Background
François Rabelais was born on February 4, 1494, at Chinon, in the province of Touraine, the son of Antoine Rabelais, Sr., a rich Touraine landowner and a prominent lawyer, and Marie Dusoul.
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François Rabelais was born on February 4, 1494, at Chinon, in the province of Touraine, the son of Antoine Rabelais, Sr., a rich Touraine landowner and a prominent lawyer, and Marie Dusoul.
After apparently studying law, Rabelais became a novice of the Franciscan order, and later a friar at Fontenay-le-Comte in Poitou, where he studied Greek and Latin as well as science, philology, and law, already becoming known and respected by the humanists of his era. Harassed due to the directions of his studies and frustrated with the Franciscan order's ban on the study of Greek, Rabelais petitioned Pope Clement VII and gained permission to leave the Franciscans and to enter the Benedictine order at Maillezais in Poitou, where he was more warmly received.
Later he left the monastery to study medicine at the University of Poitiers and at the University of Montpellier.
Graduating within weeks, he lectured on the works of distinguished ancient Greek physicians and published his own editions of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms and Galen’s Ars parva ("The Art of Raising Children") in 1532. As a doctor he placed great reliance on classical authority, siding with the Platonic school of Hippocrates but also following Galen and Avicenna.
After practicing medicine briefly in Narbonne, Rabelais was appointed physician to the hospital of Lyon, the Hôtel-Dieu, in 1532. In the same year, he edited the medical letters of Giovanni Manardi, a contemporary Italian physician. It was during this period that he discovered his true talent. Fired by the success of an anonymous popular chapbook, Les Grandes et inestimables cronicques du grant et énorme géant Gargantua, he published his first novel, Les horribles et épouvantables faits et prouesses du très renommé Pantagruel, roy des Dipsodes (1532; "The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Renowned Pantagruel, King of the Dipsodes"), under the pseudonym Alcofribas Nasier. Pantagruel is slighter in length and intellectual depth than his later novels, but nothing of this quality had been seen before in French in any similar genre.
Though condemned by the Sorbonne in Paris as obscene, Pantagruel was a popular success. It was followed in 1533 by the Pantagrueline Prognostication, a parody of the almanacs, astrological predictions that exercised a growing hold on the Renaissance mind.
In 1534 Rabelais left the Hôtel-Dieu to travel to Rome with the bishop of Paris, Jean du Bellay. He returned to Lyon in May of that year and published an edition of Bartolomeo Marliani’s description of Rome, Topographia antiquae Romae. He returned to the Hôtel-Dieu but left it again in February 1535, upon which the authorities of the Lyon hospital appointed someone else to his post.
La vie inestimable du grand Gargantua ("The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua") belongs to this period. The second edition is dated 1535; the first edition was probably published in 1534, though it lacks the title page in the only known copy. In Gargantua Rabelais continues to exploit medieval romances mock-heroically, telling of the birth, education, and prowesses of the giant Gargantua, who is Pantagruel’s father.
After Gargantua, Rabelais published nothing new for 11 years, though he prudently expurgated his two works of overbold religious opinions. He continued as physician to Jean du Bellay, who had become a cardinal, and his powerful brother Guillaume, and in 1535 Rabelais accompanied the cardinal to Rome. There he regularized his position by making a "supplication" to the pope for his "apostasy" (i.e., his unauthorized departure from the Benedictine monastery); the pope issued a bull freeing Rabelais from ecclesiastical censure and allowing him to reenter the Benedictine order. Rabelais then arranged to enter the Benedictine convent at Saint-Maur-les-Fossés, where Cardinal Jean du Bellay was abbot. The convent was secularized six months later, and Rabelais became a secular priest, authorized to exercise his medical profession.
In May 1537 Rabelais was awarded the doctorate of medicine of Montpellier; and he delivered, with considerable success, a course of lectures on Hippocrates’ Prognostics. He was at Aigues-Mortes in July 1538 when Charles V met the French king Francis I, but his movements are obscure until he followed Guillaume du Bellay to the Piedmont in 1542. Guillaume died in January 1543, and to Rabelais his death meant the loss of an important patron. That same year Geoffroy d’Estissac died as well, and Rabelais’s novels were condemned by the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris. Rabelais sought protection from the French king’s sister Margaret, queen of Navarre, dedicating to her the third book of the Gargantua-Pantagruel series, Tiers livre des faits et dits héroïques du noble Pantagruel (1546; "Third Book of the Heroic Deeds and Words of the Noble Pantagruel"). Despite its royal privilège (i.e., license to print), the book was immediately condemned for heresy by the Sorbonne, and Rabelais fled to Metz (an imperial city), remaining there until 1547.
From 1547 onward, Rabelais found protection again as physician to Cardinal Jean du Bellay and accompanied him to Rome via Turin, Ferrara, and Bologna. Passing through Lyon, he gave his printer his incomplete Quart livre ("Fourth Book"), which, as printed in 1548, finishes in the middle of a sentence but contains some of his most delightful comic storytelling. In Rome Rabelais sent a story to his newest protector in the Guise family, Charles of Lorraine, 2nd Cardinal de Lorraine; the story described the "Sciomachie" ("Simulated Battle") organized by Cardinal Jean to celebrate the birth of Louis of Orléans, second son of Henry II of France.
In January 1551 the Cardinal de Guise presented him with two benefices at Meudon and Jambet, though Rabelais never officiated or resided there. In 1552, through the influence of the cardinal, Rabelais was able to publish - with a new prologue - the full Quart livre des faits et dits héroïques du noble Pantagruel ("Fourth Book of the Heroic Deeds and Words of the Noble Pantagruel"), his longest book. Despite its royal privilège, this work, too, was condemned by the Sorbonne and banned by Parlement, but Rabelais’s powerful patrons soon had the censorship lifted. In 1553 Rabelais resigned his benefices. He died shortly thereafter on April 9, 1553, and was buried in Saint-Paul-des-Champs, Paris.
The prominent writer and physician François Rabelais wrote the comic masterpiece Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is praised for its use of language and satire.
In May 1537 Rabelais was awarded the doctorate of medicine of Montpellier.
The public university in Tours, France is named Université François Rabelais.
Asteroid "5666 Rabelais" was named in honor of François Rabelais in 1982.
In Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio's 2008 Nobel Prize lecture, Le Clézio referred to Rabelais as "the greatest writer in the French language".
François Rabelais never belonged to any political party. He was a pacifist and was against any war in the world.
Quotations:
"To good and true love fear is forever affixed."
"If the skies fall, one may hope to catch larks."
"Debts and lies are generally mixed together."
"We always long for the forbidden things, and desire what is denied us."
"Science without conscience is the death of the soul."
"There is no truer cause of unhappiness amongst men than, where naturally expecting charity and benevolence, they receive harm and vexation."
François Rabelais was a quiet and intelligent man. He never spoke too much. All of the pains he experienced and the hardships he experienced he expressed in the Gargantua and Pantagruel series.
Physical Characteristics: François Rabelais was described as a tall man with baldish brown hair. His face was surrounded by some kind of special aura. His physical trademarks were his goatee, curved eyebrows and a smile that he wouldn't put off his face.
Quotes from others about the person
"It must be laid down once and for all, that the chief purpose of reading a classic like Rabelais is to prop and stay the spirit, especially in moments of weakness and enervation, against the stress of life, to elevate it above the reach of commonplace annoyances and degradations, and to purge it of despondency and cynicism.... Rabelais is dynamogenous and illuminating; he lights up the humane life with the light of great joy, so that it shows itself as something lovely and infinitely desirable, by the side of which all other attainments fall automatically into their proper place as cheap, poor, and trivial. One closes with it gladly, joyfully, perceiving that for the sake of it all else that is lost is well lost." (Albert Jay Nock)
François Rabelais never married, but he had two children from an unknown widow.
