François Rabelais (1494-1553)

An important figure of the life of Montpellier, he was the pupil of the famous doctor Rondelet, founder of the school of medicine, and with him contributed to the development of medical science through experiments, especially in the field of anatomy.

Rabelais - montpellier

Between 1530 and 1536, François Rabelais came to Montpellier on several occasions. It was at the Faculty of Medicine that he found the inspiration for the drunken scenes that punctuate the life of the carabineers in his Pantagruel. Student there on the benches in 1530, he followed the lectures of Guillaume Rondelet, a prestigious doctor at the time, who bore all the traits that would be exaggerated in the personage of Rondibilis. He left Montpellier with a genuine tradition, where no doctor can leave the Faculty without preaching sermon whilst dressed as Rabelais !

Rabelais’ work

Codisciple of Nostradamus, he undertook to write his first texts in the form of carnavalesque farces and « prognostications », predictions that were very in vogue at the time and which he parodied and mocked. He became thus one of the principle figures of the first Medical School in France and one of Europe’s grand universities, to this day the oldest to have functioned continually since its foundation.
His writings, containing a calculated mixture of ancien (latin, greek, hebrew…) and modern languages, are at the origin of the modern novel and propose an incredible richness of imaginary figures, anchored in a wide variety of popular and religious myths.
Designed to free the individual from the weight of the fears that paralyse him (religious, superstitious, existential …), the adventures of Gargantua, of his son Pantagruel, and his friends, the stories point to an individualist imperative (Do what you like !) which passes by an voyage of initiation, loaded with an obvious epicurean dimension, that of the “Dive Bouteille”, his ode to the contents of the bottle.
Rabelais’ work includes five volumes. The Pantagruel recital was published in 1532, followed in 1534 by Gargantua. These two were followed, eleven years later, by the Tiers Livre (the Third Book) in 1546, the Quart Livre (the Fourth Book) in 1548, then revised in 1552, a year before his death, and the Cinquième Livre (the Fifth Book) was published posthumously in 1564.
" Grandgousier was a great complaining groaner of his time, enjoying a clean swig drowned just as much as any man who then was alive, and willingly feeding salty “.