Feutry and Belleforest: Rewriting the Histoires tragiques in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract

François de Belleforest’s histoires tragiques, which were published for the last time in 1616, quickly joined the ranks of forgotten, rare, and curious books. Eighteenth-century bibliophiles often de-spised the style of an author whose stories they judged to be ghastly and tasteless. Yet in the 1750s, readers were able to rediscover the histoires tragiques when Aimé-Ambroise-Joseph Feutry pub-lished an anthology titled Choix d’histoires tirées de Bandel, Italien; de Belleforest, Commingeois; de Boaistuau, dit Launai; et de quelques autres Auteurs. In this volume, Belleforest’s stories under-went surprising transformations. These changes allow us to understand the specificity of the histoire tragique genre as Belleforest envisioned it. Feutry’s anthology also shows that this type of narrative had to undergo significant stylistic and thematic transformations in order to fulfill the tastes and expectations of eighteenth-century readers.