| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Xavier Le Person. "Practiques" et "practiqueurs": La vie politique à la fin du règne de Henri III (1584–1589). Foreword by Denis Crouzet. (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, number 370.) Geneva: Librarie Droz. 2002. Pp. 658.

Historians have long remarked on the notorious duplicity of Henry III of France as recorded by sixteenth-century chroniclers, his reputation as a dissembler and hypocrite, and his predilection for wearing masks, both real and metaphorical. No previous study has explored this theme in as much depth or with such meticulous attention to detail, however. By examining the language and behavior of the king and those grands who experienced a fraught relationship with their monarch, notably the dukes of Guise and Nevers, Xavier Le Person succeeds in building up a picture of French political life dominated by dissimulation and mutual suspicion, in which political survival was dependent on ambiguity, bluff, and counter-bluff. Concentrating on a few key incidents in the later years of Henry's reign, Le Person reconstructs an elaborate game in which the arts of persuasion and artifice (his practiques) were used (by les practiqueurs) to manipulate and outwit opponents, and a world in which all pronouncements and actions were redolent with symbolism. Henry III is presented as the master of the game: the individual whose thoughts are hardest, and yet most important, to read. Yet his success in this regard was also the source, for contemporary observers, of savage criticism.

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