Louis Le Roy

Loys Le Roy (Latin: Ludovicus Regius; c. 1510 – 1577), better known as Loys Le Roy de Coutances, was a French writer.

Biography

Louis (Loys, according to the old spelling) was born at Coutances, in Normandy, from a family of very modest condition. Poverty seems to have accompanied him throughout his life and to have conditioned, at least in part, his existential and intellectual choices.

After his first studies, the humanist and future Bishop of Coustances, Philippe de Cossé-Brissac, offered him the necessary financial help to be able to move to Paris and attend first the Collège Harcourt, reserved for Norman students, and then the Collège Royal, to learn Latin and Greek from Pierre Danes (1497–1577) and Jacques Toussain (c. 1499–1547), both students of Guillaume Budé (1468–1540).

It was the latter, alongside Greek scholar Nicolas Berault (1473–1540), who recommended Le Roy in 1535 to the Bishop of Rieux, Jean de Pins — whose help was fundamental, as Le Roy himself acknowledged — and to the jurist Jean de Boyssoné, professor at the University of Toulouse, which Le Roy intended to attend. At the end of the four-year course in jurisprudence, to which he had preferred private humanistic studies, perhaps after a year as a reader, he left the University to return to Paris on April 22, 1540. There, on August 22, Budé died, and his old patron Cossé-Brissac urged Le Roy to write a biography of the late humanist, which he hastily completed within the year, dedicating it to the Chancellor of France Guillaume Poyet (1473–1548).

Written in programmatic Ciceronian Latin, the short Vita Budaei is not so much a critical biography of the Parisian humanist as it is an apologia for contemporary culture and an exhortatory panegyric of Francis I (1494–1547) who, in Le Roy's estimation, should be the promoter of the defense and development of French humanism threatened by a retrogressive aversion that has its fulcrum in the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne — which saw in humanism as the mortal enemy of the old scholastic culture.

The book did not went unnoticed at court and in the administration of the Kingdom, to which Le Roy was perhaps called in 1542, collaborating with the Chancellors Poyet and Olivier. Le Roy spent almost twenty years as a "wandering courtier, distracted by business, his days ordinarily spent close to great personages, without being able to study, "amidst infinite indignities and many troubles and disturbances that the Court brings, except on occasion". But the distraction from his studies was compensated by the possibility of listening and observing directly "ceux qui negocioyent": a living experience, inhibited to the scholar who spends his time only among books, and indispensable to be able to form a conscience and a political science.

In 1545, Le Roy wrote a commemoration of Charles of Valois (1522–1545), entitled Oratio and dedicated to Pierre Duchâtel Bishop of Mâcon. In 1551, he published Trois livres d'Isocrate ancien orateur et philosophe, which had been completed since 1547. The first book, dedicated to the Dauphin, consists of the French translation of Isocrates' oration A Demonicus, the second, with a dedication to King Henry II, of the translation of the oration A Nicocles, and the third contains translations of Isocrates' Nicocles, of Xenophon's Agesilaus, dedicated to the Duke of Montmorency, and of Book I of the Institution of Cyrus, still by Xenophon, dedicated to Edward VI of England, to whom he personally offered the manuscript when, from October 1551 to February 1552, he was visiting London.

Upon the death of his friend and royal official François Connan (1508–1551), Le Roy wrote a eulogy of him that would be prefaced to the edition of Connan's Commentaria iuris civilis and continued the series of translations from Greek, publishing Demosthenes' Olintiache and Philippics, the seventh book of Xenophon's Cyropedia, Timaeus, Gorgias, Phaedrus, Symposium, and three books of Plato's Republic, as well as one of Theodoret's sermons.

The Symposium was translated in the early months of 1558, as Le Roy himself reveals in his dedication to the Dauphin, when he was a guest of Piero Strozzi (1510–1558), a member of the well-known Florentine family who had become Marshal of France, after he settled there following the exile of his father Filippo, an opponent of the Medici. And to a Medici, Catherine, he dedicated the Consolatio for the death of her husband Henry II, occurred during the tournament of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine (July 10, 1559), to whom a few months earlier he had dedicated the oration De pace et concordia, on the occasion of the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis.

It is not clear whether Le Roy was admitted to the Parliament of Paris, as his Oratio ad Curiam Parisiensis might suggest, in which he writes that being in that "amplissimo Gallorum loco ac clarissimo torius Europae concilio" is as much as he could hope for, but then asks not to take the test for admission to Parliament, introduced by Henry II in 1547, fearing to fail it.

In 1562, with the publication of Des differens et trobles advenans entre les hommes par la diversité des opinions en la Religion, begins the series of political treatises that will occupy Le Roy throughout the decade.

This highly educated man and good writer contributed to give variety and harmony to prose. By his haughty mood, by his sarcastic character, he made many enemies, among others Joachim du Bellay, who, in his epigrams, mocks him for his pedantic knowledge.

Works

Among his works, in addition to translations of Plato's Dialogues (1558), speeches of Demosthenes, Treatises of Aristotle, etc., we can cite:

• Considérations sur l’histoire française et universelle (1562)
• De l’origine et excellence de l’art politique (1567)
• Des troubles et différends advenant entre les hommes pour la diversité des religions (1567)
• Projet ou dessein du Royaume de France pour et représenter en dix livres l’état entier (1568)
• Les Monarchiques (1570)
• De l’excellence du gouvernement royal (1576)
• Douze livres de la vicissitude ou variété des choses de l’univers (1576)

References

• Becker, A. Henri (1896). Un Humaniste au XVIe Siècle: Loys Le Roy de Coutances. Paris: Lecène, Oudin et Cie Éditeurs.
• Duport, Danièle (2011). Loys Le Roy, renaissance & vicissitude du monde: actes du colloque tenu à l'Université de Caen, 25-26 septembre 2008. Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen.
• Gundersheimer, Werner Leonard (1966). The Life and Works of Louis Le Roy. Genève: Droz.
• Sciacca, Enzo (2007). Umanesimo e Scienza Politica nella Francia del XVI Secolo. Loys Le Roy. Firenze: Olschki.

External links

• Works by Louis Le Roy at Gallica