The
Ranums'
Panat Times
Volume 1, redone Dec. 2014
Counseling Assassination in 1636:
A Study of Montrésor's and Goulas's Political-Ethical Vocabularies
Part I: The Printed Sources about High Politics (1610-1643) that were available by 1670
by Orest Ranum
return to Title page to select another section
Several royal historiographers, most notably Voisin de la Popelinière, requested access to the royal archives of state and interviews with kings, to deepen their knowledge of state policies in order to write more "perfect history."(1) The prime subject would be the political actions of the most powerful in the state, the king and his councilors, diplomatic relations with other states, decisions about peace and war, fiscal matters, appointment of high officers in the state such as governors, presidents of the Parlements, army commands, and nominations of bishops and abbots in the Church.
Novelists and, more generally, pamphlet writers often subsumed all these affairs of state and the royal councils as into one category, "the court." The confusion of counciliar authority and actions with the oikos or royal household and hangers-on, may still be found in novels and general historical works about the seventeenth century; but the sphere of high politics, or state politics, was always distinct throughout the Ancien Régime.
Through royal decrees, edicts, letters, and speeches, the decisions of king and council would be made known across the realm. The use of circular letters, just like calling up the ban and the arrière ban, orders to celebrate a Te Deum for a military victory, announcements of the birth or death of a member of the royal family, all provided a well established fabric of information that would be supplemented by more personal missives from high-ranking councilors addressed to their vassals and "servants." Royal missives were cast in formulaic terms that characterized towns as "good" and subjects as "faithful." Kings differed in their approaches to divulging information, but in general under the Bourbons the major events in the lives of members of the royal family, decisions about peace and war, and yes, conspiracies, were quickly narrated and distributed across the realm. The creation of quasi-official newspapers, notably the Mercure and the Gazette, increased the amount of information available, particularly about diplomatic relations and lengthy accounts of military victories by the French. The coverage of battles lost was always more brief!
Politicization, that is, the development of a collective awareness of the existence of, distribution of, and use of coercive power, did not start from point zero in the reign of Louis XIII. In addition to the fabric of royal information distributed, some knowledge of past history, of major defenders of the realm, and the "realms of memory" associated with names, places, and things, were firmly in place, to the point that they could be meaningfully alluded to in prose, verse, and image about the uses of social, military, and verbal powers.
Thanks to the many works about the notion of public, or about the public, notably by J. Sawyer, H. Merlin, C. Jouhaud, and H. Duccini,(2) it is necessary to refer to these works before suggesting that indeed, a sizeable portion of the population not only knew about Concini's assassination, but possessed sufficient political information to celebrate the King's coup d'État. The wish that the King govern "alone," or without favorites or all-powerful ministers, was a constituent element in Early Modern French political culture.(3) There were plenty of shocking details published about the murder itself, but just who was, and who was not, aware of the plot as it was worked out? There were royal councilors left completely "out of the loop," notably Marie de Médicis and the young, inexperienced secretary of state, Richelieu. I have brought up the Concini assassination (execution?) to illustrate how a lot of secrecy about a conspiracy could persist, despite some 300 pamphlets published about it. The equation to the effect that the more information about affairs of state that is out and available, the deeper and subtler will be the awareness or even the consciousness of the political is the presupposition in what follows.
Not activism but awareness, not yet consciousness, but some perhaps
disparate facts integrated into such large conceptual schemes as
patriotism, pride in military victories, particularly victories over the
English, and love for the royal family. Book dedications to Richelieu,
sermons by his clerical supporters, and vituperative invective published
by the Cardinal's enemies (most notably Mathieu de Morgues) accusing
that same cardinal of betrayal, could have been pondered by literate
readers and inserted into the conspiratorial frame of politics that in
its intensity would prompt orientalist parallels.
This essay is an
attempt to characterize how ever-increasing information about
conspiracies and other coups d'État might have had a long-range
consequence on French political culture. Interpreting some major
decision, a ministerial disgrace, or a shift of emphasis in diplomatic
or military policies, as probably never far from what Richard Hofstadter
referred to as the "paranoid style" of American politics. I shall leave
it to medievalists and seizièmistes to determine when, where, and in
just which ways the French developed the habit of always questioning,
doubting, and virtually rejecting official accounts of affairs of state.
But it would be unhistorical to infer that an American style of politics
has its equivalent in France. Seeking the full, credible historical
account of a conspiracy has specific consequences in any political
culture. (the Kennedy assassination comes to mind); but in
seventeenth-century France the cult of state secrecy, of an obviously
intellectually and morally exciting option to dissimulate, and the
privileged obsession with political conspiracy on the stage, and even in
other arts, would frame and not only prompt mimetic impulses but also
nourish skeptical interpretations of virtually every aspect of secular
elite culture. Whether it is Naudé on the coup d'État, Corneille in
Cinna, or Poussin in The Death of Germanicus, the possible
relation between conspiracy in high politics and recourse to brutal,
violent actions is significant. It seems that schoolboys throughout the
realm acted out versions of the Catiline Conspiracy, Caesar's
assassination, and various narratives of high politics as adapted from
the Old Testament. Fostering the realms of uncertainty through uncertain
parallels between the fictional and the historical in high politics, and
especially in conspiracy, probably was favored by the move toward
Asianism in virtually all aspects of the elite culture, except that of
the Robe. Gaston Hall sums up this tendency in his discussion of
Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin's Roxane, of 1639:
In Roxane the jealous Phradate's conspiracy (V, i) to murder Alexander as well as Roxane is novelistic but may also evoke the Montrésor affair of 1636. During the crisis of the Spanish invasion, the Comte de Montrésor and the Comte de Soissons arranged with Gaston d'Orléans to assassinate Richelieu following a council of war at Amiens; but Gaston failed to make the agreed signal and afterwards disclosed the conspiracy. Desmarets's historical sources mention various threats to the life of Alexander, including one in wich a man is condemned to death for failing to denounce a conspiracy ― a judgment revived on French precedent for the execution of François de Thou (1607-1642).
Phradate's conspiracy is no more a documentary of the Montrésor affair and other recent French conspiracies than of plots against Alexander. Desmarets embellishes history, playing on analogies. It is not so much the analogies themselves which assist in the interpretation of Desmarets's stagecraft as the way in which he reorganizes a blend of ancient and recent historical data to associate the murder of Clyte, for example, with resistance to royal policy, with a challenge to royal prerogatives, and with the crime of lèse-majesté.(4)
As a defender of Richelieu and his policies, Desmarets, that astute ear-to-the-ground writer, may have bridged the walls of secrecy around the King and his councilors, thereby making parallels on conspiracy more plausible; but, he gives no precise documentation.
Brief, and for that reason certainly inadequate to describe its overall importance as a stimulant for a creative cultural moment, my description is here only as a context for understanding how increased information, "true" or not, would mark seventeenth-century French political attitudes and behaviors.
The works of Jean-Marie Constant and Arlette Jouanna will be more fully discussed later; but at this point we should note that they do not take up the question of the effects of increased information on attitudes toward the conspiratorial.
In Le Labyrinthe de l'État (Paris: Droz, 2004), Hubert Carrier presents a congeries of beliefs, feelings, and attitudes that the French share about the realm, kingship, the patrie, popular action, the court, public service, the Parlement and the Estates General that are expressed throughout the Mazarinades and that are the bedrock of the political in the early and mid-seventeenth century. He does not find that the conspiratorial was part of this ensemble of attitudes; and yet, from the very beginning of the century, a conspiracy allegedly headed by that best of compagnons, the Maréchal de Biron, would send shock waves throughout the high-political sphere of the realm. The official accounts were lengthy, and it would not be too many years before Scipion Dupleix, himself a jurist, would publish a lengthy account of the trial. But wasn't there more to be known en dessous?
Trickles of more precise, personal-witness type of information such as letters and reports, began to flow on the subject of high politics despite censorship and the all-important atmosphere of self-censorship. Appearing first in 1624, an edition of Cardinal d'Ossat's letters permitted readers at last to know something about the ways of the Vatican, most notably about its own conception of its powers, thereby nourishing Gallican attitudes about church-state relations.
Jacques Davy Du Perron's Les Ambassades et négotiations, 1623, with an augmented edition by 1629, provided a mine of precise information on virtually every subject of high politics. It would serve as a manual for those who sought to learn about how to write official letters, and how to address the grands personnages of Europe and of the realm. The editor provides arguments at the head of each text. An example is: "Ce sont des complimens pleins de rares et excellentes fleurs de rhetorique, et une comparaison à Jules Cesar, digne de la plume de Jules Cesar lui-mesme." This was addressed to Admiral de Joyeuse. On p. 238 there is a letter from d'Ossat to Henry IV, from Rome, March 28, 1596. It would enable the curious reader to see if the same letter is produced in the 1624 edition of D'Ossat's letters. Is material about the Biron conspiracy included? His name is not in the rudimentary index, but that fact must not be taken as absolute proof that du Perron and his secretaries omitted correspondence about Biron. I do not intend to skim 724 pages to find the answer to this question.
Among the flow of pamphlets, and especially the collections of pamphlets and poems, "real" letters might be published. An example is in the Recueil des pièces les plus curieuses ... de M. de Luynes (4th edition of 1628), which contains Marie de Médicis's open letter to the King of July 12, 1620, from Angers, as well as her Manifeste that was sent to the King. Both were printed and sold at the time of the Querelle entre la Mère et le Fils.
Sharon Kettering has recently explored this explosive pamphleteering moment, and has stressed that the exchanges between King and Queen Mother shifted opinion and the outcome of a civil war.(5) We have come a long way from the days when it was proposed that writers only wrote for other writers.
It is very easy to overlook a major publication of information, but I have found nothing in the next decade. Then, in 1638, with the first but not complete edition of Sully's Économies Royales, an immense amount of fiscal and political information became available. There had never before been such a level of detail about the royal finances, and such a clear, sustained narrative of the high politics in reign of Henry IV. Still more information would become available in the complete edition of 1662, prepared by Louis Le Laboureur.
The Maréchal de Toiras was killed in 1636. In 1643 a privilege to publish his Histoire was granted to the prestigious publisher, Cramoisy. Michel Baudier, the libertin and critic of ministerial government through writing about Oriental Despotism (see Artisans of Glory, p. 213) is certainly partial to Toiras and hostile to Richelieu; but along with letters and documents he creates an atmosphere about high politics that is convincing.
Though never part of a ministerial circle, duc Henri de Rohan's political and military career was certainly part of the high politics of the times. Samuel de Sorbière published a partial edition of his memoirs as early as 1644. The Oeuvres of Bérulle, published in 1644, include 238 letters, most of which deal with spiritual matters; but as Bourgeois and André put it, some deal with affaires générales and relations between France and England (p. 223).
The épaves of Richelieu's history of the reign of Louis XIII (published under the title Mémoires) began to appear as early as 1648-1649. A considerable number of his letters would be published by Antoine Aubery in his Histoire du Cardinal..., which appeared in 1660. The 5-volume edition of the Cardinal's Lettres, marked "Cologne" but most certainly published in Holland, appeared in 1667, a truly remarkable amount of information in 6-point type. We will note this work again.
Re-evaluating all the information published in the 1649 Journal ... de Richelieu, and in the 1652, 1664, 1665, and 1666 editions of the so-called Mémoires, would be a six-month task but would not change the important fact that these materials contained a great deal of facts that supplemented the accounts in the Gazette de France. The Mémoires promised readers information about all the major treason trials held in the 1630s, but not yet about high politics. This may have been an incentive to those who published the aristocratic memoirs that are listed below. While I have not read all the latter, the ones I did read recently (La Châtre, Nicolas Goulas, Bassompierre, and Montrésor) make no specific or vague allusions to the Richelieu partial Mémoires that were available for them to read. Obviously, by the time the 1664 edition of Richelieu's Mémoires was printed, many of these writers were already dead or had moved on to other things. In this sea of pages, I may have missed a phrase, a vague reference; hence review and rectification will be most welcome.
A critical comparison of these works with Antoine Aubery's Histoire du Cardinal de Richelieu (Paris: Berthier, 1660), in-folio, has not to my knowledge ever been made. Nineteenth-century and not a few twentieth-century historians dismissed Aubery's narrative because it was too favorable toward the Cardinal (the same happened with Scipion Dupleix's Histoire); but a more detached reading from the perspective of the information available at the time yields a more balanced judgment.
But just what was available to Aubery? In addition to the anonymous journal-memoirs just noted above, Aubery includes many more letters, plus the Cardinal's last will and testament, all of which would appear in the anonymous five-volume Mémoires, the Marteau edition from Cologne (Holland). In my youthful Richelieu and the Councilors of Louis XIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), I did not hesitate to attribute this edition to Aubery. If it was Aubery, he was concerned about making the sources as authoritative as possible. He sometimes mentions "du Cabinet Dupuy" and gives the citation; in other instances, the sources seem to be en vrac and without provenance, in order to make up the thousands of pages in the 1667 edition. For example, in volume 5, page 590, there is a "Copie du Billet que Monsieur le Duc Charles de Lorraine m'a envoyé, et que j'ay receu le 8 decembre 1639." On page 591, after a letter from Du Hallier dated October 29, 1639, we find: "J'ay fait voir les originaux à Monsieur de Chavigny." The latter died in 1652 (See our Fugitive Piece on Chavigny's conversion to Jansenism and his wiil). As for the correspondence between a secretary of state for war, Sublet de Noyers, and the commanders in the field, it could only have come from someone who had access to the copies of letters that Sublet himself saved, and which would become the A1 series in the Ministry of War archives. It is impossible to conceive of any researcher having access to the papers of Fabert, Châtillon, Condé, et al., in order to copy letters that Sublet had sent them. In the "Liste des Pièces" preceding the texts themselves in volume 5, the subjects are about as varied as in any volume of Avenel's Papiers d'Etat edition of Richelieu's correspondence, or of P. Grillon's edition of the related correspondence.
On page 92 we find the "Manifeste des Princes retirés à Sedan"; and
just prior to that is an italicized phrase: "En suite de cette depesche
est la remarque suivante," at which point the conspiracy of Soissons,
Bouillon, Guise et al., of the summer of 1641, is summarized, including
Vaucelles's role as informer concerning their negotiations with the
Spanish. The Relation of the battle of Marfée, included here, is
anonymous, but it is devastating for the loser, Maréchal de Châtillon,
commander of the royal army. Châtillon writes to Sublet from Rhetel,
July 7, 1641: "Je vous depesche le sieur de Bocasse pour le sujet qu'il
vous dira. Je vous suplie me proteger en l'occasion présente [his
defeat] et faire en sorte que le Roy et son Eminence soient contents de
moy, et qu'ils le fassent voir à toute la France. A un bon entendeur il
ne faut qu'un mot ..." (p. 124).
Letters about high politics
were contextualized by Aubery, and he constructs an anti-rebellion
narrative in which readers could learn about the rebels' thought and
actions.
Despite Avenel's monumental eight-volume achievement, which includes thousands of letters that are presented only in a sentence or clause summarizing the principal subject, and the multi-volume edition of the letters received by the Cardinal done by Guillon et al., some of the materials edited by Aubery have still not been re-edited! There is, of course, much more available than what he edited, but our task is to pursue the answer to the question of how readers in the 1660s could learn about the high politics, indeed the secrets of state, during the previous reign. It seems only faire to conclude that a careful reader would read, question, and correct the available narratives by Dupleix, Sorel, Mézeray, et al., and develop a keen historicist sense of what happened. He/she could begin with favorable or unfavorable narratives about Richelieu's ministry, and, from there, deepen one or another perspective or reach a nuanced understanding grounded on available sources such as Aubery, Le Laboureur's Histoire du Maréchal de Guébriant, and others that will be noted later in this essay.
Since Antoine Aubery seems not yet to have been the subject of a major study, I mention only two texts: the first is the article in the 1743 edition of Moréri's Dictionnaire, which cites "Journal des Savants, tome 23, pag. 185"; and the second is H.-G. Lachmann's article in the Actes du 6e Colloque de Marseille (1976) of the C.M.R. 17, pp. 145-152. Aubery frequented the Cabinet Dupuy, probably at a time when Pierre Dupuy was writing his anonymous Histoire des Favoris (1654), a quite carefully researched critique of tyrant-favorites through the centuries. Moréri also mentions that Naudé supplied him with materials; thus the collection of letters and reports --- really state papers --- that Aubery published had sound provenances. I have never come upon a charge against the authenticity of the documents. We may safely conclude that he was an atticist, for his transcription and publication of hundreds of letters and reports, despite the parti pris, permitted readers to develop a feel for high politics.
Always ready to be appointed to some higher government post, but never really succeeding, Arnauld d'Andilly published a selection of his letters in 1645, yet another effort to gain the Regent's attention. These letters by an outsider who wanted to be "in," are filled with his earlier experience and what facts he could glean later about high politics, and his response to them. Like so many publications during the Regency, the 1650 edition of d'Avaux's epistolary exchanges with Servien probably would simply have been dropped into a fire, had it not been for the Frondeur contestation that fostered attempts to "have at" a colleague who has been charged with ineptitude. Reading these letters in 1650 must have given the impression of participating vicariously in the government, though with some embarrassment at the lack of dignity shown by such high-ranking officials.
François Maynard's culture of combined literature and politics makes him seem more sixteenth-century than seventeenth-century, though he lived until 1646. His letters, published in 1652, contain information about Franco-Vatican relations in the early 1630s.
Only one major publication of very high politics would appear between the early publication of Richelieu's partial memoirs, and the dam-break of information coming out in the 1660s. This was the first edition of Jeannin's Mémoires, appearing in 1656. Like Sully and like Richelieu, Jeannin had certainly wielded as much real, if not symbolic powers as his sovereigns. His Mémoires both challenge and complement Sully's, by the high level of fact, opinion, and judgment. Marolles's Mémoires appeared that same year, but they are not particularly informative about high politics.
Maréchal de Guébriant's widow commissioned Jean Le Laboureur to draft a Histoire of her husband's career. It would be published as a magnificent folio volume in 1656, in Paris, a contrast from the economical Dutch duodecimo publications that would be so frequent in the next decade. The book contains a surprising quantity of letters from the ministry and from high-ranking allies in the campaigns in Europe. I have written elsewhere (Introduction, vol. 1, Le Boindre's Journal) about using the edition of Castelnau's Mémoires (both father and son), also edited by Le Laboureur, for building a historicized civic identity in the eighteenth century. Castelnau's memoirs appeared in 1659.
Alexandre Campion has attracted less interest from historians than has his brother Henri, whose Mémoires have been brilliantly analyzed by Yves Castan and Marc Fumaroli (6); but since they were not published until 1807, they should only be noted here, not considered. Alexandre really played an important role in Henri's development as a conspirator, and his Lettres appeared in 1657. Though not the rank of a Guébriant or a La Rochefoucauld, Alexandre Campion belonged to an elite of Norman nobles, some of whom were no doubt piqués de lettres. This 1657 edition of letters exchanged among the Vendômes, the Soissons, Longueville, Guise, Fiesque, and Montbazon, may well have inspired at least partially the "dam break" of editions of memoirs that begins in 1662, with the publication of those of La Châtre and La Rochefoucauld.
Gaston d'Orléans died in February 1660; Mazarin followed him in March 1661. Did the court's lengthy stay in the South contribute to a mood of réjouissances and relaxed controls over the importation of books from Holland, via Rouen? Bourgeois and André remark on the frequency of Cologne as a place of publication for many of these memoirs, and of course, on Marteau being the publisher. Henri-Jean Martin summed up as follows the use of Cologne-Marteau as place and publisher:
Cependant, l'un des pseudonymes qui apparurent ainsi, était destiné à une fortune exceptionelle: celui de Pierre Marteau. L'adresse: à Cologne, chez Pierre Marteau semble avoir été employé pour la première fois lors de la publication d'un livre particulièrement dangereux ― le Recueil de diverses pièces servans à l'histoire de Henry III, que Jean Elzevier imprima à Leyde en 1660. Dans les années qui suivirent, le nom de Pierre Marteau ― ou Du Marteau ― revint encore au titre d'un Recuil de quelques pièces nouvelles et galantes (1663), des Mémoires du Mareschal de Bassompierre (1665), de l'Histoire du cardinal de Richelieu d'Aubery (1666), ou encore de l'Histoire amoureuse des Gaules (1666), de la Carte géographique de la Cour et autres galanteries (1668) et de Lupanie, histoire amoureuse de ce temps (1669). Désormais, Pierre Marteau sera présenté comme l'éditeur d'une foule de pamphlets de toutes sortes. On lui inventera même un gendre digne de lui ― Adrien l'Enclume ― et une foule d'émules: Jacques ou Louis le Sincère, Robert le Turc, Jean Le Blanc, F. Revels, tous domiciliés d'ordinaire à Cologne. Enfin, on verra se multiplier des adresses plus fantaisistes ― mais non dépourvues d'allusions politiques ou pornographiques.
Ainsi se généralisent des procédés déjà utilisés au temps des guerres religieuses, mais à moindre échelle ― du moins en France. Qu'on ne s'y trompe pas pourtant: tous ces noms de libraires ne constituent pas un pseudonyme simple. En règle général en effet, les libraires qui remettent sous presse ces livrets clandestins, copient simplement l'adresse fictive imaginée par le responsable de la première édition: c'est ainsi que le nom de Pierre Marteau, imaginé par les Elzevir, fut très vite employé par leurs émules hollandais et flamands, puis français.(7)
La Châtre's Mémoires appeared in 1662, along with a truncated version of La Rochefoucauld's. Very briefly, La Châtre's Mémoires recount the plots that he knew about and/or participated in, most notably the Cabale des Importants of 1643, for which he was forced to relinquish his post as maître de la garderobe du roi and colonel général des Suisses, and then go into exile; but after returning to the army, he was killed in the Battle of Nördlingen (1645). His conception of high politics is vague, but he managed to get himself between la Rivière and Montrésor in one of the later phases of their duel over being "principal minister" to Gaston; and later, a false step in the incredibly thorny briar patch that was the court and the royal council in the weeks after Louis XIII's death. In Brienne's reply to La Châtre, we have the beginnings of a meta-discourse about falsehood, dishonesty, and truth in memoirs:
J'ai presque toujours désapprouvé les apologies que j'ay vu donner au public, parce que leur usage n'estant légitime que quand elles deffendent l'innocence et la vérité, l'on s'en sert d'ordinaire pour déguiser la vérité et pour obscurcir les choses fort manifeste ....(8)
As a sometime secretary of state, and born into a secretary-of-state family, Brienne's perspective and habitat was the royal council and the formal relations that very low-ranking members such as he would have with the chancery, the maîtres des requêtes, and the lesser secretarial staffs. The uncertainty of power relations early in the Regency would temporarily bring Brienne into a stronger advisory relationship with the Queen. La Châtre's principal habitat had been more in Gaston's household than the royal council, and he was close to Claude de Bourdeille de Montrésor, Louis d'Astarac de Fontrailles, Henri d'Escars de Saint-Bonnet de Saint-Ibar, and Hippolyte de Béthune. (The first two were leaders in the assassination plot against Richelieu in 1636, the Cinq-Mars plot of 1642, and the Cabale des Importants of 1643. After Beaufort's arrest, etc., La Châtre feared that he too would have to go into exile; but then he writes:
Pour moi, je croyois à chaque moment accroitre le nombre de proscrits; mais enfin, l'après-dîner, on me vint assurer que j'étois guaranti du naufrage, et que la protection de Monsieur m'en avoit sauvé. J'avois peine à comprendre que celui que je n'avois jamais servi me préservât des malheurs ....(9)
Mazarin would attempt to cajole Montrésor to return to Gaston's household, and Montrésor would repeatedly refuse, owing to La Rivière's dominant influence over Gaston at the time. Time after time (I should say "plot after plot"), Gaston negotiated to maintain plotters and fellow-plotters in his household. The participants took care to write about the events in which they participated, down to the slightest relation, gesture, and conjuration. The publication of La Châtre's Mémoires marked the first big leak in the flow of information about plotters whose activities had to be "managed" and/ or repressed by arresting individuals or forcing them into exile; but none of them were part of the ministry or familiar with the secrets of state.
La Rochefoucauld's partial Mémoires, published around the same time as La Châtre's, created much more interest because he belonged to a prominent family that was involved in the princely Fronde. (Much of his political action took place while he was still prince de Marcillac.) Writing to relive the intense experiences of his youth, such as the civil war in Bordeaux and his wounds in the Battle of Porte-Saint-Antoine, La Rochefoucauld never quite knew whether or not he wanted to be a chef de parti, while he chafed at being treated as a mere client by various princes and clerics. This excursus serves as an introduction to the dam-leak of memoir publications that begins in 1662 with La Châtre's Mémoires and that continues with the memoirs of his cousin and fellow heroic conspirator, Claude de Bourdeille, comte de Montrésor, a edition purportedly from Cologne but very probably from Holland. Montrésor's writing will be the subject of an entire section of this essay, as an introduction to Nicolas Goulas's Deffense ....
The general title of the work in which Montrésor's Mémoires are included, takes us back to what Henri-Jean Martin referred to as explosive: the Recueil about Henry III's reign. Here is another example: Recueil de plusieurs pièces servant à l'Histoire Moderne (Cologne, 1663). The volume also contains the Relation by a fellow companion-conspirator, Louis d'Astarac, marquis de Marestang, vicomte de Fontrailles, whom Gaston ordered, in 1643, to go to Spain and negotiate an "alliance" with Olivarès. The principal articles in the negotiations would deal with subsidies for the anti-Richelieu plot, plus military support. Prior to narrating the Cinq-Mars affair, negotiations with the duc de Bouillon, and the trip to Spain, Fontrailles noted the boundary between council and court, in the way described above. He wrote:
Aussitôt après Sa Majesté [Louis XIII] vint à Mézières pour traiter avec M. de Bouillon. Il est à remarquer que M. le Grand [Cinq-Mars] avoit accoutumé d'être en tiers avec le Roi et M. le Cardinal dans tous les conseils les plus secrets, et que Son Eminence, mal satisfaite de lui, se résolut de l'empêcher à l'avenir. Je n'ai pas su s'il en étoit convenu avec le Roi, ou bien s'il croyoit que M. le Grand ne viendroit jamais à un éclaircissement qui ne lui réussiroit pas, et qui pourroit procurer sa ruine. M. le Cardinal lui témoigna donc, par M. de Saint-Yon, qu'il ne trouvoit pas bon qu'il lui marchoit toujours sur les talons quand il étoit auprès de Sa Majesté, et qu'il avoit à l'entretenir d'affaires qui ne requeroient point sa présence.(10)
As we shall see, Louis, like Gaston, would be continually confronted
by duels for being his supreme advisor-favori --- in this
instance would the King support the Cardinal or Cinq-Mars?
The King
would accept to go on keeping Cinq-Mars near his person, just as Gaston
did with Montrésor, despite irritations and outbursts of intense
negative opinions regarding Richelieu. Here is how Fontrailles describes
Cinq-Mars's reaction to exclusion: "Après qu'il eut pleuré de rage et de
colère, et sanglotté longtemps, il ne put trouver autre consolation que
celle du souvenir du dessein qu'il avoit pris de ne rien omettre pour
perdre son ennemi."(11) From someone predisposed to
be Richelieu's client (his father had been a close collaborator), Cinq-Mars
moved toward hearing the sirens of conspiracy over differences in
foreign policy; but the tipping point would be exclusion from high
politics.
Fontrailles's Relation contains letters from Gaston to Richelieu, and letters to the King, dated June 17 and 25, about Cinq-Mars's arrest; the King's letter to the Parlement de Paris about Cinq-Mars's conduct, the Spaniards, the duc de Bouillon's capture, and, finally, flattering remarks about the judges' fidelity. Drafted by Brienne, perhaps helped by Lucas, the King's personal secretary, the royal letter is signed and dated Fontainebleau, August 6, 1642, when the dying Cardinal was traveling between Agde and Frontignan.
There is often a colorful fact in Louis's letters; Richelieu's are mordant. Here the King writes:
Cette connoissance nous fit résoudre de faire arrêter le duc de Bouillon, et avoir tellement l'oeil aux déportemens de notre frère le duc d'Orléans, qu'il ne nous pût faire le mal qu'il avoit projeté. Dieu bénit tellement nos résolutions que le duc de Bouillon fut trouvé caché dans le foin, où il s'étoit mis pour pouvoir ensuite se retirer dans le Milanois.(12)
Also included are letters from Cinq-Mars to his mother, and from de Thou to the princesse de Guémenée, after their trials brought the death penalty; a letter from Marca, a royal councilor, about the trial itself; and a lengthy anonymous Relation about the executions, which ends:
... ils [the bodies of Cinq-Mars and de Thou] furent emportés dans l'église des Feuillants, et le lendemain celuy de M. de Thou fust embaumé et emporté par sa soeur, Madame la présidente de Pontac; celuy de M. le Grand fust enterré sous les balustres de l'église desdits Feuillants par la bonté et l'authorité de M. du Gué, trésorier de France à Lyon, qui l'obtint de M. le Chancelier. Ainsy noururent ces deux personnes, le premier plus cavalièrement que l'autre, mais tous deux fort constamment et religieusement.(13)
It is highly probable that all these documents appeared in one form or another soon after the deaths of Richelieu (December 1642) and Louis XIII (May 1643); but reading them in 1662, after following the blow-by-blow account of the conspiracy, and of earlier conspiracies as well, could only have prompted dark reflections on the not very remote past of the Monarchy. What a contrast between the celebration of a youthful King who promises to govern himself, the treaty with Spain that gave the King a Habsburg bride, and a royal entrée into the capital the exuded réjouissance and authority.
In the same year, 1663, an acidic, acrimonious critique of his commanding officers, penned by a naval captain named Gargot, was published. Gargot was characterized by Bourgeois and André as a perpetual mécontent (p. 78). What is interesting is that, five years later, it was suppressed by order of the royal council, yet as far as I know, no attempts were made to suppress the writings of La Châtre, Montrésor, and Fontrailles. Very probably an officer who had been attacked, or the brother or son of such an officer, Gargot's victim made an appeal to the royal council and received some sort of satisfaction. Did no one involved in the conspiracy memoirs make such an appeal? The relations of several deceased plotters seem not to have turned to the royal justice system to have La Châtre's, Montrésor's, and Fontrailles's memoirs suppressed.
In 1664 there would appear an edition of the Histoire of Maréchal de Toiras by Michel Baudier (see Artisans of Glory, p. 213). It included some letters, notably about the siege of Montauban of 1621. We already noted the 1643 edition, but Toiras's fate probably interested readers of recently published memoirs, and the 1664 edition was in-12o and therefore much cheaper. The dark clouds over the nobility produced by the trials and executions of Maréchal de Marillac (May 1632) and Montmorency (October 1632) were undoubtedly more ominous than had been Châteauneuf's disgrace and Gaston d'Orléans and Marie de Médicis' flight to Brussels the previous year.
In March 1665 Barbin was given a privilège to publish a little book written back in 1638 by a myopic petit abbé named Jean-François-Paul de Gondi (de Retz): La Conjuration de Fiesque.(14) A pirated edition from Cologne, in other terms, Holland, appeared that same year. Throughout the mémoires and histoires that have been briefly described here, may be found occasional general reflections on human nature, politics, good and evil. And there are often parallels to historical facts from ancient Greek and Roman history. Sometimes these are stated in lapidary ways, as sententiae that may be actual quotations, or that may be decantations of thought.
Gondi's Conjuration de Fiesque is literally about a prominent member of a Genoese noble family, the Fieschi. Fiesque, with Machiavellian calculation and moral ambiguity, puts together a parti to challenge the powers of the Doria family. Agostino Mascardi was the author of the original text, which Jean-Jacques Bouchard translated before passing it on to Retz. The young prelate had gone to Rome when he was in his mid-twenties, after a contestation with a Richelieu protegé that left a deep impression on him. As Simone Bertière puts it, Retz perceived something of the Cardinal's political genius and concluded: "Etre Richelieu ou rien" (p. 68).(15)
Bouchard's translation of Mascardi inspired Retz to create the historicized image or exemplum of the chef de parti, the consummate conspirator, Fiesque. The work reads as a short cerebral history, and though the voice is different, the intensity, the ingenious manipulation, and the sententiae about power and politics bring Machiavelli's Prince to mind after reading only a few pages. Fiesque is Richelieu without a cassock; it is the Retz whom the author wished to be, the supreme wizard-like master of high politics. At the very moment of Fiesque's triumph (a specific date is supplied to make the reader imagine that what he is reading is history), he falls from a plank into the murky waters of the harbor and drowns. Paradox: Retz wished to be like Richelieu, and at the same time to destroy him.
In a similar vein, when Nicolas Goulas accuses Montrésor of not abiding by his Stoic principles, as we shall see in the last part of this essay, he is condemning him for acting in accord with Machiavelli's principles.
Why did an oeuvre de jeunesse, written circa 1638, suddenly appear in the Parisian bookshops in 1665, and in two different editions? The tempting answer is that Cardinal Retz's finances were in bad shape. Selling something scarcely longer than a pamphlet, and written by a defeated but somewhat rehabilitated Frondeur, would have brought in an insignificant amount of money to someone who owed as much as 3,000,000 livres, and perhaps as much as 4,000,000 (Bertière, p. 482). More probable, someone in his household who had been let go for economy measures, trundled off to the publisher, manuscript under his arm, to sell a work that would be published anonymously. There were copies, and copies of copies; but as D.A. Watts has judiciously observed, the copy sent to the publisher is carefully worked over and strengthened, and it is in the French of the 1660s, not that of the reign of Louis XIII.(16) The thought, however, was changed very little. Watts explores every avenue of the history of this publication, a model scholarly work that ought to inspire other scholars who prepare modern editions of all these memoirs: for there are none!
Just a few short passages from Retz will help us with the context where Montrésor's persona belongs. Not the precise facts of high politics, but their esprit are grasped and articulated by the high political genius. Mechanisms are discerned that lift up the hero, for example:
Il n'y a rien qui flatte si puissamment un homme de coeur, et qui le porte à des résolutions si hazardeuses, que de se voir recherché par des personnes qui sont beaucoup au dessus des autres ou par leur dignité, our par leur réputation; cette marque de leur estime luy remplit d'abord l'âme d'une grande confiance de luy-mesme. ... et comme un naturel de cette qualité ne trouve point d'action qui soit au dessus de son courage, il se porte aux plus grandes avec impétuosité....(17)
As is Montrésor, so Retz-Fiesque is obsessed by his name and his rank: "Pouvez-vous ignorer que Jannetin Doria n'ait une envie secrète contre vostre naissance beaucoup plus élevée que la sienne, contre vos biens plus legitimement acquis que ceux qu'il possede, et contre vostre reputation qui passe de bien loin toute celle qu'il peut esperer en sa vie?"(18) The correlations between génie and antiquity of family produces a heroic individual free of acquisition of knowledge (savoir) and human experience. Montrésor asserts that the grands, and certainly Gaston, need not read. [Though it is ] always tempting to interpret Retz through a mock-hero lens, he meant what he wrote, as studied ambiguity:
... enivrez de la bonne opinion d'eux mesmes, qu'ils se reposent sur la foy de leurs propres lumières dans les afaires les plus difficiles, et n'écoutent les conseils d'autruy que pour les mépriser: Il est vray que la pluspart de ces hommes extraordinaires que les autres vont consulter comme des oracles, et qui pénètrent si vivement dans l'avenir sur les intérests qui leur sont indifférents ... ils sont en cela plus malheureux que les autres, qu'ils ne scauroient se conduire ni par leur raison, ny par celle de leurs amis.(19)
Though Montrésor celebrates family and friendship, he does not mention taking advice from anyone. Friends and family support his plans and plots without question. Fiesque addresses his fidèles: "Mes amis, c'est trop souffrir de l'insolence de Jannetin, et de la tyrannie d'André Doria, il n'y a pas un moment à perdre si nous voulons garantir nos vies et nostre liberté de l'opression dont elles sont menacées ..."(20)
Montrésor could have read Retz in manuscript, but I am not suggesting that he did. The heroic persona, as Paul Bénichou analyzed him way back in 1948 in Morales du Grand Siècle, is as sound as ever. The second chapter on political drama and aristocratic politics provides the warp on which many studies such as Constant, Jouanna, and my own Paris in the Age of Absolutism are woven. In his excellent Condé in Context (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), Mark Bannister does not cite Bénichou. I very much doubt that this is an oversight. Closer to the mark may be an attitude toward older works, an implicit positivism that suggests they have been surpassed. Bénichou's citational procedures are much more congenial to me. In addition to citing the seventeenth-century sources on the hero in Corneille, he notes Sainte-Beuve, Guizot, Brunetière, J. Lemaître, Lanson, and Nietzsche; whereas Bannister does not cite the duc d'Aumale's classic work on Condé. Not to criticize, but simply to recognize change in scholarly practice, the only nineteenth-century book cited by Bannister is Alphonse Feillet's La Misère pendant la Fronde (1862), a pioneering work in social and economic history but long since surpassed. Bannister's work on the hero will be considered in greater depth in the essay on Montrésor. And it will also be a pleasure to confront Fumaroli's classic L'héroisme cornélien et l'idéal de la Magnanimité.(21)
Also in 1665 appeared the Mémoires of Bassompierre, in-12o, from Cologne, that is, Holland. Perpetual courtier, occasional diplomat, and army commander, after decades of loyal service to Henry IV, Marie de Médicis, and Louis XIII, he was put in the Bastille after the Day of the Dupes. Jean-Marie Constant notes the very old connections between Bassompierre's family and the Guises.(22) How could a gentilhomme accept, and probably support, Condé's arrest in 1616 ― clearly an indication that Bassompierre did not participate in aristocratic plots remained on board ― and then be arrested on vague charges in 1631? As long as the crown lowered the prestige and power of the Condés, he remained on board; but Richelieu's accommodement with Condé and his quite systematic effort to reduce the prestige and power of the Guises, may have made him uncomfortable. Bassompierre remained in the Bastille until after the Cardinal's death. His Mémoires, if he indeed wrote them, convey the persona of an easy-going courtier caught up in minor offenses, triumphs, and triumphs of the heart, and not particularly aware of higher affairs of state. With Charles duc de Guise leaving on a "pilgrimage" in Italy, and with the Queen Mother under palace arrest (again), Richelieu may have thought that Bassompierre could tip into rebellion. What is interesting, however, is that Louis XIII did not lift a finger on his behalf. Lloyd Moote remarks: "... the free-spirited Marshal Bassompierre, who had defiantly corresponded with his fellow marshal Louis de Marillac [was] now under indictment for treason. The sad monarch told his friend that he was not a criminal but that he had to enter the Bastille to avoid being corrupted"!(23)
Also in 1664 appeared the Mémoires ... ou l'Histoire des favoris depuis Henri II jusqu'à Louis XIII (Paris, 1665), 2 vols in-12o, by Beauvais-Nangis, a mécontent who was not an Important. He had enough familiarity with the courtiers around the duc de Nevers to overhear their plans and lesser plots; and he commanded troops in Troyes during Soissons's revolt that culminated in a military victory and in the princely rebel's death at La Marfée. Montrésor might well have said about Beauvais-Nangis: he certainly puts interest over honor, since he was primarily concerned with extracting income from the crown in compensation for his military service.
In 1666 there appeared an edition of the Mémoires of the duc d'Estrées, as prepared by Father Le Moyne (Paris, in-12o). There are occasional passages with an authoritative tone that differs from the usual eyewitness claims found in memoirs. Bourgeois and André ask whether the early part (1610-1616) was written at Richelieu's request, since there are rather heavy borrowings from them in the Cardinal's memoirs. There is a part having to do with the 1650s. A. Chéruel seems to have written a little book, Notes sur les Mémoires inédits du Maréchal d'Estrées (Paris, 1853). I have not read it, but he would not have taken the trouble if it were not informative about high politics. Where d'Estrées narrates intrigues, it is often with a tone of near-condescension.
In 1667, appeared the five volumes of Richelieu's correspondence referred to earlier (in-12o, Cologne: Marteau, that is, Holland). Very very rich, and quite representative as well as decently transcribed and composed, for the would-be comprehender of high politics, there would be nothing more complete and deeply informative until the later nineteenth century. If one had access to official royal correspondence and to decrees published in the Gazette, supported by Richelieu's letters, it was now possible to do what Father H. Griffet would do: write a three-volume general history of the reign that appeared in 1758. Here was a narrative that was more authoritative than those of Scipion Dupleix, Mézeray, Levassor, et al.
At Grenoble, in 1668, appeared Guichard Déageant's Mémoires,
perhaps written at Richelieu's request. They were dedicated to the
Cardinal. Sharon Kettering's Power and Reputation at the Court of
Louis XIII (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2008)
offers an interesting critical discussion of Déageant's career and
writing, as centered especially on the Concini assassination.
Jacques-Danile du Bois d'Ennemetz's Mémoires d'un favori
appeared in Leiden (probably Brussels) in 1668, in-12o. That there were
also editions in 1669, 1670, and 1702, indicates an interest in the
early years of Gaston d'Orléans, and in the Chalais conspiracy. The
author does not seem to be mentioned in either Héroard or Griselle's
Maisons...; Bourgeois and André characterize the work a a "preface"
to Montrésor's Mémoires.
Also published in 1668 were the Mémoires du duc de Guise, published in Paris by his secretary, Saint-Yon, in-4o, a size worthy of the duke and of the pretensions to high rank and military heroism that characterized the memoirs of Guébriant and Toiras. Parts were by Saint-Yon and others by Esprit Raymond, comte de Modène, Gaston d'Orléans's chambellan; Saint-Yon held the privilege; and the final polishing probably was done by Philippe Goibaud-Du Bois.(24) These memoirs contain little information about what the duke did or did not do in the conspiracies of the early 1630s, nor in of those of the early 1640s. The principal theme is his attempt to oblige rebellious Neapolitans to recognize the ancient claims of the Lorraines of Guise over Naples. The Naples adventure was a political and financial disaster, but it lent itself to being narrated in quite heroic prose. Although somewhat lengthy, the Bourgeois and André's final sentences about Henri II de Guise are a delight to read: they reveal how strongly historians may become engaged in a historical life and career: "Bien que restreints à ce sujet, ils [the memoirs] suffisent pour faire connaître le caractère inconstant et sans équilibre et la faible intelligence de ce duc ... car, pour justifier son échec, l'autheur accuse tout le monde, en particulier Mazarin, alors qu'il n'aurait dû accuser que son incapacité" (p. 96).
What occurred to prompt the slowdown in memoir-publishing from the late 1660s down to the 1720s? Henri-Jean Martin, as we have already noticed (op. cit., pp. 662-298), characterizes the late 1660s-1670s as very difficult for Parisian printer-publishers: in addition to intense competition from the Dutch, there was the Colbertian multifaceted administration of controls on libraires and subsidies to other segments of the book-publishing business.
The conclusions to this part of the essay must be very tentative:
1) The actual amount of information about high politics increased considerably as the result of publishing such works as histories of Guébriant and Toiras and, above all, the correspondence of Richelieu.
2) The amount of high political information in the memoirs was not only small, it was contextualized in ways that might have led readers to believe that court intrigue and conspiracy were integral parts of high politics. The King is infrequently mentioned in the memoirs; he is at the center of the histoires of Guébriant and Toiras, and of Richelieu's letters.
3) Writings about high politics and court politics were all done by gentilhommes or persons of even higher rank whose aims varied from the confessional to the portrayal of a would-be political hero.
4) I cannot think of any way to find out reader response to this tide of memoir publishing. The occasional reference scarcely helps us discern why one reader might buy the latest panegyric about the Sun King's conquests or would instead choose a memoir about intrigue and assassination plots. As we shall see, Nicolas Goulas sums up Richelieu's priorities, and he rejects Montrésor's plotting while France was at war with Spain.
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Notes
1. See my Artisans of Glory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 92.
2. Sawyer: Printed Poison, Pamphlet Propaganda ... (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Merlin: Public et littérature... (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1994); Jouhaud: Les Pouvoirs de la littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 2000); and Duccini: Faire voir, faire croire ... (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2003).
3. Hubert Carrier, Le Labyrinthe de l'Etat (Paris: Champion, 2004), pp. 263-287.
4. Gaston Hall, Richelieu's Desmarets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 176.
5. Sharon Kettering, "Political Pamphlets in Early Seventeenth-century France, the Propaganda War between Louis XIII and his Mother, 1619-1620," forthcoming, Sixteenth Century Journal.
6. Yves Castan, A History of Private Life, ed. G. Duby. and P. Ariès, trans. A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1989), III, pp. 21-29; and Marc Fumaroli, Exercices de Lecture (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) pp. 111-161. On the question of subjectivity in Campion's Mémoires, Noémi Hepp, "La place du sujet dans le genre des Mémoires," in O. Pot, ed., Emergence du sujet: de l'amant vert au misanthrope ... Cahiers d'Humanisme et Renaissance, vol. 73 (Geneva: Droz, 2005), pp. 171-196; and Jean Garapon, "Les Mémoires du XVIIe siècle, nébuleuses de genres," in Le Genre des mémoires, Colloque de Strasbourg, ADIREL, 1995, pp. 259-271.
7. Henri-Jean Martin, Livre, pouvoir et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1969), II, p. 754.
8. Montrésor, Mémoires, in Nouvelle collection des Mémoires ed. by Michaud and Poujoulat (Paris: Fechoz and Letouzez, 1881), XVII, p. 297; hereafter cited as "Montrésor, Mémoires."
9. Montrésor, Mémoires, p. 292. Yves-Marie Bercé, "Exercice du complot et secret d'Etat dans la France de 1640," Vives Lettres, 1 (1996), pp. 63-73. See also L'Assassinat politique, Actes du Colloque de l'Ecole supérieure de Saint-Cloud et à Paris X, 1996, passim.
10. Montrésor, Mémoires, p. 249. It has sometimes been overlooked that Richelieu took considerable risk in pressing Cinq-Mars into royal favor. Cinq-Mars's father, Antoine Coëffier de Ruzé, marquis d'Effiat, had worked well with the Cardinal; but he suddenly left the court in 1629 because he had not yet been appointed maréchal. Richelieu characterized him as a man of "hauts desseins, bien que déréglé en iceux." D'Effiat became a maréchal before his death, but did the son have a mind filled with hauts desseins like his father, none of which could be carried out as long as Richelieu remained principal minister? Duc de la Force, Histoire du Cardinal de Richelieu (Paris: Plon, n.d [1935]), IV, p. 443.
11. Montrésor, Mémoires, p. 249.
12. Montrésor, Mémoires, p. 257.
13. Montrésor, Mémoires, p. 266.
14. D.A. Watts, La Conjuration de Fiesque (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); and G.E. Reed, Claude Barbin, Libraire de Paris (Geneva: Droz, 1974). See evidence, p. 58, about a Parisian libraire who purchased books printed in Holland. The Watts edition keeps the original spelling.
15. Simone Bertière, La Vie du cardinal de Retz (Paris: Editions du Fallois, 1990), p. 68.
16. Watts, p. xx.
17. Watts, p. 12.
18. Watts, p. 30.
19. Watts, p. 41.
20. Watts, p. 48. In Gaston's household there was a Frenchman named Charles-Léon comte de Fiesque, but I have not found references to a play on the names.
21. Marc Fumaroli, first published in the Actes et Colloques de Strasbourg, ed. Noémie Hepp (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974), pp. 53-76.
22. Jean-Marie Constant, La Folle liberté des baroques (Paris: Perrin, 2007), p. 201.
23. Lloyd Moote, Louis XIII (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 223.
24. For Goibaud, see P.M. Ranum, Portraits around Marc-Antoine Charpentier (Baltimore: The Author, 2004.
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