Pasquier's Recherches de la France

At the beginning of his revised version of Book I of the Recherches de la France (1596), Etienne Pasquier claims the intrinsic interest of the anciennetJ of France, and claims that all he writes, he writes for France toutefois escrivant ici pour ma France, & non pour moy.I Certainly it is the case that it is neither possible nor desirable to displace the current working hypothesis, initiated by Kelley, Huppert, and Franklin, that Pasquier's history, like other histories of his period, responds to the exigencies of the Civil Wars and fits into a program of political of history.2 The Recherches, then, contributes to a Gallican project of finding indigenous paradigms for French policy; they substantiate Pasquier's fundamental axiom: in the well-ordered state peuple soit sujet au Magistrat, & le Magistrat a la loy.993 I propose, however, by focusing on Pasquier's of the exemplum -the narration of a particular episode to illumine and edify-to develop an additional, modifying hypothesis of reciprocity: the Recherches represents not simply a sixteenth-century reorganization of medieval material, but a medieval reorientation of sixteenth-century historical politics. That is to say, not only are the exemplary incidents medieval, but the exemplary form or strategy as well; this exemplarity constrains a particular tactic of use of history in the confection of moral-political identity. I shall claim that Pasquier's epitome of Book V -La commemoration de quelques notables exemples, que ie voy ou n'estre deduits par le commun de nos Croniquers, ou passez si legerement qu'il son 'a plusiers inconnus4 signals an anomalous, but diagnostically interesting, project within

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