   
The Edict of Nantes:
Coexister dans l'intolérance
...Orest's other
reviews
Reviewed on April 30, 1998!
Current teaching duties will make it impossible to try to capture here the
richness and erudition of this special international volume on the Edict
of Nantes, published by the Société de l'Histoire du Protestantisme
français, and as a book by the publisher Labor et Fides, under the
title Coexister dans l'intolérance; but a rapid survol
seems indispensable as we all look at our notes and thoughts when teaching
the history of the Edict of Nantes this spring, 400 years later. Known for
centuries more as a lieu contesté than as a place for celebration,
and rightly so, it is now apparent that it can be more deeply understood
still, and reflected upon, as a moment in which beliefs, communities and
powers may be perceived and assessed in a historically grounded atmosphere
that makes "conflict resolution" a subject for historical understanding
within a society every bit as important as the great peaces of Augsburg
and Westphalia, and beyond.
The authors of the articles in this 544-page volume testify to the complexity
of understanding the Edict and the circumstances in which it was drafted
and signed. As if this were not enough, the articles on the history of historical
thinking about the Edict in France and Europe down to the present are a
remarkable testimony to the usually quite positivist and triumphalist attitude
of historians in France, eager to pursue one or another type of "new" history.
Reading this volume is exhilarating and humbling, but not edifying in any
way, save as history as a wellspring of understanding human experience in
all its complexity.
Jean-Louis Bourgeon opens the volume by exploring the problem of the exact
date when the Edict became an edict. He does not address the usual
problem of registration in the parlements, but rather explores whether the
13th or the 30th of April is the more appropriate date. Showing the enormous
stakes for the king and his subjects as revealed by the differences in the
dates, Bourgeon explores the need for secrecy, the need for knowing how different
constituted groups in the realm would respond, particularly the Huguenot
Assembly in Chatellerault. Brittany had only recently accepted re-integration
into the realm; negotiations with Spain were at a critical stage, requiring
secrecy, certainly. Bourgeon makes the case for considering April 30 as the
preferred date, but that is less the matter at hand than the creation of
the atmosphere of tension and high stakes that he creates through a minute
reading of the principal sources. And, instead of being like so many previous
attempts at peace, Nantes was about religion, not just pacification (p. 42).
The phrase, "L'histoire tient toujours dans le refus de la
simplification" (p. 49) merits being engraved on the ceilings of the
glitzy hotel rooms where we often read our papers at professional meetings.
Philip Benedict's essay reviews the condition in which the reformed churches
found themselves up to 1598, and he finds another type of significant complexity;
islands where Huguenots were really free of possible attacks on church-going
were rare indeed (La Rochelle and the Cévennes); others where they
had really lost the possibility to assemble; and the intermediary, largely
typical range of constant insecurity and moderate security. Beginning in
1589-91, greater and greater numbers were allowed to assemble, certainly
as a result of Henry IV's policy (p. 66). This is not to suggest, however,
that Huguenot communities felt largely secure before the Edict; it was more
a larger, quite culminating step toward establishing rights to assemble.
The statistical studies of assemblies accompanying the article support the
conclusion that the early years of Henry's reign had been a major turning
point.
Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard does some close reading of the preambles of the
pacification edits. She begins by noting that they were ordonnances,
i.e., lois du roi en forme de lettres patentes, that is, open letters
addressed to all and destined to be registered in sovereign courts. The terms
"troubles," " desordres" and "calamitez" are placed
in a framework that embodies royal authority in the form of ripe deliberation
and desire for peace. By looking over the whole genre, the author discerns
that terms such as "heresy" and "heretic" are abandoned and that the turn
to the phrase "R.P.R.," with its mixture of derision and recognition as religion,
makes its appearance. One striking usage involves meetings of theologians
of both parties, which are called a "bon, sainct, libre et général
ou national concile" (p. 90).
The provisionary character of lettres patentes, even though they carry
words such as "irrevocable et perpetual," is understood quite brilliantly
by general examination of the very nature of the letters patent in the Monarchy's
range of instruments — since the 14th century — which another
ordonnance could replace or declare null and void. As the author puts it:
"Bref, pour les légistes des rois de France, comme pour les
fidèles bien informés de l'Eglise catholique, la
perpétuité n'est pas l'éternité" (p. 92).
Mario Turchetti very rightly begins by reminding us that the term "political"
generally had negative connotations in the late 16th century, and that for
the words "courants" and "partis" the reader must be extremely
careful to keep in mind that the latter usually is a "more structured group"
than the former. Great prudence must also be the norm in reading a patriotic
perspective back into the 16th century in order to make negative comments
— for instance, that the Guises were "valets d'Espagne" — when
diocesan administrations in Northeastern France were still not entirely congruent
with the French realm. Turchetti then questions the too explicit differentiation
of the parti des politiques from anything other than their opponents
— with Catholic clergy and parlementaires generally hostile to pacification
if it included any form of recognition of the Huguenots as something other
than heretics. Lazare Coquelay, former Leaguer, is noted as someone who comes
over to the politiques, in the sense of putting tranquillity over
violence, saying "que Dieu nous a donnée le canal du roi" who
came around to support Henry IV. Turchetti discerns a coherence and an
intelligence in Henry's every action, to make the Edict of Nantes Henry's
doing. The significance of the word "concord", rather an "re-establish,"
"conquest," "subdue," is very interestingly brought out by an analysis of
the pamphlet De la Concorde de l'Estat.
Bernard Roussel's review of the efforts to maintain union and intelligence
in the Synods of 1594, 1596 and 1598; is more of a success story than one
might think, given the tensions, etc. The shortage of pastors is stressed,
which helps clarify the concern about academies that came up in the
discussions about clauses to be included in the Edict of Nantes. The clashes
prompted by quite different initiatives by Cassegrain, Lescaille and de Serre
are surmounted with considerable maturity and moderation.
Beatrice Nicollier writes about diplomatic relations with Spain, with a view
to clarifying the dynamics behind not only the promulgation of Nantes but
the signing of Vervins. With the nadir being the Joinville treaty of 1585
by the Guises that granted huge concessions to Philip II, it was no small
task for Henry to recover reputation on the international stage while at
the same time treating with Mercoeur over Brittany, capturing Amiens, etc.
Nicollier places emphasis on Henry's declaration of war with Spain as a
galvanizing action: after Amiens is retaken, a "vent de panique" comes
over Huguenot diplomatic correspondence, partly owing to the fact that their
chiefs, Bouillon and La Trémoïlle, had failed to come to the
king's aid against the Spanish invaders. The Huguenots sent embassies to
allied powers, England and the Netherlands, to work to impede a Henrician
settlement with Spain.
The peace of Vervins was in place, except for the signatures, by the time
the Edict of Nantes was signed on April 30 ("sans doute"). Elsewhere
in the volume there are further remarks about Bouillon and La
Trémoïlle, but at Vervins their "logic" had been completely rejected
by a king who was now master of his realm. Henry would turn to an essentially
Protestant foreign policy for the rest of his reign.
Robert Descimon's study of Pierre Forget de Fresnes's social, professional
and even cultural life is a model study that illuminates much more than what
appears under the title,"L'homme qui signa l'édit de Nantes."
Forget was attached to royal persons — virtually as a servant and
householder. After household offices that give his family connections and
experience in the royal financial administration, Forget became a secretary
of state and, as such, a strong supporter of personal royal authority —
the "antidote" to the scientia juris that pervaded robe families.
With Amboise origins, a Forget became treasurer of the construction of the
chateau of Chambord; another was a silk merchant. The purchase of parlement
offices by some did not impede others from remaining in the fiscal
administration. Marriage alliances with the Beauvilliers (not yet as prestigious
as they would be under Louis XIV) impress less than the consumerist culture
of the Secretary of State — whose fortune totaled some 300,000
écus! His tapestries, books, two coaches and library make him
an example of the Epicurian, as anti-Stoic, with im-moderation in
all things. Descimon compares the Forget brothers to the Potiers — also
politiques — "En servant le roi, on se servait soi-même,
on ne servait forcément pas sa politique." Perhaps only biological
accident prevented the Forgets from becoming one of those powerful state-servant
families who never cease to gain in rank and wealth during the Ancien
Régime. The signer of the Edict of Nantes was a royal servant who
died without posterity, but needless to say, not without heirs!
Janine Garrisson's review of the role played by the Protestant grands
is generally more sympathetic to them than Nicollier's. Garrisson notes that
Bouillon and La Trémoïlle thought they had such important things
to do that they could not come to their king's aid at Amiens. Always wanting
ever greater compensation for their "services," the Protestant grands
may have been more in rebellion than dutiful, if we may use Arlette Jouanna's
formulation and change it to emphasize rebellion over duty. Much more important
is Garrisson's discernment of the Huguenots' general deference toward the
grands. Still, the support of the grands legitimated the Huguenot
cause. Maréchal Henri de la Tour frequently attended the Assemblies
at Saumur and Chatellerault in 1596- 97, exercising a leadership role. La
Trémoïlle claimed that "Dieu s'est servi des Princes du sang
pour protéger son Eglise...." At another point he proposed that
the assemblies be given a special supervisory role over the political actions
of the grands! Garrisson wonders whether or not he could have been
disingenuous, as she notes that finding valid reasons for not joining Henry
goes back as far as Benoist. Terms involving "security" were in the brevet,
of course, not in the Edict. The 180,000 écus paid to the Huguenot
military establishment by the Crown (except for the Dauphiné) simply
stated a fait accompli. Already earlier, but after Mercoeur's coming
over, the Huguenot military forces would have been badly beaten by the victor
of Amiens! Garrisson's ironic vision of the grands is sympathetic,
yet deeply historical. She ends by noting that "Henri IV ... s'apprête
à déployer tout son charme et son talent pour amener l'un
après l'autre ces gentilshommes carnassiers à se convertir
à la religion d'Etat." (p. 186)
Mutsuji Wada takes up the question of just how "representative" the Assemblies
were and bores deeply into the Saintonge-Aunis-Angoumois region to discern
the strength of local rivalries, the claims of La Rochelle to dominate the
region politically, and the powers of the nobles and notables. Localism remained
so strong that representation in a more general and regional strength barely
existed, and this despite strong political and military pressures for
consolidation and univocality. Pastors no doubt played a greater role as
a result of localism, but they too could quickly divide in ways that undermined
effective "representation." Like Janine Garrisson's Les Protestants du
Midi, Wada's article captures the effervescence in the blend of the religious
and political at the regional level: the frustrations help clarify an impulse
for new "national" unity that would come under Henry IV.
Hugues Daussy analyzes the role played by Duplessis-Mornay in the negotiations
prior to the signing of the Edict of Nantes. He was a fidèle to
whom Henry genuinely listened, in no small measure as a result of Mornay's
successful accommodationist leadership in the Assemblies of Saumur and
Châtellerault. Mornay was not, however, clay in the king's hands. He
was deeply conciliatory and an effective negotiator. His finest hour may
have been 1598. Arthur Herman found him, at Saumur in 1611, still eloquent
but ineffectual because state servants (Claude de Buillon) could be coercive,
and great nobles could simply go their own way — which they did.
Nicolas Fornerod explores the issue of confessional coexistence as imagined
and practiced by Duplessis-Mornay. The analysis of his Lettre au Roy de
1593 and his Brief [sic] Discours de 1597draws on historical
fact and precise knowledge of the terms and conditions of life in both
"churches," with liberty of conscience being the tenet to be, above all else,
preserved and allowed to grow for the Huguenots. And enhancing loyalty to
the Crown and to Henry's person required that Duplessis- Mornay send a message
of strength and confidence. It is evident that he could scarcely imagine
the attacks on the Huguenots, as a corps, that would come after Henry's
death. Duplessis-Mornay's vocabulary is so interesting! In 1605, when
recommending that the churches reduce demands to essentials, he writes: "car
de nous amuser ... à requerir accroissement de liberté ...
on croiroit que ce seroit chercher nouvelle querelle; au lieu que nous ne
debvons avoir but que d'assurer notre condition presente" (p. 245). The
key word for Duplessis-Mornay would be "concord," not "tolerance."
Olivio Fatio also explores Duplessis-Mornay's thought as found way back in
1581, in his treatise against Epicureanism and Averroism, the De la
verité de la religion chretienne. Drawing on François
Laplanche, Fatio finds that Duplessis-Mornay's notions about God, reason
and human nature are laid down in a formal apologetic genre. To be sure,
the work is "peu original," but Fatio stresses that this in no way limited
its import. As a testament of faith and a Humanist-Christian "exercise,"
Duplessis-Mornay's work answered a need in an era when antique philosophies
held a special and sometimes dangerous appeal.
Part IV of the book is entitled Réception, and it begins with
Gabriel Audisio's review of the situation in Provence, 1598-1602.
Duplessis-Mornay had been dubious about, if not downright resistant to the
claims that the parlements in the realm were making to review and, if necessary,
curb the powers of the king in council. In Provence, by various procedural
devices the Parlement delayed registration of the Edict of Nantes until October
1600. What could one expect from a previously ligueur Parlement? The story
is one of cajoling and pressuring by the Crown. It would seem that, again,
only Henry's constant supervision of all the dossiers from all the
regional parlements (after Paris, in 1599) accounts for final acceptance
in form, if not in spirit.
Marc Venard's very thoughtful chapter on how the Catholic Church was the
principal beneficiary of the Edict is so true and so profound that historians
rarely have emphasized it enough. The Edict reestablished the Church
everywhere in the realm — thus denying the legal possibility
of Huguenot enclaves that excluded Catholics. Then, in the sort of brilliant
move we expect of Venard, he explores the question of just when and where
episcopal visitations were reestablished, and what the bishops found. The
texts are a lamentation about the degradation of edifices and the spoliation
of income-producing property by town councils, local nobles and others. Evidence
of using sacred spaces and objects for sheltering and feeding livestock was
no doubt recorded to nourish hostile attitudes toward Huguenots. Circumspection
remained the word in communities where Protestants were strong. In places
where they were not very strong, bishops ordered that Huguenots be disinterred
from the old church cemeteries. Venard is, of course, profoundly correct
about the tone of the Edict that recognizes Roman Catholicism as the religion
of the realm, and how that tone yields to an interpretation of the rights
being recognized for the R.P.R. as being only temporary.
Françoise Chevalier explores the cahiers des plaintes of 1599-1600
that in some ways are a mirror of the episcopal visitations — darkened
by the Catholics' lack of respect for the terms of the Edict. In Aubenas
the Jesuits built a chapel directly across from the maison de ville
where the Huguenots held services, and the Reverend Fathers would ring the
bell during those services. These chapters on the reception provide interesting
bits of ethnographic evidence about how difficult it was in many places to
develop a "live and let live" atmosphere of the type that, generally, Hanlon
found in Layrac. The pains over cemetery and sanctuary placement — like
the restoration of Catholic churches — had a "religious correctness"
about it in all its pettiness, a fact that again helps explain a rise of
royalist and unitary thought in subsequent decades. The dynamics of intensified
royalism were grounded on frustration, anger and violence by neighbors (and
who knows, perhaps by one's own relatives?). True, it would be a mistake
in all this to think of Henry IV himself as the popular king of 18th- and
19th-century myth. Au contraire: he was seen as the betrayer, the
flubber, the disrespecter not only of what seems to be the essential finer
points of Catholicism as articulated by the League, but also of corporatist
Protestantism, as articulated by some consistories.
Raymond Mentzer takes up the very important history of the chambre de
justice, often referred to as the "chambre de l'Edit," in Languedoc,
and he categorically refers to the Parlement of Toulouse as
"réactionnaire." Believing that no justice was available to
them in an all-Catholic court, as early as the late 1560s the Huguenots demanded
courts where they would be in the majority. By 1579 some signs of hope were
found in a special chambre established at Lisle-sur-Tarn, a town northeast
of Toulouse that was still under League authority, but in the direction of
Castres. Some royal officials may have seen the chambre as a neat
way of clipping parlementaire pretensions a bit. Threats to establish new
courts in the same jurisdiction (and doing so) were frequent, for example,
when parlements refused to register newly created officials. After 1595,
a number of Huguenot judicial dynasties would eventually create a kind of
Protestant and royal subculture in Castres. One of these families, the Lacger,
has been the subject of a very interesting monograph by Mentzer, Blood
and Belief...., (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1994), with
venality of office playing a part. Mentzer's main point is that, through
the difficult history of these special courts, the actual living conditions
created in part by the Edict of Nantes can be discerned.
Alain Tallon, author of a synthetic work on the Company of the Holy Sacrament
and a thèse on France and the Council of Trent, here explores
the refusal of the Curia to imagine or accept any type of existence for the
Huguenot heretics. Catherine de Médicis was continually obliged to
justify to papal nuncios her efforts to find a middle way between the parties.
Santa Croce pressed firmly on and did not hesitate to support Catholics in
their confrontations with Protestants. Only royal authority could and did
limit Santa Croce's attempts to sabotage an accommodation. Tallon, for lack
of a better word, it would seem, refers to Santa Croce's later appeals to
have edicts enforced as creating a kind of pragmatic tolerance — while
waiting for the heretic forces to diminish. Appeals for obedience by Santa
Croce for royal edicts to be enforced suggests how their tenor could still
very generally but forcefully be supportive of Catholics.
Bertrand Haan, without any reference to Ranke or to Pastor, explores Clement
VIII's unbending opposition to a settlement that would justify coexistence.
Only a nuncio — perhaps without the need to score points with Clement
— Alexander de Médicis actually helped Henry and his negotiation
to promulgate the Edict of Nantes by leaving the pope uniformed. D'Ossat
and Joyeuse were also doing their best to prepare for some royal intervention
regarding religion in France, and eventually Clement never openly opposed
Nantes! The neutralization of the League and its defeat left the pope little
real choice in the matter.
Part of the book is entitled "Interprétations," and
this part begins with an article by Hubert Bost on Elie Benoist, the late-17th
century minister-historian of the Edict. Benoist believed that Henry had
wrung concessions from his high-ranking Catholic subjects to promulgate Nantes.
How to explain the Revocation? Benoist understood history as something of
a weapon in an age-long battle, so much so that he may be compared with the
great Port-Royal narrations of his day: "... j'ay cru plus utile pour
le public de luy donner un ouvrage tel que je suis capable de le produire
sur cette matiere que de le laisser mal informé d'une aussi pitoyable
revolution ..." (p. 17, p. 376 of Bost).
This was written in 1694-95. The notion of public here is civic. Benoist
is not just writing for Protestants, he is writing for the French and for
the diaspora, and who knows who else? His perspective remains very centered
on events in France as he understands his duty to write the history of the
Edict, as if he were writing the history of a trial. Bost suggests that Benoist's
perspective may have been shaped by reading Bayle, and well it may have been.
And as a historian, doesn't Benoist get it right when he perceives that Louis
XIII undermined the Edict's authority by his inability to stay "au-dessus
des partis" (p. 380)? Still, Benoist's understanding of royalism remained
closer to that of the parlements (though these judges might not have accepted
the proposal!) when he argues that the Edict had become a "fundamental law"
of the realm and therefore could not be revoked. The council of state was
not a body that often referred to fundamental laws!
Guy Bedouelle describes Roman Catholic understanding of the Edict in the
19th century, showing again that the division between more reformist Catholics
(Lamennais, Lacordaire and Montalembert) and other currents differed deeply
on the recent history of the Church and Nantes. Montalembert's éloge
of the Edict of Nantes was in effect condemned in Pope Pius IX's reign
by a papal official, Antonelli. Thus the debate over directions for the Church
to take in the 19th century inevitably included deep differences over Nantes
and the Revocation. Finally, among some monastic orders, individual voices
continued to be heard in an "alternative history" of the Church. A number
of Dominicans, including le Père Maumus and le Père Constant,
and the Jesuit Father Yves de la Brière, forcefully supported Henry's
action in the name of liberty of conscience and civil peace.
Patrick Harismendy discerns the difficulties with which French Protestant
historians struggled when writing about Nantes. How to integrate into the
collective memory such tearing actions as promulgation, long-term decline
of enforcement and finally revocation? Harismendy is right to take his subject
toward an effort to understand in more general, if not universal terms just
how the memories and histories of communities deal with this type of ambiguous
historical fact. He shows that typical models of the way ideologies intersect
and produce memory and history help understanding — but there is always
something more. While Guizot warned his co-religionnaires against
too much optimism, there was nonetheless a renouveau sustained partly
by republicanism:
"Les conclusions de Léonard [E.G.] sur la décadence trouvent
un certain écho dans un système de polarisation parisienne
de la production historique. Car à force de défendre la
nationalité française comme un absolu, la capacité
du discours minoritaire à se construire comme entité est remise
en cause" (p. 414).
Isn't this point interesting? Living in a pluralistic culture, presumably
pursuing diversity, it may be useful to recall that America is an intensely
strong and possibly still silencing and quite coercive national identity,
and one in which the boundaries between church and state must be continually
tended.
David El Kenz starts off his discussion of tyrannicide by quoting Anne du
Bourg on a passage that merits quotation:
"Par cela je conclus que le Roy nostre Prince est subjet, et tous les
siens, aux commandements du souverain Roy, et commet luy mesme crime de loese
majesté, s'il determine quelque chose contre la volonté de
son roy et le nostre, et par ainsi coulpable de mort, s'il persiste en une
erreeur qu'il devroit condamner." (p. 415)
To condemn a king for error is not quite the same as to say he is a tyrant,
nor to say that he, the king, may be killed. To be sure, this is remarkable
— since kings are and must be obedient to the Sovereign King's laws,
like anyone else, but I do not believe du Bourg was echoing John of Salisbury
or originating his own doctrine of tyrannicide. Nevertheless the elements
are there, the evocation of the law of lèse-majesté
and of the death penalty meted out to those who broke that law. Still,
interpreting Du Bourg's phrase merits more research and reflection. This
reviewer recognizes that the word "belief" is dangerous on matters of
interpretation.
El Kenz is really interested in the intense Messianism among Protestants
and its decline, and this in a context of measuring just how many Huguenot
churches there were. Stabilization in the numbers occurs largely with enhanced
royal authority and acceptance of that authority by the Huguenots. But as
El Kenz rightly says,"L'Etat royal ne fut jamais dans la religion
huguenote" (p. 426) so a hope for a united and unified Protestant church
was doomed, and this was confirmed in 1598.
G. Hammann reminds us all that a close reading of the actual Edict by historians
is quite rare. Each plunges in to write this or that article and plows along
back to earlier ones articles to compare and infer something about the
"originality" of this or that clause. It was P. Beuzart who launched the
trend by saying that the only original feature about Nantes was that it had
been enforced, and for a rather long period. Hammann rightly forces us to
prick up our ears when we read: "Il a plu à Dieu de nous donner
la vertu et la force de ne ceder aux effroyables troubles" (p. 431).
Note also a grounding on intentions, which the king says (for peace) are
the same among all. The uniqueness and power of the royal signature, and
its association with a place and date, makes for the oneness of the monarch,
a lieu de pouvoir. Also of importance is the infrequent use of the
word "Eglise," and greater the reliance on the word "religion"
— a distinct contrast with decrees from Trent. La "religion
prétendue réformée" is a religion characterized
as aspiring to something. The "Eglise réformée" is not,
of course, a part of the vocabulary. I admire Hamman's technique of close
reading here, which yields very important results on the Edict.
Bernard Cottret explores the "success-by-force" interpretation and the
"success-by- weakness" interpretation. Were the Huguenots compromised by
the Edict? Preserved by it? A tradition dating from at least Agrippa
d'Aubigné down through Michelet interprets fidelity to the Monarchy
as the true Achilles heel of the community. Cottret also makes interesting
comparisons between the Edict and the English Bill of Rights, of
Glorious-Revolution fame — a comparison that is perhaps more to the
point than a juxtaposition with the Declaration of the Rights of Man,
which is so much more abstract.
In lofty prose, Bernard Vogler traces the general history of the thirty-year
struggle for legal recognition by the Reformed Church (Lutheran) in the Holy
Roman Empire, with specific reference to Alsace. As the Augsburg Diet ended
in 1555, it was evident that the Empire as an entity no longer had the same
sacred dimension that it had claimed, and often had had over the centuries.
Lutheranism received juridical recognition, and with it came, paradoxically,
"... une mentalité de possédant jaloux plus de que
missionnaire." (p. 467)
Claire Gantet touches on a profound element in political culture through
her study of the fêtes held in the Empire between 1648 and 1660.
Commemoration and celebration, notably in Swabia, Franconia and Wurtemberg,
where they were the most frequent, became a more general festival of peace,
beginning more civic and slowly becoming more religious. One might have thought
the opposite. Catholics and Lutherans understood the Peace in different terms
and remembered it in different ways. From the sermons preached, it is also
evident that there was a sense of the stakes for all the participants in
the Peace. She ends with this remarkable observation:
"Spiritualiser une paix confessionnelle, c'était en dernier ressort
le moyen le plus rationnel de partager la vie avec autrui: Les Aufklärer
avaient tort: Augsburg n'était pas l'Irrationnel." (p. 488)
This research into commemoration merits being studied in seminars along with
the classic articles by N.Z. Davis, and the model study by B. Diefendorf
on the ordering of thought and of processional politics in Catholic Paris
prior to the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre.
Olivier Christin takes a general view as he attempts to support the notion
that among all the pacification and peace-making attempts, those evoking
more general and fundamental principles and specific institutional modifications
stood a better chance of being enforced than those that only held the personal
word or commitment of sovereigns. This issue is political history in the
grande manière, and is thoroughly admirable, if debatable.
In the study of fundamental political texts, in British history for example,
it is a refrain that the less abstract charters, beginning with Magna
Carta, and own down to the Petition of Right, and then the Bill
of Rights, etc., have been more effective in establishing conditions
of individual liberty than the more abstract Declaration of the Rights
of Man and of the Citizen. But then, what could have been more abstract
than personal sovereignty, with the prince always the most difficult of beings
to keep strictly individual. Christin also stresses how religious peaces
could often serve as the provocation for further violence, and notes how
the exclusion of Calvinists in 1555 laid the groundwork for the Thirty Years'
War. Beneath Christin's contention links a profound issue of the relations
between "ideas" and collective action in history. Perhaps different cultures
respond in different ways to principled thought. It may not be an accident
that possible critics for Christin's view could draw on English history to
nuance his arguments.
Solange Deyon and Patricia Guyot conclude this splendid harvest with a note
about the paucity of iconographic sources of the signing of the Edict of
Nantes. The engraving so frequently reproduced is from Benoist's 1693 work
— almost a century after the fact! Vervins was also so close chronologically
that from the beginning the "public mind" tended to note it more than Nantes.
A final thought. I well recall the years when it was terribly unsophisticated
to state that a king did this or that — in other words, there were just
"forces," or "mentalities," or councilors acting in his name. Hilary Ballon's
fine book on Parisian urbanism has been criticized for discerning royal and
personal initiative in the squares being built in Henry IV's reign.
Here the last word in this volume is a speculation about what Henry might
have "judged" on the matter of whether or not to make an official iconographic
image of the signing of Nantes:
"Henri IV lui-même jugea très probablement plus prudent et
plus habile de faire respecter cette discretion iconographique et de patronner
tout ensemble la célébration de la paix retrouvée tant
à l'intérieur qu'à l'exterieur." (p. 508)
In this simple, eloquent and deeply historical prose, a new initiative in
history joins the venerable tradition of having kings act (the current jargon
in the U.S. is "agency") as part of history. And note the coherence between
the recommendations in the mirrors of princes being written throughout the
sixteenth century: in kingship, prudence should be put before craftiness!
Deyon and Guyot do not know for a fact what the king thought about illustrations
for Nantes, but their knowledge of the period and of the king permit them
to reinsert this essentially biographic technique into political history,
where it had been for centuries, only to be displaced for about a half-century
by various impersonal forces and social-science jargon.
So, from Bourgeon on the date of the promulgation, to Deyon-Guyot on the
absence of the "engraving-opportunity" shot, this volume is chock full of
humans fighting, writing, thinking and negotiating. A few years back, there
was questioning about whether the historians of France could write political
history. Biography had been allowed to develop as an immense semi-historical
mushroom, while history had largely only structures and classes as movers
and non-movers through time. Political history is alive and well among the
historians of sixteenth-century France.
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