Helene Germa-Romann. Du "bel mourir" au "bien mourir. "Le sentiment de la mort chez les gentilshommes francais (1515-1643).

(Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 347.) Geneva: Librairie Droz S. A., 2001. 352 pp. index, bibl. 88 [euro]. ISBN: 2-600-00463-7.

The notion that a large class of men, privileged by birth, education, and rank, raised as Christians, would actively seek death in battle and consider this the most desirable end to life is difficult to accept. Yet Helene Germa-Romann contends that the French nobility in the sixteenth century had precisely these aspirations and beliefs. She writes "[Le gentilhomme] se preoccupe avant tout de trouver une 'belle mort,' c'est-a-dire la mort au combat" (12). She asserts that "[Lie champ de bataille, theatre des exploits du gentilhomme est le lieu ou il souhaite demeurer" (84). She asserts that dedication to the ideal led to the development of duels, "afin de pouvoir mourir les armes a la main, meme en temps de paix" (119). Recognizing that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many nobles were not involved in warfare, she maintains that a minority imposed its ideal on the rest of the "ordre" (119). She implies that the preoccupation developed with the chivalric ideal in the thirteenth century and disappeared in the seventeenth century, with the decline of admiration for earthly renown fostered by the Counter Reformation, changes in warfare, and the growth of an absolutist monarchy. Until Louis XIII (r. 1610-43), she proposes, rulers shared the nobility's dedication to death in battle, but Louis' death as a pious Christian exemplified a new model, more consistent with absolutist aims. According to her, Louis was "le premier roi dont la mort en chretien et non en chevalier apparait comme un module valable pour toute la noblesse" (17; see 300-07; compare 13).

Germa-Romann constructs this ideology from a variety of sources, all published, including moralizing manuals of conduct. Praise of death in battle is understandably scarce, and is generally found in hortatory treatises or works of secular hagiography. The battlefield might be called "la plus belle des sepultures" (50, 84-85), but such phrases were coined as tribute to the dead or to hearten the pusillanimous. Germa-Romann's most telling evidence is a declaration the biographer of the marshal of Vieilleville attributed to him. Rejecting the king's assignment of the governorship of Brittany in 1550, Vieilleville is said to have complained of being put out to pasture like a worn-out 60-year-old, whereas what he wanted was to die in royal service, facing the king's enemies and exposed to cannon fire. Germa-Romann believes this means that Vieilleville felt "[1]a peur de mourir age et sans avoir revu les ennemis" (269). But, evidentiary issues apart, should the statement not simply be read as a polite means of excusing Vieilleville's disdain for a dull, dreary post?

To her credit, Germa-Romann presents recalcitrant and discordant evidence, but she often dismisses its relevance. Brantome, for example, labels as "belles morts" the Christian deaths (in bed) of Maximilien d'Egmont, count of Buren, in 1548 and of Francois I de Cleves, duke of Nevers, in 1562. Rather than suggesting that Brantome may have had various criteria for "belles morts," Germa-Romann emphasizes that in the first case the count died attired in military garb and in the second, that the duke's death "est fort differente de celle que les gentilshommes revent ordinairement d'obtenir" (268)--without explaining how she knows this.

As to the exemplarity of royal deaths, Germa-Romann would have found useful Jean du Tillet's Recueil des Roys de France, leurs couronne et maison (published in many editions between 1578 and 1618), which does not appear in any of her twelve (rather cumbersome) topical bibliographies. Du Tillet praised the kings of France for "en mourant [laissant] preuue de la droite foy tres-chrestienne qu'ils auoient tenue en leur viuant," and offered a survey of model royal deaths which shows that accounts were widely-disseminated long before 1643. He cited "la belle fin" of Louis VI in 1137; the "saints derniers propos" of Philip the Fair in 1314; "l'humilite exemplaire, & fiance feruente enuers son createur" shown by Francois I in 1547 and recorded by Pierre du Chastel; and the "Enseignements" of Saint Louis to his son that Joinville recorded (which Du Tillet quoted in full). In the grand tradition of royal "belles fins," King Francois' death, which Germa-Romann does not discuss, foreshadowed in many details Louis XIII's passing.

Germa-Romann does not prove her thesis, but her book provides many interesting commentaries on and anecdotes concerning French noble dying. The first half of the book focuses on death in battle and noble ideology. The second presents a typology of noble deaths, ranging from the honorable through the dishonorable, and ends by arguing the displacement of the noble ideal by the Christian model in the seventeenth century.

The book contains few typographical errors, and is handsomely printed and bound, a testimony to the high standards for which Droz is known.

ELIZABETH A. R. BROWN

The City University of New York, Emerita