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

2. The Grandeur and Magnificence of His Household: Noble Households and Kinship

c h a p t e r t w o W hen describing Henri II de Montmorency’s youth and the negotiations for his marriage, Montmorency’s secretary and biographer marveled at “the grandeur and magnificence of his household.” Henri married Maria Felicia Orsini, daughter of a Roman noble, in a ceremony at the Louvre in July 1613. Less than a year later, the young duc de Montmorency received news of his father’s death in the province of Languedoc and headed to his family’s château near Pézenas to take up his father’s provincial government.1 On his arrival in Languedoc, Henri “rewarded all his [father’s] servants,” and began reorganizing his household as the new patriarch of the Montmorency family.2 The Montmorencys unquestionably constituted one of the most powerful noble families in all of France, but what did it mean to be the head of this grand and magnificent family? The profession of arms structured kinship and shaped the everyday lives of the family and staff members of warrior households. This chapter explores the ways in which the warrior nobles of Guyenne and Languedoc lived kinship and devised strategies to survive civil conflict in the early seventeenth century. Southern French nobles, I suggest, conceived of family simultaneously as kinship , household, lineage, and alliance. Armed noble families organized the warrior practices through which military elites participated in civil warfare. The Grandeur and Magnificence of His Household Noble Households and Kinship 34 t h e p r o f e s s i o n o f a r m s kindred warriors A Thousand Gentlemen, My Relatives The warrior nobles who dominated provincial life in southern France during the early modern period defined themselves largely through their familial relationships . Noble households provided sites of family interaction, but nobles also engaged broad kinship networks encompassing bonds with uncles, aunts, and cousins, as Kristen B. Neuschel has shown.3 Repeated intermarriages and remarriages among noble lineages produced a proliferation of multiple cousin and half-cousin relationships. The pervasive use of the salutations mon cousin and ma cousine in noble correspondence reveals the importance of perceived closeness within broad conceptions of kinship. Nobles and members of the royal family also employed such greetings to establish proximity and kinship with the king, even when no blood relationship justified such language. Some of these extended kinship ties remained weak connections, but distant kinship relations could be activated during family crises. Nobles, both women and men, often corresponded with distant kin in their requests for pardon, leniency, or ransom during the religious wars. Numerous cousins and more distant relatives came to the aid of Charles de Valois comte d’Auvergne during his imprisonment, for example.4 After the comte’s release, Henri II de Montmorency thanked Marie de Médicis, pledging his loyalty and promising that “a thousand gentlemen, my relatives ,” would be ready to join him in an oath of fidelity.5 Similarly, when François V de La Rochefoucauld arrived at the siege of La Rochelle with 1,500 noble followers , he famously exclaimed to Louis XIII: “Sire, there is not a single one of these who is not my relative.”6 How are we to interpret such extraordinary claims of kinship? My understanding of early modern French warrior noble families has been influenced by anthropological studies of kinship, and in particular by Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of kinship as a very complex set of relationships that can be read in multiple ways. By distinguishing between official kinship and practical kinship, Bourdieu shows how official kinship structures are opposed by strategic uses of kinship relations. Despite official genealogical connections, families actually construct themselves through representational kinship by creating collective self-representations and actively promoting the idea of the family through members’ strategic uses of kinship. Bourdieu suggests that families attempt to manage kinship relations through a series of interrelated approaches, arguing that “marriage strategies are inseparable from inheritance strategies, fertility strategies, and even educational strategies, in other words from the whole set of n o b l e h o u s e h o l d s a n d k i n s h i p 35 strategies for biological, cultural and social reproduction that every group implements in order to transmit the inherited powers and privileges, maintained or enhanced, to the next generation.”7...