Pierre de Ronsard’s
The Franciad

Translation, annotation, and critical bibliography
by Phillip John Usher

First published in 1572, the first four books of Ronsard’s Franciad are the closest the French Renaissance came to having an epic comparable to Camões’s Lusiads or Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Never before translated into English, the Franciad is presented here in a faithful and highly readable translation, and complemented by plentiful critical notes.

Ronsard’s Franciad appeared at a crucial point in French history. The first four books, after many years of elaboration, finally left the presses of Parisian printer Gabriel Buon on September 13, 1572, less than a month after the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre—an event normally thought to have been ordered by Catherine de Medici, the mother of King Charles IX, Ronsard’s patron. France thus sorely lacked national unity; Ronsard’s unfinished epic, on the other hand, sought to bolster national (Catholic) pride by providing a shared genealogy that made the French King a descendant of Hector and the Trojan War. The contrast between the historical reality and Ronsard’s poetic monument underscores the epic’s underlying ideology and its inscription in a slightly earlier, more positive, belief in the destiny of the French nation.

Ronsard never finished his poem—his patron, for one thing, died soon after the first edition—and so Francus, the hero of his epic, never completes his journey through storms, battles, and personal doubt to found France. Still, the poem’s notoriety before, during, and after its 20-year-long gestation, helped ensure that The Franciad has remained a fundamental emblem of the French Renaissance’s heroic triumphs and failures.