Portraits from the French Renaissance and the Wars of Religion (review)

This book is an annotated translation of thirteen selections from André Thevet’s Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres (Paris, 1584). Most of the individuals featured in this edition were Thevet’s contemporaries: kings (François I, Henri II, Charles IX), aristocrats and warriors (including François de Lorraine, duke of Guise; Constable Anne de Montmorency; and Chancellor Michel de L’Hospital), and scholars (Guillaume Budé and Guillaume Postel).

This gallery of portraits contains little that is new. Thevet’s eulogies of powerful political figures often are trite and at times redundant. As Frank Lestringant wrote in his biography of Thevet, a certain realism, if not opportunism, dictated the cosmographer’s writing. As a protégé of Cardinal Jean de Lorraine, who funded his first voyage to the Levant in 1549, Thevet celebrated de Lorraine (the cardinal’s nephew) as a martyr during the first Wars of Religion. According to Lestringant, Thevet reconfigured his political position from 1563 to support the policy of conciliation led by Catherine de Medici and advocated by L’Hospital. After the St. Bartholomew Day’s massacre in 1572, Thevet justified persecution of seditious Huguenots. He increasingly veered toward the Catholic Ligue and, before his death in 1590, received protection and favors from Charles, duke of Mayenne and son of de Lorraine. This rapidly shifting political stance may explain why Thevet, a laicized Franciscan and the queen mother’s chaplain, largely avoided thorny issues of confessional conflict. The overall absence of ideological steadfastness in Les vrais pourtraits may reflect his career as a quintessential courtier—he managed to serve as royal cosmographer under four successive kings. The introduction in this English edition provides a balanced picture of the events and developments surrounding the Wars of Religion, but it rarely mentions Thevet’s political opinions, paying perhaps too much attention to his earlier travel accounts. One wonders whether it would have been more helpful if the editor had attempted to discuss Thevet in the context of political patronage and power politics of the time.

Thevet’s work often is compared with Theodore Beza’s Vrais pourtraits des hommes illustres en piété et doctrine (Geneva, 1581). There are differences between the works of the two authors. Nearly every entry in Thevet’s book was accompanied by a copperplate engraving of the subject’s portrait, but the chapter on L’Hospital was left with an empty frame. Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva, had presented in his book a picture of L’Hospital with a lit candle hanging behind his back. According to Beza, the chancellor, although he held Protestant sympathies, failed to declare openly his true religious belief and thus turned his back to the light, which signified the Truth. Thevet stated:

Very willingly should I have offered you [L’Hospital’s] portrait, if the Seigneur de Besze [Beza] had not set it in his work of the portraits of illustrious men. I am angry that he put the candle behind his back. . . . [H]e wishes to tax de L’Hospital with not having taken sides over Religion, but if Besze [Beza] takes light for his Religion, I will leave him, and shall confess to him that an infinite number saw de L’Hospital live as a Catholic. One can hardly be sure whether he did so with his heart, that being a secret not revealed to men.

(p. 117)

Thevet considered L’Hospital to be a good Catholic, yet stopped short of disputing Beza’s presentation of the chancellor as nicodemite, pointing out instead the futility and vanity of speculating on individual religious belief. L’Hospital himself strenuously denied that he was a crypto-Protestant, but Thevet, by effectively referring the readers to Beza’s book, left the chancellor’s religious opinion in doubt. Thevet’s ambivalence...