François Rabelais

• 1. Introduction

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  François Rabelais died in Paris in 1553, leaving behind four books that the Sorbonne had condemned, a fifth whose authorship scholars still argue over, and a single adjective that bears his name in dictionaries to this day: Rabelaisian, meaning marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism. He was a Franciscan friar who abandoned his order without permission, a physician who gave anatomy lessons using the corpse of a hanged man, a diplomat who traveled to Rome twice, and a satirist who invented giants. In his own lifetime, he was better known as a doctor than as a writer. How did a Catholic priest from the Touraine countryside become the figure that Milan Kundera, writing in 2007, placed alongside Cervantes as the founder of the entire art of the novel? The answers run through Renaissance courts, papal briefs, banned books, and an abbey where the only rule was: do what you want.

• 2. From Cloister to Clinic

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  The estate of La Devinière, near Chinon in Touraine, is where tradition places Rabelais' birth, though the exact year remains uncertain, with scholars settling on around 1483. His father, Antoine Rabelais, was a seneschal and lawyer, and the family property now houses a Rabelais museum.

  By 1520, Rabelais was living at Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou as a Franciscan friar, already corresponding with Guillaume Budé, who noted that the young monk was competent in law. When the Sorbonne banned the study of Greek in 1523, citing fears that it encouraged personal interpretation of the New Testament, both Rabelais and his friend Pierre Lamy had their Greek books physically confiscated. Rabelais petitioned Pope Clement VII and, with a bishop's help, obtained a transfer to the Benedictine Order at Maillezais. At the abbey there, he served as secretary to the bishop, a prelate appointed by King Francis I, whose protection gave Rabelais a measure of stability.

  Around 1527, he left the monastery without authorization, a step that made him technically an apostate and barred him by church law from practicing medicine or surgery. Pope Paul III did not formally absolve him of this until 1536. In the years between, he studied at the University of Poitiers and then at the University of Montpellier, eventually taking a post as a physician at the Hôtel-Dieu de Lyon, one of the intellectual centers of the French Renaissance. There he also worked as an editor for the printer Sebastian Gryphius, producing translations and annotations of Hippocrates, Galen, and Giovanni Manardo. He returned to Montpellier in 1537, paying his fees on the 3rd of April to obtain his medical licence, and earning his doctorate the following month on the 22nd of May.

• 3. Giants and Their Maker

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  In 1532, under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier, an anagram of his own name, Rabelais published Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes. He chose the pseudonym partly for cover, partly to supplement his income at the hospital. The idea for the giant allegory came not from pure invention but from the folklore of les Grandes chroniques du grand et énorme géant Gargantua, cheap pamphlets sold by itinerant booksellers at Lyon fairs.

  Pantagruel's lineage in the first chapter runs back sixty generations to a giant named Chalbroth. The narrator waves away any skeptics who doubt a giant could fit on Noah's Ark by explaining that Hurtaly, the giant alive during the flood, simply rode the Ark like a child on a rocking horse. The absurdist logic is deliberate: Rabelais was building a comic universe with its own internal rules.

  The book was an immediate success, and a 1534 prequel dealing with the life of Pantagruel's father Gargantua followed. That second volume was more overtly political, tilting toward the monarchy. The 1534 re-edition of Pantagruel introduced typographic innovations that were new to French printing: diacritics including accents, apostrophes, and diaereses. Scholar Mireille Huchon traces this in part to the influence of Dante's De vulgari eloquentia on French letters. The first book also contains the first known occurrence in French of the words encyclopédie, caballe, progrès, and utopie, among others. According to Radio-Canada, Gargantua alone permanently added more than 800 words to the French language.

  A parodic almanac called Pantagrueline prognostications appeared from the press of his publisher François Juste beginning with the year 1533, bearing the name Maître Alcofribas in its full title. These popular almanacs continued irregularly until a final edition prepared for the perpetual year in 1542.

• 4. Protectors and Enemies

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  Jean du Bellay became the most important of Rabelais' several powerful protectors. When du Bellay was sent to Rome in January 1534 to dissuade Pope Clément VII from excommunicating Henry VIII, Rabelais traveled with him as secretary and personal physician, staying until April. Rabelais found Rome so compelling that he arranged for a new edition of Bartolomeo Marliani's Topographia antiqua Romae to be published back in Lyon.

  The following year, the Affair of the Placards, a Protestant provocation that enraged Francis I into issuing an edict forbidding all printing in France, forced Rabelais into hiding. He quietly left the Hôtel-Dieu de Lyon on the 13th of February 1535 after collecting his salary, and did not surface again until August. It was the du Bellays' influence that got the printing presses running again. That May, Jean du Bellay was named a cardinal, and Rabelais joined him once more in Rome. On the 17th of January 1536, Paul III issued a papal brief authorizing Rabelais to join a Benedictine monastery and practice medicine, provided he avoided surgery.

  The condemnations from the Sorbonne were relentless. In 1543, both Gargantua and Pantagruel were censured by the theological college. Between 1545 and 1547, Rabelais lived in Metz, then a free imperial city outside French jurisdiction, specifically to escape the reach of the University of Paris. King Francis I had granted him approval to publish on the 19th of September 1545 for six years; yet on the 31st of December 1546, the Tiers Livre immediately joined the Sorbonne's list of banned books.

  John Calvin had his own objections, viewing Rabelais not as a champion of reform but as a dangerous moderate whose mocking tone could too easily be read as rejecting sacred truths altogether. Rabelais occupied that uncomfortable ground attacked from both sides, which was precisely the position his mentor Erasmus had also occupied.

• 5. The Abbey of Do What You Want

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  Among the most quoted passages Rabelais ever wrote is the founding charter of an imaginary monastery called Thélème, described in Gargantua. Built by the giant Gargantua as a reward for the monk Frère Jean, it is the deliberate opposite of every real monastery Rabelais had known.

  Thélème has a swimming pool, maid service, and no clocks. It is open to both monks and nuns. The inscription at its gate lists who is excluded: hypocrites, bigots, the pox-ridden, Goths, Magoths, straw-chewing law clerks, usurious grinches, old or officious judges, and burners of heretics. The Abbey of Thélème operates by a single rule: Do What You Want.

  The prologue of Gargantua dedicates the novel to the most illustrious drinkers and the most precious pox-ridden, a gesture that makes sense in context: an unprecedented syphilis epidemic had raged through Europe for more than thirty years at the time of publication, and even the king of France was reputed to have been infected. The narrator then turns to Plato's Banquet, stitching together body humor and classical philosophy in the same sentence.

  Rabelais called this philosophy Pantagruelism, a kind of eat, drink and be merry orientation to life. The theologians hated it. Later critics came to admire it precisely for its insistence on the body as a legitimate subject for serious literature. The Third Book, published in 1546, took that inquiry in a more abstract direction, centering on the question of whether the character Panurge should marry. To answer it, Panurge consults a sibyl, a mute named Nazdecabre, a theologian, a philosopher, and eventually a court jester named Triboulet, getting contradictory answers from all of them.

• 6. Language as Invention

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  The French Renaissance was a period when the language itself was still being assembled. The first book of French grammar, rather than Latin grammar, was published in 1530, followed nine years later by the language's first dictionary. Spelling had not yet been standardized.

  Rabelais preferred etymological spelling, the kind that preserves traces of a word's origin, over phonetic spellings that erase them. His writing drew on Latin, Greek, regional dialects, creative borrowing, neologism, and deliberate mistranslation, all made possible by the printing press having been invented less than a hundred years before he wrote. As a physician, he wrote extensively about bodies and everything they take in or expel. His novels are filled with multilingual puns, often sexual ones, absurd creatures, bawdy songs, and extravagant lists.

  Words and metaphors from Rabelais continue to circulate in modern French. Some have found their way into English, through Thomas Urquhart's unfinished 1693 translation, completed and considerably extended by Peter Anthony Motteux by 1708.

  In The Fourth Book, the crew encounters an episode where thawing frozen words rain down on the boat. Pantagruel listens to them contentedly, understanding the exchange as an act of love. His companions scramble to gather as many as they can and offer to sell them. Scholar Jeanneret reads this scene as Rabelais insinuating that books are petrified tombs, where signs stop moving and get reduced to simplistic meanings by lazy readers, and that all writing carries within it the danger of the Decretals.

• 7. A Contested Legacy

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  Jean de La Bruyère, writing in 1688, called Rabelais' book an enigma and a chimera, a monstrous assembling of refined and ingenious morality and foul corruption, adding that it either sinks far below the worst to charm the rabble, or rises to be perhaps the most delicious of dishes. That double verdict has shaped Rabelais' reception ever since.

  Abel Lefranc, in his 1922 introduction to Pantagruel, read Rabelais as a militant anti-Christian atheist. M. A. Screech, following Lucien Febvre, argued the opposite: that Rabelais was an Erasmian Christian humanist. Mikhail Bakhtin derived his concepts of the carnivalesque and the grotesque body from the world of Rabelais, locating his humor in medieval carnival culture. Aldous Huxley, writing in 1929, praised Rabelais for loving the bowels which Swift so malignantly hated, and for accepting reality in its entirety with gratitude and delight. George Orwell, writing in 1940, called him an exceptionally perverse, morbid writer and a case for psychoanalysis.

  Honoré de Balzac was inspired by Rabelais to write Les Cent Contes Drolatiques and quoted him in more than twenty novels. In his 1830 story of Zéro, Balzac even borrowed Rabelais' old pseudonym, Alcofribas. James Joyce slipped an allusion to Master Francois somebody into his 1922 novel Ulysses. Kenzaburō Ōe cited Rabelais in his 1994 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, in his 2008 Nobel Prize lecture, called Rabelais the greatest writer in the French language.

  At the University of Montpellier's Faculty of Medicine, no graduating doctor can be formally certified without taking an oath beneath Rabelais' academic robe, a tradition that has outlasted every ban, condemnation, and scholarly argument about what Rabelais actually believed. The asteroid 5666 Rabelais was named in his honor in 1982.