Abstract EN:

The hymn, specially devoted to singing the praises of Gods in ancient pagan poetry or in ecclesiastical Christian poetry, is with the ode or the canticle one of the great lyric genres of eulogy in the XVIth century French poetry. But because of its abundance and heterogeneousness, the hymnary corpus presents two difficulties : the French hymn can take any possible shape (stanzaic or not, long or short. . . ), and it can sing the praises of a great diversity of subjects, either religious ones (Olympian deities, liturgical occasions, Christian notions. . . )or not (places, individuals, profane abstractions, events. . . ). There is no problem in giving the historical definition of the hymn : "It is a song with praise of God" wrote Saint Augustine whose definition has been taken up by the classical scholars about Greek hymns. However, when dealing with the French corpus, the problematic extension of the field covered by the praise of gods needs questioning. Far from defining an essence of the genre, the thesis proposes a pragmatical study of a large corpus of French pieces so as to set up a typology of the French hymn of the Renaissance which is regarded as the original acclimatization of both a pagan and Christian poetic inheritance. Three parts are devoted to the re-invention of the hymn : its slow emergence between 1500 and 1549 in its traditional ecclesiastical form ; its taken-up by the Brigade between 1550 and 1556 (from the ancient pagan species to the natural ronsardian hymns) ; its multiple militant takovers (both political and religious) between the 1560's and the end of the reign of Henry IV.