Cyrano de Bergerac
born March 6, 1619, Paris
died July 28, 1655, Paris
French satirist and dramatist whose
works combining political satire and
science-fantasy inspired a number of
later writers. He has been the basis of
many romantic but unhistorical legends,
of which the best known is Edmond
Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac
(1897), in which he is portrayed as a
gallant and brilliant but shy and ugly
lover, possessed (as in fact he was) of
a remarkably large nose.
As a young man, Cyrano joined the
company of guards and was wounded at the
Siege of Arras in 1640. But he gave up
his military career in the following
year to study under the philosopher and
mathematician Pierre Gassendi. Under the
influence of Gassendi’s scientific
theories and libertine philosophy,
Cyrano wrote his two best known works,
Histoire comique des états et empires de
la lune and Histoire comique des états
et empires du soleil (Eng. trans. A
Voyage to the moon: with some account of
the Solar World, 1754). These stories of
imaginary journeys to the Moon and Sun,
published posthumously in 1656 and 1662,
satirize 17th-century religious and
astronomical beliefs, which saw man and
the world as the centre of creation.
Cyrano’s use of science helped to
popularize new theories; but his
principal aim was to ridicule authority,
particularly in religion, and to
encourage freethinking materialism. He
“predicted” a number of later
discoveries such as the phonograph and
the atomic structure of matter; but they
were merely offshoots from an inquiring
and poetic mind, not attempts to
demonstrate theories in practical terms.
Cyrano’s plays include a tragedy, La
Mort d’Agrippine (published 1654, “The
Death of Agrippine”), which was
suspected of blasphemy, and a comedy, Le
Pédant joué (published 1654; “The Pedant
Imitated”). As long as classicism was
the established taste, Le Pédant joué, a
colossal piece of fooling, was despised;
but its liveliness appeals to modern
readers as it did to Molière, who based
two scenes of Les Fourberies de Scapin
on it. La Mort d’Agrippine is
intellectually impressive because of its
daring ideas, and the direct and
impassioned character of the tragic
dialogue makes it interesting
theatrically.
As a political writer, Cyrano was the
author of a violent pamphlet against the
men of the Fronde, in which he defended
Mazarin in the name of political realism
as exemplified in the tradition of
Machiavelli. Cyrano’s Lettres show him
as a master of baroque prose, marked by
bold and original metaphors. His
contemporaries regarded them as absurdly
farfetched, but they came to be esteemed
in the 20th century as examples of the
baroque style.
