Quarrel of The Ancients and The Moderns - Debate in France

Debate in France

On one side of the debate were the Ancients (Anciens), led by Boileau. They supported the merits of the ancient authors, and contended that a writer could do no better than imitate them. On the other side were the Moderns (Modernes), who opened fire first with Perrault's Le siècle de Louis le Grand ("The Century of Louis the Great," 1687), in which he supported the merits of the authors of the century of Louis XIV and expressed the Moderns' stance in a nutshell:

Fontenelle quickly followed with his Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688), in which he took the Modern side, pressing the argument that modern scholarship allowed modern man to surpass the ancients in knowledge.

In the opening years of the next century Marivaux was to show himself a Modern in establishing a new genre of theatre, unknown to the Ancients, the sentimental comedy (comédie larmoyante). In it the impending tragedy was resolved at the end, amid reconciliations and floods of tears. By constraining his choice of subjects to those drawn from the literature of Antiquity, Jean Racine showed himself one of the Ancients. He also restricted his tragedies by the classical unities, derived by the classicists from Aristotle's Poetics: the unities of place, time, and action (one scene location, 24 hours, and consistent actions respectively).