François Rabelais

François Rabelais (c. 1493-1553), French writer, whose boisterous satirical work, with its emphasis on individual liberty and on a sensual enjoyment of life and its enthusiasm for knowledge, is a vigorous expression of Renaissance humanism.

Rabelais was born in Chinon, Touraine. His father, Antoine Rabelais, Lord of Lerné, was a prosperous lawyer of Chinon. Tradition records that François began his studies at the Benedictine abbey of Seuilly. Later, as a Franciscan friar at Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou, he continued to study Greek, despite the opposition of the ecclesiastical faculty of the Sorbonne, Greek still being regarded as the language of heresy. After further studies at another Benedictine house and at various universities, including Paris and Montpellier, he went to Lyon, then a rigorous intellectual centre, where he practised medicine and published a reprint of the Aphorisms of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. At the same time he expressed his sense of humour writing popular almanacs making sport of astrology.

Pantagruel (1532), Rabelais’s first great work, is the life story of a lusty young giant of great strength and appetites. It had its origins in an anonymous contemporary pamphlet, sold at fairs, entitled Les Grandes et Inestimables Cronicques du Grand et Énorme Géant Gargantua (The Grand and Inestimable Chronicles of the Grand and Enormous Giant Gargantua). In 1534 Rabelais published La Vie très Horrificque du Grand Gargantua (The Very Frightful Life of the Grand Gargantua), the story of Pantagruel’s father. Both books, printed under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier, had prodigious success, although they were condemned by the Sorbonne as obscene and heretical. Although Rabelais revised them in 1542, they were again condemned.

Following two trips to Italy, Rabelais resided and taught at Montpellier. In 1540 he moved to Paris. During this time he was writing his third book in the series. The first two books were read to Francis I, who was so pleased with them that he granted a licence for the publication of the third, Tiers Livre, which appeared in 1546. Quart Livre followed in 1552, but was condemned; in 1547 Francis had died, and a reaction against liberty of thought immediately began. Rabelais himself fled to Metz, and then to Rome. He subsequently became curate of Meudon, where he spent the remainder of his life quietly. Rabelais died in Paris, probably on April 9, 1553. A fifth book, the authorship of which is controversial, was published in 1564.

In Pantagruel and Gargantua broad humour is mingled with keen social satire, political insight, and pedagogic wisdom. Rabelais was neither a drunken buffoon nor a profound philosopher, as different legends have represented him, but a genius who, like the 18th-century English satirist Jonathan Swift, gave satirical expression to the philosophical and political concerns of his contemporaries. Rabelaisian ideas and attitudes may be found in the work of such 20th-century writers as James Joyce and Henry Miller.