A Coups de Libelles

The starting point of Tatiana Debbagi’s complex study of the modes of operation of the defamatory libel is Pierre de L’Estoile’s mémoires-journeaux. L’Estoile, who avidly collected printed materials, songs and rumours during the dramatic period of the League, is often evoked as evidence for the emergence in sixteenth-century France of an independent public opinion. The central question addressed by À Coups de Libelles is the role that printed books, especially defamatory libels, played in the emergence of a new political culture where individuals were encouraged to form their own opinion. The theoretical safeguards against giving individual opinion free reign in this period were considerable and the defamatory libel has its origins in rigidly codified uses of print in times of war that was sanctioned by the crown. Resort to printed libels followed carefully choreographed rituals of diplomacy, legitimizing a specific political standpoint in the eyes of potential allies, or served as ultimatums to the enemy indicating the point of no return at which all-out war would be declared. The libels often offered the possibility for the parties at play to backtrack, opening up a space for further negotiation and ultimate reconciliation. Yet, as Debaggi points out, this genre spilled out from its initial context and was used throughout the wars of religion by different parties to legitimize their taking up of arms, or by private individuals, theologians, lawyers and the lower nobility, to defend their honour or the honour of what they saw as the true faith. Libels were unusual at the beginning of the period (two dozen in 1560) whereas by 1589, as Paris was taken over by a League that was hostile to the crown, there would have been as many as 400 or more. The political developments that followed the death of Henri II in 1559, of course, provoked the mobilization of parties around the Protestant Reformation and its opponents. The peaks of production of libels in the vernacular, in 1561 and 1588, indeed follow closely the crown’s two worst crises of confidence: the beginning of the wars of religion and the League. Resort to print became commonplace in a bid to mobilize public opinion that was called upon to judge the fama (reputation) of the war leaders and elevated to the status of evidence in a quasi-judicial trial of the respective merits of a given cause. Debaggi demonstrates, through carefully chosen campaigns of defamation, that resort to print responded to an internal logic of legitimization a priori or justification a posteriori of diverse forms of political posturing, occupying a space in the public sphere that was already won over. Unlike the slow emergence of an Habermasian public sphere, culminating in democracy where public opinion ratifies political decisions through the ballot, À Coups de Libelles argues instead that defamatory libels sought a different kind of suffrage from the public. In the sixteenth century, public opinion was closer to classical and medieval models than modern ones: the opinion of the people was a vehicle for the supernatural (reflected in the commonplace vox populi vox dei) whereas only civil servants and public officers were qualified to evoke the voice of reason for the public good. Defamatory libels, therefore, resorted to two different types of rhetoric, the sacred and the judicial, the first appealing to the passion (in a positive sense) of the people for the defence of true religion, and the second trusting in the rational abilities of civil servants to ‘do the right thing’. The strength of À Coups de Libelles lies in demonstrating how the political crises of the wars of religion led authors to throw caution to the wind and to explode the accepted rhetorical norms in making ordinary subjects judges, juries and executioners of the common good. The responsibility lies at the feet of no-one in particular and Debaggi shows how all parties, royal, ultra-catholic and protestant, share a portion of the blame for derailing the defamatory libel from its accepted norms of usage. The most dramatic episodes of this story, from the taking up of arms of the Prince de Condé to the eventual restoring of order after the regicide of Henri III by the harnessing of the printing press by the crown, are discussed in separate chapters. The sum total is a remarkable book that painstakingly outlines a set of rhetorical conventions and commonplaces that contributed to the emergence of a new political culture. If the book conclusively demonstrates that contemporaries, when resorting to defamatory libels, were keenly aware of its codes, the same could not be said about historians, until now.

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology) · Diplomacy · Feud · Honour · Humanities · League · Nobility · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Reign · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medieval and Early Modern Justice

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