Jacques-Auguste de Thou: Taking off the Toga

I: Reflections on Recent Publications about Jacques-Auguste de Thou,
his Life and his Writings

I - Taking off the Toga, Reflections
II A - Searching for Legal Perspectives in de Thou's dedication to Henry IV
II B - Searching for Legal Perspectives in de Thou's History, books I-LXIV
II C - Hesitant findings
III - Brief bibliography

It would seem pretentious to offer a preface to an essay made up of gleanings and bibliography, but I do so because I wish to call attention to certain salient facts that come to mind after a cursory review of recent works on Jacques-August de Thou and his History.

First, inadequate though it is, what follows has brought me back to three historians of my generation whose path-breaking scholarship still very much frames de Thou studies. Nancy Roelker's posthumous One King, one Faith, the Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) is much more than a synthesis of known facts, although it is also that. In certain critical chapters, Roelker's text is peppered with AN* citations; and her integration of the work of younger historians (notably Linda Taber's and Seong-Hak Kim's) makes her work indispensable reading for historians of sixteenth-century France. Samuel Kinser's monograph (The Works of Jacques-Auguste de Thou, The Hague: Nijhof, 1966) and Alfred Soman's unpublished Harvard doctoral dissertation of 1968 - briefly presented in "Press, Pulpit and Censorship in France before Richelieu," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 120 (1976): 439-63 - and several related articles merit special attention, because of their exhaustive research and lucid analysis. Soman's work is not as well-known in France as it should be. It is in direct dialogue with the general thesis that de Thou worked out in his History. By their oaths and coronations and ordinations, kings and prelates had the legal, moral, and spiritual duty to repress what de Thou calls heterodoxy and most of his contemporaries called heresy.

Twenty-first-century bibliographic tools excuse me from filling pages and pages with notes on de Thou studies. My readers must dig and find these works on their own, thereby saving their authors from oblivion. Which is the more wounding: being totally neglected? or having one's work cited but with no allusion to it or fact from it in the body of the article or book? This second tendency has proliferated for two reasons: 1) learned articles must be short, if they are to be read at a scholarly meeting or printed in a journal; 2) shifts by scholars, from one genre or field of inquiry to another, somehow declassifies or renders less important the scholarly literature in the more recently adopted genre to be worked in.

In the last part of this essay I will offer a bibliography on the sub-field of the history of historical thought, a bibliography that is virtually unknown to the literary scholars who have recently worked on de Thou in France or that is rarely cited by them. There may be other exceptions. The fact that much in this sub-field is in English has no doubt influenced and distorted inquiry; but it astonishes that Marc Fumaroli's L'Âge de l'Éloquence rhétorique et littéraire, "res literaria" de la Renaissance au seuil de l'Époque classique (Geneva: Droz, 1980, and Paris, 1995) is almost never cited (E. Bury cites it). Fumaroli's study of the Attic rhetorical perspective in legal culture ought to serve as a frame for analysis of de Thou's outlook on time, language, history, and custom. There may be exceptions, but I do not think that this very important work has been referred to, or its analysis addressed, since Roger Zuber's pioneering article, "Cléricature intellectuelle et cléricature politique: le cas des érudits gallicans (1580-1620)," Travaux de linguistique et de littérature ... de l'université de Strasbourg, 21 (1983): 121-34, which is often cited in recent works but not engaged. A similar fate has befallen Claude-Gilbert Dubois's La Conception de l'histoire en France au XVI^e siècle (Paris: Nizet, 1977), which is cited more often, but without the slightest "dialogue" with it in the body of the study.

There are exceptions. Ingrid De Smet's Thuanus: the Making of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (Geneva: Droz, 2006) is a model of exhaustive research and lucid analysis on all the major (and a lot of lesser) aspects of de Thou's life and works. Her study of the close contexts of all de Thou's writings inspires awe. De Thou, the poet, has found his museful reader. Learning, significance, and generosity mark this work as exemplary. De Smet has not only read everything from the close and remote contexts, on point after point she also is in dialogue with scholars recent and less recent. It is a joy to observe how her work takes into account Jean-Marc Châtelain's "Heros togatus: culture cicéronienne et gloire de la robe dans la France d'Henri II," Journal des Savants (1991): 263-87. ⁽¹⁾ The building-up of knowledge is evident from De Smet's cautious proposals about de Thou's Tacitism, to Amy C. Graves's "L'art du portrait chez J.-A. de Thou," in F. Lestringant, ed., Cahiers V.L. Saulnier 24 (2007): 127-42, a powerful contribution to the history of historical thought.

The articles by my friend Robert Descimon, on de Thou, his family, long-robe elites, and Parisian history represent all that is best and outstanding in early-modern French history. Descimon's own dogged hours and hours in the notarial archives and his inspiration in his EHESS seminar have yielded more important original findings than any one else's, not only about de Thou but also about his world. The article -- "Le président Jacques-August de Thou (1553-1617): rupture intellectuelle, rupture politique, rupture sociale," Revue de l'histoire des religions (2009): 484-95 - brilliantly encapsulates previous recent work and proposes a deftly constructed general interpretation of de Thou's History that, on reflection, I hope to nuance but by no means reject. I write this with trepidation.

Anne Teissier-Ensminger's critical edition and translation of J.-A. de Thou's Vita (Paris: Champion, 2007) is awe-inspiring. I cannot check her translation owing to my weakness in classical languages (Descimon's bravery does not surprise me!); so as I go forth here, her translation will be de Thou's prose whenever I cite the Vita. Her presentation of the Vita, and all the notes, prepare the reader and shed a powerful light on the text. Like no other early-modern French historian, de Thou has stimulated so many years of research and thought. De Thou is joining Rabelais and Montaigne, a wonderful sight to behold.

If Zuber's first note in the clericature article alludes to Fumaroli (and rightly so), Descimon's cites Jotham Parsons, The Church in the Republic (Washington: Catholic University Press, 2004), and rightly so. A former student of mine, Parsons wrote this learnedly mature work that belongs on the same shelf as Kinser, Soman, Fumaroli, De Smet, Teissier-Ensminger, and Descimon. I'll cite the titles of four chapters:

Gallicanism from Reform to History
Custom, History and Law
Gallicanism in the Wars of Religion
Gallicanism as a political ideology

Descimon recognized this as a major contextual frame for de Thou. It presents, in the deepest and most convincing scholarship, the case for interpreting de Thou as manifestly part of the mental world of the Long Robe, and of what most people in that world believed.

In the pages that follow, I will offer some thoughts on the relation between de Thou's historical thought and that of the robe Gallican elite; some cursory work on social mobility and literary creativity; and a mental bibliographical map of the field of early-modern French historical thought.

When Machiavelli returned home from the Florentine streets, he removed his day clothes and put on a toga; then he would read and write on into the evening. Jacques-Auguste de Thou's father, Christophe, and his other male friends and relatives, wore the everyday robes of the parlementaire throughout their careers.

Jacques-Auguste no doubt wore various clerical and judicial vestments over the years, as he changed posts and moved from the religious to the parlementaire. What did he wear as royal councilor, as traveler, as diplomat? On the tomb he commissioned for himself and his two wives, François Anguier showed him wearing a toga, a longue robe, that was more mannerist than the garment in the sculpture-portrait of his beloved father by Barthelmey Prayer, which Jacques-Auguste also commissioned.

I stress his choice of sculptors and the disposition of the figures, because his intentions and self-representation have become of interest to scholars.

One of the phrases on the paternal epitaph caught Ingrid De Smet's attention, and rightly so. De Smet translates the phrase thus: "an incorruptible writer of history of his own times, of which he left papers in his filing cabinets," p. 217, where she cites the Epitaphier du vieux Paris, I, p. 56. Upon reading this remark about the father, our immediate thought is: Like father, like son. Jacques-Auguste either wrote his father's epitaph, or he supervised the writing. He approved of what it said. The critique of Jacques-Auguste's use of pamphlets and other non-official sources in his own History need only be mentioned, to demonstrate that the father never completed, or perhaps never began, the "history."

Now, in a brilliant article (see above), my learned and eloquent friend, Robert Descimon, proposes that Jacques-Auguste, for all intents and purposes, became the greatest historian of his age because he removed his toga, so to speak, and jumped the rails from the long-robe track on which he had seemingly started out, abandoning his father's master plan.

Jacques-Auguste's life has been studied in great detail by scholars more learned than I. My aim here will only be to highlight what is already known about his life, in order to suggest that, intellectually and psychologically, he never fully belonged to the Long Robe, and that although he wanted its highest office (his father's office), his earlier training and inclination made it quite easy for him to take off the toga. This is not to say that he did not respect, indeed love the Parlement and all its ways and works. Quite the contrary. He remained attentive, and on guard against any and all attempts to curb its powers, as war inspired fiscal measures, religious division, and corruption of and by parlementaires themselves weaken it and the French Monarchical Constitution. Montaigne, Jacques-Auguste, and Montesquieu remained firm defenders of parlementaire outlooks, even as they grew tired of participating in their judicial routines. Put another way, the long-robe identity, so professional and intellectual, would be subsumed by Jacques-Auguste and assumed by his elite contemporaries.

Single, all-encompassing interpretations of de Thou, no matter how analytically subtle and powerfully applied, simply do not account for the man, his life, his works. The social interpretation is one of the richest and most effective, but it elucidates only part of the whole. I admire Laurence Giavarini's summary portrait; and dare I suggest that it is a partially successful attempt to fit into the social all that Jacques-Auguste is.

Le tableau de cette vie érudite, chrétienne, voué au service du roi, construit une homologie entre le devenir historien, tôt posé dans ce récit et une intégration dans la noblesse d'épée .... ("Communiquer exemplairement l'histoire," XVII^e Siècle, 247 [2010]: 279).

When Jacques Faye d'Espesses sought to convince Jacques-Auguste to accept a presidency in the Parlement then being constituted at Tours:

... lui-même et le reste des magistrats présents se rejoignaient pour désigner Jacques, parce qu'il était issu d'une famille de parlementaires; que son père et son grand-père avaient été revêtus de cette même dignité; qu'il comptait encore d'autres conseillers parmi ses parents; qu'il était allié aux plus nobles familles, qu'il s'était toujours rallié - c'était l'essentiel -, au parti du roi... (Vita, pp. 704-705)

Jacques-Auguste's future colleagues in the Parlement of Tours perceived alliances with nobles of the sword as a distinct asset for someone with the dignity of président in the Parlement.

De Thou's very significant refusal to be one of the royal deputies in June 1596, to mediate with the Protestants in Loudun (along with Gaspard de Schomberg, with whom he had good relations), prompted more explicit remarks than can typically be found about this professional identity. In a letter to Villeroy, it is his membership in the Parlement that impedes him from accepting the king's request. De Thou has Harlay de Sancy intervene, to avoid personally telling the king that he will not accept. Having noted that there was a distinct possibility that whatever he negotiated in the king's name would be submitted to the Parlement, which might refuse the terms, de Thou adds:

En quoi il me semble que l'on n'a pas assez pris garde la qualité que j'ai, qui m'astraint à être plus retenu, que ne serait un autre, qui n'aurait à rendre compte de sa charge, qu'à la personne seule du roi, et non à cette compagnie, de laquelle ayant honneur d'être, je suis obligé aussi d'y rendre le respect qui lui est dû (BNF, ms. fr. 4047, fol. 259, quoted by Michel de Waele, Les Relations entre le Parlement d Paris et Henri IV [Paris: Publisud, 2000], pp. 64-65; Vita, p. 937).

It would be interesting to work through other royal appointments of parlementaires in potentially conflictual, or at least controversial situations. Henry and the council may well have sought de Thou in order to facilitate acceptance of a settlement with the Protestants; if so, he let them down. One suspects that his father would have taken on the task. ⁽²⁾

Despite the richness of social interpretations of de Thou and his writings, the binary features of these interpretations are reductionist. Someone has proposed that, in the end, Jacques-Auguste should be considered a neo-Latinist above everything else. He was that, of course; but this is just another example of reductionist interpretation being so strongly articulated in France today. Was Jacques-Auguste de Thou a poet? Of course. Was he an author? Of course, if late-twentieth-century scolia on the term are avoided. Was he a historian? Of course, and an exemplary one. Later in this essay we shall return to this issue of the multiple general exemplarities of historians who are part of French literate culture, circa 1600.

Having summed up a debate on the possible reception of the decrees of the Council of Trent in France, de Thou alludes, in the Vita, to "... Christophe de Thou, le Premier Président, excellent connoisseur des droits du royaume et héritier de l'antique gravité ..." (p. 992). This passage appears only a few paragraphs from the end of the Vita. It is revealing of Jacques-Auguste's attitudes late in his career. The disappearance of his father's prisca gravitas might be just a bit of nostalgia; but he is really saying that neither he nor any other robin possessed, in his generation, what his father had possessed: a gravitas, that is, heavy in the sense of being of consequence, reasonableness, control of the facts, powers to convince, and above all the knowledge of history that put into its deeper context whatever question was being deliberated. See F. Goyet, Le Sublime du lieu commun (Paris: Champion, 1996) p. 165. To confirm that, we need only continue the quotation. He notes that the second president, Pierre Séguier "savait avec la prudence d'aujourd'hui, assaisonner de pragmatisme cette gravité démodée ..." (p. 992). The deep cleavages are evident: gravitas founded on moral presence and historical fact, versus prudence and pragmatism. The shift toward the latter marked a loss, regarding not only the Gallican historical defense against increased papal power in France, but also the evident declining cogency of historical argument.

We are accustomed to reading prudence in a Lipsian, generally morally positive context; but here it is opposed to history, custom, and precedent. The prudence of today, along with pragmatism, is serving to make the argument on behalf of accepting the decrees of the Council of Trent. In the end, Séguier would be persuaded to oppose their reception, on the grounds of his views (and those of de Thou's father). In support of his findings about de Thou's evolution out of Robe professional thought, at the end of his article Descimon cites W.F. Church's "the Decline of French Jurists," French Historical Studies, 3 (1967): 19-63. Descimon notes that in relation to his father's career and outlook, Jacques-Auguste's career supports Church's argument, and more directly, Descimon's argument.

It is tempting to tease from the whole oeuvre the constituted elements of the robin who argues from prudence rather than history; but would it advance our understanding of de Thou's great last-ditch effort to recover a world that was lost regarding the relation between law and history? The passion for the study of ancient laws and customs weakened during the Wars of Religion. Order had not been restored by citing custom and precedent in royal legislation. A clause in the Edict of Nantes forbade any and all attempts to bring suit for any cause in any royal court. It became illegal to evoke facts in court from the period 1585-1598! The vagaries of enforcement of the Edict is something we need not bring up here; but by its very existence, the clause against attempting to litigate on precedentalist grounds, citing cases from the later civil wars, may well have helped tip the balance toward a more philosophical jurisprudence, in lieu of one grounded on Atticist historical precedent.

Family loyalty to the kings of France, belonging to the Hurault clientele, and experience and success on various governmental missions (pace Richelieu's critique) had led to de Thou's appointment in a moment of extreme crisis and debacle of Henry III's council (Vita, p. 639).

If we mention Kantorowicz's king's-two-bodies theory at this point, de Thou's situation becomes easier to comprehend. ⁽³⁾ In the Vita he is often critical of the royal ministers, because they always seek to increase the personal power of the king at the expense of royal powers delegated to the parlements and other institutions. Being sucked up into the council could be interpreted as a betrayal for someone whose father, as first president, went to the Louvre only when invited (Vita, p. 665). But the crisis was so deep after the disgrace of almost all the royal councilors and secretaries of state following the Guise murders that royal personal power was at its lowest in centuries. De Thou's poem about the advice given by various councilors is sarcastic and ironic in the extreme. The tragic dimension of Henry III's government became personal for de Thou, since it was the failure of his brother-in-law, who over the years had exerted enormous influence over the king. De Thou does not reveal his assessment of Hurault de Cheverny as a royal councilor. The implication is that he could do better if the king would stick to one policy. Sent off on a mission, de Thou had little chance of keeping Henry III going in one direction. Henry's death made the point moot. Agrippa d'Aubigné does not seem interested in the specific conditions surrounding de Thou's appointment at this point; but does he not recognize that de Thou was neither a favorite nor a mignon? His intellectual frame for understanding what constitutes a historian is grounded on careful readings of other secretaries and lesser officials, and of Machiavelli, Mascardi, and Guicciardini, even more than on antique models.

Agrippa, himself a courtier, imagines the courage needed to speak out about what one thinks in a cabinet filled with cardinals and grands; his identification with de Thou is very strong at this point, and concrete, first as councilor and then as historian. A political exemplum elucidated in mirrors of princes, mémoires, and history.

The Vita and the History could be read to yield a very full portrait of de Thou's career ambitions prior to his brother's death. At this point I will quote only one brief passage from the Vita and mention another passage where he tells of his satisfaction at receiving a text that described the German constitution. At the moment of the great career shift, he remarks: "... qui déjà accoutumé à la vie de célibataire ne rêveit que voyages et ambassades, sans ambitionner quoi que ce fût d'autre. ..." (Vita, p. 387).

He did not have to add that if the Hurault and de Harlay and Joyeuse families continued to hold the very influential offices they then held, service as secretary to an ambassador, then nomination for a bishopric, and who knows, perhaps a cardinal's hat, might appear on the horizon. If we look over the horizon of major writers of histories in Florence, Venice, and England, the first stars to appear had experience as official diplomats or in high administrative office. Negotiation is grounded on training in perceiving multiple points of view. So genuine was de Thou's sincere pleasure at receiving a description of the states and powers in the Holy Roman Empire, that it is possible to suggest that his ignorance of these generally little-known regions of the East on the part of the French, had almost made him fear that he would be ordered to go there in the company of a general or an ambassador (Vita, p. 371). This material was probably used to draft part of book II.

The career turning points of 1578 reveal a young man willing to adapt to dynastic and, more particularly, parental wishes. Before his fatal illness, his brother Jean had brought back to the king and council messages from Henry of Navarre. The public confidence in the father extended to the sons, a confidence built upon grasping absolutely what is said, what is revealed by gestures, and what is written: the role of a diplomat. Garrett Mattingly stressed the symbiotic relation between humanist learning and the rise of professionalized, experienced diplomats (Renaissance Diplomacy [London, 1955]). Jacques-Auguste's passion for travel does not stop with visits to learned humanists. He observes the commercial power of Antwerp (Vita, p. 345). At his father's request, he goes to interview Maréchal de Cossé about any secrets or negotiations he might have carried out.

Thus, had Jean de Thou not died, Jacques-Auguste probably would have pursued a career in royal service as a diplomat, a career that would depend on still stronger ties to the Huraults and other royal councilors. Learning and connections were requirements for such duties, and a willingness to travel at the risk of life and limb on occasion. Jan Pendergrass's edition of Jean de Pin's letters (Geneva: Droz, 2007) shows that de Pin's career is indicative of just how developed this ambassadorial-diplomatic identity had already become by 1537, the year of de Pin's death. Michel François's classic Le Cardinal de Tournon (Paris: Boccard, 1951) carefully analyzes the elaboration of the role of diplomat during the generation just prior to that of Jacques-Auguste de Thou. If a family owned only one major office in a sovereign court, diplomacy had long since become an option for second sons (could the de Thou family predict that Augustin de Thou's office would come to his nephew Jacques-Auguste?). And the template of the diplomat overlaid almost perfectly that of the republic of letters. Often with high-ranking court nobles and the formal ambassadors, it was their secretaries who worked out the terms in negotiations. Was Richelieu's critique of Jacques-Auguste simply meanness of spirit (the cardinal most certainly was capable of such)? Or was it revenge against de Thou's harsh remarks about Antoine de Richelieu in the History? Or was it a sound assessment of failures and successes? Be that as it may, observations while traveling, the creation of a network of relations across Europe, and a knowledge of the recent history of all the European states were the prerequisites for service (in Cicero's sense of the term). Jacques-Auguste's refusal to go down to the southwest again, to conduct negotiations (Vita, p. 937), probably undermined the esteem in which the king held him, a harbinger of the falling-out the next year. But this did not mean that de Thou wanted to abandon diplomatic and council service. He idolized Cardinal d'Ossat for his success as a diplomat and a defender of Gallican rights.

But I do not mean to propose the diplomatic career as a single alternative explanation for de Thou's immense success as a historian. The long-robe family outlook, and extremely intense political engagement in a period of violence and civil war, were perhaps more important than were his Tacitism and his creative self-expression in verse. His Humanist culture impeded him from feeling vicarious satisfaction over violence. Most of his contemporaries went to a beheading or a burning, to feel deep, cathartic pathos. Neither Montaigne nor de Thou would be in such crowds (the exception is Montaigne in Rome), or for that matter in any crowd. The extraordinary contradictions in the policies put forth by the royal council, the lack of enforcement of royal decrees, and indeed the jeu between what the Crown said as law, and what it actually did, disoriented and infuriated de Thou. Montaigne's strategy of withdrawing into private life (save for the rare occasions when the king or Bordeaux asked him to do something) was not unlike de Thou's paraphrasing of books of the Bible, an act that calmed him in the face of malheurs publics. The intense, at times almost wild political engagement of a Tacitus and a Machiavelli, released in de Thou the constraints that impeded so many of his contemporaries and kept them from writing down what they observed. The over-arching thesis of the History -- namely that the resort to violence, in order to repress heterodoxy, only produces more violence - that de Thou enunciates in what is really a prayer to Henry IV in the form of a Preface, is probably articulated more strongly throughout the work than I have found it to be so far. Humility is the only word that ought to come to mind when trying to characterize de Thou's accomplishment. Being very intensely wound up politically, and writing brilliant history, is not unknown in France today. Roland Mousnier's Assassinat de Henri IV has many explicit contemporary resonances that partially account for its being the best book written by my feu maître.

Just how social mobility has an impact on historical writing is fairly easy to establish for entire social groups, but it seems less evident at the individual level. Olivier Carbonell's Histoire et Historiens (Toulouse: Privat, 1976) establishes statistically that the French clergy in the nineteenth century who wrote history, focused on religion and the church; that nobles wrote aristocratic histories, genealogical, and biographical; and that lawyers and judges wrote legal history. Those general frames, if transported back to early-modern times, would not shed much light on de Thou, Humanist of the Long Robe, royal councilor, and diplomat. The shift from being of the church to being a maître des requêtes obliged him to give up his study of Euclid in ancient Greek! (Vita, p. 561). In his youth, he had an appetite for drawing (Vita, p. 155). In the History he notes the careers and deaths of numerous mathematicians. His interest in neo-platonic texts, notably Proclus, merits reflection. While suggestive, Stephen Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning, as Giavarini presents it, captures some of the principal features of de Thou's life; but it generally seems more courtly, more restrictive, and less professional than what we find in de Thou.

The more recent concepts are not always the most revealing of what can be discerned or characterized in Renaissance culture.

Perhaps closer than any social interpretation is the historical idea of the universal man, as Jacob Burckhardt conceptualized it. (Michelet's influence is recognized.) A discoverer and unleasher of human potential. It is, of course, a single concept, and therefore insufficient for capturing the complexity that is de Thou; but its unparalleled analytical and descriptive strength makes it particularly appropriate for de Thou, truly a "universal man" who, like the ancient historians, placed politics at the heart of human activity. There is scarcely anything (except theology!) that does not interest de Thou. This eagerness, this curiositas, was in no way seen as sinful (see G. Defaux) or constricting on a professional identity such as the law. Why does he include a brief summary of the Martin Guerre case, probably based on reading Coras? Because it revealed that learned, conscientious judges could not only be mistaken, they could be deceived. The moral stakes for a long-robe judge were high, not unlike a priest's, but with no help from the equivalent of the decrees of the church in response to Donatism.

Though never formally characterized as such, given de Thou's ranks in the council and the Parlement, and his diplomatic activity, his History has a quasi-official status owing to the king's acceptance of the dedication, emphatically reinforced by the use of the third person and the frequent inclusion of observations or facts without the least attribution. It is the voice of a president of the Parlement. So, Carbonell is confirmed: lawyers and other legal professionals edited and wrote laws and jurisprudence, which from the generation of Baudouin, Cujas, and numerous other historian-jurists, created the thought that underlay the modern state, a learned characterization of custom, and a historicity that cannot be characterized as either mythical or relativist. To be sure, there were mythical elements, and relativist critiques of history; but this edifice failed to keep the peace in the face of religious conflict and aristocratic ambition. The golden age of historical jurisprudence ended, as Catholic Reformism imposed cultural conformities that created an oppressive climate in which it became suspect to evoke memory, history, and religious practices in the primitive church. Robert Schneider has analyzed this movement very convincingly.

But like their nineteenth-century heirs, sixteenth-century jurists wrote verse, social and moral treatises, even fiction. They did not think of themselves as less professional when they took up (as Bodin did) problems of historical relativity, natural philosophy, a kind of natural theology, and demonology. The Methodus of 1566 was an early attempt from the reception side, to propose ways of reading history that would, with critical judgment, optimize the possibilities of truthfulness. Bodin read the gigantic brief that was the historical writings about the Italian wars, and he suggested that reading the history written by one's enemies enhanced critical and factual understanding. Marie-Dominique Couzinet does not offer a civic reading in her remarkable Histoire et Méthode à la Renaissance (Paris: Vrin, 1996); see my Artisans of Glory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 82-89, for the beginnings of one. For Bodin, it is the reader's task to judge the truth of what he is reading (Couzinet, p. 149). Bodin also published on monetary theory and, of course, on demons. De Thou had the latter book in his library! This is not the place to explore the relations between history and law in the Methodus of 1566, but it may be useful to repeat that Bodin's answer to Pyrrhonist and other critiques proposed a universal approach to reading history, that is, writings by one's enemies along with histories by allies (for example, in the effort to find the truth about the Italian Wars).

Pierre Pithou also addressed very contemporary questions, notably the history of Gallican liberties (1594), and a work defending French bishops who granted Henry IV absolution, based once again on historical precedent. But along with the legal "briefs" and the editing of ancient law codes, Pithou also published Quintilian's Declamationes, etc, and even an edition of Petronius!

Guillaume du Vair published a volume of Parlement arrêts. None of the earlier volumes of collected arrêts had official status, nor would du Vair's; but his was a step in the direction of stability on texts. His work on rhetoric was applied learning, in the sense that the powers of persuasion had become weakened from what they had been in the past, as a result of sectarianism, and truly threatened by the non-listening prompted by the rise of factionalism. His Holy Philosophy, Meditations, and songs based on the Old Testament, remind one of de Thou's paraphrases of many books of the Old Testament. As Jotham Parsons has found, Antoine Loisel did most of his legal-civic work in the genre of speeches that he himself wrote and later published. He left no major work akin to the Recherches de la France, where learned Medievalism contextualized the laws and customs of various provinces. (See N. S. Struever, "Pasquier's Recherches de la France: the Exemplarity of his Medieval Sources," History and Theory, 27 [1988], pp. 51-59.) De Thou seems not to refer to Pasquier; but I like to think that between Loisel's speeches on contemporary legal questions, and Pasquier's Recherches, de Thou's History (an exemplary Medievalism that would inspire Lacurne de Saint-Palaye) complements, on a European and world scale, what Voysin de la Popelinière had already accomplished for the recent French past.

There is a social consciousness in de Thou. When he mentions a province in an introductory way, he often also names the oldest, most illustrious, and richest families in the region, and then centers his attention on the activities of individuals belonging to those families. De Thou shows a kind of patriotic love for these families, just as he shows love for the rivers and mountains of their region; and he very probably would have been eager to render service to each and all of them. Here and there he also implies that, as royal governors, the heads of these old families accommodate to the Protestants' demands and resorted less to the use of force. Such was the case of Guy Laval de Ventadour in Poitou (the History, book xxx).

Long ago, Jean-Pierre Labatut discerned the relation between ancient titles and wealth, something de Thou sensed but did not express as sociological history. I may have missed it (which is easy to do!), but the Tocquevillian refrain about the failure of nobles to remain on their estates, etc., is simply not in de Thou.

De Thou's remarks about the grands are not unlike those of Goulas, who wrote a half century later. Rendering service to the grands and, God forbid, taking "their" expressions of friendship literally when lending them money (Vita, p. 575), is a recipe for disappointment, or worse. (See my Study on cas royaux .)

I have only noted it occasionally here, but I suspect that a statistical study of the marriages of presidents in the Parlement would reveal that both of de Thou's marriages were in the range of what his colleagues were doing. The first marriage seems less "mysterious" once we learn about the role of a family doctor, as mentioned in the Vita. As for the second marriage, the Hurault family and its clientele brokered and celebrated the tie; and if I recall correctly, this took place after the death of de Thou's sister, who had provided the firm tie to the Hurault. In the ascendence of his second wife, it was the maternal link to the Batarnay that he mentions, a family whose illustrious ancestors would include an older alliance with the Bourdeille-Montrésor and, almost contemporaneously, the Lorraine-Guise (Vita, p. 613). Was there gossip around the Palais about how rapidly a financier family could marry up? De Thou occasionally mentions his de Beaune relatives in the History, without saying that they are close relations. Between the social and the professions there remained the integrating and assimilating forces of client relations. De Thou's second marriage has a Hurault dimension that merits more research (Vita, p. 605). N.M. Sutherland long ago referred to Joyeuse as a "treacherous favorite" who was secretly in alliance with the Guises (The French Secretaries of State [London: Athlone, 1962], p. 278). He was someone whose death inspired in de Thou not only verses but also civic despair. Clientage in such a time of crisis can descend into the maelstrom where everybody belongs to everybody. The Fiesque Conspiracy is de Thou's parallel with the fate of his relations and friends, as the Lorraine-Guise gained ever greater power.

Or les loix se mantiennent en credit,
non par ce qu'elles sont justes,
mais par ce qu'elles sont loix,
            Montaigne, Essais, III, xiii

The chapter from which this passage is taken refers to what is "naturel." Its title, L'experience, prepares the reader for some form of knowledge that is, perhaps, not grounded on reason. De Thou's use of the term expérience, as knowledge he has personally acquired by collecting sources and by recording what he has seen and heard in his own journal and in the works of other historians, provides grounds for believing what he wrote. Would de Thou have prescribed Montaigne's philosophical boutade in the affirmative? Hardly; and it might be added, in all probability hardly more than Montaigne. Commynes likewise grounded the authority of his history on experience; and none other than Machiavelli resorts to experience to justify what he writes in The Prince! Is de Thou's evocation of experience a commonplace, or is it a methodological statement?

How to read de Thou? Whether I find a juristic Long-Robe perspective, frame, or attitude, is less important than not coming up with wrong-headedness. Some of the possible contexts in which de Thou wrote may be mentioned at this point; and it should be noted that on the historian's part, the remark about experience was serious and sincere.

If de Thou subscribed to François Baudouin's contention that it is almost impossible to distinguish law from history, then my technique of doing an obvious, first-meaning history will not be successful. Divine law, natural law, custom, biblical law, Greek, Roman, and French royal law (to name just a few collections of laws) may well be present in the form of resonances in any early-modern work of history. (See V.P. Mortari, Cinquecento giuridico francese, pp. 296-310, as cited by Marie-Dominique Couzinet, Histoire et méthode à la Renaissance (Paris: Vrin, 1996), p. 228. Bodin rejects Baudouin's virtual collapsing of law and history into one (Couzinet, p. 228), and I must confess that, in my reading of de Thou thus far, he seems closer to Bodin (and Cicero) on this point. But it is worthwhile to raise the issue. It must be admitted that de Thou mentions Providence on occasions that are difficult to interpret. He does not usually refer to nature or her laws, but there may be exceptions.

Would the fusion of law and history be stronger or more complete if the historian larded his narrative with commonplaces? Superficially, this would seem to be the case. Z.S. Schiffman, in his "Montaigne and the Rise of Skepticism," Journal of the History of Ideas, 45 (1984), pp. 499-516, finds that doubts about the truth of commonplaces is a source for Montaigne's skepticism, not his reading of a Skeptic such as Sextus. Francis Goyet has much to say on this topic, but all I wish to do, in raising it here, is to sharpen my eye as I read, and to note when and where de Thou includes commonplaces.

La Popelinière offered a critique of Bodin's Methodus on the grounds that it had a judicial frame (Couzinet, pp. 291ff). De Thou read all these works. The historians of his age whom he most admired were Guicciardini and Sleiden, neither of whom may be said to have deliberately, or not consciously used juridical frames in their histories. A juristic frame or attitude should in no way be considered limiting or pedantic; but there just may be more attention to legal issues, institutions, and jurisdictions than to, say, a historian with nobility-of-the-sword origins. For example, de Thou includes quite lengthy passages on the reforms of justice proposed by chancellors Olivier and de l'Hospital. Does La Popelinière include this material? Does Jean de Serres? The results of my démarche cannot be predicted at this point; but it is as least one way to control the perspective or attitude in de Thou's History. Content, or matières, not vague allusions. A Gallican perspective might be an indication, although it alone would scarcely be specific to robin history.

We must recall that the Parlement, as a body, rarely had held a unique view about anything. Various philosophical, historiographical, and theological savoirs were represented in the "illustrious senate." As William Farr Church remarked way back in 1941: "As the century progressed, the tendency became more and more to interpret legal problems in terms of natural and divine law rather than the customary law of the land," Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), p. 8. The emphasis on a historical interpretation of the foundations of law, and indeed of the Monarchy, would certainly become stronger after mid-century as customary law, and with it precedentalism, received more solid jurisprudential defenses. ⁽⁴⁾ See the excellent general study of these issues by Jotham Parsons, The Church in the Republic (Washington: Catholic University Press, 2004), chap. 2.

Just how the various approaches to provide understanding of law as expounded by the parlementaires would be accompanied by doctrinal questioning and a spirit of humanist reform of the Church, is unclear despite the excellent work by Linda Taber, "Religious Dissent within the Parlement of Paris," French Historical Studies, 16 (1990), pp. 654-99; Nancy Roelker, One King, One Faith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Sylvie Daubresse, Le Parlement de Paris ... 1539-1589 (Geneva: Droz, 2005); and Marie Houllemare, Politiques de la parole (Geneva: Droz, 2011). It may never be possible to go beyond what the tenors and tribunes said in their mercuriales and other speeches; but de Thou's humanist reverence for the early church, for customary law, for Gallican criticism of the Church in which he lived and prayed (he attends vespers, Vita, p. 677), and his belief in the Providential protection of the French Monarchy, are all echoed in history, in his History. The law and juridical procedure constitute the frame, as Anne Teissier-Ensminger comments in her translation of this very revealing passage:

... car s'agissant de ce qui prête à haine et à outrage, il [de Thou] a même soigneusement veillé à tempérer l'amertume du fond par la modération de la forme, et à constamment se ranger, comme c'est l'habitude en Droit, au parti-pris du minimum en matière préjudiciable. Ce dont on peut facilement se rendre compte, avec un peu d'équité, en le comparant à ceux qui ont écrit sur les mêmes sujets. Il veillait aussi scrupuleusement - c'est lui qui me l'a dit -, a réciter une oraison spéciale pour l'ouvrage qu'il avait entrepris, en plus de celles que chaque fidèle, à son lever, est tenu d'adresser à Dieu, et il ne se mettait jamais à écrire sans avoir, grâce à la prière, purifié son esprit de toute passion: il suppliait respectueusement la Divinité de lui faire l'honneur de l'assister dans son travail et d'illuminer son esprit, pour lui permettre de faire émerger la vérité dissimulée sous les flots tumultueux des factions et des haines, et de la mettre au jour sans rancoeur et sans flatterie...(Vita, p. 871).

Yet another possible frame or attitude which may have been at work throughout the History is suggested by N.S. Struever's work on exemplarity in Pasquier's Recherches: "Pasquier's Recherches de la France: the Exemplarity of his Medieval Sources," History and Theory, 27 (1988), pp. 51-59. From his reading of Machiavelli and medieval sources such as customs and poetry, Pasquier came to question the exemplarity of classical rhetoric. He does not hold up a founding Merovingian as an exemplum, for "example"; but in his reflections on the sources, or the documents themselves, he proposes to his readers a critically-informed and general exemplarity or attitude toward those sources. Pasquier thus pioneered in creating Medievalism, as well as a quasi reverence for medieval sources hitherto reserved for antique inscriptions and books. The Medieval became a place or locus for discovering moral rectitude in communities and kingdoms, not in individual heroic action. De Thou's reverence for ancient laws and customs was very strong. History constituted the principle with which to resist change and decay. Pasquier and de Thou probably would never be quite satisfied with a Quintilianesque exemplarity. For me, caution, and still more caution, must be the rule at this point.

When de Thou recounts all the attempts by a Bordeaux magistrate, de la Chassagne, to curb physical and political violence during the "troubles" of 1548, and when he narrates Bodin's failure, after great effort, to restore order and to impede civil war through his engagement in the Estates-General of 1588, de Thou may be exploring the possibilities of negative exemplarity, Erasmian-inspired perhaps. The actions of these magistrates were heroic in their failure. Only a hypothesis to be rejected or confirmed at this point, it would seem that, in addition to his unreserved praise for the learned, de Thou may recognize worthy actions and lofty harangues, but without elevating historical figures as examples. His father was certainly the heroic magistrate in the son's eyes, but the former suffered defeat and humiliation in Parlement and at the hands of royal councilors. ⁽⁵⁾

*     *     *

I shall not quote lengthy passages to support my comments. I shall provide brief phrases from the London 1733 edition, to help readers locate the passages in question. My approach has obvious weaknesses. Lacunae are inevitable. If de Thou comments on French laws and institutions in, say, a book on Ottoman history, I will miss it.

Of the research on "law in so and so or such and such," Michele Duco's "La Réflexion sur le droit dans les Annales [Tacitus] et son influence," in Caesorodunum, bulletin de l'Institut des Études latines de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines d'Orléans-Tours, 26 bis (1992), pp. 117-25, is the most formal and least anachronistic that I have come across.

The other recent work that provides just the right level of interpretation in the field of studies of historical thought, is Amy C. Graves, "L'art du portrait chez J.-A. de Thou," in F. Lestringant, ed., Cahiers V.L. Saulnier, 24 (2007), pp. 127-42.

Notes:

1. Twenty-five years earlier, J. Dewald constructed a similar perspective in "The Perfect Magistrate ...," Archives for Reformation History, 67 (1976): 284-300.

2. The tendency to reduce an individual's life, thought, and activities to one profession or activity, brings back the amusing memory of a CMR 17 banquet at the Palais du Pharo in Marseille. André Bourde was entertaining us all by playing a harpsichord and singing popular songs in Provençal. One of his colleagues who was sitting near me (his name will go unmentioned) literally expostulated: "Enfin, il faut qu'il se décide d'être soit historien soit musicien; on ne peut pas faire les deux!"

3. For scholars who might think Kantorowicz's outdated, see M.-F. Renoux-Zagamé, Du droit de Dieu au droit de l'homme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003); et J. Krynen, L'État de justice, France, XIII^e-XX^e siècles ... (Paris: Gallimard, 2009).

4. Marie Houllemare argues that the foundation of law in history ended in relativism, Politique de la parole (Geneva: Droz, 2011), p. 248.

5. Thanks to Samuel Kinser's work, it is possible to follow the shifts in the placement of the Vita and Preface in the various editions of the History. I will follow the order in the London edition of 1733, which means that after the Dedication I shall turn to Book VII, 12, for the Preface, before starting with Book I. De Thou's original plan was to place the Preface before the Dedication, as would be the case in the fourth edition (Kinser, p. 64). Again, as in all of de Thou, one is never quite certain of respecting his intentions. Indeed, with so many changes, not only the ones made by de Thou himself, but also those of his friends and publishers, the original Foucault question about what an author is, seems malposée.