Un régicide au nom de Dieu: L'assassinat d'Henri III, 1er août 1589 (review)

In the last thirty years, our understanding of many controversial topics on the violent and near-chaotic end of the Valois dynasty has gone through a sea change. Historians have broken from old generalizations primarily based on the flaws, ambitions, and corruption of rulers and great personages to redefine sharply the agents and contingencies that shaped the period's transformations in culture, politics, and society. Nicolas Le Roux's stirring and erudite narrative of the 1 August 1589 assassination of Henri III ably employs recent scholarship and his own wide learning to illuminate the many impulses underlying the assassination, the varieties of responses to it, and its consequences as one of "the days that made France," the title of the series in which the book is published. The immediate crisis resulted from the last Valois's inabilities to produce a male heir, but the sources of the problems were rooted in sixteenth-century developments and concepts of the French monarchy.

Le Roux's study begins with the young monk Jacques Clément, who with a concealed dagger at Saint-Cloud palace killed the king. Before Henri III died on the next day, he had his court and royal officials swear obedience to the Huguenot Bourbon King Henry of Navarre as the legitimate successor to the crown of France. At Henry III's death, the allied royal and Huguenot armies were besieging Paris and poised to capture it. Loyalists to the monarchy condemned the patricide of God's anointed and conducted memorial funerals. Supporters of the Guise and Catholic League staged processions and Te Deum celebrations in praise of God's miracle in having a monk kill a tyrant and save Paris. Le Roux relates debates over kingship during Henry III's reign in book 1, "Henri III et la Majesté Royale." Henry III as king took the Herculean mantle of both secular and religious reformer and embodied contradictory images and obligations that figured in his decisions and conduct: officiating in religious processions, waging war against Huguenots, making truces with them, attempting to persuade his subjects in various assemblies (Henry III was reputed the best orator of his age), appointing and rejecting favorites and officials, and finally assassinating his nemeses, the Duke of Guise and the Cardinal of Guise. These assassinations and Henry's assassination seven months later resulted in a crisis of legitimacy —a "régicide symbolique" (161) —and a reconfiguration of monarchical institutions. Because of the spread of printed materials, more French had some knowledge of events at the center of the monarchy than ever before.

Book 2, "L'Union des Catholiques," delineates the responses to the assassinations of the Guise brothers, where fanatic Catholics demonized him as tyrant and servant of the devil. The new head of the Guise family, the Duke of Mayenne, with control of Paris, sections of France, and rump monarchical institutions governed under the title of the lieutenant general de l'Etat royal et couronne de France. In "La Raison du Roi" Le Roux turns to the ideologies of royal, religious, and national identities to analyze the ideas and expediencies that guided towns, nobles, and institutions in their dealing with the king. Book 4, "Des Valois aux Bourbons," traces the restoration of the sacred unique character of the French monarchy according to the mythic Salic Law with Henry IV as the only legitimate heir. Henry III entered the royal pantheon as "martyred king" whose death triumphantly made Henry IV the divinely chosen savior of France. Henry IV's military successes and revisions of royal symbolism were essential for the recovery of Bourbon France.

Le Roux enlivens his sympathetic, convincing, and superbly written account of the last Valois king with many quotations: from the dying king, anxious courtiers, the furious noblewomen of the Guise family, reflective...