Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (review)

Honour and retribution are just two of the key themes of this investigation into violent behaviour by individuals as well as social groups in Early Modern France. Stuart Carroll provides a detailed analysis of various contexts (family feuds; hereditary questions; adultery, seductions and rape; religious conflict; and the exercise of authority), in which aggression and bloodshed took place, from their inception to their escalation and resolution; he studies its mechanisms and judiciary treatment, and the degrees to which violence was accepted or deemed acceptable. Written in a lucid, punchy style, the study rests on a dazzling — at times bedazzling — array of archival sources and judicial pieces, in the main pardon letters, supplemented with extracts from journals, memoirs and occasionally literary sources. Chronologically, examples range from the late Middle Ages to the end of the reign of Louis XIV. The materials and discussions, however, are arranged around broad thematic rather than chronological lines. The first part, ‘the structure of vindicatory violence’, retraces the deep causes of many disputes, which frequently lay in questions of landownership and rights, as well as in matters of status and reputation. The second theme of the book centres on ‘violence and society’, and tackles questions of hostility and assault in terms of the justice and the law; mediation, arbitration and mercy; and gender and vindicatory violence. In the third part, ‘violence and the polity’, Carroll concentrates on the particularly acute use of aggression in the Wars of Religion, and on the deployment of violence in the centralization processes of the seventeenth century. Carroll’s chosen theme places his publication in the wake of pioneering studies of early modern violence (e.g. by Natalie Zemon Davis and Denis Crouzet), while offering also a counterpane to historical enquiries into the rise of the period’s gentlemanly and courtly culture, fronted most notably by Elias’ The Civilizing Process. Yet in his emphasis on vengeance the author clearly —and successfully — steers an independent course. By its nature, the study will in the first place appeal to cultural and social historians. However, the life-world, conjured up by Carroll, of belligerence and antagonism, which was nonetheless heavily codified, will equally command the attention of literary scholars specializing in Early Modern France. Carroll’s investigations provide useful background on any literary treatment of, for instance, the question of duelling (a central theme in Corneille’s Le Cid) or on the use of violence against women. (Interestingly, violent acts committed by women surface only very occasionally in this book.) In the course of the narrative, Marguerite de Navarre, Brantôme, L’Estoile, Montaigne and Tallement des Réaux are all called to the witness stand, alongside evidence drawn from the tabulation of ‘deaths of gentlemen in vindicatory actions’ between 1550 and 1659, ‘pardons presented to the Parlement of Aix’ between 1571 and 1720 and the ‘settlements for murdered nobles’. Montaigne’s family-in-law, the La Chassaigne, also make a fleeting appearance with an inheritance dispute marked by confessional differences within the family (pp. 294–95); it would have been useful, though, had Montaigne’s brother-in-law, Geoffroy de La Chassaigne (p. 294), been identified (or cross-referenced) with the very sieur de Pressac, whose French translation of Seneca’s Epistles is evoked on p. 12. A map of the French parlements and 16 well-chosen, if rather grainy, illustrations pleasantly punctuate the book’s tidy lay-out. Readers turning to Carroll’s Blood and Violence in Early Modern France will indeed find that they have laid their hands on a quality product.