The
Ranums'
Panat Times
Volume 1, redone Dec. 2014
Jacques-Auguste de Thou: Taking off the Toga
II A: Searching for legal perspectives
in de Thou's dedication to Henry IV
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
With just that Montaigne-like mixture of directness, modesty, and claims to not seeking gloire, Jacques-Auguste de Thou addresses his king in the first person: "I." A shift to the impersonal third person, "he," occurs when he says that the first law of history is to express nothing false, and to speak only the truth (At enim cum haec prima sit lex historiae nequid falsi dicere audeat, deinde ne qui veri non audeat: [London, 1733], the Dedication, p. 2, par. 2).
While there still are scholars who scoff at the use of commonplaces by Renaissance historians, the recent studies by Ann Blair, Francis Goyet, and Ann Moss generally propose that as a way of thinking, analyzing, and arguing, the use of loci by the great minds of the sixteenth century yielded really remarkable works of savoir. Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature (Princeton, 1997); Francis Goyet, Le Sublime du lieu commun (Paris, 1996); and Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace Books (Oxford, 1996).
Our first thought on reading this "first law," is that it is among the many commonplaces belonging to the rhetoric that framed early-modern historical thought, as Anthony Grafton characterizes it in his What was History? (Cambridge, 2007). But the term "first law" prompts second thoughts. We begin to ponder about possible scientific claims, or to wonder if de Thou is not simply extending his legal professionalism into an arts-of-history frame where the emphasis is as much on nothing-false as on only-truth.
In the collections of early-modern commonplaces, the first law of history may possibly be found. I do not know. The origins and use of the phrase may be less interesting than the fact that, as we shall see, de Thou elaborates his preface from beginning to end, with the term "law" shifting from history to French law.
And as for how to practice (my word here!) historical thinking and writing, de Thou proposes what good judges do when they deliberate on the lives and the property of individuals.
Thus when we came to write this history, we did exactly as good judges ought to do when they weigh the lives and fortunes of men, diligently examining our consciences to whether anything was treated bitterly such as to push us away from the straight path with respect to the precept of the work .... Finally I have settled on a naked and simple style of writing, so that, as it were, even as by my very style I might keep free of all pretense and ostentation, so might I also [refrain] from hatred and gratitude (Historia, as quoted by J. Parsons, The Church in the Republic [Washington, 2004], p. 91; his translation with the help of Sylvia Parsons).
For any reader of de Thou, the analogy between writing history and judging is the only part of this passage that is straightforward! We must be cautious about characterizing this discourse as judicial (it is an analogy).
But the main point is that, in history writing, de Thou relies on fact (see Barbara Shapiro, The Culture of Fact (Ithaca, 2000), not on reasoning by juxtaposing commonplaces or by ordering facts under commonplaces. His thought is not dialectical. A side bar is in order at this point. On his announced principal theme (Preface) that the use of physical force, even by legitimate governments, to exterminate heterodoxy does not work, de Thou says that it is experience that permits him to conclude as such. Many sixteenth-century readers would recall at this point the very difficult-to-elucidate claims for learning by experience in the Essays of Montaigne, a fellow robin. In chapter III, 13, Montaigne says a great deal about law and then turns to a very personal comment on what experience has taught him about his own body, taste, and so forth.
For readers of history, there might have been another echo from an earlier text, notably Commynes, book 2, chapter 6:
Et si me semble, à ce que j'ay veu par [experience] en ce monde, où j'ay esté l'espace de dix-huyt ans ou plus ayant clere congnoissance des plus grandes et secretes matieres qui se soient traictées en ce royaulme de France et seigneuries voisines ... (Mémoires de Philippe de Commynes (Paris, 1901), vol. 1, p. 133).
For political history to lay claim to being true, the writer must have proximity to the prince. The skepticism expressed by historians in more recent centuries is so often centered on the written history itself, not on the historian who lacks access to state papers, as La Popelinière and Retz noted (see above, my Introduction).
In de Thou's brief exploration of the history of the Early Church, he finds that while there were heretics and divisions, the resort to physical violence to enforce orthodoxy did not work. With the past assessed in a precedentalist mode, de Thou then turns to the history of his own times and gives the facts, allowing the reader to judge for himself. This symmetry of the historian as judge and his readers as judges is Bodinian, as Marie-Dominique Couzinet has shown in Histoire et méthode de la Renaissance (Paris, 1996), p. 135ff, with an extended genealogy going back to numerous antique historians and to de Thou's friend, Guy du Faur de Pibrac.
Before making his peroration about divine justice, justice, and the idealized panegyrical model of Henry's roles as law-giver and law-enforcer, de Thou inveighs against vice, traffic in offices, failing to compensate merit, and failure to appoint the pious, the disinterested, and the virtuous to positions of service in the state. Reference to shameful profiting and avarice may certainly be found in numerous non-parlementaire texts, but the judges' voices were often heard in these themes. The Ciceronian resonances are very strong (see Goyet, p. 113).
When de Thou writes of the liberties, immunities, laws, and privileges that constitute the state, the implication is that all these must be respected so that there will be order in the monarchy and gloire for the king.
The first-person voice returns very strongly when de Thou reminds Henry of his father's, his grandfather's, and his great-grandfather's probity and their faith in the "ancient religion." This synthesis of patriotism, dynasties both royal and robe, and the laws that derive from God, can provide peace and security. As a pendant to the first law of history, comes the maxim that law is the source of strength for the state.
Prior to making his own profession of faith, de Thou reminds the king that twenty-two years have passed since they first met; the implication is not only that de Thou has faithfully served, but also that the authority of his pen is sustained by that service. His confession of faith takes the form of a spare credo regarding the three persons of the Trinity, and a prayer for the conservation of the king himself, and of the Dauphin.
Any study of de Thou's Preface might well begin with what he does not say, and of what he asserts has obtained in France since the beginning of the reign. But that is another subject.
In the Vita (p. 419), de Thou remarks that "le mot 'testa' n'a pas chez nos Gascons le même sens qu'en latin." Although he does not seem to confront formally the debates about langue naturelle, the "decay" of Latin and the "creation" of French, de Thou gives every indication that he wished to do everything possible to slow down, if not reverse change. He passionately disliked "nouveautés," but unlike some of the great jurists, and Montaigne, he did not express skepticism about there being too many laws, nor think of Roman law as inherently a harbinger of tyranny. His Atticism might have been considered unacceptable by Asianists, but it was not as radical as that of some jurists. His father's work on "editing" French customary law may have given Jacques-Auguste an anchor in the stormy seas of linguistic debate in the sixteenth century. History, always and ever history, would be his answer to numerous skepticisms. In choosing to write the history of his own times, he could bracket or avoid numerous thorny topics involving the relation between language and law. His History in Latin is an effort to convey a synthesis of the recent past to all who belonged to the republic of letters in Europe, and indeed in the world. The overlap between that republic and the emerging corps of learned diplomats and councilors to governments and to the grands is manifest in de Thou's celebration of robin virtue and erudition. In Weberian terms, de Thou believed in knowledge's power to legitimate individuals, and collectively, governments. He did not consider learned the people who wrote monkish Latin and held the discipline of theology to be a sufficient program for action in the world. While she might not agree with my broad-brush intellectual portrait of de Thou on language, it has been Marie-Luce Demonet's work that has inspired it. See her "Langue naturelle chez Pasquier et Montaigne," Histoire et littérature au siècle de Montaigne: Mélanges offerts à Claude-Gilbert Dubois, ed. F. Argot-Dutard (Geneva, 2001), pp. 207-20. She cites very important articles by D. Kelley, C.-G. Dubois, et al.
My inability to read de Thou's Latin requires me to search for legal culture in the 1734 Paris translation, the only one available to me in Baltimore. To mitigate the dangers that befall anyone who reads this faulty work, throughout what follows I am supplying references to the Carte Latin edition (London, 1733). Readers therefore can quickly turn to the best general edition until such a time as a definitive new edition shall appear.
Given the weaknesses of the French translation, I shall refrain from close readings of any and all passages that express legal culture in one manner or another. Here and there I also add odd bits of fact that frame some of the more general themes in the History. At first I made excerpts from the Latin, but this quickly became too lengthy, and not particularly useful without contexts. My original plan had been to continue all the way to Book LXXX, the last one published in de Thou's lifetime. The Hopkins library only had 7 of the 16 volumes of the 1734 London edition; thus at this point I shall not be going beyond Book LXIV (1577).
These limitations may have major consequences for the whole project: 1) I shall not be able to measure, in general terms, whether de Thou's attention to legal matters remains the same throughout the History; and 2) at this point the question cannot be answered of whether he interpreted the later civil wars as a breakdown of institutional-legal framework so dear to the robins. In any event, what follows carries us beyond issues of style, to issues of content. As a coda, I shall informally explore some contemporary histories, with a view toward answering the question of whether de Thou's History is more legal-cultural than are, say, Agrippa d'Aubigné's or Pierre Mathieu's.