Monsieur. Second Sons in the Monarchy of France, 1550–1800

Jonathan Spangler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367761943
• eBook ISBN: 9781000482904
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

For the first time, this volume brings together the history of the royal spare in the monarchy of early modern France, those younger brothers of kings known simply as 'Monsieur'.

Ranging from the Wars of Religion to the French Revolution, this comparative study examines the frustrations of four royal princes whose proximity to their older brothers gave them vast privileges and great prestige, but also placed severe limitations on their activities and aspirations. Each chapter analyses a different aspect of the lives of François, duke of Alençon, Gaston, duke of Orléans, Philippe, duke of Orléans and Louis-Stanislas, count of Provence, starting with their birth and education, their marriages and political careers, and their search for alternative expressions of power through the patronage of the arts, architecture and learning. By comparing these four lives, a powerful image emerges of a key development in the institution of modern monarchy: the transformation of the rebellious, politically ambitious prince into the loyal defender – even in disagreement – of the Crown and of the older brother who wore it.

This volume is the perfect resource for all students and scholars interested in the history of France, monarchy, early modern state building and court studies.

1

THE EVOLUTION OF FRATERNAL RELATIONS AND THE INSTITUTION OF THE APANAGE

DOI: 10.4324/9781003165897-3

There have always been stories of royal brothers in human history and mythology. The biblical story of Cain and Abel forms the core of one of the earliest Judeo-Christian beliefs: the central importance of brotherly affection in the maintenance of a well-ordered community. The rivalries between the Greek gods Zeus, Poseidon and Hades provided the plots for good storytelling but also delivered moral lessons on jealousy and trust. Fraternity, from the Latin word frater (‘brother’), was held to be one of the highest forms of honour in the Roman Republic, as recounted in the histories of Livy in the tale of Horatii, triplet warriors who fought together to defend the honour of Rome against its enemies.¹

As Classical Mediterranean republics gave way to early medieval Germanic customs of monarchy from northern Europe, moralising narratives promoting unity yield to epic conflicts between brothers, aggressive struggles for power ending in fratricide. Early Germanic tribes selected their chiefs and kings based on strength and skill rather than seniority of birth, but usually from within a pool of potentially royal candidates.² One of these tribes, the Franks, took power in Gaul in the sixth century. Their first royal dynasty, the Merovingians, were notorious for their fratricidal bloodletting – though some of the worst excesses of this come from the ambitions of royal mothers, arch-rivals Fredegund and Brunhilda, the latter of whom was finally torn to pieces by horses on orders of the former’s son, Clothar II, in 613.³ The second Frankish dynasty, the Carolingians, were not much better. Briefly unified under Charlemagne, the realm was divided again to keep the peace between his three grandsons by the Treaty of Verdun, 843, but wars soon broke out between them. Violence seemed endemic in a family-based monarchical system.

As a way of attempting to curb this violence, this struggle for power evolved in two contrasting directions as the Middle Ages progressed: partible succession and primogeniture. In the eastern parts of the Carolingian empire – what became the Holy Roman Empire and eventually the modern state of Germany – inheritance practices were guided by an egalitarian system known as ‘partible succession’, under which brothers shared their father’s inheritance equally. This pertained to thrones as well as possessions, and the result was the repeated fragmentation of several German states into smaller and smaller units. It may have been egalitarian and fair, but the resulting weak petty principalities maintained ongoing rivalries and squabbles for generations, keeping Germany from uniting into one centralised nation-state until the late nineteenth century – though whether such decentralisation was necessarily a bad thing is a topic that recently came under revision by historians of Germany.⁴ Contemporaries did see the downsides of partible inheritance: Emperor Ferdinand I in the mid-sixteenth century is said to have expressed the opinion that it is better to have many daughters than many sons because alliances and friendships can be formed through the marriage of daughters, whereas sons tear countries apart through the division of estates.⁵ Partition did not necessarily bring domestic harmony, as lamented by Duke Břetislav I of Bohemia on his deathbed in 1055:

five sons have been granted to me by God. It does not seem to be expedient to divide the realm of Bohemia among them, because every realm divided against itself will be ruined. Proven examples testify to us that from the origin of the world…friendship between brothers has been rare.⁶

The second system for deciding royal successions to emerge in the Middle Ages was primogeniture. This system was developed primarily in the western Frankish kingdom (modern France) as a way of putting a stop to the constant fraternal rivalries and bloodshed. A new dynasty (from 987), the Capetians, initiated a practice known as ‘association’, whereby the king crowned his eldest son as co-king within his lifetime; the son was therefore already king when his father died and thus succeeded without question.⁷ From this point onward the throne would pass automatically to the eldest son of the king – no division, no contest, no argument. Indeed, the Abbé Suger, one of the architects of Capetian dynastic policy in this era, wrote that the purpose of crowning a son in the lifetime of the father was ‘to confute the sedition of rivals’.⁸

Primogeniture spread from Capetian France to become the accepted norm for aristocratic succession across western Europe. But in this non-egalitarian system, if everything passed to the eldest son, younger sons still required something to support them in their lives and careers. Many noblemen could make a living in higher ecclesiastical offices, as bishops and abbots; while others became successful military commanders, fulfilling the traditional call to arms that formed the core of a nobleman’s identity. But as the Middle Ages progressed, the chief claim to noble status and source of wealth shifted from warrior activity to possession of land.⁹ Younger sons were sometimes provided with smaller estates from the family patrimony, often inherited from their mother’s properties so as not to diminish the holdings of the eldest son. Marriage to wealthy heiresses was therefore central to this process. At the highest levels of society, landed estates for younger sons had to be proportionately larger, to sustain the rank and reputation of their owners. A chief reason for this need for reputation for a younger son lay in the uncertainties of day-to-day health in pre-modern Europe, kings included. A younger son might be called to succeed to a princely throne at short notice, as occurred in 1316 in France, when Philip V succeeded his brother Louis X, who died suddenly – though Philip had to wait five months for his nephew to be born, and reign briefly (only five days) as John I. Similarly, Prince John ‘Lackland’ – a nickname certainly suggesting the sad state of a landless younger son – came unexpectedly to the throne of England in 1199 after the death during a siege of his brother, Richard the Lionheart. A younger brother’s reputation needed therefore to be one already of grandeur and majesty, so as to been seen as ready to uphold the dignity of the office to which he might potentially succeed. Two themes emerged from this desire to maintain the reputation of younger members of royal clans: the ideological debate over the physical versus spiritual nature of European kingship (the ‘king’s two bodies’); and the practical means of sustaining this ideology in sons other than the direct heir (the ‘apanage’).

The ‘king’s two bodies’ and sacralisation of the monarchy

At the core of the ideological debates about monarchy in late medieval and early modern Europe were the very practical efforts to stabilise society, using a variety of theoretical or symbolic devices, notably in making use of the authority of the Church and Christian theology. Prelates and princes needed each other. Kings defended the monopoly of the Church over spiritual matters, and in return received divine legitimacy from the Church, through ceremonial displays such as coronations and anointings.¹⁰ Symbolically, the Church named kings as ‘belonging’ to them, reviving biblical terminology such as ‘God’s Vicar on Earth’, the phrase used for centuries for the supreme model for Christian kingship. The echo of this medieval tradition even in today’s modern monarchies cannot be clearer than in the anthem used in British coronations since the 1720s, Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’, in which King Solomon was marked out to the people of Israel as God’s choice through his anointment by the High Priest Zadok.¹¹ This sacralisation of the monarchy was thus not new to early modern monarchies, but it did receive further emphasis, especially in terms of public opinion. Public ceremonies became much grander affairs, the better to demonstrate the alliance of Church and state and win the support and loyalty of the people.¹²

But the notion of the king as ‘God’s Vicar on Earth’ did have some problems. Besides the clearly contentious clash between the fact that the pope was supposed to hold this position as inheritor of the keys of St. Peter, any notion of men representing the divine threatened to have overtones of blasphemy, that is, humans pretending to have divine attributes. Medieval philosophers therefore came up with the idea of ‘the king’s two bodies’, as elucidated famously in the work of that name by Ernst Kantorowicz in 1957.¹³ Stated simply, this idea put forward that any king was composed of two parts: a physically human part, flesh and blood that would live and die; and a purely spiritual part, a representative of divine authority unchanging through the ages. A physical body of a king could be sinful, whereas the spiritual office of king, regardless of the holder, would forever remain pure.

One of the clearest manifestations of this closer union between Church and monarchy – known as ‘sacralisation’, or making sacred the person of the prince – was developed at the court of the dukes of Burgundy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In one sense it was used by these dukes as a way of creating an identity, forging unity out of disparate territories they ruled, and solidified through the sponsorship of an elite club whose symbolism was an odd mixture of Christian and pagan: the Order of the Golden Fleece, based on the ancient Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts, but infused with the Christian ideals of chivalry, selflessness and charity.¹⁴ Its head, the duke of Burgundy, was thus a sacred person, worthy of respect and deference, protected from harm by a sacred aura.¹⁵ A significant, if mostly psychological barrier was erected between princes and courtiers. Kings in both England and France made use of this sense of their physical person as a conduit between the divine and humanity, heightening their own importance in the eyes of their subjects through the annual ceremony of thaumaturgy, or ‘touching for the king’s evil’, by which kings placed hands on those suffering from scrofula (related to tuberculosis) and cured them. Royal brothers were included in this religious mystique since this power needed to be transferable: for example, Charles II of England touched for the last time in late January 1685, and his brother James II performed the ritual for the first time in March, less than a month after Charles’s death.¹⁶

How is all of this – two bodies and sacralisation – relevant to a study of second sons in the French monarchy? The answer lies in the importance attributed to royal blood. Though the science of genetics was still centuries off, theologians and philosophers did think about inheritance, and in particular the sources of characteristics like leadership or valour. It was agreed that these were transmitted in the blood.¹⁷ Blood was therefore something physically treasured by European royalty and aristocracy alike – and protected through strict marriage practices, creating a class of society which we now sometimes refer to as ‘blue bloods’, or in Spain the sangre pura – but it was also becoming something seen as crucial in the transmission of divine authority. Why else did people rush forward to mop up bits of blood from the scaffold after the execution of Charles I of England in London in 1649? They were certain it would retain some form of divine power even after the King’s death. It is for this reason that the term ‘prince of the blood’ (prince du sang in French) became so important in this period. It was not just the king, therefore, who enjoyed divine favour. Anyone who shared the king’s blood was equally sacralised, and had the potential to wield God’s authority on earth if called upon to become the new physical vessel for undying spiritual kingship.

For this reason, kings’ brothers were without exception immune from execution. They could be exiled or imprisoned, but any impingement on the sacredness of their blood would affect the perceived sacredness of the king’s own blood. We can see this in the well-known example of Elizabeth I of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and maps
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: an overly powerful younger brother
• Introduction
• 1 The evolution of fraternal relations and the institution of the apanage
• 2 Parentage, birth, education
• 3 Getting established: apanage, marriage and family
• 4 Expressions of authority and rebellion, at home and abroad
• 5 Beyond politics: the household and princely patronage
• Epilogue: the last Monsieur
• Bibliography
• Index