Abstract
Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson eds, Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France, Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2009; x + 270 pp.; 9780230521391, £55.00 (hbk)
This edited collection assembles a series of 10 articles on a hinging period of French history, between the end of the French Wars of Religion and the beginning of Absolutism. These two periods are usually treated as discrete historiographical entities in spite of an obvious chronological overlap. The volume argues that the governing practices and challenges faced by the early Bourbons owed much to the preceding dynasty’s vicissitudes. The authors pursue this argument in five loosely themed sections on Gallicanism, memory, government, Catholic reform and the provinces.
Opening the volume, Alain Tallon addresses the important question of the crown’s relationship with Rome in the immediate aftermath of the French Wars of Religion. He shows how Henri IV exploited rivalry between Spain and Italy to rebuild diplomatic links with Rome with relative ease, notwithstanding the Edict of Nantes. Megan Armstrong, for her part, highlights the difficulty faced by the Franciscan observant order in squaring its commitment to Catholicity with its reliance on Henri IV’s patronage. Her analysis shows how the order was able to distance itself from the League all the while remaining faithful to its commitment to the re-catholicization of French Protestants.
The second section opens with Michael Wolfe’s treatment of the conference of Fontainebleau, which was a pretext for the public shaming of Duplessis-Mornay, Henri IV’s former chief advisor and diplomat. Mornay had disapproved of the new monarch’s conversion and Wolfe demonstrates how Henri IV had laid the foundation of the Bourbon propaganda machine as early as 1600. The next piece, by Robert Descimon, explores the making of the Chastel Affair of 1594 where the Jesuits were framed for the attempted murder of the monarch. Descimon goes beyond its immediate relevance, however, and analyses its historical legacy, which stretches to the eve of the French Revolution.
Eric Nelson opens the central section on governance with a detailed analysis of Henri IV’s speech to the Parlement of Paris for the ratification of the Edict of Nantes in 1599. This amazing piece of royal rhetoric, reproduced in translation in the appendix, is essential for understanding the subsequent Bourbon governing style. Indeed, Michel De Waele then demonstrates, in the next piece, that the strategies deployed by Henri’s successor were first developed in the immediate aftermath of the French Wars of Religion.
Part IV of the collection places the origins of the dévots’ religiosity in the Catholic conservatism of the Catholic League at the height of the French Wars of Religion. Barbara Diefendorf shows that, in spite of their visceral opposition to Henri’s claim to the throne before 1594, former Leaguers became champions of reform as it was envisaged by the crown. In the second piece, Forrestal demonstrates that the ideas of Vincent de Paul, the seventeenth-century arch-dévot who became the symbol of the Catholic Reformation, did not appear fully formed but were contingent upon De Paul’s contact with prominent Parisian noble families between 1608 and 1617.
The volume closes with a discussion of France’s provinces and the impact that both regime change and Catholic reform had on two important towns, Nantes and Senlis. Elizabeth Tingle recounts the history of Nantes’ volatile involvement in the League and analyses the causes that may have made it France’s last town to surrender to Henri IV. The tenth and final chapter, by Thierry Amalou, is devoted to Senlis, a town that became a bastion of seventeenth-century Catholic reform and was dubbed the ‘little Milan’. The book is completed by an afterword by Mark Greengrass, who very skilfully unpicks the historiographical consequences of many of the essays’ conclusions, thus giving the volume an overall cohesion that it would otherwise lack.
The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts, in this instance, and this is irrespective of the individual qualities of the pieces assembled in this volume. This book has considerable merit, however, in offering a very important thesis: the French Wars of Religion and Absolutism can no longer be treated as two completely separate spheres of inquiry. All pieces argue in one way or another that the seventeenth century owed much more to the preceding period than had previously been thought. Continuity with the past seems to have replaced discontinuity as a historiographical commonplace, and, as far as this volume is concerned, this is for the best. Greengrass has already argued, in Governing Passions (2007), that Bourbon rulership had taken its cue from reforms in government instituted by Henri III and Catherine de Médici. Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France complements this thesis admirably, and will without doubt provide considerable inspiration for those who want to take the historiography of this period to the next level.
Newcastle University