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

There have been many books about the civil/religious wars in France during the second half of the sixteenth century, most of them in some way trying to explain the reasons for the conflict and for its long duration. Mark Greengrass’s book seeks instead to understand how and why projects for peace were formulated in the reign of Henri III, a monarch frequently written off in the past as a frivolous failure but more recently seen to be a more substantial and serious figure. The book is about the intersection of ideas and politics and the response of competing elites to severe upheavals. The crown was, for a wide range of reasons, subjected to unprecedented scrutiny and sought to embrace reform in this period as a means to achieving peace. This intersected with a philosophical debate about the role of ‘passions’ in the wars and thus the role of moral philosophy in discussions of the reformation of state and society. Central, therefore, to the argument is the interplay between events and ideas. Although the book concentrates on the period from the Estates of Blois in 1576, it begins with the shock of the royal army’s defeat at La Rochelle. This provoked in Henri de Valois (Anjou) and his advisers questions about both military organization and reform of church and state, with remarkable tours d’horizon submitted to the Council by Nevers and Retz in August 1573 and partly contributed by Anjou. Greengrass argues that Anjou’s failure to see these as blueprints for reform indicated the absence of hard thought on the problem, which remained characteristic. For him, reform was an inclination rather than a systematic programme. Admittedly, he was overwhelmed by the intractable problems of the Fifth War of Religion at the start of his reign, a war that ended in failure and calls for further reform. Indeed, the king promised to follow this course. In this he was encouraged by his Palace Academy, but the main preoccupation of that group of intellectuals was how to govern the passions. This reflected, from their point of view, the key problems in re-establishing the moral authority of the monarchy: just peace with the Protestants and a new moral order. The difficulty was that the Edict of Beaulieu, which bound the King to genuine religious pluralism, was swept away by the phenomenon of the Catholic Leagues. Thus there was a move back from religious equality in 1577 in the form of the king’s peace (Edict of Poitiers), in which the compromises made it difficult to implement in the absence of a mechanism for ensuring compliance. The rest of the book is about attempts to make this peace work, with Henri III seeking to establish it as the father of his kingdom. France was unique as a major unitary kingdom in trying to implement a policy of religious pluralism in this period. The problems faced were formidable. The official state was everywhere compromised by the world of noble passions and ambitions. There was intense Protestant opposition to the terms, which Henri III had to underplay in order not to provoke Catholics. The theme of restoring virtue continued through projects of law reform, reform of the royal court, and the Assembly of Notables of 1583. Yet Greengrass argues that a monarchical ideology of reform survived the apparent failure of 1585 and passed into the political repertoire of the Bourbon monarchy. This is a challenging and thought-provoking book, which makes no scholarly compromises over the discussion and analysis of texts in French. It has implications for scholars in early modern politics, social history, and ideas.