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In his Observations sur Le Cid (1637), Georges de Scudéry directed scathing critiques toward what he saw to be Corneille's implausible treatment of military subjects. Scudéry ridiculed Corneille's characterization of the noble grand capitaine incarnated by Don Gomès, calling him a "Matamore," "capitan ridicule," "fanfaron," and "capitaine Fracasse" as opposed to a martial "honnête homme" (85). Scudéry pinpointed Corneille's misuse of the terms "brigade," "bataille," and "equipage" to illustrate the playwright's unfamiliarity with the martial lexicon and jeered that Le Cid's military protagonists had a most unsavory and discrediting habit: "parler de la guerre en bon bourgeois qui va à la garde" (102). Through these and other remarks on the subject, Scudéry scornfully condemned the representation of military culture in Le Cid and recommended to Corneille that "quand on se pique de vouloir parler des choses, selon les termes de l'art, il en faut scavoir la veritable signification, autrement on paroit ridicule, en voulant paroistre sçavant" (102).
In this article I contend that, contrary to Scudéry's claims, Corneille was keenly aware of and engaged in the terminology, structures, practices, and debates related to the military sphere of his time. This should be no surprise knowing that Corneille had personal experience with war, not as a combatant, but as a petty landowner and officier in the provincial Parlement de Rouen when northern Normandy was a functional border province during the Thirty Years' War.1 In 1636, the Spanish successfully marched through much of Picardie and took Corbie, just east of Amiens. As a result, in addition to the pressures of high wartime taxation, the people of Normandy were forced to equip and send men to the front. They were also obliged to lodge and sustain unwieldy and sometimes dangerous French regiments, whose reputation for debauchery and crime made them as fearsome as enemy forces.
With this in mind, rather than seeing Corneille as lacking an understanding of the military sphere and labeling his representations of it as ornamental broderie, I argue that scholars need to better understand this thematic, which has not been sufficiently explored on its own terms, through the lens of seventeenth-century martial culture.2 Most previous studies that attended to Corneille's treatment of military matters grounded their analyses in frameworks...