Marot and the cultural (literary) link between Lyon and Northern Italy (Turin)
Summary from Gianni Mombello, "Lingua e cultura francese
durante l'occupazione," in Storia
di Torino, vol. III, Dalla dominazione francese alla ricomposizione
dello Stato (1536–1630), a
cura di Giuseppe Ricuperati, Torino, Einaudi, 1998, Parte prima ("Il
tempo dei Francesi, 1536–1562"), pp. 59–108. The
volume's first part covers the French occupation of Turin and Piedmont
from Francis I's 1536 seizure of the duchy to the 1562
restoration under Emanuele Filiberto.
It contains two main chapters: Pierpaolo
Merlin's political-administrative history of the occupation, and
Gianni Mombello's chapter on French
language and culture:
[Part One: "Il tempo dei Francesi (1536–1562)", chapter: "Lingua e
cultura francese durante l'occupazione"]
The author, Gianni Mombello, argues that pre-occupation Piedmont was a culturally arid borderland — dependent on a capital elsewhere (Chambéry), producing chiefly scholastic Latin in writing and a scatter of dialects with little literary dignity. Dante had branded the subalpine speech "turpissima." Against this, French was already partly familiar: the ducal court under Carlo II spoke French, the Savoyard secretaries wrote decent French, and figures like Claude de Seyssel (Savoyard, Turin professor then bishop) embodied a francophone-but-cisalpine culture. He develops an ideological theme: French writers of the era (Symphorien Champier, Guillaume du Bellay, Rabelais in the Tiers Livre prologue) promoted a quasi-Anschluss notion that northern Italy was "really" Gaul/France returning "à leur naturalité." The occupation was thus imagined as a lasting linguistic-cultural conquest, not just a strategic one — a hope Mombello judges ultimately illusory, since Piedmontese distinctiveness held. He surveys Piedmontese who wrote in French (mostly badly, unless they'd lived long in France): Giovan Giorgio Alione of Asti, the exceptional polyglot Mercurino Arborio di Gattinara, and diplomats like Carlo Solaro di Moretta and the linguistically dreadful Chiaffredo Pasero. A key figure is the Turin jurist Giovanni Nevizzano, whose Sylva nuptialis (expanded 1523; the influential edition printed at Lyon, 1524) shows an enormous, up-to-date command of French literature — Villon, Jean Lemaire de Belges, Gringore, Budé and others — evidence of Turin's outward-looking curiosity.
Guillaume du Bellay and "la Francia torinese"
Under Guillaume du Bellay, seigneur de Langey (governor from 1537, effective viceroy until his death in Jan. 1543), Turin became a humanist hub — a cenacolo dubbed "la Francia torinese." Around him gathered jurists, diplomats and men of letters: Antoine Arlier, Jean de Morel, Guillaume Bigot, the parlementaire François Errault, Villegagnon, and above all François Rabelais, who served Langey as physician/secretary and drew on his Piedmont years in the Tiers and Quart Livre. Turin's university, though in crisis, kept functioning (Erasmus had taken his theology degree there in 1506).
Clément Marot and the Lyonese connection
Marot appears at several points:
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First crossing (1535–36): Marot passed through Piedmont in 1535 en route to refuge with Renée de France at Ferrara. Returning across the snowy Alps in autumn 1536 — the territory now occupied by French troops — he likely met Alessio Jura (from Chieri), to whom he dedicated a verse epistle.
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Final year and death (1544): Feeling threatened, Marot left France and moved to Geneva, from there to Annecy and Chambéry (staying with his friend Boyssonné), and finally into Piedmont around the time of the French victory at Ceresole (15 April 1544), which he celebrated in an epigram and a 76-line poem — grandiloquent but stylistically old-fashioned (deliberately, because of the adressé? as suggested by Defaux) returning to old "Rhétorique" games. His last flash of satire was eight barbed lines (epigram) against an unnamed Piedmontese woman who'd rejected his six écus (she wanted ten) NB: his epigram is only published in 1550 (Groulleau), it's not dated. Authenticity can be doubted (Groulleau published a corpus mixtum). It is accepted by Defaux, OPP. LXXXII, p. 331: Ma dame, je vous remercie. Put to music by 'Anonymous' (published in Cinquiesme livre, contenant XXV chansons nouvelles à quatre parties en deux volumes, composées de plusieurs autheurs, Nic. Duchemin). Marot died in early September 1544 and was buried under the side steps of San Giovanni (Turin's cathedral), with an epitaph by Léon Jamet — which had been chiselled away by the time Nicolas Audebert visited in 1574, possibly linked to the death of Duchess Margherita di Francia.
Read here a full treatment of Marot's final peripations and the location of his tomb in the Duomo -
He also wrote a Complainte mourning Langey ("L'esprit du preux Guillaume du Bellay, / Tant travaillé des guerres Piedmontoises...").
There is a strong link with Lyon, that runs through the chapter's discussion of printing. Mombello stresses that printing in Piedmont was in crisis: barely one French-language work may have been printed there between 1536 and 1560, and Lyon was the real center of French book production feeding the region. Rabelais's lost Stratagèmes (his Latin account of Langey's exploits) was translated and printed at Lyon by Sébastien Gryphe in 1543.
Marot's last (??) work, Le Riche en Pauvreté (authenticity doubted by Defaux, almost certainly not: Higman, Wursten; accepted by Mayer, Mombello) was supposedly printed at Turin by Antoine Blanc without date (C.A. Mayer accepted this idea, rejected by G. Defaux, so this discussion is a non-issue, that is to say: Mombello is right, but states the obvious)— but Mombello, following Jolliffe and Rhodes, casts serious doubt: Antoine Blanc was born in Lyon in 1546 and worked in Lyon, Geneva and Grenoble, never demonstrably in Turin, so the attribution can't hold on chronological grounds. The "Turin" edition may instead be a later reprint by the Como printer Antonio Bianchi (active in Turin 1585–99), which would make it post-date the 1558 Paris edition by Estienne Denise. Nevizzano's fortune likewise ran through the Lyonese press.
2026 Dick Wursten.