In October 1588, Henry III attempts an unprecedented coup: reconquering its authority through print rather than the sword. Two months before the assassination of the Guises, the king orchestrated a propaganda campaign, now rediscovered, to seduce supporters of the League.
The States General of Blois of 1588 remained in historical memory as the scene of a spectacular and bloody event: the assassination of the Duke and Cardinal de Guise, on December 23 and 24, by order of Henri III. This act of political violence, qualified from the XVIIe century of “ stroke of majesty », has long attracted the attention of historians, to the point of obscuring the less spectacular, but just as historically significant, course of the weeks which preceded it.
And if, before this “ stroke of majesty » succeeded, the king had attempted another blow, peaceful this one, by persuasion ? It’s this missed gesture – “ and, probably, forgotten because missed » (p. 14) – as Alexandre Goderniaux recounts, exhuming a royal propaganda campaign eclipsed by the violence of the Wars of Religion.
Henry III strategist of his reign
The work is born from a remarkable documentary discovery: that of eleven texts printed at the end of 1588, all from Henry’s sphere of influence III and centered on the first sessions of the Estates General (October 16 and 18). These documents, of which the book includes the edition, present a quadruple unity – chronological, formal, editorial and political – which reveals a centralized communication operation. All were produced by royal printers and given official privilege, suggesting a concerted strategy for disseminating the royal reading of events.
These texts must be read in light of Henry’s extremely fragile position III in October 1588: the king faced a popular, powerful Catholic League, supported by Spain and led by the Duke of Guise, then at the peak of his popularity. By taking the opposite view of a teleological approach, A. Goderniaux invites us to reassess the strategy of the sovereign and his attempt, aborted, to impose through print another narrative of monarchical authority. It’s this “ missed stroke of majesty », aiming to replay on paper a political success that reality did not grant it, which this book analyzes, in a fruitful dialogue with the recent work of Jacqueline Boucher, Xavier Le Person and Nicolas Le Roux, among others, who contributed to rehabilitating the political action of the last Valois king.
A political response to the crisis of the monarchy
The strength of the book is to place these texts in a moment of major political crisis. The death, in June 1584, of François d’Alençon, younger brother of the king, had caused a dynastic crisis: with a Protestant heir (Henri de Navarre, the future Henri IV), the prospect of a non-Catholic king at the head of the kingdom deeply divides the country. The Catholic League then organized itself around a fierce rejection of this succession. The Barricades Day (May 1588), during which the Parisian population rose up against the king, their flight from the capital, and the growing tensions gave full meaning to the convocation of the Estates of Blois.
The king intervened directly – something exceptional – before an assembly largely favorable to the Leaguers. In the texts studied, he appears in a double presentation: on the one hand, as an uncompromising defender of the Catholic faith ; on the other, as the man capable of channeling the demands of the Leaguers in the service of the unity of the kingdom. He attacks the League as a competing political movement, while validating some of its religious objectives. This double gesture – delegitimizing the League while seducing its supporters – is part of a strategy aimed at rallying the undecided and reaffirming the centrality of the king in the political order.
Sacred monarchy and reform project
Beyond the immediate management of the crisis, the eleven printed documents bear witness to a vast reform project carried out by Henri IIIbased on a sacred conception of the monarchy. Breaking with a historiography long focused on the ineffectiveness of the last Valois king, the author shows how these texts expose a real political program, broken down into four parts: justice, police, finances and religion.
Henry III defends, for example, the abandonment of the venality of offices – that is to say the sale of public offices – in favor of a power of appointment based on merit. He also positions himself as the guarantor of the Catholic faith and internal peace, restorer of an ancient order in a logic of moral and political regeneration. Through many topoi – the doctor-king, the father-king, the heir-king – the texts depict a sovereign invested with a mission of salvation: to care for a kingdom perceived as a sick body. The objective is clear: restore royal authority without resorting to violence.
A paper theater: consensus and staging
Among the many avenues opened by the book, one of the most original concerns the analysis of the way in which the printed matter of 1588 depicts a fictionalized political consensus around the king. A. Goderniaux shows that the published texts function according to a dialogical logic: on the one hand, the royal speeches (the texts “ transmitters “) ; on the other, the staged or suggested reactions of the deputies (the texts “ receptors “). The whole composes a carefully orchestrated polyphony, in which adherence to royal ideas seems natural and unanimous – as if the Estates General spontaneously gave their approval to the sovereign’s project.
The case of the oath on the Edict of Union, at the heart of the texts of October 18, is particularly revealing. This edict, promulgated in Rouen in July 1588 under pressure from the League, committed the king to defending the Catholic faith, to prohibiting the exercise of Protestant religions and to excluding heretics from succession to the throne. It was a major political and religious concession made to the League camp, intended to strictly regulate the king’s action. Gold, Henry III publicly repeats its terms before the States, not to submit to them, but to strategically re-appropriate them. By displaying his acceptance of these commitments, he gives the feeling of giving in, while making it an instrument of legitimization of his own authority. As the author summarizes, “ the voluntary submission of the monarch is conceived as an illustration of his authority » (p. 72).
This rhetoric is based on a performative conception of speech: to speak is to act politically. The author identifies three registers used in these texts – deliberative (convincing), judicial (debating what is just and unjust), and demonstrative (highlighting royal power). All are inherited from the humanist oratory tradition. In this device, the king, as a good orator, distinguishes himself from his adversaries not by force, but by mastery of language. Thus it is essential in monarchical communication “ a certain equivalence between speaking well and governing well » (p. 86).
By reconstructing the overall logic of these printed documents, A. Goderniaux shows that they aim to produce, through writing, an ideal assembly, consistent with the expectations of royal power. Far from faithfully reflecting the real debates of the States General, these texts offer a scripted version of political exchanges, where the king triumphs without real opposition. It is a paper theater, where power seeks to impose its own fiction of political unity – a rhetorical success on the fringes of a more conflictual reality.
A fine, sometimes demanding proofreading
Beyond the textual staging of royal power, the book by A. Goderniaux stands out above all for the original rereading that he offers of a key moment in modern political history. By shifting the focus from the bloody days of December 1588 to the first sessions of October, he is not content with correcting a chronology that is too often teleological: he invites us to rethink Henry’s political action IIIlong reduced in historiography to an indecisive king overwhelmed by events.
This revaluation is based on a rigorous, solidly supported demonstration. The exploitation of the printed corpus, its fine contextualization and its political reading are fully mastered. The work of editing texts, by making rarely studied documents accessible, constitutes a scientific contribution in itself, useful to historians as well as literary scholars.
Certainly, even if the author takes care to situate his analyses, the argumentative density and the conceptual requirement of the work presuppose a good familiarity with the political-religious tensions under the last Valois and with the codes of rhetoric of the Ancien Régime. Certain passages – notably those devoted to “ ideal reception ” or “ dramatized polyphony » – would undoubtedly have benefited from being more explained, to better support the reader in sometimes complex concepts.
But these occasional difficulties in no way diminish the scope of the investigation nor the finesse of the analysis of monarchical political language. By bringing to light this abortive attempt to reconfigure authority through speech and writing, the book invites us to reconsider the temporality of politics: even weakened, monarchical power continues to reinvent itself in an emergency, at the crossroads of constraint and action.
With A missed stroke of majestyA. Goderniaux delivers a dense, original and historically salutary study. By choosing to focus attention on the first weeks of the Estates General of Blois, he restores political substance to a sequence often overshadowed by the spectacular violence of the assassinations of December 1588.
In doing so, he pursues a broader historiographical enterprise of rehabilitation of the last Valois king, not by depicting him as a victorious sovereign, but as a lucid political actor, strategist and aware of the performative force of speech and writing. Henry III appears there as a king who tries to govern by word, to convince rather than coerce, in an increasingly hostile context. The eleven texts therefore raise a stimulating question: “ and if Henri III was misunderstood because he was ahead of his time ? » (p. 112).
In short, if this “ stroke of majesty » was missed in the facts, it is not in the texts – and this is where the great success of the book lies: to show that history can also be written from what failed, but which was thought, prepared, scripted with an ambition which deserves to be taken seriously.