Autour de l'Histoire universelle d'Agrippa d'Aubigné. Mélanges à la mémoire d'André Thierry (review)

André Thierry (1924-2000) is mainly remembered for having restored d'Aubigné's Histoire universelle to its rightful place in critical appreciation alongside the Tragiques, with his 1976 thesis (published in 1982) on Agrippa d'Aubigné, auteur de l'Histoire Universelle, and his eleven-volume edition of the Histoire (Textes littéraires français, Geneva, Droz, 1981-2000). The present volume brings together seven articles by Thierry, published between 1970 and 1999, and nine studies by friends and colleagues, the whole introduced by Gilbert Schrenck in an avant-propos, a brief biography of Thierry and a bibliography of his writings. While the articles by Thierry himself are stimulating illustrations of the 'Autour de …' theme (d'Aubigné and Montluc, old men in the Histoire, d'Aubigné's debt to Jacques-Auguste de Thou, for example), the contributions by colleagues form the more original part of the book. Some articles are homages to Thierry with little connection with d'Aubigné (Jean Brunel, Jean-Marc Debard); others are more directly connected to the title of the volume. Gilles Banderier studies d'Aubigné and Pierre Jeannin as historiographers of Henri IV. Claude-Gilbert Dubois picks out a detail from the Histoire, VI.13, which implicates Olivier de Serres in the capture by Huguenot troops of his native town Villeneuve-de-Berg in 1573, and the bloody massacre which followed. Dubois reviews the contemporary narratives, then shows how nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiographers, unable to accept that the peace-loving author of the Theatre d'agriculture (1600) had a violent past, distorted the record for their own religious (France protestante) or political (agricultural idealization) purposes. A closely argued study by Jean-Raymond Fanlo on 'Les enjeux politiques de la disposition dans l'Histoire universelle' traces a curve from d'Aubigné's initial 'impartiality', through the explicit glorification of 'Henri le Grand' restorer of religious peace, to the author's delicate final position which, while still apparently praising the king and lamenting his murder, is discreetly invoking Huguenot resistance. Marie-Madeleine Fragonard reviews la trahison des chefs in the Supplément to d'Aubigné's Histoire and in the correspondence of the years 1620-1626 (a betrayal presented more in sorrow than in anger). Madeleine Lazard lambasts d'Aubigné for his seemingly boundless admiration for Queen Elizabeth of England, maintained at the expense of some serious filtering of his sources, in particular on the trial and death of Mary Stuart. Marie-Dominique Legrand traces the presence of Michel de l'Hospital in the Histoire, and brings out an important more general theme: for d'Aubigné a moderate, a Nicodemite, a moyenneur is almost worse than an out-and-out 'enemy of the Truth', though as the work progresses the idea of 'balance' promoted by l'Hospital takes on a more positive connotation. Finally Daniel Ménager studies the origins of the Reformation as presented in the Histoire. While German writers of the period regarded the Reformation as springing full-grown from the head of Luther, Huguenot authors, concerned to show the unbroken continuity of 'true' doctrine from the Early Church to the present, laid emphasis on pre-Reformation movements like the Vaudois and the Albigensians, hence Wicliffe, Hus and Jerome of Prague, hence the German and francophone movements. D'Aubigné, we learn, was so persuaded by this historical vision that in the first two books of the Histoire the names of Luther and Calvin are practically absent! A stimulating volume for d'Aubigné students.