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| Making fun of women's fashions, French satire, 1810s. |
P. H. Ditchfield, in Books Fatal to their Authors, comments on the hazards of writing satire:
To "sit in the seat of the scorner" has often proved a dangerous position, as the writers of satires and lampoons have found to their cost, although their sharp weapons have often done good service in checking the onward progress of Vice and Folly. All authors have not shown the poet's wisdom who declared:—
Satire's my weapon, but I'm too discreet
To run amuck, and tilt at all I meet.
Nor have all the victims of satire the calmness and self-possession of the philosopher who said: "If evil be said of thee, and it be true, correct thyself; if it be a lie, laugh at it." It would have been well for those who indulged in this style of writing, if all the victims of their pens had been of the same mind as Frederick the Great, who said that time and experience had taught him to be a good post-horse, going through his appointed daily stage, and caring nothing for the curs that barked at him along the road.
Roger Rabutin de Bussy—A military man for the first part of his life.
Then literature claimed him as her slave. His first book, Les amours du Palais Royal, excited the displeasure of King Louis XIV., and prepared the way for his downfall. [In another work] he satirized the lax manners of the French Court during the minority of the King, and had the courage to narrate the intrigue which Louis carried on with La Vallière. He spares few of the ladies of the Court, and lashes them all with his satire, ...and his victims were so enraged that they carried their complaints to the King...
This aroused the anger of the self-willed monarch, who ordered the author to be sent to the Bastille, and then to be banished from the kingdom forever...
Trajan Boccalini—This Italian satirist
...was one of the wittiest and most versatile of authors, and would have risen to positions of greater dignity, if only his pen had been a little less active and his satire less severe. He wrote a book entitled Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612), which was most successful. In this work he represents Apollo as judge of Parnassus, who cites before him kings, authors, warriors, statesmen, and other mighty personages, minutely examines their faults and crimes, and passes judgment upon them...Boccalini was compelled to leave Rome and seek safety in Venice...[where] he imagined himself safe; but his powerful foes hired assassins to "remove" the obnoxious author. He was seized one day by four strong men, cast upon a couch, and beaten to death with bags filled with sand.
Pietro Aretino—Used his talent to lampoon prominent figures, and extort money from potential victims in exchange for leaving them alone. He also became a satiric "hitman." His pen was for hire, and some influential people engaged him to discredit their enemies.
[Aretino] acquired great fame, but not of a creditable kind...Utterly venal and unscrupulous, we find him at one time enjoying the patronage of Francis I of France, and then abusing that monarch and basking in the favor of the Emperor Charles V, who paid him more lavishly. His death took place at Venice in 1557. Some say that he, the flagellum of princes, was beaten to death by command of the princes of Italy; others narrate that he who laughed at others all his life died through laughter. His risible faculties being on one occasion so violently excited by certain obscene jests, he fell from his seat, and struck his head with such violence against the ground that he died.
John Giovanni Cinelli—Taught
medicine at Florence.
Italian air seems to have favored satire, but Italian susceptibility was somewhat fatal to the satirists...He began the great work entitled Bibliotheca volans, the fourth section of which brought grievous trouble upon its author...caused by an unfortunate note which attacked the doctor of the Grand Duke. This doctor was highly indignant, and reported Cinelli to the Tribunal. The book was publicly burnt by the hangman, and Cinelli was confined in prison ninety-three days and then driven into exile.
Nicholas Francus—An Italian poet of the sixteenth century who wrote a "severe satire on Pope Pius IV."
Francus was a true poet, endowed with a vivid imagination and with a delicate and subtle wit. He scorned the coarse invective in which the satirists of his day used to delight. He had many enemies on account of his plain-spoken words and keen criticisms. The problem which perplexed the Patriarch Job—the happiness of prosperous vice, the misery of persecuted virtue—tormented his mind and called forth his embittered words. He inveighed against the reprobates and fools, the crowds of monsignors who were as vain of their effeminacy as the Scipios of their deeds of valor; he combated abuses, and with indignant pen heaped scorn upon the fashionable vices of the age. The Pope and his Cardinals, stung by his shafts of satire, cruelly avenged themselves upon the unhappy poet...
At length Pius V. condemned him to death. Some historians narrate that the poor poet was hung on a beam attached to the famous statue of the Gladiator in front of the Palace of the Orsini, called the Pasquin, to which the deriders and enemies of the Pope were accustomed to affix their epigrams and pamphlets.
Lorenzo Valla—A great scholar who
...contributed more than any other man to the revival of the love of Latin literature in the fifteenth century. His works are voluminous. He translated into Latin Herodotus (Paris, 1510), Thucydides (Lyons, 1543), The Iliad (Venice, 1502), Fables of Aesop (Venice, 1519); and wrote Elegantiae Sermonis Latini, a history of Ferdinand Aragon (Paris, 1521), and many other works, which are the monuments of his learning and industry.But Valla raised against him many enemies by the severity of his satire on almost all the learned men of his time. He spared no one, and least of all the clerics, who sought his destruction. A friend advised him that, unless he was weary of life, he ought to avoid heaping his satirical abuse on the Roman priests and bishops...he was cast into prison, and would have suffered death by fire had not his powerful friend Alphonso V., King of Aragon, rescued him...Erasmus in his Second Epistle defends Valla in his attacks upon the clergy, and asks, "Did he speak falsely, because he spoke the truth too severely?"
Daniel Defoe—As a young man was
A strong partisan of the Nonconformist cause during the controversial struggle between Church and Dissent. In the reign of Queen Anne, he published a pamphlet entitled The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), in which he ironically advised their entire extermination...
When Defoe's jest was discovered, and his opponents found that the book was "writ sarcastic," they caused the unhappy author to be severely punished. Parliament condemned his book to the flames, and its author to the pillory and to prison. On his release he wrote other political pamphlets, which involved him in new troubles; and, disgusted with politics, he turned his versatile talents to other literary work, and produced his immortal book Robinson Crusoe, which has been translated into all languages, and is known and read by everyone.
Du Rosoi—A Royalist who wrote about the wrong side of the French Revolution.
In the dangerous years of 1791 and 1792 he edited La Gazette de Paris, which procured greater celebrity for him, and brought about his death. When the fatal tenth of August came, the Editor was not to be found in Paris. However, ultimately he was secured and condemned to death by the tribunal extraordinary appointed by the Legislative Assembly to judge the enemies of the new government. He died with great bravery at the hands of the revolutionary assassins, after telling his judges that as a friend of the King he was accounted worthy to die on that day, the Feast of Saint Louis.
Caspar Scioppius—The Attila the Hun of authors.
All the venom of satirical writers seems to have been collected by that strange author Gaspar Scioppius, who had such a singular lust for powerful invective that he cared not whom he attacked, and made himself abhorred by all...
[H]e would have been slain, if he had not enjoyed the protection of a powerful Venetian. He boasted that his writings had had such an effect on two of his literary opponents, Casaubon and Scaliger, as to cause them to die from vexation and disappointment. He made himself so many powerful enemies that towards the end of his life he knew not where to find a secure retreat. This "public pest of letters and society," as the Jesuits delighted to call him, died at Padua in 1649 hated by all, both Catholics and Protestants.
