Images of Kingship in Early Modern France

Louis XI in Political Thought, 1560-1789

Adrianna E. Bakos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136191978
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Louis XI, known as "The Spider King" because he wove many intricate plots, lives on in popular imagination primarily as a villain and a cruel, cunning, rather unscrupulous character. Absolutists fled to his banner whilst constitutionalists reviled him as a rapacious totalitarian murderer. In Images of Kingship in Early Modern France, Adrianna Bakos uses the changing nature of Louis XI's historical reputation to explore the intellectual and political climate of early modern France.
Using Louis XI's historical reputation as a prism for fresh investigation, Adrianna Bakos offers new, more complex interpretations of the ideological landscape of early modern France. Images of Kingship in Early Modern France is an important contribution to European historiography and to debates on historical versus political interpretations of Kingship.

Part I

“Le roi hors de page”

Solon used to say that speech was the image of actions … that laws were like cobwebs, – for that if any trifling or powerless thing fell into them, they held it fast; while if it were something weightier, it broke through them and was off.

(Diogenes Laertius, Solon, Book X)

1 The architect of tyranny

It is a truism that people feel compelled, both in their personal lives and collectively as a society, to fashion and refashion the past to meet the requirements of the present. In France, such a need was most keenly felt during the tumultuous era of the French Religious Wars, when the only solution to the deepening chaos seemed to lie in a return to a glorious French past. Intensified interest in the origin and evolution of the French monarchy, coupled with the scholarly efforts of legal humanists to discover the roots of French law, contributed to the emergence of the historical and evidential sensibility considered central to “modern” historiography.¹

The sixteenth-century interest in the original form of the French monarchy, its “ancient constitution,” has received considerable attention from historians, although the French side has never elicited the same sustained study that English historians have devoted to the ancient constitution in early Stuart England.² Two things seem apparent from a comparative examination of the French and English contexts. First, John Pocock, and more recently and emphatically Glen Burgess, have stressed the early Stuart vision of the English constitution as a living thing. The ancient constitution, although immemorial, evolved in tandem with the changing circumstances of the commonwealth, always perfectly suited to the English people. New or modified customs could be accommodated without altering the fundamental nature of the constitution. In contrast, French writers such as François Hotman and Theodore Beza possessed a much more static interpretation of the French constitution. These authors acknowledged that changes had taken place over the centuries since the days of Clovis, most notably the institutional alterations that had accompanied the transfer of authority from the Merovingians to the Carolingians and later to the Capetians. They nevertheless insisted not only on an awareness of origins but also on an outright return to the institutions that were the concrete manifestation of the original constitution. For them, change to a great degree equalled perversion and degeneration.

Second, and more important, if the view taken by most English historians is correct, contemporary ideas about the ancient constitution were distinct from a vision of popular sovereignty based upon natural rights theories.³ In France, on the other hand, the two visions were much more closely connected, even mutually reinforcing. Although André Lemaire has asserted that François Hotman’s Francogallia formed a turning point at which time the emphasis on an ancient constitution gave way to the discussion of more abstract notions of natural rights, I would argue that, for Hotman, Beza and other resistance theorists, arguments based on universalist pleas for the existence of natural rights were always balanced with an attention to and exposition of the particularities of French constitutional origins.⁴ It does seem that throughout the course of the seventeenth century we do see a drift away from an interest in the ancient constitution in favour of positions predicated upon reason and natural rights. Critics of Louis XIV, such as the anonymous author of Les soupirs de la France esclave, preferred to characterize absolute monarchy as an illegitimate form of government per se rather than as a deviation from established customary relationships. By the eighteenth century, however, in the form of the well-known thèse royale/thèse nobiliaire controversy, writers once again wedded arguments concerning sovereignty based upon natural rights with renewed attention to, one might say obsession with, the excavation of the French past.

Louis XI is central to all of these discussions. Even during the seventeenth century, when polemicists such as the author of Les soupirs, and more temperate voices like that of Fénelon, tried to construct reasoned arguments transcending a limited French context, frequent references to Louis XI can be found. The ubiquitous appearance in these works of Louis XI, as well as other figures from the French past, testifies to the consistent and profound importance of historical example not just as diverting anecdote but as critically bracing support for their arguments. Throughout these shifts of emphasis, the use of Louis XI remains a constant weapon in the battle against absolutist ideology. Louis XI functions not merely as an illustrative example of the inherent flaws of monarchical government; he is the usurper, the diabolical perverter of the French constitution. He is, paradoxically, both cause and effect; simultaneously an agent of cataclysmic change and the monstrous creation of a people that has shirked both its rights and its responsibilities as a sovereign community. In the next three chapters we will explore how images of Louis XI amplify arguments based on the ancient constitution, on natural rights and on some melding of the two.

The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which began on 24 August 1572, stands out as one of the most important events of early modern French history.⁵ The massacre is generally believed to occupy a pivotal position in the history of French political thought,⁶ and indeed Louis XI receives his harshest criticism from polemicists moved by the horrors of the weeks following the assassination of Admiral Coligny, the leader of the Huguenots, on 24 August. I have chosen to begin my examination of the historical reputation of Louis XI with the cataclysm of St Bartholomew’s Day because I firmly believe that the massacre, and the French religious wars in general, caused a bifurcation of traditional political theory into two clearly defined and opposing camps of constitutionalism and absolutism. Obviously political treatises were produced between 1516, when Seyssel published La Monarchie de France, and the outbreak of the religious wars in 1562, and several of these do mention Louis XI, but the portraits they draw lack the passionate rage or admiration found in works produced during the tumultuous decades after 1560. This moderate appraisal of Louis XI in the first half of the sixteenth century corresponds, I would argue, with a corpus of political thought which, for all its internal gradations, possesses a unity and cohesiveness that was effectively and irrevocably shattered by civil war. Although regalians like Charles de Grassaille and Jean Ferrault emphasized the expansiveness of royal authority, while Etienne Pasquier and Bernard du Haillan stressed the importance of consultative governmental institutions such as the Parlement of Paris and the estates general, all of these individuals believed that monarchical limitation and monarchical authority formed two halves of an organic whole.⁷ After the outbreak of the religious wars, and more particularly after the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, this whole was torn asunder so violently that limitation and authority could never again fit comfortably together.

The murder of Coligny and other Huguenot leaders was made pathetically easy by their presence in the capital for the wedding of Henri de Navarre and Marguerite de Valois, the sister of Charles IX. This fact was not lost on the Huguenot writers. It led many of them to believe, as did the author of Le Reveille Matin, that the massacre was in fact a premeditated plan fully endorsed by the king.⁸ It was speculated that the plan for the elimination of the Huguenots had been formulated as early as 1565 when Catherine de Médicis met with the Duke of Alva at Bayonne.⁹ Whether or not the massacre was premeditated, the results were the same: about 3,000 Huguenots were murdered in Paris and 10,000 in the provinces.¹⁰ This already lamentably high figure was inflated by Huguenot writers to more than 100,000, thus endowing the massacre with apocalyptic proportions.¹¹ The magnitude of the event impelled Huguenot writers to renew their polemic against the government, specifically against the Guisard manipulation of royal policy.

The St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre ushered in a new phase in French political theory, since the Huguenot works produced after the massacre exhibited a radical new posture.¹² The tone of Huguenot polemic sharpened; the commitment to institutional checks on the crown was now unswerving. The recognition that the estates general could well function in this capacity was not, however, new. Well before 1572, the estates general had become the focus of Huguenot hopes for governmental reform. This is certainly not surprising given that, at the estates general of 1560 and 1561, both the second and third estates did seem inclined to endorse toleration.¹³ Among works of the 1560s calling for the assembly of the estates, two stand out both in terms of the vehemence with which they expounded the need to assemble the estates, and the connection made between the support for the estates and the denigration of Louis XI. The emphasis on the estates general, not coincidentally coupled with vigorous attacks on Louis XI, I would argue, marks a dramatic shift away from the sort of political literature produced before the outbreak of war.

The first of these two anonymous works, the De la Necessité d’assembler les Estats is actually a short pamphlet composed of extracts from other sources extolling the virtues of the estates general. The first extract is from Book 5, Chapter 18 of Philippe de Commynes’s Mémoires. This chapter is the one most often cited by sixteenth-century writers searching for statements on the desirability and indeed necessity of holding frequent meetings of the estates. By isolating Commynes’s opinions about the value of the estates from the corpus of the Mémoires, this short extract grossly distorts his general views about the limitations on kingship. The characterization of Commynes in this pamphlet is consistent with that of most other sixteenth-century authors: he is perceived as a forerunner of the Huguenot brand of constitutionalism.¹⁴ The extract includes the famous rhetorical question posed by Commynes: “Was there ever a king or lord on the earth who had the power, outside his domain, of levying one denier on his subjects without permission and consent of those who had to pay it, except by tyranny and violence?”¹⁵ The work also includes an extensive quotation taken from later in the chapter where Commynes argues against those who say that it is lèse majesté to speak of assembling the estates.¹⁶ The Huguenot writers derive from this passage an endorsement of institutional checks on the crown. Although originally deployed by the Huguenots, Commynes’s view on the estates makes its way into the absolutist arsenal by way of Gentillet and Bodin. These authors agree that calling for the convocation of the estates general is not an act of lèse majesté, although their reasons are wholly different from those of their opponents. Absolutists argued that calling for the estates general did not undermine the authority of the crown since that body only served to enhance the king’s power and prestige through the process of supplications.¹⁷ The tactic of reinvesting examples and primary material used by one’s opponents with a directly contrasting meaning was common among early modern writers of all political stripes. Charting such semantic inversions, especially those surrounding Louis XI, whose complex personality and chaotic reign supplied just the sort of material needed for these manipulations of meaning, provides us with invaluable information about the ebb and flow of early modern political discourse.

The other two extracts which make up the rest of the pamphlet are from the speech of Charles de Marillac, Archbishop of Vienne, to the court at Fontainebleau in August of 1560, and Michel de L’Hôpital’s address to the estates general assembled at Orléans in 1561. In Marillac’s speech, utility appears to be the main consideration. If the people are not succoured they will become desperate and will then more willingly listen to the words of seditious men.¹⁸ On the other hand, L’Hôpital’s address emphasizes the more positive aspect of how the calling of the estates facilitates the administering of the realm.¹⁹ Together, the three extracts provide the spectrum of arguments about why the estates general should be called. The importance of the work lies in the implicit association of the estates with Louis XI through the inclusion of the extract from Commynes. The Huguenots writing after 1572 create out of this connection an inverse relationship between the estates and Louis XI, wherein the more the former is elevated, the more completely the latter is condemned.

The anonymous Mémoires des occasions de la guerre, appellee le Bien-Public (1567) contributes in no small measure to the development of this inverse relationship between the estates general and Louis XI. Like De la Necessité d’assembler les Estats, it calls for the holding of an assembly as imperative for the welfare of the realm, but the argument in the Mémoires des occasions is constructed in a manner far more detrimental to Louis XI’s historical reputation. Drawing on a number of different contemporary and near-contemporary accounts, the writer describes the events surrounding the so-called War of the Public Weal. According to the author France had been in a similar situation, a century earlier, to the one in which she found herself in the 1560s; reform of the administration was needed in order to preserve the health of the commonwealth. In 1465, the princes and great lords of the realm met secretly to discuss the “plaintes et doléances” which had been communicated to them. They decided to take up arms to force Louis XI to call an assembly of the estates:

as that [thing] which at all times before had been the only and sovereign remedy for public disorder in the kingdom and which alone had the right and authority to cure such disorder, the monarchy of France having been from the beginning tempered by the authority of the nobility, and the communities of the provinces and great towns of this kingdom.²⁰

The work contains as strong a statement about the sovereignty of the estates as any found in the works of the writers after 1572: “In effect, the issue is nothing else but that the king, no matter how great, aged, shrewd and well-advised he is, must submit himself to this assembly.”²¹ In order to bring the rebellion of the nobles to an end, Louis XI agreed to the appointment of thirty-six commissioners who were called “les Reformateurs du Bien Public.” It seems apparent that the author chose the events surrounding the War of the Public Weal to support his assertions about the necessity of holding estates precisely because of Louis XI’s reputation as a strong-willed, politically shrewd monarch. If a king with Louis’s noted disregard for counsel could be induced to call the estates and agree to the formation of a council of thirty-six deputies, then the assembly could be said to have had an entrenched place in the constitution which could not be denied even by the most wilful of monarchs.²²

At first it seems paradoxical that the author would present Louis XI in an almost laudatory light, writing of the king’s greatness and sagacity. Yet the very fact that Louis XI was loath to call the estates but felt compelled to do so by the force of circumstance only serves to strengthen the author’s arguments regarding the importance of the institution. The reputed unwillingness of Louis XI to share his authority is thus powerfully juxtaposed with his ultimate reliance on the estates general. In other words, by elevating Louis XI, the author is also enhancing the prestige of the estates, since such a great prince was willing to acknowledge the necessity of holding an assembly in order to reform the realm.

If this argument had been sustained throughout the work, perhaps Louis XI would have been judged less harshly by later writers. The author changes tactics, however, when he discusses how Loui...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: “le roi araignée”
• Part I “Le roi hors de page”
• Part II “Le plus sage de nos roys”
• Part III “Le roi à cheval”
• Epilogue: “le roi bourgeois”
• Appendix: chronological list of works referring to Louis XI, 1560–1795
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index