Governing Passions: Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576–1585 (review)

History in general is written not just by and for but about the winners: failed initiatives and unsuccessful leaders are seldom at the center of our attention. This inevitably and seriously distorts our perspective, since failure is not usually a foregone conclusion, and efforts that appear vain to us may well have been all-consuming to participants and their contemporaries. Mark Greengrass’s book lovingly details one of the most spectacular political misfires of the sixteenth century: Henri III of France’s attempts, in the first decade of his reign, to revive his war-wracked state through a program of pacification and reform. Four years after this study ends, Henri fell to an assassin’s knife, pitied or reviled by most of his subjects and with only a fraction of France under his effective control. His less reflective but more fortunate successor, Henri de Bourbon, would take up the task of pacification and reform, but, as Greengrass shows, the last gasp of the Valois dynasty helped set the stage for the Bourbons and, more importantly, revealed a tremendous amount about how politics worked (or did not work) in the later sixteenth century.

To reform France, Henri III and his advisors, notably his mother Catherine de Medicis, relied on tradition, including both the old institutional structure of royal officeholders, noble governors, and consultative assemblies (national and provincial estates, assemblies of notables and of the clergy), and ideas of personal and political self-discipline through eloquence and a harmonization of the passions that humanists had long advocated. What was new was the urgency and thoroughness with which Henri applied this machinery to a country debilitated by the political, religious, and military failures of the state. Greengrass describes the competing and (as a combination of humanist rhetoric and bureaucratic memorandizing) often frustratingly imprecise reform proposals put forward and the herculean efforts required to even begin getting reforms agreed on and implemented. By 1584, indeed, inflation was under control, religious violence had subsided, and even the royal finances were showing some signs of recovery. But progress had not been quick enough to prevent Henri’s authority from being swept away when his brother, François d’Anjou, died, leaving the kingdom with a Protestant succession and no foundation of trust on which to continue rebuilding.

Like his subjects, Greengrass devotes enormous attention to rhetoric, as it was deployed both toward and by the king and his representatives. Henri’s reliance on persuasion and consultation was not merely a sign of weakness — though his failure may have branded his strategy with the taint of weakness for a century to come — but rather the result of a broadly-shared ideological commitment to public life as a shared moral endeavor and to monarchy as a moralizing force. This ideology mobilized real support, but it also lent itself to the kind of factionalism and disillusionment that eventually brought down Henri’s project and his reign. Thus, beyond the new information this book provides on the political life of an important and neglected decade, it gives an important new interpretation of how the relatively consultative and performative “Renaissance monarchy,” described by scholars like R. J. Knecht and J. Russell Major, both functioned and failed.

This is a book written and published with no compromises. The footnotes and bibliography are as extensive as the research, which seems to have involved consulting practically every contemporary manuscript in France, and the narrative’s level of detail is astounding. For the foreseeable future it will be the starting point for all research involving French political life in the decade in question. Valuable as it is, the book’s approach will make life difficult for nonexperts. French quotations are untranslated, and Greengrass assumes a high level of familiarity with the political configuration he discusses. Readers, for example, are largely left to their own devices on the question of how Henri’s reforms related...