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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 126-127



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Book Review

Blood and Religion:
The Conscience of Henri IV 1553-1593


Blood and Religion: The Conscience of Henri IV 1553-1593. By Ronald S. Love. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2001. Pp. xxii, 458. Can $65.00.)

"Paris is well worth a Mass!" This famous quip attributed to Henry IV of France has usually been taken to characterize neatly the king's motivation in announcing his intention to convert to Catholicism in 1593, even if he probably never did say it. Ronald Love takes sharp issue with the conventional wisdom that the quip summed up Henry's attitude at the time when he attended Mass at St. Denis. He rejects the view that it was possible for anyone in the sixteenth century to be agnostic toward religious belief, as some historians who have written about Henry have suggested. Love's thesis in this book is that Henry was deeply committed to his Calvinist faith and his fateful decision to convert came only after a deep crisis of conscience. One might call this a spiritual biography of the first Bourbon king, although the author pays bountiful attention to the political and military events of his first forty years.

Love proposes that Henry's mother, Jeanne d'Albret, the ardent Calvinist queen of Navarre, endowed her son with a powerful belief in her faith. He frequently quotes Henry's remark that he had imbibed his Calvinist beliefs with his mother's milk. The author downplays, probably too much, the influence of Antoine de Bourbon, his father, through whom came his claim to the French throne and for whom religion was largely a matter of expediency. He proceeds to trace Henry's life through the labyrinth of the early religious wars to the St. Bartholomew's Massacre, just prior to which Jeanne died. For the next twenty years, Henry fought to maintain his Calvinist faith despite being coerced to convert the day of the massacre and spending nearly four years at the royal court [End Page 126] feigning belief in Catholicism. Once he escaped in 1576, Henry became the leader of the Huguenot party, and Love shows how his faith informed his military and political decisions to 1593. He had several occasions to benefit politically by converting to Catholicism and refused, so Love argues, because of his commitment to his mother's religion. Having become king based on the Salic Law following Henry III's assassination in 1589, Henry refused to do the expedient thing by converting until it had become absolutely clear that he could not return peace and harmony to France except by becoming Catholic. The author emphasizes the anguish of this decision for Henry and concludes that he merits praise for putting the good of the realm ahead of his religious convictions. The author eschews any hidden motivation for Henry's actions, whose motives are pure and simple. Scant attention is paid to his notorious womanizing, which influenced his decision-making on a number of occasions.

The book provides not only a systematic and sympathetic study of Henry IV's religious beliefs but also an extensive examination of the political and military aspects of his career. There are points where this reviewer would quibble with Love's interpretations, but the only jarring one is when Antoine de Bourbon and Anne de Montmorency are placed among the "ultraCatholics" (p. 28). The range of manuscript and printed sources the author cites is impressive, but the bibliography contains few works from after 1993. Works that were in print in time for him to use include R. J. Knecht's biography of Catherine de Medici and Stuart Carroll's study of the Guises. The book has a fine set of contemporary portraits but needs a genealogical table or two and a good map of France. The question of how strongly Henry IV was committed to his Calvinist faith is not as much at issue as the author asserts, but the book makes a valuable contribution to the continuing effort...

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