Chansons de Gestes, long narrative poems, dealing with warfare and adventure, which were popular in France during the middle ages. Gestes, from the Latin gesta, signified, first, the deeds of a hero, and secondly, the account of these deeds; the family to which the hero belonged being spoken of as gens de geste. One of these poems, and that the greatest of all, was composed in the 11th century—namely, the Chanson de Roland, which is treated of in the article ROLAND. Most of the others were produced in the 12th and 13th centuries, only a few poems to which the name is strictly applicable having been written after the year 1300 A.D. They were mainly the work of trouvères, and were carried by wandering minstrels, jongleurs and jongleresses, from castle to castle, and from town to town. They are distinguished from the later Arthurian romances and from the Romans d'Aventures both by their matter and their form. Their subjects are invariably taken from French history, or from what passed as such, and they are written in verses of ten or twelve syllables, arranged in laises, or stanzas of irregular length, throughout each of which the same rhyme or assonance is repeated. In his introduction to the Song of Roland, M. Génin points out that it is the decasyllabic verse of the Chansons and not the Alexandrine (a form introduced in the 13th century) which is the true epic verse in French literature. A large number of these poems celebrate the exploits of the peers of Charlemagne, and form what is termed the Carlovian cycle, which includes the Song of Roland. But while the author of that poem depicts Charlemagne as on the whole a worthy and venerated sovereign, the aim of the later writers is to exalt the vassal nobles at the expense of the emperor, who is invariably presented in an odious or ridiculous light. 'The great emperor,' says M. Gérueze, 'pays for the misdeeds of his feeble successors; the monarchy of which he remains the representative has been degraded; consequently he is degraded along with it, to the profit of the feudal hero who is opposed to him.' The principal poems of the Carlovian cycle (setting aside the Song of Roland) are Ogier le Danois, Renaut de Montauban, Raoul de Cambrai, Huon de Bordeaux, Les Saisnes, Doon de Mayence, Gérard de Viane, and Hugues Capet. Ogier is a typical chanson containing more than 13,000 lines, written by Raimbert of Paris in the first half of the 12th century. It tells how the vassal noble Ogier, after vainly seeking reparation for the death of his son, who has been slain by a son of Charlemagne, is pursued by the emperor into Italy and captured after a heroic resistance; how, saved from death by the intervention of Archbishop Turpin, he lives in concealment until the Saracens invade France, and the emperor is forced to implore his aid; how he yields at last to repeated entreaties, frees the land from the heathen, marries a princess, and lives happily to the end of his days. The style of the poem is clear and vigorous, the characters stand out vividly, the narrative interest is considerable, and the hero rivets the sympathy of the reader. The Voyage du Charlemagne à Constantinople, which belongs to the same cycle, offers a strong contrast to Ogier. It is a mock-heroic piece, full of broad and extravagant pleasantries, and is rather a long fabliau than a true Chanson de Gestes. Among the other chansons which have come to light, the most remarkable are Garin le Loherain (ascribed to Jean de Flagy), which takes us back to the times of Charles Martel and Pepin, and describes the feud between the Counts of Metz and the Counts of Boulogne; Amis et Amiles, and its sequel Jourdain de Blaiives; Berte aus grans Piés, one of the most graceful of all; Gérard de Roussillon; Fierabras; Aliscans, which relates the wars of William of Orange with the Saracens; and Antioche, which gives a singularly animated account of the siege of Antioch by the crusaders, one of whom is supposed to have written the original version of the poem. The last forms one of the series known as Le Chevalier au Cygne, which is concluded with Baudouin de Sebour.
The Chansons de Gestes are not, strictly speaking, epics, though they are frequently described as such. They are rather the material out of which a genuine epic, such as the Iliad or the Nibelungenlied, might have been wrought had a great poet appeared to extract the gold from the dross and mould—a work of art out of this rich mass of national legend. There has been a natural tendency to overestimate their worth on the part of those by whom they have been exhumed and edited. Their literary merit, however, is incontestable, and their historical interest is very great. They faithfully reflect the beliefs and customs of the ages in which they were written; they abound in spirited battle-pieces, and contain not a few passages marked by deep and simple pathos. Their plots are somewhat monotonously alike. The strength of their writers does not lie in invention, but in fresh and vivid and sometimes (as in the picture of the sack of the abbey in Raoul de Cambrai) terribly realistic descriptions. Their verse is by no means unmelodious, and their style is rich in picturesque and poetical epithets.
After lying in neglect for centuries, the Chansons de Gestes have for the last fifty years been assiduously studied and brought into notice by a band of French and German scholars. Some fifty of them are now in print, a number of these having been edited by the late M. Paulin Paris, a scholar who did more than any one else to promote the study of this department of literature.
See Léon Gautier's Les Epopées Françaises (2d ed. 1878); the Histoire Poétique de Charlemagne, by G. Paris (1866); C. d'Héricault's Essai sur l'Origine de l'Epopée Française (Frankfort, 1860); Génin's introduction to the Chanson de Roland (1850); the series, Les Anciens Poètes de la France, which MM. Guessard and Michelant began to issue in 1858; and Fauriel's Epopée Chevaleresque au Moyen Age.