Lorenzaccio is usually considered Musset's most original contribution to world literature and drama. Yet, although most critics agree on the play's literary quality, history shows us few successful productions. As was the case with most of his plays, Musset did not write this drama for the stage. Musset's plays are primarily meant to be read, as the title of one of his collections, Armchair Theatre (Un Spectacle dans un fauteuil, 1832, 1834) indicates. But the trouble with the play lies chiefly in the enigmatic character of its protagonist: the complex, almost obscure motivation for his climactic act is the substance of the play. Lorenzaccio's characterization is a delicately woven texture, whose threads seem to converge toward the murder in act IV, scene 8.¹ Yet the murder does not solve anything: in view of its final result—the immediate coronation of another tyrant—and Lorenzaccio's own indifference, our general comprehension of the play's “hero” is confused, and we are left with more questions than answers.

I would like to suggest that Lorenzaccio is not the tragedy of a misunderstood or unappreciated hero: there is little or no evidence in the text that points to a noble motive in Lorenzaccio. The most ambitious, if not completely successful, definitions of Lorenzaccio's character have been thematic and historic. Many critics espouse the optimistic view of the historian F. Schevill,² to the effect that Lorenzaccio's murder of Alessandro is designed to free his country from a monstrous tryanny. In this interpretation, Lorenzaccio is a disillusioned young aristocrat fallen from innocence, a man bone-weary of a debauchery to which he had meant only to pretend in order to win Alessandro's confidence. Herbert Hunt³ and Paul Dimoff⁴ adopt a biographical point of view: they see in Lorenzaccio the reflection of Musset's own disgust with society after the failure of the 1830 revolution, which he had wholeheartedly supported, and the deterioration of his relationship with George Sand.

More satisfying perhaps is Robert Denommé's interpretation.⁵ He views Lorenzaccio as an early version of what Verlaine called the “poète maudit,” the Romantic hero par excellence, who deliberately alienates himself from the society he lives in, and whose predicament puts him above the petty laws of a tedious and hypocritical universe. Inherent in the posture of the Romantic hero is a deep-rooted disgust with the world. In Lorenzaccio, this feeling takes on ironical overtones, inasmuch as the protagonist, because of his privileged position at court as the Duke's minion and informer, is not only a part of the society he loathes but an instrument of its survival. This irony is the key to Lorenzaccio's character. It elicits an attitude of self-contempt that is present throughout the play, but which becomes prominent in Lorenzaccio's last scene. He is subject to a strong self-destructive impulse, which finally overwhelms him when he willfully surrenders to the blows of his assassin.

Lorenzaccio's tendency toward self-annihilation is a corollary of his predicament as “poète maudit.” It arises from his awareness of his own dual nature: unable to reconcile his life of debauchery at the court of Florence with the loftier ideals of his Romantic youth, he chooses to evaporate into nothingness. His murder of Alessandro has no other purpose than itself, and it is nothing short of suicide. On a political level, it achieves nothing. Far from inciting the people of Florence to revolt, as the partisans of the Strozzi would have it at the beginning of the play, it simply reaffirms the rule of the Medici over the city. Lorenzaccio himself is conscious of the gratuitousness of his act from the start. To Filippo Strozzi, who asks him why he is going to commit the murder if he believes it useless, Lorenzaccio replies:

I'll make a wager with you. I am going to kill Alessandro. Once my deed is accomplished, if the republicans act as they should, it will be easy for them to establish a republic, the finest that ever flourished on this earth. Let's say they may even have the people with them. I wager that neither they nor the people will do anything.

(61)

The murder will not change anything, and Cardinal Cibo knows it; he quotes The Aeneid:

The first golden bough torn down is replaced by another,
And as quickly there grows a similar branch of a similar metal.

(84)

Alessandro is like one of the statues that Lorenzaccio beheaded at the Arch of Constantine in Rome in a fit of iconoclastic frenzy. Indeed, in his last scene, Lorenzaccio strongly suggests that he himself could be one of them when he confesses to Filippo Strozzi after the murder that “I am hollower than a tin statue” (91). Alessandro's murder is a mere act of vandalism, and, as in vandalism, the emphasis in Lorenzaccio is on an individual's act: Musset is concerned only with what is done rather than with why it is done. The private and public significance of the action are explored, not its motivation.

The murder scene further emphasizes Lorenzaccio's suicidal tendencies. As Marie MacLean noted,⁶ it has all the aspects of a tumultuous wedding night; the stabbing has the connotations of a monstrous copulation, whose orgasmic culmination ends in the death of one of the lovers. Ironically, it is Lorenzaccio who is “laid to rest.” Transfixed in front of the Duke's dead body, he mutters as Scoronconcolo drags him away: “O magnificent nature! O eternal tranquility!” (82). He realizes that by killing Alessandro he has sealed his own doom. He is not a praying mantis but a wasp, and he has just lost his sting. His actual demise is only a matter of days. By killing the Duke, Lorenzaccio has no other purpose than to realize his own nature, whose essence he tries to explain to Filippo Strozzi in a beautiful moment of shrewd self-definition:

You ask me why I'm going to kill Alessandro? Do you want me to poison myself or jump in the Arno? … Do you realize that this murder is all that's left of my virtue? … If you honor anything in me, it is this murder which you honor.

(61-2)

Lorenzaccio is this murder.

His own death, which is eagerly called for, is deprived of any tragic dimenson: it has nothing to do with tragic retribution. In fact, it occurs almost unobtrusively in a most undramatic scene. Lorenzaccio rushes out on the street despite Filippo Strozzi's warning and almost immediately thereafter is reported dead by one of the servants. The whole takes only a few seconds, and the killing is off-stage. The play closes on the image of the new duke taking the oath of office, and we realize that Lorenzaccio's crime has been useless. As he himself has maintained since the beginning of the play, he is not invested with a messianic mission. He is merely trapped in a world he cannot call his own. His urge toward self-consumption and the gratuitousness of his act can be seen as Romantic prefiguring of the existentialist cry of the burned-out Meursault in Camus' Stranger.

As we see then, Lorenzaccio's murder of his cousin Alessandro de Medici, Duke of Florence, is little else than the culmination of a series of selfish, malevolent acts, the logical outcome of a life of corruption. Lorenzaccio is the Romantic hero par excellence. As Shaw observed in his review of the play in 1897, “In the Romantic school horror was naturally akin to sublimity.”⁷ Lorenzaccio is the monster whose otherworldliness puts him above the petty laws of a tedious and hypocritical society. The representative of a perversely superior race of giants, as the Medici view themselves, he is an outlaw in the true sense of the term, and his life is governed by a single non-principle: chaos.

Notes

1. Alfred de Musset, “Lorenzaccio,” The Modern Theatre, vol. 6., ed. Eric Bentley (Gloucester Mass.: Peter Smith, 1974). Hereafter referred to by page number in the text.

2. Ferdinand Schevill, The Medici (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949).

3. Herbert J. Hunt, “Alfred de Musset et la Révolution de Juillet: la leçon politique de Lorenzaccio,” Mercure de France 251: 1934.

4. Paul Dimoff, La Genèse de Lorenzaccio (Paris: Droz, 1933).

5. Robert T. Denommé, “The Motif of the ‘Poète Maudit’ in Musset's Lorenzaccio,” L' Esprit créateur vol. 5, no. 2 (1965): 138-46.

6. Marie McLean, “The Sword and the Flower: The Sexual Symbolism of Lorenzaccio,” Australian Journal of French Studies 16(1979):166-81.

7. G. B. Shaw, “Lorenzaccio,” Dramatic Opinions and Essays with an Apology by Bernard Shaw (New York: Brentano's, 1922):295.