Of noble family, he soon followed his father in the service of Francis I, and spent his adolescence at court as a page to the royal princes. Struck by deafness in 1540, he had to abandon the military career that opened before him, and turned to the study of letters, already cultivated during his years at court, writing verse in French and Latin. In 1543 he received the tonsure and obtained some ecclesiastical benefices. He formed friendships with fellow students such as Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Jodelle, Pontus de Thyard, and finally Joachim du Bellay, and with their common master Jean Daurat, in 1549 he founded the nucleus of the Pléiade, the poetic school that dominated French Renaissance, of which he was the principal exponent. With his collaboration, indeed, in the same year 1549 Joachim du Bellay published the *Défense et illustration de la langue française*, the manifesto of the new school which sought to rehabilitate the national language in literature, even in its dialectal forms, against the Italianisms and Latinisms then in vogue. This school, which enjoyed great success at its inception, rapidly declined in the following century before Malherbe (v.).
In 1550 R. published *Les Quatre premiers livres des Odes* (the fifth in ’52); then, in 1552, the first book of the *Amours*, a series of Petrarchan sonnets in honour of “Cassandre,” followed in 1560 by the *Second livre des Amours* for Marie du Pin, and later, in 1578, the *Sonnets pour Hélène*. In those same years he published various *Bocages*, *Mélanges*, *Hymnes*, a series of *Discours*, *Élégies* and *Les quatre premiers livres de la Franciade*.
In the *Hymnes* R. expresses a profound love for his country and his king; he also keenly felt the distress of the religious struggles tearing France apart and repeatedly accused the Protestants of fomenting discord in the land. The Calvinists, for their part, reproached him with being a priest, an atheist, and leading a dissolute life; there was even a literary Protestant uprising against him. But R. in his poems (*Poèmes*, lib. II) replied to his religious enemies, proving that he had never taken holy orders but merely enjoyed the revenues of certain abbeys. R. enjoyed a reputation as the greatest poet of his time; the following centuries ignored him completely: at least in France, though Scipione Maffei praised him and Goethe admired him. Only Romanticism drew him from obscurity along with his school: Balzac, Michelet and above all Sainte-Beuve rehabilitated him, placing him among the great French poets.