The Economics of Power: The Private Finances of the House of Foix-Navarre-Albret during the Religious Wars.

From the pioneering work of Jean Meyer and J. Russell Major to more recent contributions by Sharon Kettering, Jean-Marie Constant, Kristin Neuschel and Mack Holt, historians of early modern France have provided us with important insights into the lives, values and fortunes of nobles great and small, allowing us to move beyond the generalizations drawn from literary sources and parallels with the "crisis of the aristocracy" in England. In examining the finances of one of the greatest noble houses of sixteenth-century France, S. Amanda Eurich offers a significant contribution to the literature on the topic, adding new dimensions to our understanding of how certain noble houses managed to adapt to and even profit from the rapidly changing economic conditions of the period.

Despite its title, Eurich's study traces the fortunes of the house of Foix-Navarre-Albret over the course of the entire sixteenth century, from the career of Henri d'Albret, husband of Marguerite d'Angouleme, the sister of Francois I, through that of their daughter, Jeanne d'Albret, and finally that of their grandson Henri de Navarre, later Henri IV. Eurich recognizes that the closeness of the house to the crown and the unusually large size of its holdings make it difficult to determine the degree to which her findings can be considered representative of even the more prominent noble houses, let alone of the nobility in general, but is careful to place her findings into historiographic context in a manner that makes them perhaps more useful than she herself concedes. Many of her findings fit quite well into the larger picture of the evolution of the French government, economy and society in the period, and provide important points of reference for further studies.

Working from rent receipts and related documents, Eurich pieces together a remarkably complete picture of the Albrets' responses to pressures of inflation, growing household expenses, and civil war by introducing increasingly flexible systems of assessment and collection of rents. By moving to short-term leases and providing temporary rent relief to peasants in regions hit by crop failures and marauding soldiers, the Albrets proved themselves to be much more capable of adapting to both immediate crises and long-term trends than many earlier authors, notably Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, had given absentee noble landowners credit for. Eurich's research is every bit as thorough and painstaking as that of her French counterparts, and here she has done them one better.

In the later sections of the book, Eurich offers significant insights into the relationship between the crown, the nobility, the Protestant movement and the economy. While the Albrets had managed to keep their domanial revenues reasonably high through adept management, they quickly found themselves faced with three interconnected problems. As leading protagonists in the religious wars, often in rebellion against the crown, they had to bear the tremendous costs of the war effort, which neither the fundraising capacity of the Huguenot communities nor even subsidies obtained directly from the crown could totally offset, and this placed a serious drain on the resources of the house. The Huguenot communities themselves suffered from the same economic strains, and the Albrets found themselves subsidizing the whole French Protestant movement. Finally, the war drove many lower ranking nobles to seek the patronage of Jeanne d'Albret and Henri de Navarre, who brought them into their households in order to enhance their own prestige relative to the royal family and rival houses, to provide a corps of experienced military leaders and to keep potential troublemakers loyal. These factors proved costly to the Albrets in the long run, and forced them to alienate domains and to try to appeal to the crown for extended privileges and greater subsidies. The combination of the accession of Henri IV and the end of the religious wars eventually rescued the house from fiscal crisis, Eurich concludes, and the skills in financial management developed in the lean years enabled it to rebuild its fortunes very quickly at the end of the century. Eurich's findings are valuable and persuasive, and her work should serve as standard reading for anyone seriously interested in the nobility of early modern France.

JAMES R. SMITHER Grand Valley State University