Images of Kingship in Early Modern France: Louis XI in Political Thought, 1560-1789.

Adriana Bakos. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. x + 249 pp. $69.95. ISBN: 0-415-15478-2.

Although these works are both concerned with the public image of a French king, their orientations and focuses are very different indeed. The first is a long-term study in the history of French political thought, while the other analyses one of the grandest occasions for French royal pageantry in the Renaissance.

Louis XI, the energetic fifteen-century monarch recalled as the roi araignee, is cited usually, if not always, for his undesirable qualities. Adrianna Bakos does not aim at throwing new light on his character or actions, although there is a minimally interpretive summary of his life and reign. She sets out rather to study his image in history "as a prism through which to examine the political discourse of the time" (1). After an initial look at historians or memorialists contemporary to Louis, notably Thomas Basin and Philippe de Commynes, her main attention is given to writers from the second half of the sixteenth century to the Revolution, with an epilogue to deal with a surprising revival of interest in the first half of the nineteenth century. In addition to a long series of book-length works of history or political theory, the author has examined a remarkable number of polemical pamphlets, many of them anonymous. If her study is basically a depouillement, it receives meaningful structure from her underlying distinction between "absolutists" and "constitutionalists," and from organized attention to less lasting currents such as those of the sixteenth-century politiques and the eighteenth-century nobiliaires.

In the age of deconstruction and semiotics, the author is keenly aware of the multiple meanings that texts may acquire in different times and places. In this theoretical context, the ingenuous tone of her concession that "what the author intends to do in writing is of significance" (5) may be enough to make the hair of old-fashioned literary scholars stand on end, but in practice she is quite respectful of authors' intentions. It is the actions and pronouncements of Louis XI that acquire surprising meanings. Often seen as a supreme example of the abuse of royal power, he was also extolled at times as the defender of order, or, by quite different sources, as a champion of the common people, the Parlement de Paris, or the Estates-General against a rapacious nobility. Bakos's tracing of these evolving interpretations demonstrates the extreme complication of political discourse in early modern France and makes thus a very useful contribution to the history of ideas whose basic findings would doubtless have parallels in other countries and periods.

The visit of Henri II and Catherine des Medicis to Lyon in September, 1548, was one of the grandest French state occasions of the century, and arguably the most interesting of all for cultural historians. The city government commissioned elaborate street decorations for separate entries of the king and queen, and subsequent entertainments were sponsored not just by that authority but also by Archbishop Ippolito d'Este and by the colony, or "nation," of Florentine merchants. Most of the municipal planning was entrusted to the humanist literati Maurice Sceve, Barthelemy Aneau, and Guillaume du Choul, working with the artist Bernard Salomon. Sceve is also the author of the handsomely illustrated official account, which was published after a delay and without bearing his name. In keeping with the practice of the Renaissance Triumphs and Magnificences series, the editor, Richard Cooper, reproduces in facsimile (1) Sceve's livret, (2) a shorter, doubtless anterior printed news bulletin recounting the entries, and (3) a special description of a Florentine comedy production that had been added to the Italian edition of Sceve (printed, like the French one, in Lyon). In appendices, he edits as well diplomatic reports in Italian sent to the dukes of Mantua, Ferrara, and Florence, along with eyewitness descriptions by Jean Gueraud and Denis Sauvage.

Cooper's particularly full introduction is based upon archival work, as well as on meticulous comparison of the unusually plentiful first-hand accounts. The wealth of documentation has a disadvantage, for the various accounts present an astonishing number of discrepancies - more, at least in the reviewer's experience, than for any other grand French or Italian festival of the period. Many differences must be explained by the evident fact that the illustrious Serve left numerous things out, either because he was not interested or because they did not fit in with the neo-classical image in his mind, and even altered details after the fact in order in report what he would have liked to be rather than what was. The author of the printed account of the Italian comedy, recorded only as "EN.," seems also to have improved upon the text of some verse intermezzi for publication, unless that was done by their original composer Luigi Alamanni.

The editor's reconstruction of the setting and proceedings of the theatrical production is especially interesting and well done. This was the first staging of an Italian neo-classical comedy abroad and a source both of subsequent French developments in the genre and of the later vogue in that country of Italian actors. Cooper is to be commended as well for unusually painstaking attention to Latin inscriptions that had been placed on buildings and on temporary street decorations, There were more of them on this occasion than for any preceding French royal entry, and more also than for the following entries of Henri II into Paris (1549) and into Rouen (1550). The inscriptions and the iconography of the decorations were an essential part of the neo-classical image of Lugdunum that Sceve wished to present. Cooper has tracked down many classical quotations and paraphrases (not always quite apposite to their new settings), while having to deal again with not a few discrepancies. There appear also to have been some inscriptions in vernacular verse, reported in Italian to the duke of Mantua, that Serve ignored. Both the planning and the reporting of events were clearly marked by tensions between opposing tastes. Cooper's masterful edition gives us a keen sense of these tensions and succeeds admirably in recreating a high moment in the movement of French humanism and classical revival.

BONNER MITCHELL University of Missouri, Columbia