Wounded Faith: Monarchy and Memory in the French Wars of Religion, 1559-1629

This study traces a transformation in the way French kings were ritually commemorated during the Wars of Religion, focusing on the deaths of Henry II (1559), Charles IX (1574), Henry III (1589), and Henry IV (1610). It suggests that the violence of the civil wars first between Catholics and Protestants, and later between royalists and supporters of the Catholic League, created a crisis of memory by allowing the development of divergent understandings of the meanings of their deaths. In a dynastic political culture that depended on continuity and tradition, such divided memories centered on factional political and religious identities posed a threat to the legitimacy of the king and the stability of the institution of monarchy.

Traditional approaches to commemorating the king were not influential enough to stop Huguenot opposition to successive Valois rulers from finding an origin story in Henry’s sudden death. By 1589, the Catholic League emerged to combat the religious policies of Henry III and the succession of Henry IV, and when Jacques Clément assassinated Henry III and was celebrated as a martyr, it showed how contested the memory of a French monarch could become. When France again faced a sudden, violent royal death in 1610, Marie de’ Medici and her advisers not only improvised the rituals surrounding the change of regime, they flooded the market with a wide range of printed propaganda that was designed to ensure universal mourning of Henry IV and support for both Marie as regent and Louis as legitimate successor. The campaign employed traditional literary forms and intensified the quantity and intensity of emotional language, in imitation of the Catholic League’s attempts to undermine Henry III in 1589.

In the aftermath of the death of Henry IV, the stability of the monarchy rested on the attempt to shape and constrain collective memory of the late king through appeals to and critiques of feelings and emotional display. I argue that this inextricably linked politics with a contested set of emotional norms that particularly challenged Marie de’ Medici’s authority as a woman in a patriarchal French political culture. I also suggest that this created a template for large-scale public mourning that would increasingly shape early modern and modern political life.