Blood and Belief: Family Survival and Confessional Identity Among the Provincial Huguenot Nobility.

Blood and Belief is a study of the Lacger family, Protestant nobles of Castres in southern France, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Raymond Mentzer discovered a rich family archive that allowed him to follow their careers and fortunes - an "ordinary and unexceptional, hence representative and informative past" (26). The Lacgers were aspiring royal officeholders. By the 1550s Antoine de Lacger was a judge in the Parlement of Toulouse. But the Wars of Religion cut short their ascent; the Protestant Antoine was murdered in 1572. Subsequent generations had limited opportunities for judicial service in the biconfessional Chambre de l'Edit until that court was dissolved in 1679. All the while, and particularly after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, the Lacger and other Protestant nobles were under pressure to convert to Catholicism. A few could retreat to their country estates; others became military officers, paid taxes with their noble blood and displayed at least outward religious conformity. Yet the newly-converted who were showered with royal favors did not forget their Protestant relatives. Mentzer shows convincingly that over two centuries "ties of kinship and sociability overcame religious division" (45). Survival and prosperity of the family as a whole mattered the most. To support their status and tenacity as French landowners, the Lacgers chose suitable careers and arranged marriages, dowries and inheritances. Godparents and patronage were found within the family circle as much as possible. During the old regime two-thirds of their adult men married, and all of the adult women did, although their choices were restricted to a narrow confessional group after 1685. Thanks to their good fortune in having heirs, the Lacgers escaped the natural noble tendency to extinction. They preserved and even increased their patrimony. Some lands they purchased in the 1530s were kept well into this century, and the chateau of Naves, acquired in 1724, is still held by their descendants today.

The massive details are arranged under topical headings such as patrimony, marriage, inheritance, and education, though there is little mention of material culture and no discussion of how agricultural incomes fluctuated over time. Mentzer shows that the Lacgers were typical by making comparisons to other families in the same region. He provides an intelligent summary of Huguenot noble family histories, covering the accumulation of royal offices and land beginning in the sixteenth century, the disruptive Wars of Religion, the years of relative stability while the Edict of Nantes was observed, and the painful effects of the Revocation - loss of office, persecution, forced conversion, retreat to the land, and exile. Through all this, the Lacgers endured. It is a remarkable story of the unremarkable, its telling possible only because the documents survived, conscientiously preserved by the Lacgers themselves.

The main shortcoming of the book, however, may be attributed to inadequate editing. By Chapters 7 and 8, on family allegiances and confessional identity, the book is tediously repetitive, belaboring obvious points and recycling the evidence. The text is full of superfluous phrases and parenthetical remarks: "as previously noted," "as might be expected," "so-called," "naturally enough." We are told many things twice, and even three times that Roze de Correch was the daughter of a magistrate of the Chambre de l'Edit (84, 97, 155); that Jean-Jacques-Joseph de Lacger married a rich Catholic woman (56, 153, 176); that Paul Pellisson Fontanier bought the office of secretaire du roi from the Lacgers in 1652 (113, 136, 188). By the conclusion readers will agree that the cream has been sufficiently whipped. Still, every budding graduate student in French history should read Mentzer's book for its clear explanations of family strategies, provincial nobility and Protestantism on the local level.

MAARTEN ULTEE University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa