La Lettrine

La Lettrine · FightsThe Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes — the dispute over whether ancient or modern writers were superior — ran from roughly 1687 to 1716 and involved Racine, Boileau, Perrault and Fontenelle.

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The Quarrel That Ran for Three Decades

The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes — the dispute over whether ancient or modern writers were superior — ran from roughly 1687 to 1716 and involved Racine, Boileau, Perrault and Fontenelle.

Detail of a painted portrait showing a hand resting on a marble bust beside old books and a scroll

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A dispute over Homer and Virgil was really a fight over whether French could stand beside Latin — and whether the present could outrank the past.

The Argument in Full

On 27 January 1687, Charles Perrault — better known today for the fairy tales he published a decade later — read a poem called Le Siècle de Louis le Grand ("The Age of Louis the Great") before the Académie française. Its claim was simple and incendiary: the writers of the present age surpassed the ancients. Homer nodded, Plato was obscure, and the French monarchy had produced a culture finer than anything Greece or Rome had managed.

Key texts of the quarrel

The room was not pleased. Nicolas Boileau, the reigning arbiter of classical taste and author of the verse treatise L'Art poétique, responded with open contempt. Jean Racine, whose tragedies drew directly on Greek models, sided with Boileau. The querelle des Anciens et des Modernes ↗ — the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns — had begun in earnest.

Front page of L'Aurore newspaper showing Émile Zola's "J'Accuse...!" open letter headline
Émile Zola's open letter to the President of the Republic was published in L'Aurore on 13 January 1898 with a headline chosen by the editor Georges Clemenceau. J'Accuse…! Was a Front Page, Not an EssayPhoto: J'accuse - Gallica - page 1 · Wikimedia Commons

What followed was not a single exchange but a sustained argument conducted across pamphlets, prefaces, and letters for nearly three decades. Perrault pressed his case in the four volumes of Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (1688–97), staging the debate as a series of dialogues in which a champion of classical antiquity is gradually and systematically outargued. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Perrault's ally on the Moderns' side, added his own weight to the argument: if knowledge accumulates across generations, he reasoned, then the moderns must necessarily know more than the ancients, and writing could not be exempt from that logic.

A handwritten manuscript page under conservation glass at the BnF, the ink and corrections of the author visible in raking light, an archivist's gloved hands at the edge of the frame
Autograph manuscripts are consulted under glass and under supervision. The corrections, the pasted extensions and the abandoned pages are what a printed edition cannot show.Photo: Tahir Xəlfəquliyev / Pexels

The Ancients answered that literature was not science. Genius did not progress like astronomy or anatomy; Homer could not simply be superseded the way Ptolemy had been. Boileau eventually withdrew from the most heated exchanges, and a formal reconciliation between him and Perrault was brokered at the Académie in 1694 — but the quarrel's energy persisted in the correspondence of the period and spilled into England, where Jonathan Swift's The Battle of the Books (1704) staged the same contest as a library war.

Chronology

  1. 1674Boileau publishes L'Art poétique, establishing the classical standard
  2. 1687Perrault reads Le Siècle de Louis le Grand; the quarrel begins
  3. 1688–97Perrault's Parallèle appears in four volumes
  4. 1694Formal reconciliation between Boileau and Perrault at the Académie française
  5. c. 1716The quarrel's last significant exchanges; the argument effectively closes

The dispute was settled by nothing so clean as a verdict. What it accomplished was a shift in assumption: by the time the last volleys were exchanged around 1716, French had established itself as a literary language with its own authority, not merely an imperfect imitation of Latin. The Moderns lost the argument on Homer; they won the longer one about the Académie française and the legitimacy of the vernacular tradition it had been founded, in 1635, to protect.

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