Cahiers d’Humanisme et Renaissance

131

Cornel Zwierlein

The Political Thought of
the French League and Rome
1585-1589

De justa populi gallici ab Henrico tertio defectione

and

De justa Henrici tertii abdicatione

(Jean Boucher, 1589)

LIBRAIRIE DROZ

11, rue Massot

GENÈVE

2015

Mentions légales

Résumé

Depuis le XIXe siècle, la théorie politique de la Ligue catholique française (1585-1595) a été décrit comme un simple plagiat des textes des monarchomaques calvinistes de l'après de la Saint-Barthélemy (1572). Appuyé sur la version originale manuscrite du traité le plus important de la Ligue, rédigé par la Sorbonne pour le Conseil des Seize et pour Mayenne, et envoyé au pape Sixte V en Mars 1589, ce livre démontre, que la véritable tradition dans laquelle se situe la pensée liguiste est le thomisme radicalisé de l´école de Salamanca, le droit canonique, le conciliarisme et gallicanisme. Ce sont en effet les monarchomaques calvinistes qui avaient caché leur héritage thomiste. Les archives du Vatican, de l'Inquisition, et en France révèlent que De justa populi gallici ab Henrico tertio defectione avait été d'abord un document presque secret au cœur des relations internationales avec la papauté avant d´être augmenté et publié après l´assassinat de Henri III (août 1589), maintenant reconnu comme œuvre de Jean Boucher. Mais le tyrannicide avait été embracé bien avant par la Ligue au sein de leur théorie constitutionnelle. La crise de 1589 et la théorie développée préfigurent ainsi d´autres conflits confessionnels au sein du système international naissant d´Europe comme la controverse entre Jacques I d´Angleterre et Bellarmine autour de 1610 ou même la révolte en Bohême de 1618.

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Abstract

Since the nineteenth century, the political thought of the French Catholic League (1585-1595) has been considered to be mere plagiarism of Calvinist monarchomach texts written after the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572). Based on the original manuscript of the most important Leagueist treatise, composed by the Sorbonne for the Council of the Sixteen and for Mayenne, and sent to Pope Sixtus V in March 1589, this book shows that the real traditions in which the Leagueist thought was rooted are the radicalized Thomism of the school of Salamanca, Canon Law, Conciliarism and Gallicanism. It was in fact the Calvinists who hid their Thomist legacy. The archives of the Vatican, of the Inquisition, and in France reveal the new insight that De justa populi gallici ab Henrico tertio defectione had first been a secret document serving within the international relations between the League and the pope. Only after the assassination of Henri III (August 1589), it was published in an expanded version and became known as authored by Jean Boucher. The tyrannicide had been actively embraced from March 1589 as part of the League´s constitution. The French crisis and intellectual developments in 1589 thus prefigure many later Catholic-Protestant conflicts on the European scene, such as the controversy between James I and Bellarmine around 1610 and even the Bohemian Revolt of 1618.

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Printed with support by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Düsseldorf

www.droz.org

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Références papier

ISBN : 978-2-600-01927-9

ISSN : 1422-5581

Copyright 2016 by Librairie Droz S.A., 11, rue Massot, Genève.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or translated in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche or any other means without written permission.

Distribué en France par de Boccard :

www.deboccard.com

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Références numériques

EAN ePUB : 9782600319270

ISSN : 1422-5581

Copyright 2016 by Librairie Droz S.A., 11, rue Massot, Genève.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or translated in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, microfiche or any other means without written permission.

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Introduction

The treatise

De justa Henrici tertii abdicatione libri quatuor

(1589), traditionally attributed to the famous preacher and Sorbonne theologian Jean Boucher, is known as both the most important political text of the French League movement and as the most important Catholic monarchomach text. It therefore has a canonical place within nearly every contribution to two interlinked fields of study, the historical research by scholars of the sixteenth century French League as such, as well as the broader history of political ideas. But while a great deal of sophisticated research has been devoted to the earlier Calvinist monarchomach treatises, mostly to the

Vindiciae contra tyrannos

(1579), Beza’s

De jure magistratuum

(1574) and Hotman’s

Francogallia

, this later Catholic text has attracted less

attention and has never been analyzed with a similar respect. As opposed to the Protestant texts, no modern edition or translation has ever been published.

At the same time, research on the League as such has made huge advances. The social historical and prosopographical analysis of the Paris League members by Elie Barnavie and Robert Descimon has lifted scholarship to a new level of precision concerning our knowledge about the proto-bourgeois composition of the Parisian movement

. Its noble dimensions, and the networks of the Guise, have been studied by Jean-Marie Constant and later by Stuart Carroll

. The League’s particular history in different major cities and regions has been studied by Wolfgang Kaiser (Marseille), Philip Benedict (Rouen), Stéphane Gal (Grenoble), Mark Greengrass (Toulouse), H. Le Goff (Bretagne) to name just a view

. Our understanding of the role and the attitudes of the regular clergy, of several orders, and of the Paris curés during the League has likewise been deepened by several important contributions by Thierry Amalou (Guillaume Rose), Vladimir Angelo (the Paris curés), A. Lynn Martin (the Jesuits), and Megan Armstrong (the

Franciscans)

. The role and character of the League’s major opponents has also received many new and thorough studies, such as on King Henri III himself and his entourage (Robert J. Knecht, Nicolas Le Roux)

, on Mornay and Henri de Navarre (Hugues Daussy)

, on a figure ‘between the frontiers’ (Ariane Boltanski on Nevers)

, and on the Parlement(s) (Sylvie Daubresse, Michel De Waele)

.

The research of Denis Pallier on the printing output and on the printers of the League laid new ground for studies to follow

, of which Denis Crouzet’s

Guerriers de Dieu

has been the major innovative contribution since the 1990s, bringing religion back into the wars of religion as Mack p. Holt has put it

.

A major new path that research has taken is to revisit the international dimensions of the League, an avenue forgotten for a long time after the classic works of Croze, L’Épinois, and (though

more a regionalist than internationalist) Drouot

. Descimon and Ibañez have transferred the prosopographical approach far beyond the Paris city walls in studying the League’s exile in the Spanish Netherlands after 1595

. Serge Brunet has shown how to regard ‘international history’ at that time as an entanglement of the provincial (Béarn, Navarre, southern and western France) with inter-national history (France/Spain)

. French-Savoyard interconnections during those years have been studied through different approaches by Matthew Vester, Fabrice Micallef and myself

. Richard Cooper has pointed out again the importance of Roman sources for the understanding of the League before and after 1588

.

But despite all those advances, the study of the political thought of the League as such has found less interest in France itself; the main studies here are from the Anglophone scholars, Frederic Baumgartner and John H. Salmon, to which one might add a

Germanophone work by Quin

. On Jean Boucher, a monograph charting his biography and work has been recently published by Michel Defaye

.

At the beginning of this study simply stands a

trouvaille

, the discovery, in the Bibliothèque royale in Bruxelles (June 2000), of a manuscript copy of a shorter anonymous version of

De justa Henrici tertii abdicatione

, never mentioned in scholarship, from which then other copies in Roman archives and libraries have been traced. Unlike the privilege for the publication of

De justa Henrici tertii abdicatione

(August 17, 1589), this is dated long before the murder of Henri III (March 16)

. Focusing on that small but distinct difference, and how to explain the development of that text, this analysis has evolved into a brief study of the development of the French League’s political thought. While it remains concentrated on that one text and the intellectual traditions present within the League from 1585 to 1589 that help to understand its genesis, and while not attempting to discuss texts and pamphlets after late 1589, the study tries nevertheless to bring forward and prove the following broader theses:

The constitutional thought of the League must be taken seriously, and not just regard it as plagiarism of Calvinist monarchomach thought. Despite being elaborated in a hasty way ‘under pressure’, mostly in Paris after the Guise murder, it conceives of a French political constitution, at least temporarily, without a king, and it attempts to establish such a France as a legitimate actor of international law within the emerging state system in 1589. The

manuscript

De justa populi Gallici ab Henrico III

o

defectione

has a claim to be the major legitimating document explaining the League’s constitutional self-understanding in those international contexts, authored by ‘the Sorbonne’, and embraced by the Paris Seize as well as by Mayenne.

The path that scholarship has taken in ‘internationalizing’ the League in terms of the history of the particular events and their micro-politics should be transferred also to the level of the history of political thought. The

Sitz im Leben

of the League’s constitutional thought is only partially situated in Paris or France, it is also, and for some aspects even far more so, best understood within the League’s international outreach. In that context, the negotiations with the Pope are the most important, even more than those with Spain.

Scholarship on the social history of the League has reconstructed its important Paris proto-bourgeois roots. This produced, on the level of the history of political thought, a climate of evidence and unquestioned acceptance for taking the old reproach of William Barclay (1600) that Boucher had used the Calvinist

Vindiciae, contra tyrannos

as sufficient to understand and classify the work as such. Thus, one could reduce Leagueist thought to an extension of contractual reasoning that the Calvinists, as late humanists inspired by civil law, had embedded into their own federal theology. The Catholic Leagueists would therefore appear as late proto-bourgeois humanists, not using federal theology, but appropriating the Calvinists’ contractual reasoning. In contrast to that interpretation, I argue that the legacy of the Salamanca school was far more important for the Catholic Leagueists. Furthermore, they were similar to, and even in collaboration with Roman erudites like Roberto Bellarmino in developing Thomist-Salamancist thought. Moreover, they adopted Calvinist elements only where such ideas were a functional equivalent to the Thomist tradition. This indicates, contrary to the traditional interpretation of ‘plagiarism’, that the intellectual transfer actually took place in the opposite direction: the Calvinists had even themselves adopted the foundations of central parts of their thought from the Thomist tradition. After that, the next most important source of Leagueist ideology is certainly canon law. Civil law, in contrast, played only a minor role for the Catholic Leagueist. They also relied on certain

forms of late conciliarist thought. It was only within the context of urban Paris that some pamphlets may have acquired a stronger secular late humanist resonance. This does not apply to official correspondence and League negotiations within broader and international dimensions.

This adds to our general understanding of the League inasmuch as the actors should be conceived far less as just ‘conservatives’, and as ‘ultra-Catholic’ only insofar as they were radical Thomists and, at some times, even more radical Gallicanists than radical papalists, even if both tendencies – ultramontane papalism and gallicanism – were in a constant dialectical relationship responding to the given political situation and particular opponent

.

These broader theses will be developed by studying, in a quite traditional way, the context and text of the two main versions extant today, of the manuscript

De justa populi Gallici ab Henrico III

o

defectione

dated March 16, 1589 and the book

De justa Henrici tertii abdicatione

, printed “apud Nicolaum Nivellium” after August 17, 1589. In the following these will be referred to as

De defectione

and

De abdicatione

, respectively. It is perhaps worth to enter here just at the beginning a short remark on how to understand both titles: Quentin Skinner for instance translated the printed title with “The Just Renunciation of Henry III” which is very correct

. But the confrontation of the different titles of both versions of the text shows that such a translation might nevertheless produce misunderstandings right from the beginning and that it is hard to render the difference of “De defectione” versus “De abdicatione” in English. “Renunciation, abdication” etc. normally suggests in English a willed act by the monarch himself as actor. But clearly, the printed book and the manuscript version wanted to express rather the idea of “deposition” from the reign (“

e

Francorum regno”) by another authority. The manuscript is clearer in that, as it puts the people in the position of the active subject which is

“cutting itself off

from

” Henri. The title of the printed version still means the same, but leaves the question of the active subject undecided. The reason for this might be that the active subject of the “abdicatio” is, ultimately, God, but two authorities on earth, the people and the pope, have the right to execute this or rather the consequences of an already

ipso facto ipso jure

deprivation of power of a heretical tyrant, as the text develops. So, in the title, the active subject of the

abdicatio Henrici

is simply not mentioned, while in

De defectione

the second option (the pope) is omitted.

In what follows, in the first part, the events, situations, political missions and negotiations between January 1589 and August 1589 that were germane to the text’s genesis between Paris and Rome, as well as the text’s material transmission, is discussed. The second part starts back at the beginning of the second League in 1585 and is devoted to the reconstruction of major incidents and prior contexts that led to earlier expressions of the League’s constitutional thought, mostly in shorter forms, such as speeches and mémoires. Those circumstances and the texts consequently served like an unplanned collection of arguments and at each time resulted in the partial revitalization of various discursive traditions that were later at hand and used while formulating

De defectione

/

De abdicatione

. Finally, three major elements of

De defectione

/

De abdicatione

, the empowerment of the people, the tyrannicide section and the arguments for immediate action, are analyzed more closely and an edition of selected passages of the manuscript treatise is provided in the appendix.

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Acknowledgements

Note of acknowledgements: This study was written during the final months of my stay at Harvard, from February to July 2015, in the unforgettable 5 Cowperthwaite Street, #606. The major purpose of that stay, from 2013 to 2015, was the writing of another book (

Imperial Unknowns. The French and British in the Mediterranean, 1650-1750

[Cambridge University Press, in press, forthcoming]), but after a first version of this was finished, still enjoying access to the wealth of the Harvard libraries, I decided to go back to an unsolved problem, hidden in a footnote of my Munich PhD thesis and first book

Discorso und Lex Dei

. I therefore have to thank the Gerda Henkel Foundation (m4human senior research fellowship) and the European Commission (FP7, Marie Curie actions)

for financial support during my stay. Most of all I have to thank the History Department of Harvard University for their continued support, Ann Blair, Daniel Smail for writing the necessary letters; and the staff and students at Widener, Andover and the other libraries used, to have helped so generously even beyond the holdings of Harvard with scan and deliver, Interlibrary loans and the fantastic Borrow Direct service. The English editing was done by Stephen Walsh. I have used sources here that I was able to study in 2003/4, immediately after my thesis defense, supported by postdoc fellowships from the German Historical Institute Paris and the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften respectively to which I express again my gratitude. The

Archivio Segreto Vaticano

and the

Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

have sent a quite massive bulk of digital reproductions to me in Cambridge/Mass., allowing me to do the work of transcription and contextualization quietly in the US before making a final inspection of all relevant sources in September/October 2015 in Turin, Mantua, Florence and Rome. For admission to the

Archivio storico della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede

thanks go to Alejandro Cifres, for giving access to some restricted material in the Biblioteca Vaticana, to Paolo Vian. I would like to express my gratefulness at this point to specialists of the rare book sections of the libraries named in Appendix II that have responded to my request concerning copies of

De justa Henrici tertii abdicatione

: Felix Müller, Steven Van Impe (special thanks for his sharp eye on the second part of the fingerprint), Susanne Rothe, Sophie Defrance (special thanks for comparing the Cambridge copies!), Gabriella Wietlisbach (special thanks for the remark on the paper of the

Epistola ad lectorem

), Loretta Lanzi, Giovanna Bergantino, Qona Wright, Fiona Godber, Antonella Panzino, Claudia Giobbio, Bernadette Scully, Stephen Ferguson, Patrick Olson, Monika Kiegler-Griensteidl, Jeffrey Makala, Marieke van Delft, Margaret H. Gamm, Laura Lalli, Robert Betteridge, Gaye Morgan, Brigitte Behm, Deborah Whiteman, David Fernández, Stefano Calzolari, Lucy Evans, Peter Whidden, Andrea Reithmayr, Gilles Gudin de Vallérin (special thanks for a very precise description), Caroline Duroselle-Melish (very special thanks for the help at the Folger Library, Washington DC). Thanks also to Paola Molino for sending the transcriptions of two Florentine avvisi (Feb 11 and April 1, 1589) to the US before I could visit the archives myself, and thanks finally for a very quick but precise reading and helpful remarks to Max Engammare, and to Laura Depoisier and Flavie Lavallée at Droz.

I could only copy the words of gratitude already stated in the acknowledgements of

Discorso und Lex Dei

concerning the fruitful exchange with the seiziémistes in France and studying French history for a long time. If it is true that some results of this study explicitly contradict certain parts

of the interpretation of the League’s attitude to the tyrannicide brought forward by several researchers, first of all by Denis Crouzet, I nevertheless recall with warm gratitude having been invited by him to his Sorbonne Research seminary as early as 2004 (on a different topic). And knowing his intellectual generosity, he will take it as part of the normal process of slow advance in research. Also, what is said here from the perspective of a micro-study concentrated on the development of one major text is situated on a different level of writing history than his studies are. I am fully aware of their insights and achievements

and that holds true beyond the other truth gained by the text/context approach chosen here. Both do not ‘falsify’ each other in their own

territoires

.

The book is for Frederic.

p.7

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p.10

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p.11

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,]

La vie et faits notables de Henry de Valois

, ed.

Keith Cameron

, Paris, 2003 and the special issue

Bruce Hayes

,

Paul Scott

(eds.),

Jean Boucher (1548-1646?): prêtre, prédicateur, polémiste

, Tübingen, 2013 (= Œuvres & Critiques 38, 2).

19

Zwierlein

,

Discorso und Lex Dei

, p. 530 with n. 708.

p.13

20

On that paradoxical character of Gallicanism cf. in general

Alain Tallon

,

Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au

xvi

e

 siècle. Essai sur la vision gallicane du monde

, Paris, 2002.

21

Quentin Skinner

,

The Foundations of Modern Political Thought

, 2 vol., Cambridge, 1978, II, 345.

p.16

22

Cf.

Cornel Zwierlein

, “Die Genese eines europäischen Erinnerungsortes: die Bartholomäusnacht im Geschichtsgebrauch des konfessionellen Zeitalters und der Aufklärung”, in:

Frank Bezner

/

Kirsten Mahlke

(eds.),

Zwischen Wissen und Politik. Archäologie und Genealogie frühneuzeitlicher Vergangenheitskonstruktionen

, Heidelberg, 2011, p. 91-129, 93-96.

Chapter One The development of the text

Regarding

De abdicatione

, scholarship still very often relies on statements originally coined by mid-nineteenth century scholars, in particular on the bibliographer Brunet for the material description of the editions and on Charles Labitte for the content. This has led to the repetition of many unquestioned claims. The most prominent is that the text was published, or possibly even written, only

after

the murder, the idea being that the League would not have had a clearly developed plan and legitimation for the tyrannicide in advance, but instead only legitimated afterwards that what had already happened. Through Brunet/Labitte, research has also unconsciously taken the aforementioned perspective of William Barclay and his charging of Boucher with ‘just copying’ Protestant monarchomach texts and to re-purposing their ideas for the ultra-Catholic cause against Henri III. This is an interpretation that is nearly uncontested in the historiography of political thought. Another brief observation might legitimate restarting from the beginning: As far as I can see, no author since the nineteenth century who has consulted a 1589 or 1591 copy of the book has had formal proof of Boucher’s authorship beyond Barclay’s and de Thou’s attribution (1600, 1620) and beyond Brunet. All copies used by scholars do not indicate an author on the title page. So, when everyone wrote of and about ‘Boucher’s’ text, he or she did so without further consideration. The only one who probably had such a proof at hand was Henri Hauser in 1911 who did not realize it. This led some careful authors to write of an anonymous treatise. The major question in the following is not about authorship. I think myself that, in fact, Boucher had the major role in writing the text. But the question is how the text was first conceived, how it was distributed and how its impact was during the time of the League, and

not

during the time of Henri IV when Barclay and de Thou wrote their works.

So, it is worth restarting with the manuscript before continuing to the printed book.

The March manuscript

De Justa Populi Gallici ab Henrico III

o

Defectione

The manuscript text is entitled

...