:

Et li prince se desloga,
A chivacher se chimina,
Car celui jour ne quidoit pas
Combatre, je ne vous mente pas (v. 1268 à 1271).

Aussi, le héraut Chandos a bien soin de faire remarquer que ce fut l’arrière-
garde, placée sous les ordres du comte de Salisbury, qui eut à soutenir le
choc des maréchaux de France et de leurs 300 chevaliers d’élite et qui les mit
en déroute. Il ajoute que cette déconfiture eut lieu:

Devant qe poist estre tournée

L’avauntgarde et repassée,
Car jà fuist outre la rivère (le Miausson).
(V. 1374 à 1376.)

[24] L’armée anglaise occupait le plateau de la Cardinerie (alors

Maupertuis) sur la rive droite du Miausson entre cette rivière et la voie
romaine de Poitiers à Limoges. L’étroit chemin dont il s’agit ici est le chemin
rural, allant du hameau des Minières à celui des Bordes, qui traverse le
plateau de la Cardinerie dans sa largeur, qui par conséquent coupait en deux
la position des Anglais.
[25] «Par conseil», dit Froissart. La version des Grandes Chroniques
relativement à ce départ du champ de bataille du dauphin et des princes ses
frères est la même que celle de notre chroniqueur (t. VI, p. 33 et 34): «Et de
la dite besoigne l’en fist retraire le duc de Normendie, ainsné fils du roy, le
duc d’Anjou et le conte de Poitiers ses frères et le duc d’Orleans, frère du dit
roy.» Charles, dauphin, né à Vincennes le 21 janvier 1337, n’avait pas encore
20 ans. Le comte d’Armagnac, alors lieutenant du roi en Languedoc, dans une
lettre en provençal, datée de Moissac le 1er octobre 1356 et adressée aux
habitants des villes de son gouvernement, que dom Vaissette (Hist. du
Languedoc, t. IV, p. 288) a signalée le premier et dont Ménard a donné le
texte d’après l’original conservé aux Archives municipales de Nîmes (Hist. de
Nismes, t. II (1751), Preuves, p. 182), le comte d’Armagnac confirme la
version des Grandes Chroniques: «Cars amis, ab la plus grant tristor et dolor
de cor que avenir nos pogues, vos faut assaber que dilhus ac VIII jorns que lo
rey Mossenhor se combatet ab lo princep de Gualas; et aychi cum a Dio a
plagut a suffrir, lo rey Mossenhor es estat desconfit e es pres cum lo melhor
cavalier que fos le jorn de sa part, e es naffrat el vizatge de doas plaguas.
Mossenhor Phelip son dernier filh es pres ab lhuy. Mossenhor lo duc de
Normandia et mossenhor d’Anjo et de Peito et mossenhor le duc d’Orlhes, de
comandamen del rey Mossenhor, se so salvatz; et lo princep es o sera dins III
jorns à Bordeus, e mena lo rey Mossenhor ab lhuy e son dig filh et d’autres
preyos....»
[26] Par acte daté de Londres le 15 novembre 1356, Édouard, prince de
Galles, donna en viager à son amé et féal chevalier Jean Chandos «pro bono
et gratuito servitio in partibus Vasconiæ et præcipue in bello de Peyters» deux
parts de son manoir de Kirketon in Lyndeseye (auj. Kirton ou Kirktown dans le
comté de Lincoln près de Lindsey) à la condition de lui apporter chaque année
une rose rouge à la fête de la Nativité-Saint-Jean-Baptiste (24 juin). Rymer,
vol. III, p. 343.
[27] La liste des morts de Poitiers, donnée par Froissart, est à la fois très-
incomplète et très-inexacte. Le défaut d’espace nous permet de citer
seulement Pierre I du nom, duc de Bourbon, comte de Clermont et de la
Marche, Gautier, duc d’Athènes, connétable de France, Renaud Chauveau,
évêque de Châlons, André de Chauvigny, vicomte de Brosse et le vicomte de
Rochechouart. V. les listes données par Robert de Avesbury (éd. de 1720, p.
252 et 253) et à la suite d’une lettre du prince de Galles à l’évêque de
Worcester en date du 20 octobre 1356; cette dernière liste a été reproduite
par Buchon (Froissart, éd. du Panthéon, t. I, p. 355, en note). V. aussi la
nomenclature des chevaliers et écuyers enterrés aux Frères Mineurs et aux
Frères Prêcheurs de Poitiers publiée par Bouchet (Annales d’Aquitaine, p. 202
à 205) et reproduite ainsi que les listes précédentes dans les notes de l’édition
de Buchon. V. enfin René de Belleval, La Grande Guerre, Paris, 1862, in-8o, p.
172 à 177.
[28] La liste des prisonniers, donnée par Froissart, est comme celle des
morts incomplète et inexacte. Les principaux grands feudataires, ou grands
officiers, pris avec le roi Jean et Philippe son plus jeune fils, étaient: Jacques
de Bourbon I du nom, comte de Ponthieu et de la Marche, prisonnier de Jean
de Grailly captal de Buch (Rymer, vol. III, p. 346); Jean d’Artois, comte d’Eu;
Charles d’Artois, comte de Longueville; Charles de Trie, comte de Dammartin,
prisonnier du comte de Salisbury (JJ116, no 115); Henri, sire de Joinville,
comte de Vaudemont du chef de sa mère; Louis II, comte d’Étampes; Jean de
Chalon, III du nom, comte d’Auxerre et de Tonnerre; Jean III, comte de
Sancerre; Jean de Noyers, comte de Joigny; Robert II, comte de Roucy; Jean
VI, comte de Vendôme; Bernard, comte de Ventadour. Jean II du nom,
vicomte de Melun, comte de Trancarville; Jean, comte de Nassau; Jean,
comte de Saarbruck; le comte de Nidau, en tout 16 comtes, 13 français, 3
allemands; Aymeri IX, vicomte de Narbonne; Guillaume de Melun, archevêque
de Sens, prisonnier pour un quart de Robert de Clynton qui vendit ce quart à
Édouard III 1000 livres (Rymer, vol. III, p. 399); Arnoul d’Audrehem, maréchal
de France; le vicomte de Beaumont. V., outre les listes dont il a été question
plus haut et qui ont été reproduites par Buchon, René de Belleval, ouvrage
cité, p. 170 à 180.
[29] Froissart dit (p. 51, 278) que Bercler est «un moult biel chastiel seant
sus le rivière de Saverne, en le marce de Galles». Berkeley est en effet situé
sur la rive gauche de la Savern, près de son embouchure dans le canal de
Bristol qui forme la limite sud-est du pays de Galles.
[30] Nous identifions Ellènes, que notre chroniqueur dit être le nom d’un
écuyer et par suite d’un fief picard, avec Allaines, Somme, arr. et c. Péronne.
[31] Mignaloux-Beauvoir, Vienne, arr. Poitiers, c. Saint-Julien-l’Ars.
[32] Renaud, sire de Pons, de Blaye et de Ribérac, est mentionné comme
mort à Poitiers dans un acte de Charles, duc de Normandie, daté de Paris en
avril 1357. JJ85, no 128.
[33] Le 21 novembre 1356, à la requête de Jeanne de Vergy, dame de
Montfort et de Savoisy, veuve de Geoffroi de Charny, Charles fils aîné du roi
de France, confirma une donation faite par son père au dit Geoffroi au mois
de juillet précédent; et cette confirmation est accordée en faveur de Geoffroi
de Charny, fils mineur du dit Geoffroi «tué à la bataille livrée dernièrement
près de Poitiers». JJ84, no 671.
[34] Denis de Saint-Omer, sire de Morbecque, se fit délivrer des lettres
patentes datées de Westminster le 20 décembre 1357 (Rymer, vol. III, p. 385)
où le roi d’Angleterre constate que c’est bien à Denis que le roi de France s’est
rendu et a baillé sa foi le jour de la bataille de Poitiers. Denis de Morbecque
avait été secondé dans cette glorieuse capture par Enguerrand de
Beaulincourt son cousin.
[35] Sir James Touchet, baron Audley, descendait d’une famille normande
fixée en Angleterre après la conquête.
[36] La bataille de Poitiers se livra en effet un lundi, mais ce lundi tomba
en 1356 le 19 septembre, non le 20, d’après la leçon la moins fautive, celle du
ms. d’Amiens (p. 284), ni le 21, d’après la leçon des mss. de la première
rédaction revisée (p. 60), ni le 22, d’après la leçon des mss. de la première
rédaction proprement dite (p. 284). Jean le Bel avait commis une erreur en
sens inverse en fixant cette bataille au lendemain de la Saint-Lambert, c’est-à-
dire au 18 septembre. (Chron., t. II, p. 200). Entre autres documents
authentiques qui nous donnent la date exacte de la défaite du roi Jean, il
convient d’en citer un qui nous a été signalé par notre confrère M. Molinier:
c’est une lettre datée de Paris le 27 septembre 1356 et adressée, sous forme
de circulaire, par les Gens du Conseil du roi de France à l’évêque d’Alby au
sujet de la bataille livrée à Poitiers huit jours auparavant, le lundi 19
septembre (Bibl. nat., dép. des mss., fonds Baluze, t. 87, fo 183).
 [37] Froissart dit que le prince de Galles acheta de ceux qui les avaient
capturés les prisonniers les plus notables. Nous voyons en effet que le
vainqueur de Poitiers paya 25 000 écus d’or vieux au captal de Buch et à six
autres Gascons en échange de Jacques de Bourbon. Rymer, vol. III, p. 346.
[38] Il reste de ce butin un manuscrit de la Bible hystoriaus trouvé avec
quelques autres ouvrages dans la tente du roi Jean et conservé aujourd’hui au
British Museum, fonds du roi, DII, no 19; on y lit la mention suivante: «Cest
livre fut pris ove le roy de Fraunce à la bataille de Peyters; et le boun count de
Saresbirs (Salisbury), William Montague, le achata pur cent marsz et le dona à
sa compaigne Elizabeth la bone countesse, qe Dieux assoile!» M. Delisle a
démontré (Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions, année
1867, in-8o, p. 262 à 266) qu’un manuscrit des Miracles de Notre-Dame, qui
appartient aujourd’hui au séminaire de Soissons, avait été pris aussi par les
Anglais sur le champ de bataille dans la tente du roi Jean.
[39] Un registre de l’hôtel de ville de Poitiers mentionne ce souper, devenu
historique grâce au récit de Froissart, que le vainqueur offrit à son royal
prisonnier au château de Savigny-l’Evesquault appartenant à l’évêque de
Poitiers (auj. Savigny, hameau de 300 h. de la commune de Saint-Julien-l’Ars,
Vienne, arr. Poitiers, à une lieue à l’est de la Cardinerie (Maupertuis) et de
Beauvoir).
[40] Les quatre écuyers de James Audley étaient du comté de Chester.
Walter Woodland avait porté la bannière du prince de Galles (Rymer, vol. III,
p. 359); Jean, sire de Maignelay, dit Tristan, qui tenait celle du duc de
Normandie, fut fait prisonnier (JJ89, no 160; JJ91, no 499).
[41] Nous devons à la chronique anonyme du moine de Malmesbury
l’itinéraire suivi par les Anglais à leur retour de Poitiers à Bordeaux. Le mardi
20 septembre à midi, le prince de Galles arriva à la Roche-de-Gençay (Vienne,
arr. Civray) et y passa la journée du lendemain; le jeudi 22, il logea à Couhé
(Vienne, arr. Civray); le 23, à Ruffec; le 24, à Champagne-Mouton (Charente,
arr. Confolens); le dimanche 25 à la Rochefoucauld (Charente, arr.
Angoulême); le 26, à Bors (Bors-de-Montmoreau, Charente, arr. Barbezieux,
c. Montmoreau); le 27, à Saint-Aulaye (Dordogne, arr. Ribérac); le 28, à Saint-
Antoine (Saint-Antoine-de-l’Isle ou du Pizon, Gironde, arr. Libourne, c.
Coutras); le 30, sur les bords de la Dordogne. Le 2 octobre, le prince s’arrêta
à Libourne, pendant qu’on préparait à Bordeaux le logement du roi de France.
[42] Le procès intenté par cet écuyer, dont le nom est écrit Bernard de
Troie dans Rymer, à Denis de Morbecque, durait encore le 13 janvier 1360. V.
Rymer, vol. III, p. 467.
[43] Dès la fin de 1356, Henri, duc de Lancastre, s’était emparé des
forteresses de Bois-de-Maine (auj. château de Rennes-en-Grenouille,
Mayenne, arr. Mayenne, c. Lassay), de Domfront, de Messei (Orne, arr.
Domfront), de Condé (Condé-sur-Sarthe, Orne, arr. et c. Alençon) et de la
tour de Villiers. JJ85, nos 105, 184; JJ119, no 84.—Les intéressés rachetèrent
ces forteresses au vainqueur moyennant 20 000 florins d’or qui n’étaient pas
encore entièrement payés en 1366 (Arch. nat., sect. jud., accord du 10 avril
1366 qui nous a été signalé par M. Fagniez). Le 8 août 1356, le roi
d’Angleterre avait nommé Henri, duc de Lancastre, son très-cher cousin,
lieutenant et capitaine au duché de Bretagne (Rymer, vol. III, p. 335), et le 30
octobre suivant Philippe de Navarre, comte de Longueville, sire de Cassel, son
féal et très-cher cousin, lieutenant et capitaine au duché de Normandie.
Rymer, vol. III, p. 342.

CHAPITRE LXXIX.
[44] Cf. Jean le Bel, Chroniques, t. II, p. 205 à 213.
[45] Ces sentiments se font jour dans une complainte en vers conservée au
deuxième registre capitulaire de Notre-Dame de Paris, commençant en
septembre 1356, finissant en janvier 1361 (Archives nationales, sect. hist.,
fonds de Notre-Dame, LL 209 A, fo 183). Entre les séances du 4 et du 7
octobre 1359 ont été transcrites plusieurs pièces plus anciennes et entre
autres la complainte dont nous parlons, relative à la bataille de Poitiers, qui
doit avoir été composée à la fin de 1356 ou au commencement de 1357 et qui
paraît être l’œuvre d’un chanoine ou d’un clerc de la cathédrale (voir dans la
Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 3e série, t. II, p. 257 à 263, un article de
M. Charles de Beaurepaire qui le premier a publié ce curieux document).
L’auteur de ce petit poëme attribue la déroute de l’armée française à la
trahison de la noblesse dont il flétrit énergiquement le luxe et les vices; il fait
des vœux pour la délivrance du roi Jean dont il célèbre la vaillance, et il
espère que le souverain, avec l’aide du peuple, désigné sous le sobriquet de
Jacques Bonhomme, parviendra à triompher de ses ennemis. V. un fac-simile
du document original dans le Musée des Archives nationales, Paris, 1872, in-
4o, p. 212 et 213.
[46] Dès leur première réunion à Paris le 17 octobre 1356, les États avaient
demandé: 1o la délivrance du roi de Navarre; 2o la destitution des principaux
membres du conseil du roi et du dauphin; 3o l’établissement d’un nouveau
conseil entièrement pris dans le sein des États eux-mêmes. Licenciés le 2
novembre suivant par le dauphin, puis rappelés le 5 février 1357, ils réclament
de nouveau, dans la séance du 3 mars, par l’organe de Robert le Coq, évêque
de Laon, en même temps que la destitution de vingt-deux hauts
fonctionnaires et la suspension de tous les officiers du royaume, la création
d’un grand conseil de réformateurs généraux nommés par les États qui
ordonneront souverainement de la guerre et des finances; dès le vendredi 10
mars, ils organisent ce grand conseil tiré de leur sein et qui concentre en ses
mains tous les pouvoirs. Ce conseil n’était pas composé de 36 membres,
comme le dit Froissart, mais seulement de 34 dont 11 appartenaient au
clergé, 6 à la noblesse et dont 17 représentaient la bourgeoisie. M. Douet
d’Arcq a publié leurs noms (Bibl. de l’École des Chartes, t. II, p. 382 et 383)
qui se trouvent au dos d’un rouleau conservé au dép. des mss. de la
Bibliothèque nationale. Par acte daté du Louvre lez Paris le 8 mars 1357 (n.
st.), Charles, lieutenant du roi, nomma réformateurs généraux par tout le
royaume ses amés les évêques de Nevers (Bertrand de Fumel), de Meaux
(Philippe de Vitry, le traducteur d’Ovide, mort en juin 1361), et de Thérouanne
(Gilles Aycelin de Montagu), maître Jean de Gonnelieu, doyen de Cambrai,
maître Robert de Corbie; messire Mahieu, sire de Moucy, messire Jean de
Conflans, maréchal de Champagne, chevaliers; Colard le Caucheteur,
bourgeois d’Abbeville, Jean Godart, bourgeois de Paris (JJ89, no 150). Ces
réformateurs se contentèrent d’imposer aux fonctionnaires convaincus de
concussion des amendes pécuniaires (JJ89, nos 150, 319).
[47] Le combat où périt Godefroi de Harcourt eut lieu au mois de
novembre 1356. M. Delisle a établi le premier, d’après une chronique inédite
(Bibl. nat., mss., fonds français, no 4987, fo 61), que l’action, engagée sur la
chaussée qui traverse les marais de Brévands (Manche, arr. Saint-Lô, c.
Carentan, entre les embouchures de la Taute et de la Vire), en un lieu dit
Cocbour, se termina près des gués de Saint-Clément (Calvados, arr. Bayeux,
c. Isigny), non loin de l’endroit où Amauri de Meulan, lieutenant du dauphin
Charles en Normandie, avait été battu et fait prisonnier peu de temps
auparavant (JJ84, no 710). Le même savant a prouvé aussi que Robert de
Clermont et le Baudrain de la Heuse, maréchaux de Normandie, et non Raoul
de Renneval, commandaient les forces françaises. V. Delisle, Hist. du château
de Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, p. 92 à 108; Preuves, p. 142 et 143.
[48] Godefroi de Harcourt n’avait pas vendu, il avait légué, le 18 juillet
1356, au roi d’Angleterre son immense fortune territoriale dont il avait juré de
frustrer son neveu Louis de Harcourt (Rymer, vol. III, p. 332). M. Delisle n’a
pas trouvé mention dans les actes de ce Jean de l’Isle, auquel Édouard aurait
confié, d’après Froissart, la garde du château de Saint-Sauveur; Pierre
Pigache remplissait ces fonctions dès le 7 février 1357. Ibid., p. 111.
[49] Le prince de Galles et le roi Jean s’embarquèrent le mardi 11 avril
1357 à Bordeaux, où une trêve avait été conclue entre la France et
l’Angleterre le 23 mars précédent; cette trêve devait durer deux ans (Rymer,
vol. III, p. 348 à 351). Nous avons un acte du roi Jean daté de Bordeaux le 25
mars 1357 (n. st.). JJ84, no 801.
[50] Le prince et son prisonnier débarquèrent en Angleterre le jeudi 4 mai
(Grandes Chroniques, t. VI, p. 58), probablement à Plymouth, selon la version
des chroniqueurs anglais, qui pourraient bien avoir raison contre Froissart; car,
dans l’ordre que le roi d’Angleterre expédia le 20 mars pour faire tout préparer
sur la route de son fils et du roi son prisonnier, il est dit qu’ils devaient arriver
à Plymouth (Rymer, vol. III, p. 348). Le mercredi 24 mai, ils firent leur entrée
dans Londres où il était accouru une si grande foule pour les voir passer que
le cortége, qui avait traversé à neuf heures du matin le pont de Londres,
arriva au palais de Westminster à midi seulement.
[51] Nous avons en effet plusieurs actes émanés du roi Jean pendant les
quatre premiers mois de son séjour en Angleterre, qui sont datés de Londres
en août (JJ86, no 416); l’un de ces actes fut passé dans cette ville le 11
septembre 1357 (JJ89, no 247). Un acte passé le 7 juillet 1358 en présence
du roi de France est daté du manoir de Savoie ès faubourgs de Londres
(Rymer, vol. III, p. 401 et 402). L’hôtel de Savoie, résidence de Henri duc de
Lancastre, était situé au sud du Strand, à côté de la rue qui a reçu dans ces
derniers temps le nom de Wellington-Street. Il ne reste de ce grand palais que
la chapelle, naguère reconstruite aux frais du gouvernement sur
l’emplacement de l’ancienne détruite par un incendie en 1864.
[52] On connaît un acte du roi Jean daté du château de Windsor en
octobre 1357 (JJ89, no 220).
[53] Il y a, comme l’a fait remarquer Dacier, trois erreurs capitales dans le
peu de mots que dit Froissart, concernant cette trêve: 1o elle fut conclue, non
en Angleterre, mais à Bordeaux, le 23 mars 1357, dix-neuf jours avant le
départ du prince de Galles et du roi Jean pour l’Angleterre; 2o elle devait durer
depuis le jour de Pâques (9 avril 1357) jusques à deux ans (21 avril 1359), et
non jusqu’à la Saint-Jean-Baptiste; 3o Philippe de Navarre et les héritiers du
comte de Montfort y étaient expressément compris; il convient d’ajouter
toutefois qu’ils ne voulurent en tenir aucun compte, et c’est ce qui a pu
induire Froissart en erreur sur ce dernier point.
[54] Ce traité fut signé à Berwick le 3 octobre 1357. Rymer, vol. III, p. 372
à 374.
[55] Henri, duc de Lancastre, n’ayant pu parvenir au commencement de
septembre 1356 à opérer sa jonction par les Ponts-de-Cé avec le prince de
Galles, mit le siége devant Rennes. Ce siége, qui suivit immédiatement le
désastre de Poitiers et qui dura neuf mois, du 2 octobre 1356 au 5 juillet
1357, est le pendant du siége de Calais après la défaite de Crécy; une si
longue et si honorable défense releva un peu les courages du côté des
vaincus. Charles de Blois, alors prisonnier sur parole du roi d’Angleterre, se
tint pendant toute la durée du siége à la cour du dauphin (Morice, Preuves, t.
1, col. 1513; JJ89, no 276; JJ85, no 115; JJ89, no 312). Le duc de Normandie
envoya, dès le mois de décembre 1356, Thibaud, sire de Rochefort, au
secours des assiégés (Morice, Preuves, t. 1, col. 1512 à 1514). En dépit de la
trêve conclue à Bordeaux le 23 mars 1357, Lancastre ne voulait pas lever le
siége de Rennes; il fallut deux lettres du roi d’Angleterre, la première en date
du 28 avril, la seconde du 4 juillet 1357 (Rymer, vol. III, p. 353 et 359), pour
vaincre la résistance de son lieutenant, qui n’en obligea pas moins les
habitants de la ville assiégée, quoi qu’en aient dit des historiens bretons plus
patriotes que véridiques, à se racheter et à payer au vainqueur une
contribution de guerre considérable (Morice, Preuves, t. I, col. 1522).—Dans
les premiers mois de 1357, Charles dauphin avait chargé Guillaume de Craon,
son lieutenant en Anjou, Maine, Poitou et Touraine, d’inquiéter le duc de
Lancastre et d’obliger les Anglais à lever le siége de Rennes (JJ89, nos 37 et
127). C’est alors seulement que Bertrand du Guesclin pénétra dans l’intérieur
de la place, car, comme le dit Cuvelier dans son poëme (v. 1080 et 1081):

Mais Bertran du Guesclin se fu ès bois boutez,

A tamps n’y pot venir qui n’i pot estre entrez.

[56] Le bourg, la cité et le château d’Évreux avaient été conquis par le roi
Jean au commencement de juin 1356. Voy. t. IV de cette édition, Sommaire,
p. LXVIII, note 246.
[57] Nous ignorons si ce fut la ruse de guerre, prêtée par Froissart à
Guillaume de Gauville, qui remit les Navarrais en possession du château
d’Évreux, mais la date que notre chroniqueur assigne à cet événement est
certainement fausse. En février 1358 (n. st.), Évreux appartenait encore au
régent, qui délivrait des lettres de rémission à Guillaume de la Goderie,
demeurant à Évreux, dont le valet avait acheté pour les garnisons anglaises
des forteresses voisines de cette ville «anneaux et chapeaux de bièvre et les
plumes....» JJ89, no 83.—On lit, d’un autre côté, dans les Grandes Chroniques
(t. VI, p. 108), qu’au mois de mai 1358 Jean de Meudon, châtelain d’Évreux
pour le roi de France, mit le feu à la ville d’Évreux, ce dont le roi de Navarre
fut très-irrité. Le château d’Évreux avait été livré par trahison aux Navarrais
avant le mois de septembre 1358, date de deux donations faites par le régent
à Guillaume de Tronchevillier, chevalier, et Robinet Boulart, écuyer, des biens
confisqués de Pierre du Bosc-Renoult et de Guillaume Houvet, écuyers,
complices de la trahison du chastel d’Evreux à nos ennemis en ceste presente
année (JJ87, nos 78 et 79). Froissart raconte que Guillaume de Gauville, pour
apprivoiser encore plus sûrement le châtelain, lui parla d’une descente en
Angleterre que devaient faire les Danois alliés de la France. Il y eut en effet,
en 1358 et 1359, des négociations actives avec Valdemar III, roi de
Danemark, qui aboutirent à un projet de descente des Danois en Angleterre
pour la délivrance du roi Jean, dont le texte a été publié par M. Germain
(Mémoires de la Société archéologique de Montpellier, t. IV, p. 409 à 434).
Voy. aussi le rapport de M. Delisle, Revue des Sociétés savantes, année 1866,
4e série, iv, 33.
[58] Le travail du baron de Zurlauben sur ce chef de compagnies (Hist. de
l’Académie des Inscriptions, t. XXV, p. 153 à 168) n’est qu’un essai fort
incomplet. Le savant baron répète, après Baluze, qu’Arnaud apparaît pour la
première fois dans l’histoire à la bataille de Poitiers, tandis que nous avons
plusieurs actes, antérieurs à cette date, qui le mentionnent: le premier, de
février 1354 (n. st.), où le roi Jean assigne 200 livres de rente à Arnaud de
Cervole, écuyer, en récompense de la part qu’il a prise au recouvrement des
châteaux de Montravel, de Sainte-Foy près Bergerac (auj. Sainte-Foy-des-
Vignes, hameau de Gineste, Dordogne, arr. Bergerac, c. Laforce), du Fleix
(Dordogne, arr. Bergerac, c. Laforce), de Guitres (Gironde, arr. Libourne), et
donne en outre au dit écuyer son château de Châteauneuf-sur-Charente
(Charente, arr. Cognac), JJ82, no 93;—l’autre, du 27 août de la même année,
où le roi de France accorde des lettres de rémission à Arnaud de Cervole,
écuyer, qui, avec l’aide de Pierre de Cervole, chevalier, et de neuf autres
complices, avait occupé après l’assassinat du connétable Charles d’Espagne
les châteaux de Cognac, de Jarnac et de Merpins en Saintonge et avait fait
mettre à mort vingt-sept de ses soudoyers en garnison dans lesdits châteaux,
qui avaient volé blés, vins et draps aux habitants de Saint-Laurent (Saint-
Laurent-de-Cognac, Charente, arr. et c. Cognac). JJ82, no 613.
[59] Au moyen âge, il arriva parfois qu’un archiprêtré fut inféodé, au
temporel, à un laïque. Dom Vaissete dit (Hist. du Languedoc, t. IV, p. 292)
qu’Arnaud possédait l’archiprêtré de Vezzins; mais où était situé cet
archiprêtré? C’est ce que personne n’a encore établi jusqu’à ce jour. On lit
dans Rymer (vol. III, p. 350) que les rois de France et d’Angleterre, en
concluant à Bordeaux la trêve du 23 mars 1357, établirent l’un des quatre
gardiens de cette trêve dans la vicomté de Limoges et en Berry, pour la partie
du roi de France, «Mgr Arnaud de Servole, archiprestre de Velines.» Vélines
(Dordogne, arr. Bergerac) donnait en effet jadis son nom à l’un des
archiprêtrés du diocèse de Périgueux. Voy. le Dictionnaire topographique de la
Dordogne, par le vicomte de Gourgues, Paris, 1873, in-4o, p. 335.
[60] On lit dans la seconde vie d’Innocent VI: «Mense julio (1357) miles
quidam gasco, dictus Archipresbyter, collecta societate, intravit Provinciam, et
plurima damna fecit et strages; propter quæ, tota curia romana stupefacta,
papa, data pecunia, pro qua se Provinciales obligaverunt, ipsum abire fecit, et
transitum per Avinionem concessit. Sed interim papa stipendiarios multos
tenuit, civitatemque muris et portis ac fossatis munivit; ad quæ omnes clerici
in curia romana degentes contribuere cogebantur.» (Bal., Vitæ pap. Aven., t.
I, p. 350). On sait que les fortifications dont il est question dans ces dernières
lignes subsistent encore. Cf. Léon Ménard, Hist. de Nismes, t. II, p. 182, et
Preuves, p. 201.
[61] Cf. Jean le Bel, Chroniques, t. II, p. 215 et 216. Froissart reproduit ici
à peu près littéralement le texte du chanoine de Liége. Le roi de Navarre,
détenu au château d’Arleux, recouvra la liberté le mercredi 8 novembre 1357,
grâce aux menées de Robert le Coq, qui avait fait demander à plusieurs
reprises sa délivrance par les États, et à la complicité de Jean de Picquigny,
gouverneur d’Artois, qui l’arracha par surprise de sa prison. La mise en liberté
de Charles le Mauvais est certainement la faute la plus grave, nous dirions
presque le plus grand crime qu’on puisse reprocher à Robert le Coq et à
Étienne Marcel; car c’est le roi de Navarre qui, à peine délivré, fit occuper
entre le 13 et le 25 décembre 1357, les environs de Paris par les compagnies
anglo-navarraises cantonnées jusque-là sur les confins de la Bretagne et de la
Normandie (Gr. Chron., t. VI, p. 71 à 73). Ces brigands étaient si bien aux
ordres du roi de Navarre qu’on s’adressait à ce dernier plutôt qu’au dauphin
pour obtenir des sauf-conduits, quand on voulait voyager de Paris à un point
quelconque du royaume. Nous avons un de ces sauf-conduits accordé à deux
chevaliers et daté de Paris le 12 mars 1358 (n. st.). Ibid., p. 96 et 97.
[62] Le 25 décembre 1358, Griffith ou Griffon de Galles quitta Montebourg
en basse Normandie, où il avait longtemps tenu garnison, et vint occuper la
forteresse de Becoiseau en Brie (auj. château de Mortcerf, Seine-et-Marne,
arr. Coulommiers, c. Rozoy-en-Brie). JJ90, no 57.
[63] St-Arnoult-en-Yveline, Seine-et-Oise, arr. Rambouillet, c. Dourdan.
[64] Eure-et-Loir, arr. Chartres, c. Maintenon.
[65] Eure-et-Loir, arr. Châteaudun. Bonneval et le pays chartrain furent
ravagés dès le mois de janvier 1357 par Philippe de Navarre qui fit une
chevauchée de ce côté à la tête de huit cents hommes. Gr. Chron., t. VI, p.
52.
[66] Cloyes-sur-le-Loir, Eure-et-Loir, arr. Châteaudun.
[67] Les ennemis d’entre Paris et Chartres s’emparèrent d’Étampes, le
mardi 16 janvier 1358, le jour même où se célébrait à Paris le mariage de
Louis, comte d’Étampes, avec Jeanne d’Eu, veuve de Gautier duc d’Athènes
tué à Poitiers, sœur du connétable Raoul d’Eu décapité à l’hôtel de Nesle (Gr.
Chron., t. VI, p. 81). Dans les premiers mois de 1360, le comte d’Étampes
emprunta 1000 moutons d’or à Guillaume Marcel, changeur à Paris, «pour la
raençon du pais d’Estampes à paier aux Anglois», à raison de 400 moutons
d’intérêt pour six semaines; il donna en gage son chapeau d’or du prix de 200
moutons. JJ91, no 399.