Oraisons funèbres Reading Order

Les Oraisons funèbres (Funeral Orations, 1662–1687) by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet are the supreme achievement of French classical oratory — a series of sermons preached at the funerals of the greatest figures of the reign of Louis XIV (Henrietta Maria of France, Henrietta of England, the Prince de Condé, Marie-Thérèse of Austria) that turn death into an occasion for a meditation on history, power, and the utter insufficiency of human greatness before God. Bossuet was the most powerful preacher of 17th-century France, Bishop of Meaux, tutor to the Dauphin (for whom he wrote the Discours sur l'histoire universelle), and the most formidable theological controversialist of his age — he outlasted both Fénelon (whose Télémaque he had condemned) and the Huguenots (whose conversion he supervised after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685). The orations are organized as classical rhetoric — exordium, narratio, argumentatio, peroratio — but Bossuet's genius is in the deployment of the turn: the long portrait of the grandeur of the deceased, the sudden reversal at the word 'Messieurs' (Gentlemen) — 'Mais voici le moment redoutable...' — and the descent into the grave. The most famous passage is the opening of the Oraison pour Henriette d'Angleterre: 'Madame se meurt, Madame est morte' (Madame is dying, Madame is dead) — the two tenses of a single sentence enacting the passage from life to death.