Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France: The Rohan Family, 1550–1715 by Jonathan Dewald (review)

Jonathan Dewald’s substantial book on the Rohan family is a welcome addition to studies of the great nobility in early modern France. The work offers a detailed series of perspectives on the Rohan’s material status, the clienteles and political networks established by the family, and, perhaps most interesting of all, their social aspirations and strategies for representing themselves to the crown, to other great families, and to society in general. Central to the family through this period is the towering figure of Henri, first duc de Rohan (1579–1638). The details of his life story are well known, and it is a strength of the current book that they are inserted so effectively into a much larger story about dynastic aspirations, self-fashioning, and the subsequent fate of the family. The distinctiveness of Henri de Rohan is undeniable: a Huguenot who was for many a Protestant icon, yet who wrote a deeply cynical, secular account of political motivation; a leader who inspired loyalty and devotion among clients and associates, but was a ruthless practitioner of military violence and political self-promotion. Seemingly destined for power and influence under his cousin, Henri IV, Rohan’s position at court was dramatically weakened after the king’s assassination in 1610. Nearly two decades of inveterate rebelliousness followed, and his political rehabilitation in the 1630s was never more than conditional. Cardinal Richelieu effectively trapped him into command of an army when only the lavish expenditure of Rohan’s own resources could have held his troops together; military failure was followed by political disgrace and his death as an ordinary soldier in the army of the German condottiere, Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. Yet from this story of vaulting ambition and disastrous failure, Dewald draws out points of much wider family relevance. The males of the Rohan family regarded political and military activity as the defining element of their identity, and this left a substantial role to their mothers, wives, and sisters as managers of the Rohan estates; they proved shrewd and enterprising businesswomen who did much to compensate for the recklessness with which the males of the dynasty consumed wealth and resources. This important socio-economic role for the women of the family seems to have been accompanied by a degree of freedom in their personal lives, which scandalized a court society usually inured to such behaviour. But Dewald maintains that it was largely thanks to the women that in 1700 the family’s economic position was stronger than it had ever been, despite grave problems of succession, competition from cadet branches originally set up to preserve the dynasty from extinction, and political decision-making that continued to pit the dukes against powerful enemies in the state. This is a fascinating account, extensively researched in its assessments of the wealth and socio-economic reach of the family, and suggestive and convincing when examining the psychological motivations and the concern with self-fashioning that drove its senior members. Dewald’s book greatly enhances our understanding of aristocratic power and status in early modern France.