In the early eighteenth century, Italian and French literati were embroiled in a debate over the relative merits of their national dramatic products (I'm mostly interested in opera at this point). The French stance in this debate makes total sense: "Italian drama and poetry is really dumb, French drama is so much better!" But what doesn't make sense to me is the Italian response. I would expect a response like "nuh, uh! We aren't dumb... YOU'RE dumb!" But instead, the response appears to be "Yeah, you're right, but what if we model our opera libretti on Racine, would you like us then?"

That is, after people like Bouhours and Boileau trash Italianate literature, early eighteenth century opera reformers (Muratori, Zeno, Metastasio, etc.) were using French writers like Racine and Corneille as models, in part because to imitate these writers appeared to pretty much universally assure that your dramatic product would be shielded from criticism.

This seems to me to say something interesting about the status of French drama at this time. Not only could the French use their authors as an "objectively good" yard stick to beat up on Italians, but the Italian Academies in Rome and Bologna seem to roll over and accept that judgment. They adopt the rhetoric of "good taste" that their French writers advance, and use their principles to reformulate their own theatrical practices.

So my question is what are the circumstances that lead to the prestige of French Drama at this time? Beyond the actual aesthetic merits of Racine and others, how did these authors come to acquire the status of objectively good models that were impervious to criticism? Unlike, say, Petrarch (who Italian authors clung to in a "see? We don't all suck!" way), who had centuries of reputation built up around him by this point, the bodies of Moliere and Corneile were still warm when this debate raged, and Racine was still kicking. So their international reputation seems to have been established at a particularly rapid pace. How did this happen? What is their reception history outside of France?

I suspect that there might be political reasons behind tied up in this. Many of these Italian writers are also advocates of "Unification" plans around this time (such as Muratori), and my thoughts were that the glories of the Absolutist state under Louis XIV might have been an important source of inspiration for these guys in a political sense ("man, why can't Italy get its shit together like France? Look how powerful and glorious Versailles is!"), and therefore trying to recast their own drama via French models could have been part of a larger attempt to try to inject a degree of solidarity into their culture by making it "objectively" in good taste. I also wonder if Jansenist / Jesuit debates might be playing into this.

This doesn't seem like a focused question. But I guess at the end of the day, I'm just interested in why French literary culture was seen to be the objective standard by which other countries could measure their own products. Why was their drama accepted in this fashion, rather than resisted in favor of local traditions?

Some sources I've been reading:

• Minor, Vernon Hyde. The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

• Strohm, Reinhard. "Apostolo Zeno's Teuzzone and its French Models." In Dramma per Musica: Italian Opera Seria of the Eighteenth Century, 121-33. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.