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• Message-Id: <199612171917.TAA14468@brookes.ac.uk>
• Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 09:30:42 -0500
• From: Jim Farr <jrfarr@purdue.edu>
• Subject: BOOK REVIEW: Denault on Baumgartner, _France in the 16th c._

>From: mcarley@ccs.carleton.ca (Michael Carley)
>Subject: BOOK REVIEW: Denault on Baumgartner, _France in the 16th c._
>To: jrfarr@purdue.edu (james r. farr)
>Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 18:10:07 -0500 (EST)
>Cc: revised@h-net.msu.edu (h-net revised reviews)
>
>
>Please note that the author's comment follows the review.
>
>M. J. Carley
>book review editor
>H-France
>____________________________________
>Frederic J. Baumgartner, _France in the Sixteenth
>Century_. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995.  xvi + 352
>pp.  Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, & index.
>$45.00 US (cloth), ISBN 0-312-09965-7; $18.95 US (paper),
>ISBN 0-312-15856-4.
>
>Review by Gerard F. Denault, Harvard University, for H-
>France, December 1996.
>
>In _France in the Sixteenth Century_, Frederic J.
>Baumgartner provides a clear, readable narrative of the
>130 years that he defines as the "long sixteenth
>century".  The writing is crisp, fast-paced, and
>informative, and the presentation is informed by the
>needs and interests of the classroom.  Although he
>indicates in his Introduction that he has organized his
>book along the lines of corporative institutions and
>groups such as lawyers and artisanal guilds, Baumgartner
>refers primarily, in fact, to the traditional orders, or
>estates.
>
>                  The history is divided into three main
>sections of six chapters; the Introduction adds a seventh
>chapter to the first section as the Epilogue adds a
>seventh to the last.  Because Baumgartner believes that
>the personalities of the monarchs in sixteenth-century
>France were of tremendous importance, the initial chapter
>of each section traces the acts of individual kings and
>their governments.  Although the influences of Anne de
>Beaujeu and Catherine de Medici are noted, this study
>concentrates on them much less than have previous
>histories.(1)
>
>                  The first section deals with the years
>from 1484 to 1530, and can be characterized by the title
>of its first chapter, "The Monarchy: Ascendant".  The
>subsequent chapter titles provide a thumbnail sketch of
>their contents: "The Church: Unchallenged", "The
>Nobility: Contented", "The People: 'The very hens are
>safe from violence!'", "Justice: 'The Most Worthy of
>Virtues'", and "Culture and Thought: A Bursting Forth".
>The reputations of monarchs whose chief role was to
>provide justice and thereby to maintain order were
>increased by peace and prosperity.  Their reputations
>were also increased by the glorious pageant that was the
>French Renaissance.
>
>                  The true "Glory of the French
>Renaissance" blossomed between 1530 and 1562: Francois
>Rabelais, Pierre de Ronsard and the _Pleiade_, and the
>Loire _chateaux_.  Baumgartner narrates a solid tale of
>cultural achievement including a nuanced updating of art
>history.(2)  During these same years, however, France
>witnessed the birth of the problems that would dominate
>the remainder of the century.  The continued war against
>Charles V led not only to defeat but to financial
>distress for the royal government.  The result was a
>larger royal debt and increased taxes.  Who would pay?
>As Baumgartner notes, recent analysis suggests that the
>tax-exempt nobles remained in a good financial position,
>but that they were anxious about their position and their
>ability to remain free of taxation.  The clergy was
>threatened both by Protestantism and by the efforts of
>the nobles and the Third Estate at the end of these years
>to have the clergy sell some of its landholdings to solve
>the government's financial difficulties.  Inflation hit
>the artisans the hardest because of the strict control of
>their wages.  Urban and rural unrest resumed.  France's
>population was greater than ever before, and there was
>not enough grain to feed the people.  After Henry II's
>fatal injury at the tournament celebrating peace in 1559,
>the quick succession of his three young sons to the
>throne led to a protracted struggle for position, power,
>and influence.
>
>                  The third section presents the "short
>sixteenth century", the one that inspired Baumgartner's
>own dissertation.(3)  Baumgartner describes France on
>March 1, 1562, as a country ready for anarchy.  Francois
>de Guise's slaughter of the Huguenots at their
>conventicle in Vassy was simply the spark that set France
>ablaze; another incident would have provoked the time of
>troubles if this had not occurred.  Why?  In the previous
>thirty years, the great court nobles had formed factions,
>as their position and power became linked to royal favor
>and royal favorites.  Court factions became linked to
>religious factions.  The Catholic clergy remained corrupt
>and left itself open to criticism.  Financial burdens
>increased for the tax-paying Third Estate, as warfare
>continued to drain the treasury and continued to inspire
>financial expedients. Magistrates, tainted by heresy and
>venality, were less able to inspire belief in the
>equity of royal justice.
>
>                  The chapter titles again reveal the
>main lines of Baumgartner's interpretation.(4)  The
>chapter on culture and thought is subtitled "On to
>Classicism", and it summarizes the thrust of the
>presentation.  The first five chapters--"The Monarchy:
>Order Out of Anarchy", "The Church Tempered and
>Strengthened", "The Nobility: A Return to Arms", "The
>People: Depression, Devastation, and Recovery", and
>"Justice: The Bulwark of Absolutism"--provide the
>itinerary.  Baumgartner credits Henry IV with returning
>to the process of strengthening the monarchy after the
>interlude created by the sudden death of Henry II and the
>reigns of his three sons.  Through the programs that
>Henry IV initiated between the peace of 1598 and his
>assassination in 1610, Henry IV effected "subtle
>enhancements of royal authority", which had precedents in
>the reigns of Francis I and Henry II.(5)
>
>                  The Wars of Religion forced the Church
>to compete with the Huguenots for the minds and bodies of
>the French. The hierarchy organized itself through the
>Assemblies of the Clergy to resist raids on its wealth
>and authority and to gain royal favor through
>cooperation.(6)  The resumption of warfare permitted
>nobles to take up their military profession.  In fact,
>the new technology of firearms, by diminishing the
>usefulness of armor and permitting lighter horses,
>enabled poorer nobles, hitherto excluded from warfare by
>the high cost of armor, to return to the battlefield.(7)
>But the nobles continued to feel that their place in
>society was threatened.  The people suffered disruption
>and inflation in the years between 1562 and 1614.
>Commerce was interrupted, prices rose, and the towns were
>not always supplied with wheat.  Some French workers even
>emigrated to Spain in search of better conditions.  In
>literature, Ronsard's lyric poetry was replaced with a
>utilitarian proto-scientific literature heralding the
>work of Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal.  The highly
>individualized products of Mannerist art and architecture
>were replaced by the more stylized Classical. The
>investigations of legal, historical, and social writers
>of the mid-century were replaced by Charles Loyseau's
>attempt to reintegrate, describe, and define the laws
>governing contemporary society.(8)  Baumgartner concludes
>that the magistrates had become more committed and
>effective servants of the monarchy as a consequence of
>the Wars of Religion.
>
>                    Has anything been lost through
>Baumgartner's perspective of 130 years?  I believe that
>his treatment of the period 1562-1614 highlights a
>weakness in this vision.  Although the royal claims of
>both Francis I and Henry IV are described as traditional,
>over fifty years of violence and argumentation separated
>the two reigns, the two rulers, and their publicists.
>During these years several alternative interpretations of
>the French polity, society, law, and history were
>presented.  Even the argument for the traditional,
>hereditary monarchy was modified to criticize the
>person of the monarch and to justify the withdrawal of
>obedience.  The sixteenth century witnessed the creation
>of the myth of the Carolingians supplanting the _rois
>faineants_ (their do-nothing, idle Merovingian
>predecessors), the myth of the oath of the Aragonese, and
>references to French kings who undermined their own rule
>by failing to render justice.(9)
>
>               How anomalous was the "short sixteenth
>century" in the history of the development of the Ancien
>Regime?  What contributions did these fifty years make to
>French history?  Did resistance theory disappear from
>French political thought entirely between 1596 and 1648?
>Were there any elements that persisted?  We know that
>political Machiavellism, another strain of thought during
>these 50 years, had an interesting subsequent
>history.(10)  Baumgartner certainly does not ignore these
>questions, but he does devote less attention to them than
>would many other _seiziemistes_.
>
>                  The book contains a few minor
>blemishes.  The copyediting of the book is deficient.
>Among several errors, the following stand out: on p. 126,
>the reader is startled to read that Henry II, having been
>injured in a tournament on June 30, 1559, died on July
>10, 1557; something is missing on p. 233 before the word
>"crues; the term _haute-bourgeois_ (p. 27) joins a
>feminine adjective to a masculine noun.
>
>                  I also have minor criticisms on two
>substantive issues.  First, Baumgartner investigates the
>process of recording customs with great clarity (pp.
>84-85), and he notes that the redacted customs remained
>in effect as recorded until the French Revolution.  He
>fails to mention that the customs of some areas were
>collected and recorded several times--hence changed.
>Similarly, although his discussion of the impact of Roman
>Law in France is useful, any brief discussion of this
>complex topic can be misleading.  Although Roman law was
>studied in French universities, for example, French
>legists generally held that the authority of Roman law in
>France was itself that of customary law.  Where the local
>custom was deficient, the text of the written Roman law
>could be invoked to help interpret it.  The extent to
>which Roman law was accepted in filling out local custom
>varied considerably from one locality to another.
>Although it is a meaningful generalization to speak of
>_pays du droit ecrit_ and _pays du droit coutumier_,
>describing France divided east to west into areas of
>_droit coutumier_ and _droit ecrit_ fosters expectations
>of uniformity that did not exist.  In addition to
>geography, the history of a locality and the intellectual
>background of the royal agents who collected the local
>custom played an important role in defining the role
>assigned to Roman law in the local custom.(11)
>
>                  Despite these reservations, I must
>reiterate that Baumgartner has provided an extremely
>clear, readable text for middle-level courses that
>introduce sixteenth-century France.  Not only is it the
>only text in print devoted solely to this period of
>French history, but it is a very serviceable one.
>Baumgartner's honesty leads him to question his own
>interpretations and to provide guidance on opposing views
>through his bibliographic references.  Although the
>conclusion that "The society and government that would be
>destroyed by the French Revolution was already mostly in
>place in 1614" (p. 314) remains arguable, the study's
>method and insight open a wide vista to student inquiry.
>
>               What is needed is a more unified
>interpretation of sixteenth-century France.  Generally,
>studies of specific events and personalities have been
>situated in either a "short sixteenth century" dominated
>by the Wars of Religion or a "long sixteenth century"
>tracing the building of the "New", administrative, or
>judicial monarchy.  Sixteenth-century France holds a
>specific, definable location in the web of history;
>historians should take greater pains to acknowledge and
>identify this location in both their research and
>teaching.  Although Baumgartner makes progress in
>achieving this goal, his initial caution that he is
>dealing with the "long sixteenth century" forewarns the
>reader that he has not produced a completely integrated
>narrative.
>_______________________________
>Footnotes
>
>1. The emphasis put on Catherine's role by J. E. Neale,
>_The Age of Catherine de Medici_  (New York, 1962; 1943)
>and Jean Orieux, _Catherine de Medecis_  (Paris, 1986) is
>not present in Baumgartner's work.  Anne de Beaujeu's
>role is emphasized in Paul Pelicier, _Essai sur le
>gouvernement de la dame de Beaujeu, 1483-1491_
>(Chartres, 1882).
>
>2. On architecture, Baumgartner replaces the traditional
>succession of Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque, and
>Classical styles with the newer interpretation that in
>France the impact of Renaissance art and architecture was
>always somewhat different.  The persistence of Gothic
>elements symbolized not backwardness but the merging of
>Renaissance and Gothic in the new Mannerist style, the
>precursor to the French Classical style.  The studies he
>cites nuance the more traditional interpretations such as
>Wylie Sypher, _Four Stages in Renaissance Style_  (Garden
>City, 1955).
>
>3. Frederic J. Baumgartner, _Radical Reactionaries: The
>Political Thought of the French Catholic League_
>(Geneva, 1976).
>
>4. Baumgartner's interpretation is not new in its basic
>elements.  Older texts were directed by a similar vision;
>for example, see:  Donald Stone, Jr. _France in the
>Sixteenth Century, A Medieval Society Transformed_
>(Englewood Cliffs, 1969) or Albert Guerard, _France in
>the Classical Age: The Life and Death of an Ideal_  (New
>York, 1928).  Baumgartner uses recent scholarship to
>modify and to improve this approach.
>
>5. In _L"Assassinat d'Henri IV_  (Paris, 1964), Roland
>Mousnier notes that by 1610, Henry's policies had
>stimulated opposition among many political factions.
>Henry's government had not solved the problems facing
>France.  But the assassination itself created the myth of
>Henry IV, and the myth strengthened the religion of
>kingship.
>
>6. See Frederic J. Baumgartner, _Change and Continuity in
>the French Episcopate: The Bishops and the Wars of
>Religion, 1547-1610_  (Durham, 1986).
>
>7. For a further elaboration, see Frederic J.
>Baumgartner, _From Spear to Flintlock: A History of War
>in Europe and the Middle East to the French Revolution_
>(New York, 1991).
>
>8. Whether one interprets Loyseau to have been a
>sixteenth-century or a seventeenth-century theorist, it
>is clear that his three treatises were meant to define
>society around 1600.  Baumgartner, following Roland
>Mousnier and Boris Porchnev, sees this definition as a
>description; I have argued that it is prescriptive
>(Gerard F. Denault, "The Legitimation of the of the
>Parlement of Paris and the Estates General of France,
>1560-1614" [Ph.D. diss.: Washington University, 1975],
>pp. 555-576).
>
>9. Edward Peters, "_Roi Faineant_: The Origins of an
>Historian's Commonplace," _Bibliotheque d'humanisme et
>renaissance_, vol. XXX (1968), pp. 537-547.  And there is
>the much-told tale of the old woman who confronts the
>king (or Roman emperor) by the wayside asking for
>justice.  On being refused she responds, "Ne soit donc
>roi!"  See also Ralph Giesey, _If Not, Not: The Oath of
>the Aragonese and the Legendary Laws of Sobrarbe_
>(Princeton, 1968).
>
>10. Etienne Thuau, _Raison d'etat et pensee politique a
>l'epoque de Richelieu_  (Paris, 1966).
>
>11. See John Philip Dawson, _A History of Lay Judges_
>(Cambridge, 1960); John Philip Dawson, _Oracles of the
>Law_  (Ann Arbor, 1969); Rene Filhol, _le Premier
>president Christofle de Thou et la reformation des
>coutumes_  (Paris, 1937).
>
>Gerard F. Denault
>Harvard University
>gdenault@fas.harvard.edu
>
>                  Copyright (c) 1996 by H-Net.  All
>rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit
>educational use if proper credit is given to the author
>and the list.  For other permission, please contact H-
>Net@H-Net.MSU.EDU.
>
>__________________________________________
>Frederic Baumgartner comments (6 December 1996):
>
>               Making available book reviews on-line is one of the
>most useful services provided by H-France, in part for drastically
>reducing the amount of time before the review appears, but also for
>allowing the author of the book to respond immediately after the
>review.   There have been times in the past when I would have liked
>to have responded to a review of my work, but the format of the
>journal did not allow it.
>
>               Concerning Professor Denault's review of my history
>of sixteenth-century France, however, there is little in his fair
>and constructive review on which I feel a need to make any comment.
>I do feel I made it clear in the introduction that I organized the
>book around the theme of "the king in his Estate,," not the
>corporations, but it is true that the First and Second Estates were
>co-extensive with corporate bodies--the clergy and the noblesse.
>The Third, however, was a collage of corporate bodies, such as the
>urban communes.
>
>               Professor Denault raises the broader issue of how
>best to deal with the "the short sixteenth century," the era of the
>wars of religion and their aftermath.  Any effort to describe a
>period of such enormous dislocation as the religious wars will face
>a serious problem.  To concentrate on that era runs the risk of
>suggesting that France had undergone enormous change; to take the
>longer view risks under-emphasizing the extent of the social and
>political anarchy and the radicalness of the ideas which mark the
>religious wars.  I certainly would not suggest that there was a
>complete return to normalcy after 1594, but Henry IV deserves
>proper recognition, if not necessarily credit, for restoring France
>to stability with relatively little change in its social and
>political structures.  Certainly, the civil wars made a permanent
>impact on France, but I see there being essential continuity
>between the pre- and post-war eras.   I wish to thank Professor
>Denault for a thoughtful review, and I hope that many of those who
>read it will heed his advice to use the book for French history
>courses.
>
>Frederic J. Baumgartner
>University of Vermont
>highness@vtvm1.cc.vt.edu
>