Warrior Pursuits: Noble Culture and Civil Conflict in Early Modern France

1. The Great Quantity of Nobility That Is Found Here: Southern France and Its Warrior Elite

N obles in each sénéchaussée across France assembled in the summer and autumn of 1614 to select deputies, usually one from each estate, to attend the meeting of the Estates General that Marie de Médicis had called to deal with the problems of civil conflict in the kingdom. The deputies from the province of Languedoc who made the journey north to Paris for the opening of the Estates General in October were overwhelmingly warrior nobles. Many of the clergy elected as deputies of the first estate, such as Louis de Nogaret de La Valette, were from warrior families. The representatives of the second estate were almost exclusively warrior nobles like François de La Jugie comte de Rieux and Antoine-Hercule de Budos marquis de Portes. Even some of the deputies for the third estate were military elites, such as Louis de Gondin, who was consul of Uzès in 1614 and would go on to command a Huguenot infantry regiment as a mestre de camp in the 1620s. The meeting of the Estates General that these deputies attended must have seemed rancorous and frustrating to these provincial nobles accustomed to the productive, if limited, meetings of the provincial estates of Languedoc. The Languedoc nobles engaged in preparing a cahier de doléance to list their concerns and grievances, then argued over the order in which they would sign the document. When the meeting of the Estates General closed in February 1615, very little had been accomplished.1 When the warrior noble deputies headed home to report back to their fellow Languedoc nobles, they returned to a province already concerned with other regional affairs. The provincial governor, Henri I de Montmorency, had recently The Great Quantity of Nobility That Is Found Here Southern France and Its Warrior Elite c h a p t e r o n e 12 t h e p r o f e s s i o n o f a r m s died and had been replaced by his son Henri II, who had assembled the provincial estates in the town of Pézenas, even while the Estates General was still meeting in Paris. In December 1614, an elaborate funeral ceremony for the deceased governor had been held, attended by many prominent regional nobles. The provincial elites who assembled in Pézenas debated precedence issues and deliberated on the problems the province faced. Disorders within the province and disturbances along the Spanish border particularly worried the nobles.2 The meetings of the Estates General and the estates of Languedoc in 1614 reveal the contours of the Languedoc elites and suggest the importance of the warrior nobles in the provincial life of southern France. This chapter introduces the powerful military elites in Languedoc and the neighboring province of Guyenne and explores the divided regions of southern France in which they lived. In the early seventeenth century, these two provinces had profound confessional divisions and a long history of religious conflict. the nobility of this region stood in arms On the eve of the French Revolution, in 1784, the estates of Languedoc sponsored an effort to catalogue the nobility of the province and assess the prominent families of the region. This project involved searching for nobles and calling on noble families to submit documentation establishing their nobility and service for inclusion in a publication to be known as Le Roi d’armes du Languedoc.3 The French Revolution intervened and apparently halted the project permanently, and we are still left with as imperfect a knowledge of the identities of the provincial nobles as early modern French people had. A nobleman narrating civil warfare in Vivarais in the early seventeenth century captured contemporary understandings of provincial warrior nobles, relating that “the nobility of this region stood in arms.” This description of Vivarais nobles standing in arms encapsulated the image of a noble gentleman prepared for battle, wearing armor and bearing military arms, not the civilian rapier. This passage indicates both the extent of regional violence and the active participation of the local warrior nobles in civil warfare through their armament.4 The provincial nobles who engaged in warrior pursuits in southern France were members of a provincial military elite that was defined by the exercise of arms, divided into different ranks, and delimited by vague boundaries. s o u t h e r n f...