Sexual Discourse in the Parisian Chanson: A Libidinous Aviary

Abstract

Chanson texts featuring birds form a unique nexus of voices in the sexual discourse pervading the Parisian repertory of the late sixteenth century. The eroticism of these chansons is often expressed according to the older poetic conventions of unrequited courtly love and its carnivalesque abasement focusing on the lower body, or by a synthesis of the two characterized by the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard. Ronsard's sensual lyricism tended to employ avian imagery in support of a naturalized philosophy of love encouraging sexuality. Birds, considered to have a libido surpassing that of humans, became a favored theme, and composers set many of these Ronsardian texts. In the second part of this essay, I contextualize the reception of the erotic chanson among France's upper classes, relating it to the crisis of the French aristocracy and the noble aspirations of the bourgeoisie. The nouveaux nobles, or bourgeois that ennobled themselves with the purchase of seigneurial titles, had the fiscal power to acquire music and seem to have evinced the same sexual repression that Foucault saw as emblematic of bourgeois society itself-a repression that spawned a whole literature on sex. Around and in the chanson formed a rich locus of this contemporary discourse on sex, noble comportment, and the moral effects of music.