Local Politics in the French Wars of Religion: The Towns of Champagne, the Duc de Guise, and the Catholic League, 1560-95 (review)

This book is an extension of the author's previous study of the town of Châlons-sur-Marne during the French Wars of Religion. In that work, published in 1997, Konnert focused on the political choices made by the urban elites in Châlons to try to understand how and why they ultimately chose in the 1590's not to side with the Catholic League Guise family, who had numerous holdings and strong ties in the region, unlike every other major town in Champagne. In the work under review here, Konnert offers a comparative study, comparing and contrasting the fortunes of Châlons with the two other largest towns of the region, Troyes and Reims, as well as several much smaller towns in the province. This might seem an odd choice, given that his own monograph on Châlons and the recent monograph on Troyes during the religious wars by Penny Roberts would seem to have already covered much of this ground. Nevertheless, despite some overlap with those two books, Konnert's comparative work still has something worthwhile to offer.

Konnert's argument is that the success and failure of the League in Champagne depended much less on the patronage network of the Guise family than on the local political choices made by the municipal elites in the region. He goes on to add that the Guises' neglect of urban elites "irreparably damaged their cause in urban Champagne . . . [and] played a large part in the failure of the Catholic League and of the Guises' ambitions in the towns of Champagne" (p. 265). The author is right to stress that politics were indeed localized and each town dealt with national issues such as the rise of the League in its own way. Indeed, the strength of the book lies in the archival research that has uncovered the local dynamics of political power as negotiated by the urban elites in the towns under discussion. It is very useful, for example, to know how and why three largely similar towns in the same region came to very different religious and political decisions when faced with the same choices and options.

The downside to this approach, however, is an overestimation of the importance of urban elites vis à vis the nobility. Is it in any sense true that "the noble factions and religious parties were only as strong as their base in local communities allowed them to be" (p. 4)? The italics are mine, as I question the word only in that sentence. Surely, the Guises' strong patronage ties among the local nobility in Champagne more than made up for their paucity of clients on city councils in Châlons, Troyes, and Reims. This is exactly the conclusion drawn by Laurent Bourquin in his study of the noblesse seconde in Champagne, as well as Stuart Carroll in his study of the Guise clientele in Normandy. Controlling fortifications, arms, and munitions, entities usually in the hands of local nobles, was equally as important as having the political support of urban notables. Thus, it seems odd to use terms such as "weakness" (p. 263) and "failure" (p. 265) to describe the Guises' patronage networks among the urban elites in Champagne, especially as Konnert admits they made no real effort to create strong patronage networks in the towns. Where Konnert is more convincing, it seems to me, is in sketching out the local political negotiations between the towns and the local nobles in Champagne, many of whom were Guise clients. If the urban notables in Champagne were not quite as powerful as the author implies, they nevertheless played a significant part in the Wars of Religion.