SOURCE: Laurie, Ian. “Deschamps and Comedy.” Romance Languages Annual 7 (1995): 107-11.

In the essay below, Laurie defends Deschamps from the long-standing characterization as a humorless moralist by noting comic elements throughout a number of his works.

Deschamps and Comedy

At least since Deschamps's work was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, it has not been common to view him as a comic writer. On the contrary, his first modern editors, beginning with Crapelet, writing shortly after the Revolution of 1830, and Tarbé, publishing a year after the Revolution of 1848, viewed Deschamps primarily as a stern and uncompromising moralist to be used as a weapon against all those of whom they disapproved, from the eighteenth-century “philosophes” to the socialists and revolutionaries of their own time:

Eustache Deschamps could have gone in for socialism and other forms of hair-brained philanthropy. But he had some common sense. He thought only of service to his...