Forgetting and fictionalizing: French historical narratives and the case of the Breton League

Introduction

From 1589 to 1598, the eighth war of Religion, now called the War of the Bourbon Succession, set off by the assassination of the Guise brothers, threw the French kingdom into turmoil. ¹ While its consequences radiated across the kingdom, they affected the region of Brittany in particular ways. The peninsula, following a pattern seen in southern European regions and countries, had remained relatively hermetic in the face of the Reformation. ² Yet, for almost a decade, it was continuously disturbed by sieges, battles and attacks, until Henri IV signed the Edict of Nantes. Two explanations of this discrepancy are widely accepted today. First, the Duke of Mercœur, who had been governor of the region since 1582, played a role in keeping the region distanced from the king's authority. A devout Catholic, and brother-in-law to Henri III, Pierre-Emmanuel de Mercœur married Marie de Luxembourg who, as heiress to the house of Penthièvre, had a claim to the former duchy of Brittany. As the uncertainty surrounding the succession to the French throne grew, the couple set out to establish their influence in Brittany, and Mercœur was recognized as the chief of the Leaguers in the region. ³ The second reason was geopolitical. Brittany was located halfway between the kingdoms of Spain and England, making it a prime target for both enemies. Philippe II of Spain in particular saw Brittany as the perfect Catholic stronghold against the Protestant influence coming from England and Henri III's perceived weakness towards heretics in France. ⁴ This is why Hervé Le Goff argues that the civil war in Brittany was first and foremost a geopolitical war and not an ideological one, even though religion and the potentially profound consequences of a protestant French king underpinned its development ⁵ .

While this was undoubtedly an important period of French history, the reception and understanding of these events remained partial. A number of developments throughout the nine years of conflict were well-established and documented locally. Several authors wrote about the period from their respective towns, including Jean Pichart (?-?) a notary from Rennes, Jean Moreau (c.1522–1617), a priest from Quimper, Jean du Matz de Montmartin (c.1546–1625), a nobleman originally from Terchant but located in the towns of Vitré, Lamballe and Craon, Jérôme d’Aradon (c.1550–c.1607), a nobleman from Hennebont, Duval (?-?), a school teacher from Châteaugiron, and Jean Ravenel de la Mériais (?-?) located in Vitré, among others. ⁶ Read together, these texts offer a nuanced view of the conflict; their authors came from different religious backgrounds and social contexts. Regardless of their partisan bias, they all focus on the extensive toll of the conflict on the civilian population. ⁷ However, most national narratives of the time paid little heed to these events. Narrative histories including Pierre Droit de Gaillard's Brieve chronologie (1610) and Florimond de Raemond's Histoire de la naissance, progrès et décadence de l’hérésie de ce siècle (1610) did not include the Breton events at all. Jean de Serres's Histoire des choses mémorables (1599) touched upon the decade-long episode only briefly. Theologian Simon Goulart, in his Mémoires de la Ligue (1602) approached the topic in relative depth, but his historiographical approach of compiling documents devoid of a narrative framing is not relevant for this study. ⁸

The only historical narratives that dealt with the Breton civil wars at length were Pierre Victor Palma Cayet's Chronologie novénaire (1608), Agrippa d’Aubigné's Histoire universelle (1616–1630) and Jacques-Auguste de Thou's Histoire universelle (trad. 1734). ⁹ Despite writing independently, these historians employed similar rhetorical strategies, such as blurring the lines of conflict, shifting focus away from the enemy victory, and portraying Mercœur's journey from transgression to repentance and salvation, demonstrating the pervasiveness of the ‘oubliance’ doctrine and the necessity of a new historical narrative at the end of the sixteenth century. Their accounts of the League follow a small number of common themes and shed a negative light on the movement, highlighting its rejection by the population, the political skills of Henri IV and the healing effect of his conversion on the kingdom. ¹⁰ This common approach by three historians is notable since they were quite different in both their circumstances and beliefs. Aubigné and Thou came from magistrates’ families while Palma Cayet, born poor, became a pastor. ¹¹ Palma Cayet, born Catholic, converted to Protestantism under Pierre Ramus but renounced the faith following the conversion of Henri IV. Aubigné remained faithful to the Protestant Reformation until the end of his life and is known for his criticism of the king's treatment of the Reformed. Thou's Gallican beliefs made him inherently critical of the Crown. Whereas Aubigné and Palma Cayet wrote in French, presumably in an attempt to reach a wider, domestic audience, Thou wrote his work in Latin for a well-educated audience, most likely ‘his intellectual peers’. ¹² Finally, all three historians promoted the conformity of words and facts. Thou wished to ‘écrire sincerement’ [write sincerely] while Palma Cayet wanted to ‘reciter au vray les choses comme elles sont advenues’ [recite truthfully the matters as they happened]. Aubigné saw value in becoming ‘véritable tesmoin des yeux et des oreilles’ [a true witness with my eyes and ears] to prove the truthfulness of his work. ¹³

Shaping history is done not only at the macro level through source selection and generic choices but also at the micro level, in the ways historians use language to recount events. ¹⁴ The opportunity to focus on all the references to the Breton League allows for a comprehensive understanding of how history was shaped in this particular case. It shows that close reading of historical discourse offers a compelling path to a better understanding of complex conflicts. In this way, the process of textualization (what P. Carrard calls la mise en texte) is interrogated and the rhetorical dimensions of historical writing are acknowledged. ¹⁵ Discursive conventions are understood as having political, ideological and epistemological implications, maybe even more so when the texts being studied recount a civil conflict. Philosopher Ninon Grangé highlights the importance of reading history as a discourse when she argues that a civil war entails the ‘risque d’extinction totale’ [risk of absolute extinction] for a country and concludes that both the inability to understand this specific conflict and the angst felt at the sight of the state's implosion commonly leads writers to avoid the difficult subject. ¹⁶ Caught between two mutually exclusive options – of telling history ‘as it happened’ and risking further damage to society or of bowdlerizing events – historians tend to create a new reality, what Grangé calls a ‘fiction compensatoire’ [compensating fiction] centred on the ‘imitation de la régularité’ [imitation of regularity]. ¹⁷

Andrea Frisch has demonstrated that sixteenth century writers of historiography and tragedy constructed a ‘rhetoric of amnesia’ in their Religious Wars narratives written after 1563. ¹⁸ She found that an inner logic leading commentators to ‘forget’ certain events also existed in historiographies of the time and has the effect of ‘neutralizing neutrality’ and ‘redefining posterity’ to allow a distance between the reader and the events depicted in order to avoid resentment and passionate reactions. ¹⁹ This article explores how the League in Brittany was represented in the national historical narratives of the time and shows how Thou, Palma Cayet and Aubigné crafted a ‘compensating fiction’. I do not intend to argue that the three historians wrote imaginary histories. I do however find compelling the idea that historical writings have their own rhetorical dimensions and will show that when recounting the League in Brittany, the three historians, coming from different ideological currents, assume similar discursive conventions and strategies: blurring the lines of conflict, shifting the narrative focus away from loss and adopting a similar pattern of characterization for the Duke of Mercœur. Moreover, even though they had access to at least some local historical narratives, they all strayed from them in similar ways. This implies a certain level of consciousness on the part of these men to help rebuild the French Crown. In turn, this allows me to interrogate the role of the historian and his work in sixteenth-century France.

The Breton League plays a small part in the three historians’ texts for three main reasons. First, the circulation of the original sources and the question of whether they were known to Thou, Aubigné and Palma Cayet remains difficult to answer. The local texts cited above are only known through copies today as their originals all disappeared during the intervening centuries. ²⁰ A comparison of certain events narrated by Thou, Palma Cayet and Aubigné with local sources will show however that all of the historians most likely read Montmartin's account. The second reason concerns the lack of heirs to the League movement and the desire of the Catholic chiefs’ descendants to forge ahead and forget about the past. At the end of the conflict, historical accounts tended to favour Protestants because of the number of people willing to further that memory. Conversely, after 1598 and the surrender of all Leaguers, no one seemed to wish to maintain the memory of the League. ²¹ The third and perhaps most important reason for the neglect was the peace process ending the French Wars of Religion and the attempt at shaping collective memory that took place at the end of the century.

First spelled out in the Edict of Amboise (1563), and in many other decrees from that time forward, the policy of oubliance, in contrast to what its root oubli [oblivion] suggests, did not plead for a tabula rasa but rather for the weakening of negative memories of the civil wars. ²² Many metaphors found in these decrees qualify memory as ‘assoupie’ [dormant], ‘estaincte’ [extinct] and ‘ensevelies’ [buried] which connote a reduction in the intensity of the collective memory rather than complete erasure. While it eventually led to the signing of the Edict of Nantes (1598) and an agreement to live in religious harmony, the concept of oubliance was not definitively accepted among the population. Jérémy Foa argues that the peace builders sent by Charles IX ultimately failed at their task because of the tension between acting as if abuse had not happened in the name of peace and answering complaints of violence by local communities. ²³ Penny Roberts, while proposing a more optimistic outlook on the work of these administrators, also acknowledges that persistent religious acrimony did not encourage coexistence. ²⁴ In an attempt to emphasize peace over religious practices, these edicts appeared to be used against the Protestants, forcing them to be confined to their homes and outside of cities. ²⁵ Ultimately however, studies of local communities including Nantes and Poitiers have shown that municipal and royal powers worked in tandem and reinforced each other. When the time came to join the Catholic League, these towns remained somewhat reluctant. ²⁶ We see a similar dynamic in Brittany during the battle of Rennes in 1589 when Leaguers attempted to stir fear among the inhabitants and exhort them to take the city from the Royals but failed, as well as in the inability of the movement to take over Saint Malo in 1591. ²⁷ Leading to the Edict of Nantes and an attempt at religious tolerance, it is clear that the repeated decrees provided a conceptual framework to move away from the conflict. The difficult process of war termination had direct consequences on the shaping of history.

Blurring the Lines of Conflict

A civil war is profoundly difficult to understand since it blurs the usual understanding of borders between civilians and combatants. ²⁸ The terminology Thou, Aubigné and Palma Cayet use to qualify the conflict demonstrates significant confusion around the Breton conflict. Sometimes they call the events ‘plots’, ‘sedition’ or ‘cabal’. More often, they term them ‘league’, ‘faction’, ‘turmoils’, ‘disorders’ or the more cryptic ‘movements’. ²⁹ These similarities, following Grangé's reasoning, reflect the indefinite state of the conflict. The ambiguity of the warfare is also evident in the numbers at our disposal. An examination of historical documents dealing with the League in Brittany shows that about thirty-eight battles took place between the Royals and the Leaguers in Brittany between 1589 and 1598. ³⁰ The region counted thirty-seven strongholds, generally towns or castles, which each side alternately took and lost over nine years. ³¹ During this time, the Leaguers won approximately twenty-five battles whereas the Crown won twenty-two. This relatively equal distribution is not surprising as the conflict was entrenched and mostly consisted of sieges, spats, assassinations and other crimes rather than frontal combats between two enemy factions. It also shows that the conflict was at its heart stagnant if slightly to the advantage of the Leaguers as they gained more territory, especially in the first few years.

While this context might call for the careful depiction of a nuanced reality, the three historians pick and choose certain battles to describe. Out of six detailed battles, Aubigné depicts four Royal victories: Vitré, 1589; Blain, 1589; Montcontour, 1590 and Crozon, 1594. Palma Cayet similarly chooses to describe very few Leaguers’ victories. Out of the three, Thou recounts the most battles (thirty-five) but similarly to the others, he only mentions sixteen Leaguers’ victories. While counting battles might not seem relevant, especially in light of an entrenched conflict, it becomes significant when added to a disregard for certain well-known aspects of the Leaguers’ victories. For example, when Aubigné tells the story of the seizing of Blain's castle by Jean de Montauban for the Royals in 1589, he provides numerous details, including how a woman was used to seduce the guards, but the original source remains unclear and cannot be located in the writings of Montmartin, Moreau, Pichart, Duval, Aradon or Ravenel. Moreover, Aubigné chooses not to mention the almost immediate retaking of the castle by Mercœur aided by the Spaniards in 1591 even though at least one local writer, Moreau, mentions it. ³² Aubigné might not have had access to Moreau's text which is the only one to our knowledge that provides an account of the retaking. It was however common knowledge that this castle went from one side to the other throughout the conflict. The fact that Aubigné stops after the Royal victory and does not mention Blain again points to a discursive choice.

Palma-Cayet adopts a similar rhetorical strategy and presents the Royals in a highly positive light in his description of the retaking of Vitré in 1589. In his hyperbolic account, the Royals did not just go to battle but ‘se jetterent dedans Vitré, et unaniment avec les habitants’ [charged Vitré eagerly and unanimously with the inhabitants], suggesting their resolve and the adhesion of the populace with the king. ³³ The original source of this characterization again remains unclear. More importantly, it is a significant departure from other local texts that propose a more nuanced view. For instance, the Royals Ravenel and Montmartin both focus their account on the inadequacy of the population and their ammunition : ‘les habitans […] n'estoient pas en assés grand nombre pour défendre une brèche’ ³⁴ [the inhabitants… were not in large enough numbers to defend a breach] and ‘ils n’avoient dans la Ville pour toute artillerie qu’une courte, moyenne, & quelques petites pieces, ce qui leur causoit un grand default’ [all the artillery they had in the city was one short, one medium and some small pieces, which was a great hindrance to them]. ³⁵ This discrepancy can be explained by the fact that Vitré, belonging at the time to the Laval family, was an important patron and protector for the Huguenot community ³⁶ . Palma Cayet, in an attempt to show religious cohesion, may have wanted to commend Vitré's population as a way to emphasize the courage of its Protestant inhabitants in defending the king's stronghold even though local sources of the time do not support this interpretation. At any rate, in order to assuage the ambiguity of the conflict, Thou, Palma Cayet and Aubigné numerically, structurally and rhetorically imply that the Leaguers lost. These historical narratives promote a compensating fiction by diluting the protraction of the war, alleviating its central ambiguity and allowing the Royals to emerge as undoubted winners.

Shifting the Narrative Focus Away from Victory

When facing the reality of having to depict major defeats of the king's armies, the historians come up with similar tactics to move the focus away from the Leaguers’ clear victory. Two telling examples are the sieges of Craon (April–May 1592) and of Lamballe (July–August 1591). The battle of Craon became a colossal loss for the French king. More than a thousand soldiers, mostly Englishmen sent by Elizabeth to support Henri, died, and the Princes of Dombes and Conti, who led the armies, were compelled to retreat in confusion. Sketching this bitter defeat, Thou offers his perspective and commentary, first emphasizing the ‘maths’ of war and mentioning the unequal distribution of soldiers on both sides favouring the Leaguers: there were fifteen hundred Royals to Mercœur's six thousand soldiers. ³⁷ Thou proceeds to describe the topography of the land surrounding Craon as well as its natural fortification: a moat surrounding the town, a narrow strip of land and the river Oudon. It becomes evident that each of these topographical features provides an explanation for the impending defeat. The soldiers were too few, the moat had to be dried out and left the armies ‘quarante jours sans rien faire’ [forty days with nothing to do] ³⁸ . The strip of land was ‘étroit & désavantageux’ [narrow and disadvantageous], and the king's commanders Conti and Dombes neglected to destroy the bridge after their passage as a ‘precaution’, thus allowing Mercœur's armies to use it the next day. ³⁹ According to Thou, all of this explains how Mercœur ‘sans aucun dessein de donner bataille, remporta une victoire dans le tems qu’il songeoit le moins [not wanting to fight a battle, won a victory at a most unexpected time]’. ⁴⁰ Thou's surgical attention to detail and account of negligence and lack of experience shines a light on the lack of merit of Mercœur's victory.

Palma Cayet offers an account that devotes more lines to Mercœur's side but, like Thou, he also provides a justificatory frame at the end, listing the reasons for the royal army's defeat: the lack of ammunition, the topography and the retreat in daylight leaving the armies exposed. ⁴¹ This logic of justification through the elaboration of a list at the end of the episode underscores the opportunism of Mercœur and his lack of merit. Palma Cayet suggests that the Duke did not win because his army was better prepared or skilled but because the king's army was disorganized. Aubigné also refuses to give Mercœur any credit by emphasizing the incompetence of the Royal commanders Dombes and Conti while distancing himself and using the narrative fuzziness of the third person pronoun ‘on’, ‘le mauvais champ de bataille qu’on choisissoit’ [the disadvantageous battle field that was chosen], and the ironic use of the adjective ‘judicieux’ [judicious] when talking about a battle order that emphasizes the sheer lack of any good judgement on the part of the two royal princes. ⁴² The Huguenot historian accentuates Mercœur's lack of merit further by listing an additional factor to his ‘stolen’ victory; he sees the Spanish army as the ‘principaux instruments de cette Victoire’ [main instruments of this victory] ⁴³ . Focusing on the incompetence of the Royal commanders allows these historians to downplay the Leaguers’ success and mitigate one of the cruellest losses of that war.

Even though the flaws of the king's side are acknowledged, shifting the narrative focus away from the Leaguers’ victory is a clever way to not acknowledge the victory of the Leaguers. It also diminishes the merit of the adversary. This omission of Mercœur's victory can also be explained historically. While a great success, it was a missed opportunity for the League as the Duke failed to use his momentum to overtake larger parts of the region. 1592 ended up being the beginning of the end for the Leaguers. That year, the Spaniards moved away from this alliance and started pursuing their own agenda. ⁴⁴ Meanwhile, the impending conversion of Henri IV was poised to seal the future of the crown. This explanation is not sufficient to explain this narrative exclusion, however, since it was such a great defeat that it led to the immediate dismissal of Dombes and the nomination of Aumont as the new governor of Brittany. ⁴⁵ Moreover, these accounts stray far from local narratives such as Moreau's and Montmartin's. Moreau who was somewhat more in favour of the League, offers a complete reversal of the same story. ⁴⁶ He mentions how the Royals knew of Mercœur's arrival well in advance, and had consequently built fortifications all around themselves and in the best positions. ⁴⁷ Moreover, he opposes the order of Mercœur's armies to the chaos of the royal soldiers. ⁴⁸ Finally, he thoroughly mocks Conti ‘qui avoit tellement peur’ [who was so fearful] and ‘épouvanté’ [terrified] that he escaped and hid after the battle to avoid the wrath of the Spaniards. ⁴⁹

Even among Royal partisans, the recounting of the battle of Craon is not so neat among local chroniclers. While Thou's anecdote about the little bridge is taken from Montmartin's narrative, he completely ignores the rest of the text and De la Noue's stern assessment of the situation, including telling Dombes to destroy it. ⁵⁰ Moreover, Montmartin emphasizes the general incompetence of Dombes and his armies, mocking the ‘good order’ given to get an update on Mercœur's whereabouts that led to the miscalculation of his army's progress by many leagues. ⁵¹ Finally, Montmartin goes on to show that Mercœur did not really want to fight and simply wanted to end the siege. ⁵² The move away from local sources by Thou, Aubigné and Palma Cayet shows that they made conscious choices when recounting the events of the League in Brittany. While they did not simply avoid telling these events, they shifted their focus by downplaying the Leaguers’ key victories.

The strategy of moving the narrative focus from the Leaguers’ victory is also at play in accounts of the battle of Lamballe. A year before Craon and soon after Vitré, the strategically located Lamballe was attacked by the Prince de Dombes. Lamballe, while a fairly humble city, was one of the main towns of the duchy of Penthièvres whose heir was none other than Marie de Luxembourg, the duchess of Mercœur. This episode is only recounted first-hand by Montmartin. Against his and François de la Noue's advice, Dombes entered the city and pillaged it. ⁵³ While the goal of the Royals was to seize the fortress, their attempt failed, caused the death of De la Noue, and leading to a shameful retreat. Using Montmartin's nuanced local account of the events, the national historians mitigate the devastating loss through a literal detachment of the narration from the events and an emphasis on a war hero, François de la Noue.

This process is clear in Palma Cayet and Thou's works whereas Aubigné does not mention the episode at all. Both Thou and Palma Cayet's narratives end with De la Noue's tragic death. After several attempts to breach the walls of Lamballe's citadelle, the captain decided to climb the wall and inspect the damage himself. This decision sealed his fate, as Thou recounts in a vivid description of the scene:

Aussitot la Noue ayant quitté son casque, pour être moins embarrassé, monta sur une échelle plantée derrière des ruines. Dans le tems qu'il éxaminoit la brèche avec attention, une bale d'arquebufe, qui ne fit que lui effleurer le front, lui froissa tellement l'os, que la cervelle ayant été ébranlée du coup, il se cassa la tête en tombant & demeura suspendu par un pied, qui s’embarrassa dans les echellons. ⁵⁴

These changes provide a different interpretation of De la Noue's death, from an unlucky turn of events in Montmartin's text, spurred by a failure to listen to sound advice and a bad fall, to a more meaningful one according to Thou. When Thou does not mention Montmartin's warning to De la Noue, the latter's attempt to look over the breach becomes heroic instead of foolish. Palma Cayet also makes this event more meaningful, this time focusing on De la Noue's leg and using the captain's fall as a reminder of his past glories:

[…] ce coup le fit tomber à la renverse de dessus l’eschelle, dans laquelle sa jambe où il avoit esté blessé aux faubourgs Sainct Martin durant le siege de Paris, ainsi que nous avons dict, demeura empeschée, ce qui luy fit recevoir de grandes douleurs, pource qu’elle n’estoit pas encores bien guarie. ⁵⁷

What is most striking however is that this particular story cannot be found anywhere else. ⁶¹ This account seems apocryphal and to have emerged from the imagination of Palma Cayet after reading in Montmartin that ‘[De la Noue] avoit à la Malheur osté son casque lequel il avoit ce jour là garny de laurier’ [De la Noue had unluckily taken off his helmet that he had adorned with laurels that very day]. ⁶² Inspired by this single sentence, Palma Cayet invents a story of how the laurels were found in the first place. This narrative allows the historian to give the laurels of victory to De la Noue after all and serves to divert the reader's attention not only by lowering the emphasis on the loss of Lamballe but also by creating a new story, thus making the reader ‘forget’.

While not resorting to apocryphal writing, Thou proposes modifications to De la Noue's agony that also shift the narrative focus away from the loss. Beyond the topos of the sacrifice of the captain's family's future to the service of the state, Thou emphasizes the religiosity of the fallen captain when describing his end:

Enfin la parole lui ayant tout-à-fait manqué, il donna jusqu'au dernier soupir des témoignages de son espérance & de la foi ⁶³

The Duke of Mercœur's Character Revolution

The final rhetorical strategy used by early modern French historians to create a compensating fiction is their characterization of the Duke of Mercœur's personality and actions. Once a traitor and a bandit, Mercœur dies a martyr in a pattern of repentance symbolic of the ideological and philosophical exigencies of late sixteenth century France. All three narratives surrounding Mercœur's life story follow a pattern of transgression, repentance and salvation, in an attempt to make sense of his life. Each historian selects the same traits to highlight and treats them in very similar ways, departing from local sources.

Conclusion

The depiction of the League in Brittany by Thou, Palma Cayet and Aubigné shows that they all adopt similar rhetorical strategies, which include blurring the lines of conflict, shifting the narrative focus away from the enemy victory and representing Mercœur on a path of transgression, repentance and ultimately salvation. These strategies lead to the crafting of a ‘fiction of harmony’ by effectively defusing the conflict and going as far as characterizing Mercœur as a saint. The use of similar strategies by historians who did not have the same background or careers and had differing approaches to historiography is notable. Using the sources at their disposal, they all modified certain aspects of the civil wars in a way which had the effect of rendering the Breton period in both less chaotic and less divisive terms, and allowed them to set up a path toward re-building the Crown. In doing so, they resorted to some aspects of fiction while still grounding their accounts in verifiable events. My analysis of the recounting of the Breton events by Thou, Aubigné and Palma Cayet suggests that while the administrative resolution of the conflict might have been difficult, the peace process created a climate in which it was possible for three different writers to craft similar historiographies. While it calls into question the historians’ claims to conformity of words and facts, it suggests that they felt endowed with a duty to assuage conflict and were aware of the role that history could play in this endeavour.