Le Blanc de France: La construction des signes identitaires pendant les guerres de Religion (1562-1629) (review)

Cultural history has a way of making seemingly small things significant. Denise Turrel has followed the shifting uses of the white scarf as a badge of identification by different parties in the French Wars of Religion, and has been able to use them as indicators of change in French political culture. Turrel draws on a combination of sources, including histories, diaries, and memoirs written by witnesses to the wars, as well as contemporary pamphlet literature, paintings, engravings, and woodcuts, pulling together details that might otherwise pass unnoticed or be taken for granted, and using them to offer new insights into how the French monarchy worked through confessional and political conflicts and was able to promote an image of national unity.

At the outbreak of the First War of Religion in 1562, the Huguenots needed some means of distinguishing their soldiers, especially their cavalrymen, from those of the king. Since royal troops wore a white cross, the rebels needed something different. According to Turrel, the choice of a white scarf was practical, since white cloth was readily available and scarves were easy to create, and the color white had powerful symbolic value, but in an abstract enough way so as to avoid the appearance of idolatry, which they associated with the sign of the cross. Initially, the Huguenots used scarves interchangeably with white casaques (tunics) over their armor, and some of the women besieged in La Rochelle in 1573 wore white clothing when going outside the walls to assist the wounded — but by the 1580s the scarf had become the standard symbol of the Protestant military and of their chief, Henri of Navarre. The symbolic value of the scarf changed dramatically in 1589, when King Henri III celebrated his new alliance with Navarre by donning the white scarf himself, which made it a symbol of the monarchy, rather than of a religious faction or noble family. Later that year, when Henri III was assassinated and succeeded by Navarre, the royalist symbolism largely supplanted the religious symbolism.

The most compelling sections of the book deal with the various ways in which Henri IV, his supporters, and his opponents used and responded to the white scarf, and here Turrel effectively integrates visual materials into her interpretation, noting the uses of the scarf in everything from royal portraits to pamphlets issued by the Catholic League. Here the impressions of diarists, memories of eyewitnesses, the rhetoric of the preachers and pamphleteers, and the responses of the public to this particular symbol all come together. For the royalists, the white scarf provided a symbol that transcended sectarian divisions while still being adaptable to religious ideas, and thus could be used by both Protestant and Catholic supporters of the king. For the supporters of the League, the scarf was the subject of mockery, but also something for which they were unable to find a suitable equivalent to represent their own cause. They used black scarves to mourn the death of the Duke of Guise and green to mock Henri III, but neither were of much help after the latter's assassination. The other likely color, red, was too closely associated with the Spanish for comfort. To Turrel, the League's inability to produce its own unifying symbols was indicative of its inability to organize a coordinated campaign of resistance to Henri IV, and thus of its ultimate failure.

After Henri IV's conversion to Catholicism in 1593, the white scarf became the standard sign for both individuals and cities to show that they were going over to the king's side, and became a central component of the ceremonies celebrating individual cities' return to obedience to the king. At the same time, the king's conversion disassociated the white scarf from its Protestant origins, and the Huguenots largely abandoned...