Le conflit des publics dans le Dialogue du Manant et du Maheustre (1593)

This article seeks to examine the representations of audiences in conflict in the abundant pamphleteer literature that flourished during the Wars of Religion. Drawing on Marc Angenot’s work on polemical rhetoric, as well as on the analyses of historians and literary critics, we are interested specifically in the genre of dialogue, as mobilized in the League pamphlet entitled Dialogue d’entre le Maheustre et le Manant, attributed to F. Cromé (1593). This text is distinctive for having been republished, with little reworking, by the League’s opponents, the Politiques, who therefore recognized the validity of the dialogue’s argumentation. This article sets out to discern specific modes of address and of making present the text’s target audiences, to reflect on the polemical weapons used to discredit the enemy, but also to examine the rhetorical purpose of this dialogue, which is indicative of a new relation, less argumentative and more performative, between reading publics and political conflict

Argumentation theory · Art · Epistemology · Humanities · Linguistics · Literature · Relation (database · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · European Political History Analysis · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Philosophy