La Chronique Scandaleuse 1: The Case of Claude Le Petit

 

 

The French phrase chronique scandaleuse was one that captured my youthful imagination back in the Blind Cupid days and whilst plans for a little magazine with that title came to nothing, I did once incorporate it as a slogan into a hand-painted shirt design. 

 

I seem to recall that I picked up the phrase from Claude Le Petit; a debauched and free-thinking libertine poet and lawyer who, in 1661, published a satirical work entitled Le Bordel des Muses which included a collection of verse called La Chronique scandaleuse, ou Paris ridicule. The work not only maliciously mocked the rich and powerful, but blasphemed against the Virgin Mary whilst honouring a notorious sodomite (Jacques Chausson) for his strength of character. 

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this did not go down well: Le Petit was arrested, tried, and condemned to death for gravely insulting God and the French State. He was burned at the stake, in Paris, on the 1st of September 1662, aged 23, having first had the offending hand with which he wrote the text cut off by the public executioner. 

 

Although his work had been seized from the printers and destroyed, a copy survived and his writings were republished posthumously. It was a good while, however, before they became widely available; for as a result of this affair, all works regarded as being of an obscene, immoral, and politically subversive nature were suppressed in France until well into the 19th-century.  

 

It was said by those who sat in judgement upon him that his was a fine but wasted talent - and who knows, perhaps they were right. Though what else is there to do with talent - with life - but to waste it? As Bataille says: "Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us ..."*

 

Anyway, here's one of Le Petit's poems - Sonnet Foutatif - which anticipates not only Sade and Bataille, but Serge Gainsbourg ...

 

 

Foutre du cul, foutre du con, 

Foutre du Ciel et de la Terre, 

Foutre du diable et du tonnerre, 

Et du Louvre et de Montfaucon. 

 

Foutre du temple et du balcon, 

Foutre de la paix et de la guerre, 

Foutre du feu, foutre du verre, 

Et de l'eau et de l'Hélicon. 

 

Foutre des valets et des maistres, 

Foutre des moines et des prestres, 

Foutre du foutre et du fouteur.

 

Foutre de tout le monde ensemble, 

Foutre du livre et du lecteur, 

Foutre du sonnet, que t'en semble?

 

 

I'm not even going to try to translate the above. But readers who feel tempted to do so are welcome to give it a go ...  

* Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood, (City Lights, 1986), p. 170. 

 

To read the second entry in this short history of scandal - on Denise Poncher and her vision of Death - click here.