Editions of Clément Marot: A Guide to What Survives

Clément Marot died in 1544, leaving poems that had circulated in very different forms: some printed under his own supervision, some pirated, some (only or also) copied by hand, some revised years after they first appeared. Recent research (Guillaume Berthon) has argued convincingly that the poet's intention was the publication of a single, coherent book of his own work — only his poems, and all of his poems, arranged as he wished them read. What followed his death was almost the opposite: a long succession of editions that enlarged the corpus not only with previously unpublished poems, but also with poems he never wrote, and framed his œuvre with 'imaginative' biographies that read his life out of his verse.
The history of Marot's editions is largely the history of that divergence, and of the slow scholarly effort to reverse it (beginning with Pierre Villey in the 1920s). For a long time the poet was read in editions descending from an untrustworthy — and often tendentious — posthumous tradition; only in the second half of the twentieth century was his text disentangled from the accretions and his life separated from the legend. What follows sets out the principal editions in sequence, from those he authorized himself to the critical editions of the present day, with an indication of what each is good for and what the main characteristics of each edition are.

The authorized editions of Marot's lifetime (1532–1544)

These are the editions against which all others are measured. Marot published his work as a single evolving book, containing only his own poems, and generally printed in the pocket octavo format using the roman type he helped establish in French verse.

L'Adolescence clémentine (1532) and La Suite (1533) are the self-curated early collections, conceived as a single book in two parts, the Suite having appeared during Marot's exile. Les Œuvres (Lyon, 1538) is the definitive collection of his lifetime, printed by François Juste and issued successively under the names of Étienne Dolet and Sébastien Gryphius. It is bibliographically complex: it exists in two issues that differ by more than their titles and that accumulate corrections made while the book was on the press, which accounts for the variants observed between surviving copies. The 1538 edition is also anomalous in being set in a chancery bâtarde rather than Marot's usual roman type — most plausibly an accident attributable to Dolet's inexperience, and followed by a break between the two men. The Cinquante Pseaumes (Geneva, Jean Girard, 1543) are Marot's final authorized psalm translations, exceptionally printed in quarto and evidently intended as a book of some standing.

The last edition Marot's own text can be said to stand behind is Les Œuvres printed at Lyon “à l'enseigne du Rocher” in 1544 (with a further issue in 1545), the work of Sulpice Sabon printing for Antoine Constantin, and appearing in the year of the poet's death. It is a summing-up edition that reorganizes the whole of Marot's work under a broadly generic order, dissolving the earlier collections; it introduced the first full analytical table of contents keyed to the page, and it established the generic arrangement that later editors, down to Guiffrey, would follow.

The eighteenth century

Only two editions of Marot appeared in the eighteenth century. The first, the Œuvres de Clément Marot published at The Hague by Adriaen Moetjens in 1700 (reissued in 1702), opens with an anonymous and tendentious Abrégé de la vie de Marot, and reprints the late sixteenth-century posthumous text. It is an early instance of the biographical framing that would attach itself to the poet's editions for the next two centuries.

Excursus: Marot in The Hague around 1700

The Moetjens edition rewards a closer look, because it shows that Marot's return to print around 1700 came not from Protestant piety but from a Catholic and diplomatic readership. Adriaen Moetjens (c. 1651–1717) did not serve the Reformed devotional market: his Hague shop catered to the international elite of the city of the States-General, the embassies, and the stadtholderly court, dealing in luxury French-language publications — court literature, diplomatic memoirs, history, and classical poetry — and his premises were a known gathering point for Catholic book collectors, whose private libraries he regularly auctioned.
This milieu accounts for the character of the anonymous Abrégé de la vie de Marot placed at the front of the edition. Where Geneva and the Huguenot refuge honoured Marot above all as the devout translator of the Psalms, the Abrégé deliberately withholds that martyr's halo. It views the poet's religious choices with suspicion and presents him instead as a fickle, frivolous court poet, casting his flight to Geneva and his “errors” in religion as the fruit of a dissolute character and political imprudence. The poems are offered as elegant court verse, but the reader is quietly warned about the man's unsteady faith and morals.
The significance for the reception of Marot is considerable. The 1700 edition is the first in which a reissue of the poems is so emphatically governed by a biographical framing that dictates how they are to be read — and it is the earliest step toward the durable nineteenth-century habit of presenting Marot as a light, licentious court poet.

The second, and by far the more consequential, is the annotated edition of Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy (The Hague, Gosse & Neaulme, 1731), published under the pseudonym “chevalier Gordon de Percel” and issued in both a four-volume quarto and a six-volume duodecimo format. It furnished the first extensive Enlightenment apparatus — notes, historical commentary, biography, and a chronology of the works — and did much to reintroduce Marot to a reading public; it also fixed in durable form the reading of the poet's life out of his poems. Its title page advertised collation against manuscripts and more than forty editions, but the text in fact rests on a late reprint descended from the sixteenth-century posthumous tradition, and so transmits an enlarged body of verse containing poems Marot did not write. It is valuable as evidence of eighteenth-century reception, and as the source of a biographical framework repeated long afterward, rather than as a reliable text.

The nineteenth century

Through the nineteenth century Marot was read chiefly in a succession of annotated reading editions, directed at a cultivated public rather than at scholarship, which carried the biographical Marot of the eighteenth century forward and fixed his popular image. Each was typically prefaced by a life of the poet, and most depended textually on the corrected and enlarged tradition rather than on Marot's own editions.

The Romantic revival of interest in Renaissance literature produced two editions of 1823–24 that set out to revise and “improve” Lenglet Du Fresnoy: that edited by Pierre-René Auguis (1823), which retained Marot's sixteenth-century spelling while modernizing the historical apparatus with commentary, glossary, and chronological tables; and that edited by Paul Lacroix — the celebrated bibliophile and archivist known by his pen-name “Le Bibliophile Jacob” (1806–1884), later a curator at the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal — published in 1824 by Rapilly and by Lefèvre in the latter's Collection des classiques françois, which collated further printings to produce a cleaner and more readable text and became a standard library edition for Romantic-era readers.

Thereafter the firm of Garnier Frères issued Marot's works in its popular series in successive editions bearing much the same title. The edition of 1867, edited by Charles d'Héricault, is prefaced by his Notice sur Clément Marot and established the colorful Romantic image of the poet as a witty court figure amid religious persecution. It was succeeded in 1879 by the two-volume edition of B. de Saint-Marc, which revised the text against sixteenth-century printings, modernized the punctuation, and expanded the annotation and glossary for students; and, in the early twentieth century (c. 1920), by the widely circulated edition of Abel Grenier, accessible and affordable but resting on no new research and retaining the apocryphal poems inherited from its predecessors.

Standing apart from these commercial editions is that of Pierre Jannet (Œuvres complètes de Clément Marot, Paris, Bibliothèque elzévirienne, four volumes, 1868–72), generally regarded as the finest nineteenth-century text. Jannet made a serious philological attempt to return to the early sixteenth-century printings, and provided variants, textual commentary, and a glossary. It is the bridge between the popularizing editions of the nineteenth century and the scholarly editions of the twentieth.

The nineteenth and early twentieth century: Guiffrey

The Œuvres edited by Georges Guiffrey, and completed after his death in 1887 by Robert-Charles Yve-Plessis and Jean Plattard, appeared in five volumes between 1875 and 1931. It was the undertaking of a wealthy nineteenth-century érudit, produced over more than half a century. Its achievements are substantial: it was the first to collate several early versions rather than reprint an inherited text, it recovered a body of poems that had remained in manuscript, and it assembled much of the archival record of Marot's life.

Its method, however, was inherited rather than devised, and it has not lasted. The reading of Marot's poems as historical autobiography — treating first-person statements as evidence about a life — was the achievement of the annotated editions that had accumulated since Lenglet Du Fresnoy, and the nineteenth-century reading editions had elaborated it further, constructing a life of the poet out of the poems themselves and accepting the framing of earlier editors as established fact. Guiffrey worked within this tradition rather than against it: he brought to it far greater archival diligence, but he retained the autobiographical assumption, dated the poems from the reconstructed life, and filled the gaps in the record imaginatively. Much of the popular image of Marot descends from this cumulative tradition, of which Guiffrey's volumes are the fullest expression, and it should be treated with caution. The archival documents and the recovered manuscript poems remain their durable contribution.

The modern turn: Pierre Villey

Before the modern editions, one scholar altered what an edition of Marot could be. Pierre Villey, in his Tableau chronologique des publications de Marot (1921) and the study Marot et Rabelais (1923), reversed the direction of inference in dating the poems. Where earlier scholarship had dated poems from the biography, Villey dated them from the printed and manuscript record — the point at which a poem first appears, in what company, in which edition, and in what state — and allowed a chronology to emerge from that evidence. The early printed editions thereby became objects of study in their own right, attribution became a question with a method, and the biography contracted to what documents support. Villey published no edition; his work is the foundation of those that followed.

The modern critical editions

C. A. Mayer produced the first fully critical edition, arranged by genre across six volumes (London, Athlone Press, 1958–1970, for volumes I–V; Geneva, Slatkine, 1980, for volume VI): Les Épîtres, Œuvres satiriques, Œuvres lyriques, Œuvres diverses, Épigrammes, and Les Traductions. It was accompanied by a bibliography (1954, with a revised and expanded volume on the sixteenth-century editions in 1975). The edition sorts the corpus into its genres, weighs each poem's authenticity on Villey's principles, and prints an established text with a full apparatus of variants. It remains the standard tool for the text, the variants, and the question of authenticity argued rather than assumed. Its arrangement by genre is, however, the editor's, not Marot's.

Gérard Defaux took the contrary approach in his Œuvres poétiques complètes (Classiques Garnier, two volumes, 1990 and 1993), restoring the collections Marot himself published or planned, on the argument that his books are compositions rather than containers, whose order carries meaning that a genre arrangement loses. The establishment of the text is less reliable than Mayer's, and for the poems Marot never published Defaux arranged the unpublished epigrams into a third and fourth book that never existed, extending the corpus in what he took to be Marot's own manner. The edition's introductions and notes substantially renewed the study of the poet, and are its principal value; for the psalms his separately edited Cinquante Pseaumes (Champion, 1995) is preferable to the poetic works.

François Rigolot's Œuvres complètes (Flammarion, GF, two volumes, 2007 and 2009) presents the poems chronologically and is directed at readers rather than editors, with modernized spelling and accessible annotation. It reproduces the early editions in their original form — the princeps of L'Adolescence clémentine, the Suite, the 1538 Œuvres, the 1543 edition, and the 1544 “au Rocher” edition — supplemented by pieces published elsewhere, and is completed by a separate edition of the manuscript presented to the connétable de Montmorency in 1538 (Chantilly manuscript; Droz, 2010). The chronological presentation makes visible a career developing under increasing religious pressure. Its cost is textual authority, which a modernized text with light apparatus does not claim.

Guillaume Berthon represents the current state of scholarship, continuing both predecessors while assessing each critically. His L'Intention du poète : Clément Marot « autheur » (Classiques Garnier, 2014) treats Marot as a self-conscious author shaping his public identity through print, while attending to the material realities that this account must accommodate: printer interference, pirated editions, and regional variation. His Bibliographie critique des éditions de Clément Marot (2019) corrects and extends Mayer's descriptions with the methods of modern analytical bibliography, and is now the point of departure for textual work on the poet. His edition of Les Épîtres (Gallimard, 2021, with J.-C. Monferran) adopts a genre grouping while restoring the historical publication chronology within it, and expands the corpus from Mayer's fifty-seven epistles to seventy.

Reference tools

For the sixteenth-century editions, the standard descriptive bibliographies are Mayer (1954, revised 1975) and, now authoritative, Berthon (2019). For the secondary literature — studies, criticism, and editions of the poet — see also H. P. Clive, Clément Marot: An Annotated Bibliography (London, Grant & Cutler, 1983), a critical finding-aid to scholarship on Marot rather than to the early editions themselves.

In summary

For reading Marot, Rigolot offers the most accessible text, with the career legible in sequence. For an introduction to the poet, Defaux's introductions and notes are the richest, though the text should be used with awareness of its limits. For establishing a text, Mayer remains standard for the variants, the apparatus, and the treatment of authenticity, with Berthon now the best text for the epistles. For the psalms, Defaux's separate Champion volume is preferable to his poetic works. For the current state of the question and for bibliographical matters, Berthon (2019) is the starting point. Guiffrey retains value for the archival record and the manuscript poems, provided its text is understood to be unreliable and its biography partly invented.