Queer Places:
Rue Cyrano de Bergerac, 95110 Sannois, France
Savinien
Cyrano de Bergerac (March 6, 1619 - July 28, 1655) was a French writer. He was
born in Paris, in spite of his Gascon-sounding name which accounts for the
theatrical character created by Edmond Rostand (1897), a fictitious personnage
who has come to obscure the real Cyrano. In fact, far from being the quixotic
buffoon imagined by Rostand and perpetuated by the French tradition (that of a
ridiculous and bombastic duellist in love with priggish Roxane), Cyrano was an
incisive and cutting-edge thinker. Recent studies have exploded the French and
Hollywood myth of a philandering, boisterous yet pathetic Cyrano
(unfortunately sustained by actor Gérard Depardieu in a 1990 film) and
restored this original thinker to his prominence among the libertin avantgarde
of the first half of the seventeenth century, in the great Paduan tradition.
The libertins were intellectuals who, in the face of Calvinist rigourism
and Counter-Reformation propaganda, found in Greek and Roman scepticism
materials and methods to debunk dogmas and develop ‘free-thought’ and, often
by implication, to reinvent what was then labelled ‘pagan’ morality, sex. The
best example is by another libertin, François de La Mothe Le Vayer, who
extolled Greek love in his Hexaméron rustique (1670), having laid the
foundations for it in his early and anonymous Dialogues (1630), and who was a
friend of Molière, whose Don Juan is strongly marked by libertinage. Cyrano
the homosexual cannot be taken in isolation. Well known at the time for his
satirical plays (and a tragedy), more known today for his two famous cosmic
voyages (L'Autre monde or Histoire comique des Etats et Empires de la Lune et
du Soleil, in two separate parts, published posthumously in 1656 and 1661), he
developed a scathing critique of French society.
His work has recently been repositioned within a network of homosexual
friendships. Cyrano entertained a relationship with notorious libertin writers
Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy and
Chapelle, all three of
them close to Molière and, in one way or another, students of Epicurean
philosopher Pierre Gassendi, whose own passionate biographies of
celebrated savants of the time point towards the importance of homosocial
friendships in such circles. Whether an atheist or not, it is certain that
Cyrano's rejection of Catholic dogmas regarding nature, society (he stood
against absolutism) and morality found its source in his homosexuality as a
subversive force. He had to exercise caution in concealing his ‘atheism’ (the
sum total of the above) since such random accusation had cost the life of a
forerunner, Lucilio Vanini, burnt at the stake in Toulouse, and
brought to the pyre an effigy of fellow poet and homosexual
Théophile de Viau, as well as it frightened sympathiser René Descartes enough to
have him escape to Holland.
Yet, in the central episode of Les Etats du Soleil, Cyrano lifts the veil
on his homosexuality: a comely youth appears, whose bodily beauty resonates
through the universe, cosmetic appearance and cosmic arrangement being one in
the raptured contemplation of male assertiveness. Cyrano does not rework here
the commonplace of Renaissance ‘harmonic man’, as his philosophy is a
materialistic one, steeped in atomism. The young man does not fulfil the
function of an allegory for an orderly universe. It is an erotic vision,
powerfully sexual and seminal, which signs, as it were, that unfinished
manuscript, held back by the author at the time of his death.
The play by Rostand suggests that he was injured by a falling wooden beam in 1654 while entering the house of his patron, the Duc D'Arpajon. However the academic and editor of Cyrano's works Madeleine Alcover uncovered a contemporary text which suggests an attack on the Duke's carriage in which a member of his household was injured. It is as yet inconclusive whether or not his death was a result of the injury, or an unspecified disease.[47] He died over a year later on July 28, 1655, aged 36, at the house of his cousin, Pierre De Cyrano, in Sannois. He was buried in a church in Sannois. However, there is strong evidence to support the theory that his death was a result of a botched assassination attempt as well as further damage to his health caused by a period of confinement in a private asylum, orchestrated by his enemies, who succeeded in enlisting the help of his own brother Abel de Cyrano.
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon. Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian
History Vol.1: From Antiquity to the Mid-Twentieth Century: From Antiquity
to the Mid-twentieth Century Vol 1 (p.51). Taylor and Francis. Edizione
del Kindle.
- Les amours masculines de nos grands hommes –
April 30, 2014 French Edition by Michel Larivière
- Dictionnaire historique des homosexuel.le.s célèbres – October 19,
2017 French Edition by Michel Larivière