Les ducs de Nevers et l'état royal: Genèse d'un compromis (ca 1550–ca 1600) (review)

Lodovico Gonzaga, duc de Nevers, is one of the most intriguing and peculiar figures of the French Wars of Religion. Named duc de Nevers in 1565, Gonzaga acted as an important advisor to Charles IX and Henri III, advocating the suppression of heresy, supporting the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and promoting the early Catholic Reformation within France. Les ducs de Nevers et l'état royal explores the clientele and career of Louis de Gonzague, as the Franco-Italian Lodovico was increasingly known, through a massive collection of the duc de Nevers's manuscript correspondence, mémoires, and reports in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This evidence is supported by notarial documents, ducal papers, and family archives conserved in the Archives Nationales and the Nivernais departmental and municipal archives, as well as contemporary printed pamphlets.

Using such sources, this book considers Louis de Gonzague's relationship with the French monarchy, and examines state development processes in depth. This study follows William Beik's social collaboration model in emphasizing the duc de Nevers's cooperation with early modern monarchs. Boltanski argues that establishing Gonzague as a new grand within the kingdom required close collaboration between Charles IX and the new duc de Nevers, but the book fails to examine this stunning promotion in comparison with the rich literature on favorites such as Henri III's mignons, Concino Concini, and the Cardinal de Richelieu. The author succeeds in incorporating a number of recent English- and French-language studies of clientelism, state development, and noble politics. However, overtones of Roland Mousnier's société des fidélités begin to dominate Boltanski's analysis when the author portrays Gonzague as ever faithful to monarchy, interpreting duc de Nevers's loyalism and service through the lens of fidélité. Here, Boltanksi claims to inverse "classic historiography," but the framework of Mousnier's structural-functionalism undergirds this study's model of clientelism.

Boltanski also employs fidélités in presenting the duc de Nevers's clientele as stable and solid: "an extremely stable nebula, cemented by internal relations" (177). While family, household, clientele, and institutional relationships undoubtedly overlapped in this period, Boltanski rarely differentiates among these forms of interaction, seeing the duc de Nevers's network as structured through organized — if not purely hierarchical — relations among a restricted group of families. Family members, provincial nobles, parlementaires, domestic servants, and writers are all portrayed as clients in this book. Such an analysis depends on accepting domestic household relationships as indicating wider patterns of clientele membership, conflating reseaux d'amitié with clienteles, and downplaying the changes in clientele support during the Catholic League wars. This approach fails to resolve contradictions in the historiography on clienteles, only blurring the debates between Kristen Neuschel, Sharon Kettering, Arlette Jouanna, and Mark Greengrass on noble clientele practices.

Boltanski seeks to explore noble family identities, but confusingly portrays the Clèves and Gonzaga-Gonzague families as a single Nevers lineage. The Italian dimension of the Gonzaga family and the Mantovan dynasty is only explored in a brief section on Italians who served in Louis de Gonzague's entourage. Catherine de' Medici is occasionally mentioned as providing favors for Louis de Gonzague, yet otherwise is curiously absent from the analysis. Gonzague's connection to sixteenth-century Italian migration patterns and to anti-Italianism with France during the religious wars is not adequately explained.

The most significant finding of this study emerges through Boltanski's careful reconstruction of a prominent noble's religious motivations during the French Wars of Religion. Recent historians have abandoned older historiographical tendencies to portray the grands as self-interested, Machiavellian, and irreligious, yet nobles' complex religious-political positions are still poorly understood. Louis de Gonzague was clearly quite engaged in the religious conflicts, hosting theological disputes in...