Cette recherche interroge la monarchie française en situation de crise en partant d’un pari politique hors norme, celui des prélats catholiques qui misèrent sur Henri IV, roi protestant. Elle étudie les diverses facettes de l’action politique de ces hommes et reconstruit les mécanismes de leur travail de légitimation du premier Bourbon, en privilégiant les premières années du règne. Centrer l’enquête sur ces années permet de restituer à cette période sa dimension d’incertitude vécue par les acteurs de la monarchie, qui se trouve généralement écrasée par le poids de l’histoire de la pacification, après l’édit de Nantes. Ce choix d’un temps court rend possible l’étude attentive des cérémonies possédant une grande importance symbolique, tels que l’abjuration et le sacre royaux. Trop souvent ces événements sont uniquement décrits, racontés par l’historiographie. L’analyse proposée ici s’attache à l’inverse à leur redonner leur dimension problématique, à réfléchir sur les choix stratégiques faits par le pouvoir, notamment en ce qui concerne leur publication, comme une seconde mise en scène, imprimée. En adoptant un angle d’observation centré sur l’engagement, tantôt exposé, tantôt discret du groupe de prélats (Jacques du Perron, Claude d’Angennes et leurs pairs), il devient possible d’appréhender la monarchie en tant qu’œuvre collective d’acteurs multiples qui agissent pour assurer sa survie. En proposant ainsi une alternative à la vision navarro-centrée qui domine largement l’historiographie, cette approche permet d’aborder d’une nouvelle façon la sortie des guerres de Religion et de révéler des acteurs peu connus, qui néanmoins jouent un rôle crucial dans ce processus. / This dissertation investigates the French monarchy during a moment of crisis, focusing on an exceptional political bet made by a number of catholic prelates who chose to support Henri IV, a Protestant king. Their varied political actions are studied here, and the mechanisms of their work of legitimation of the first Bourbon are reconstructed, with a particular attention to the first years of his reign. The emphasis on these years offers the opportunity to give back to this period its dimension of uncertainty, as lived by the actors of the monarchy, a dimension that is generally erased under the weight of the history of the pacification, beginning with the Edict of Nantes. The choice of a short period allows a careful analysis of ceremonies of great symbolic importance, such as the royal abjuration and coronation. Too often these events have been merely narrated by historiography. This analysis, however, seeks to reconstruct their problematic dimension. Specific attention will be paid to the choices made when these events were published, which constituted a second staging of the act in printed form. With the focal point placed on the political commitment of the prelates, which at times was explicit, and at other times remained discreetly hidden away, it becomes possible to understand the monarchy as the collective work of multiple actors who endeavoured to ensure its survival. Thus, by proposing an alternative reading of events to the Navarro-centric vision that largely dominates historiography, this approach discusses the end of the Wars of Religion from a new perspective, which uncovers lesser known actors, who nonetheless played a crucial role in this process.

This thesis is an examination of the printing industry in Paris between 1570 and 1590. These years represent a relatively under-researched period in the history of Parisian print. This period is of importance because of an event in 1572 – the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and an event in 1588 – the Day of the Barricades and the subsequent exit from Paris of Henry III. This thesis concerns itself with the two years prior to 1572 and two years after 1588 in order to provide context, but the two supporting frames of this investigation are those important events. This thesis attempts to assess what effect those events had upon the printing industry in the foremost print centre of both France and Western Europe. With the religious situation in Paris quietened was there any concrete change in the 1570s and 1580s regarding the types of books printed in Paris? Was there any attempt to exploit this religious stability by pursuing the ‘retreating’ Protestant confession, or did the majority of printers turn away from confessional arguments and polemical literature? What were the markets for Paris books: were they predominantly local or international? The method by which these questions have been addressed is with a bibliometric analysis of the output of the Paris print shops. This statistical approach allows one to address the entire corpus of a city’s output and allows both broad surveys of the data in terms of categorisation of print, but also narrower studies of individual printers and their output. As such this approach allows the printing industry of Paris to be surveyed and analysed in a way that would otherwise be impossible. This statistical approach also allows the books to be seen as an economic item of industrial production instead of purely a culture item of artistic creation. This approach enhances rather than reduces the significance of a book’s cultural importance as it allows the researcher to fully appreciate the achievement and investment of both finance and time that was necessary for the completion of a well printed book.

This thesis will contend that a permanent body of military force under royal command, a ‘standing army’, arose during the first three decades of the seventeenth century in France. Such a development constituted a transformation in the nature of the monarchy’s armed forces. It was achieved by encouraging elements of the French nobility to become long-term office-holders within royal military institutions. Those members of the nobility who joined the standing army were not coerced into doing so by the crown, but joined the new body of force because it provided them with a means of achieving one of the fundamental ambitions of the French nobility: social advancement for their family. The first four chapters of this thesis thus look at how the standing army emerged via the entrenchment of a system of permanent infantry regiments within France. They look at how certain families, particularly from the lower and middling nobility, attempted to monopolise offices within the regiments due to the social benefits they conferred. Some of the consequences that arose from the army becoming an institution in which ‘careers’ could be pursued, such as promotion and venality, will be examined, as will how elements of the the nobility were vital to the expansion of the standing army beyond its initial core of units. Chapters Five and Six will investigate how the emergence of this new type of force affected the most powerful noblemen of the realm, the grands. In particular, it will focus on those grands who held the prestigious supra-regimental military offices of Constable and Colonel General of the Infantry. The thesis concludes that the emergence of the standing army helped to alter considerably the relationship between the monarchy and the nobility by the end of the period in question. A more monarchy-centred army and state had begun to emerge in France by the late 1620s; a polity which might be dubbed the early ‘absolute monarchy’. However, such a state of affairs had only arisen due to the considerable concessions that the monarchy had made to the ambitions of certain elements of the nobility.

Le XVIe siècle est souvent perçu comme un temps de massacres motivés par les haines confessionnelles, une litanie de carnages et d’exactions à laquelle succéderait, à partir des années 1650 une culture de la reddition honorable, une guerre réglée et limitée caractérisée par une nette amélioration du sort des vaincus. Une humanisation de la guerre se donnerait à lire au travers d’une codification des procédures de capitulation et de reddition des places. Ce travail, suivant les pistes ouvertes par l’anthropologie historique, questionne cette vision caractéristique d’une déréalisation de la guerre pour montrer que la reddition honorable émerge précocement et ne constitue jamais qu’un idéal toujours soumis aux intérêts des belligérants. Mobile de la clémence, l’intérêt est également celui de la rigueur. Tout au long des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, la reddition reste un risque pour l’honneur et la vie des vaincus. Cette histoire de la reddition entend déconstruire le mythe déréalisant de la «guerre en dentelles» pour rappeler que les guerres du règne de Louis XIV ne sont pas le théâtre d’une limitation de la violence. / The XVIth century is often perceived as an era of religious driven massacres, a litany of carnage and exactions directly followed, from 1650 onward, by reversing habits of honourable capitulation, a closely regulated and restricted warfare characterized by a great improvement in the fate of the defeated. A humanization of the war would show through a codification of the surrending procedures and the transfer of forteresses. This essay investigates this derealizing vision of warfare, based on historical anthropology’s theoretical leads. It shows that honourable capitulation come about earlier on as an ideal led by the interest of belligerent parties. These interests appear as a major motive for both leniency and rigorousness. All along the XVIth and XVIIth cent., capitulation stands as a risk for the honor and life of the losers. This history of capitulation intends to deconstruct the derealizing myth of chivalrous and limited warfare, to recall the fact that wars under the reign of Louis XIV often led to repeated acts of unleashed violence.

This thesis examines the increasing sophistication of sixteenth-century French literary engagement with Virgil's Aeneid. It argues that successive forms of engagement with the Aeneid should be viewed as a single process that gradually adopts increasingly complex literary strategies. It does this through a series of four different forms of literary engagement with the Aeneid: translation, continuation, rejection and reconciliation. The increasing sophistication of these forms reflects the writers' desire to interact with the original Aeneid as political epic and Roman foundation narrative, and with the political, religious and literary contexts of early modern France. The first chapter compares the methods of and motivations behind all of the sixteenth-century translations of the Aeneid into French; it thus demonstrates shifts in successive translators' interpretations of Virgil's work, and of its application to sixteenth-century France. The next three chapters each analyse adaptation of Virgil's poem in a major French literary work. Firstly, Ronsard's Franciade is analysed as an example of French foundation epic that simultaneously draws upon and rejects Virgil's narrative. Ronsard's poem is read in the light of Mapheo Vegio's “Thirteenth Book” of the Aeneid, or Supplementum, which continues Virgil's narrative and carries it over into a Christian context. Next, Agrippa d'Aubigné's response to Virgilian epic in Les Tragiques is shown to have been mediated by Lucan's Pharsalia and its anti- epic and anti-imperialist interpretation of the Aeneid. D'Aubigné's inversion of Virgil is highlighted through comparison of attitudes to death and resurrection in Les Tragiques, the Aeneid and Vegio's Antoniad. Finally, Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas' combination, in La Sepmaine and La Seconde Sepmaine of the hexameral structure of Genesis with Virgil's narrative of reconciliation after civil war is shown to represent the most sophisticated understanding of and most complex interaction with the Aeneid in sixteenth-century France.