INTRODUCTION
“Précaire and précairement are words that are much in use.”Footnote 1 This assessment, from Nicolas Andry de Boisregard’s (1658–1742) Réflexions sur l’usage présent de la langue françoise (Reflections on the current usage of the French language, 1692), might just as readily be taken to describe our own era, in which precariousness and precarity have emerged to play a significant role in social, political, and ethical discussions. Landmark works of francophone and anglophone critical theory have established precariousness as an unavoidable condition of “living socially”—that is, being dependent on others—and precarity as the “politically induced condition of maximized precariousness,” by which certain populations “become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.”Footnote 2 As Pierre Bourdieu put it, echoing Andry across the centuries, “precarity is everywhere today.”Footnote 3
The 1690s in France were of course not shaped by neoliberal politics and post-Fordist working conditions, but precarity still serves as a useful lens through which to read the social and political fortunes of those suffering at the hands of the absolutist, centralized state that developed over the course of the seventeenth century. This suffering was felt particularly acutely by Huguenot refugees in the years following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685.Footnote 4 That précaire and précairement were identified as emerging keywords in precisely this period might suggest that these terms and the concepts associated with them have a political and intellectual history rooted in the violence and constitutional struggles of early modern France. But what would it mean to be précaire when this word was only just finding its feet? What did it mean for Andry and for the authors he cites to support his claim?
The early modern history of précaire and, especially, précairement shows these terms to be highly contested, and subject not only to appropriation and redescription but to correction, censure, and erasure. At the center of debates about their usage is one of the lines quoted by Andry as evidence of these new words’ currency: “It is to rule precariously [précairement] when their authority extends only to what is permitted.”Footnote 5 This statement comes from the “Mémoires sur la guerre de Paris” (Memoirs of the war in Paris, 1662), a scandalous text attributed to La Rochefoucauld (1613–80) that continued to circulate in print and manuscript after its supposed author had disavowed it.Footnote 6 One of these manuscripts, considered in detail in this article, finds the word précairement so suspect that it leaves it out entirely—not by glossing over it or paraphrasing it, but by leaving a gaping hole in what is an otherwise complete and impeccably neat copy (fig. 1).Footnote 7 It is an act of self-censorship that entirely corrupts the meaning, implying that a reader should know the missing word and, presumably, the arguments for its removal. Précaire and précairement were undoubtedly controversial, and efforts to extend, twist, and restrict their meanings reflected and participated in broader controversies concerning resistance, authority, and legitimate rule.
Figure 1. “Mémoires secrets sur les Guerres de Paris.” St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge, MS 17, fol. 8v.
Tracing this largely unacknowledged history, this article attends to the rapid and widespread application of a hitherto technical term borrowed from jurisprudence—possession par précaire—in a series of key moments in French arguments about sovereign power. In this context, precariousness and political precarity are located not among the socially marginalized (the Huguenot refugees, for instance) but among kings, their ministers, and their regents. It is in accounts of and disputes about princely precarity that precariousness emerges as a political and rhetorical concept with highly volatile valences, assumptions, and implications. Today, as in the 1690s, these words are “much in use” (“fort en usage”). Piecing together this history illuminates the shifting perspectives on this cluster of keywords, from the early modern period as well as from the present. But it also reveals an early modern culture alert to the political, social, and rhetorical potential that the language of précaire afforded, a culture in which authors and political agents capitalized on a piece of jurist’s jargon transformed into a buzzword.
LOAN WORDS: FROM JARGON TO BUZZWORD
Précaire entered French around the turn of the sixteenth century as a translation of precarium, a legal fiction describing a form of land tenure.Footnote 8 It was a word always in need of explanation and one reserved in large measure for legal textbooks and law codes. As the particularly clear Code du Tres-Chrestien Henri IIII (Law code of the most Christian Henri IV, 1603) put it, “Précaire is when one gives something to another freely at his request to make use of and help himself to for as long as the person giving the thing wishes.”Footnote 9 Following the Justinian Digest, lawyers and notaries established a French translation of precarium to describe a type of possession, usually of land but also of an office or some other good, that is held on loan, subject to recall at any moment.Footnote 10
But entering the vernacular did not immediately dispel the sense that this term was in need of accommodation. In the Institution du Prince (Education of the prince, 1547), Guillaume Budé (1468–1540) makes use of précaire by way of analogy, instructing his addressee, François I, with a parallel assessment of the fortunes of Caesar and Alexander. Men who have risen to great heights, he explains, forget where they have come from and ought to remind themselves that “such great amplifications brought about by providence or by fortune are issued precariously [de nature precaire]”—though he judges this to warrant a gloss: “liable to be recalled at will.”Footnote 11 François Hotman (1524–90), in his Francogallia (1573), relates how Hugues Capet (ca. 939–96), in an effort to shore up his nascent dynasty and establish his son as his heir, sought to guarantee the obedience and loyalty of his dukes and magistrates by converting these dignities into perpetual, hereditary titles. These titles had hitherto been held personally and were conferred by election: as Hotman puts it, “they were held only as a benefice and (as the lawyers say) precariously [precario].”Footnote 12 His parenthesis, excusing his legalese, was deemed insufficient by Simon Goulart (1543–1628) when he translated the Francogallia into French: for Goulart, “précaire” seems not (yet) to have been an option; he describes these dignities as being held “as fiefs and temporal benefices only.”Footnote 13
My aim in drawing attention to these usages is not to extend work on the social or legal history of precaria—those possessions of goods, offices, and land held on loan and subject to the will of another—but, rather, to point to a word on the cusp of finding currency in French.Footnote 14 Though still a long way from being “fort en usage,” précaire began to find figurative, analogical, and metaphorical application in French during the second half of the sixteenth century.Footnote 15 I will return to this period shortly—a period in which the succession crisis amid the Wars of Religion spurred on significant developments in theories of sovereignty.Footnote 16 For the moment, I want only to note that precariousness in this period was not defined as a general condition of exposure, vulnerability, or instability (though holding one’s possessions precariously may indeed bring with it these insecurities). Rather, it was concerned with goods and power being held on loan, and the nature of that loan was that it could be recalled at will, à volonté. In this sense, one might begin to draw a connection between precariousness and servitude as set out by Quentin Skinner in his foundational studies of neo-Roman liberty.Footnote 17 In much the same way that a slave may act freely, having a benevolent or absent master who does not in fact constrain their actions, and still be in a state of servitude, one might hold a precarious possession indefinitely: what makes a possession precarious is not that it is or will be recalled but simply that it can be.Footnote 18
In the sixteenth century, then, précaire was a rare, technical term that was barely French. Despite its rarity, though, precarious possessions and precarious contracts are almost everywhere you look in early modern Europe.Footnote 19 A century later, Bossuet (1627–1704), translating the Latin commission issued by Henry VIII naming Edmund Bonner bishop of London, made it perfectly clear that precarity is the universal state under an absolute monarch: “That all Jurisdiction, ecclesiastical as well as secular, came from royal power…: That those who hitherto exercised this power PRECARIOUSLY [PRÉCAIREMENT] were obliged to recognize it as having come from the liberality of the Prince, AND ABANDON IT WHEN IT PLEASED HIM.”Footnote 20 And, as has already been seen in the example taken from Budé, precarity’s remit extends to the highest political stations. Precarity, then, is everywhere, but what of précaire and précairement? What set of circumstances—political, literary, rhetorical—led to a situation, approximately one hundred years after Hotman’s parenthetical “as the lawyers say,” in which two material texts took such divergent approaches to précairement, one printing the word in block capitals, the other leaving a conspicuous gap?
The line attributed to La Rochefoucauld—“it is to rule precariously [précairement] when their authority extends only to what is permitted”—is one of two examples given by Andry in his Réflexions. The other is taken from Antoine Varillas’s (1624–96) Histoire de Charles IX (History of Charles IX, 1684): “This manner of governing, which had been entirely precarious [précaire], which is to say on pure sufferance, was too ill-suited to the Queen’s nature.”Footnote 21 But Andry’s own jurisdiction, on matters of eloquence, was almost immediately called into question. Two years after the publication of the Réflexions, César Vichard de Saint-Réal (1639–92) derided Andry as a fool, entirely lacking in discernment and unable to distinguish legitimate usage from one-offs and calques that authors and translators sometimes find themselves unable to avoid: “Can a critic be excused for thinking that précaire and précairement are words that are much in use [fort en usage] when the famous author he cites to provide him merely with précaire thought it necessary to explain it as he used it?”Footnote 22 A few years later still, Pierre de la Touche (d. 1730), in his Art de bien parler français (The art of speaking good French, 1696) equivocated: “Précaire & précairement. Some people do not like these words; one can make use of them, however.”Footnote 23 Changes between the first (1694) and second (1718) editions of the Dictionnaire de l’Academie française similarly testify to a shifting sense of these words’ legitimacy.Footnote 24
By the end of the seventeenth century, it was not only that précaire and précairement seemed to be everywhere. Arguments about these words appear to abound as well, enough for a scribe copying the “Mémoires sur la guerre de Paris” to be confident that his audience would be able to read the lacuna. Amid the hubbub, it is this silence that cuts through.
PRINCELY PRECARITY
Making sense of this late seventeenth-century quarrel requires a more thorough analysis of the schism that fractured France a century earlier. In the aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, through the succession crisis and the rise of the Catholic League in the 1580s, précaire played a key role in the conceptualization of sovereign power and in the arguments that proliferated about obligations to and constraints on the prince. I have already noted how François Hotman’s Francogallia, one of the principal Monarchomach texts of the 1570s, borrowed this term from Roman civil law to give an account of the crucial moment in his history of the French monarchy: the moment at which elective, non-hereditary kingship was usurped by Hugues Capet and replaced with a tyrannical dynasty that ruled without popular consent. It should be noted that popular consent is not democratic consent: the Monarchomach theory of popular sovereignty located authority in the singular populus, represented in the Estates General, which bore the sovereign right of dominium that was then loaned to the king and subject to recall.Footnote 25
This transaction between populus and king has traditionally been read through the lens of public law—specifically, the lex regia, the late Roman legal fiction, much discussed by medieval jurists, wherein the people delegate their imperium to the emperor. But as Daniel Lee has recently argued, it is remarkable that Huguenot resistance theory and theories of popular sovereignty rely almost exclusively not on the lex regia but on private civil law, with the consequence that popular resistance could be “very easily understood in civil law terms simply as a legal action by a dominus to recover what properly belongs to the people.”Footnote 26 Seen in this light, the right to resist a prince ceases to be extraordinary.
The pseudonymously authored Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (1579), most likely written by either Philippe Du Plessis-Mornay (1549–1623) or Hubert Languet (1518–81), places precarium front and center. Indeed, the title itself employs a related term from Roman civil law, vindicatio, most often read with reference to persons, in which case it describes the manumission of free persons who are wrongfully enslaved, though it can also describe the “real action for recovery of property in someone else’s possession.”Footnote 27 That property, as the Vindiciae has it, is sovereignty, which belongs rightfully to the populus and can be recalled at will from a tyrannical king. Within the first few pages, the author, “Stephanus Junius Brutus,” seeks to settle the matter of whether subjects are bound to obey princes who disobey divine law; he does so by contrasting God’s absolute rule with the “precarious” rule of kings: the scriptures teach that “God rules by his own authority, kings as though precariously [quasi precario]; God through himself, kings through God.”Footnote 28 As Brutus’s argument develops, though, the nature of the king’s “precarious” hold on power changes significantly: by the time he reaches his third of four questions about the legitimacy of popular resistance—that is, whether it is legitimate to resist a prince who oppresses or ruins (“aut opprimenti aut perdenti”) the state—the king is said to hold his power precariously not from God but from the people. Both kings and their subjects, Brutus argues, emerge from the same substance (“ex eadem massa,” “d’une mesme masse”), and it is the people who elevate kings: consequently, if the latter have any power or authority, they have it as something given to them, and something that is held precariously (“tanquam precariam possiderent”).Footnote 29
Both the Francogallia and the Vindiciae, widely read across France and beyond, placed precarium at the center of theories of popular sovereignty and of legitimate resistance to tyrants. Rendering the king a precarious tenant not only, as Daniel Lee has shown, situates resistance within the everyday world of private civil law; it demands to be read as a shocking rhetorical paradox. The rhetorical and constitutional implications of these seditious arguments prompted swift and significant responses. Here, too, precarium and précaire played a key role.
William Barclay (1546–1608), the Franco-Scottish jurist famous for coining the word Monarchomach, took direct aim at Brutus’s understanding of precarium, mocking the claim that kings rule “quasi precario” as not only rendering kings mere vassals but blasphemously taking God to be no more than a feudal lord.Footnote 30 “You do not understand the benefices you are talking about,” he wrote, targeting Brutus directly.Footnote 31 But he quickly found himself fighting on two fronts. The political landscape had changed significantly in the years between the publication of Huguenot Monarchomach texts in the 1570s and the printing of his own De Regno et Regali Potestate (1600): amid the rise of the Catholic League and the 1588 assassination of its figureheads, the Guise brothers, at the behest of Henri III, along with the subsequent excommunication of the king and, following his own assassination, in 1589, the matter of Protestant Henri de Navarre’s claim to the French throne, Catholic theorists and polemicists readily adopted Huguenot arguments that kings held their power and position precariously. The question, which divided the League, was whether the king held his power precariously from the sovereign authority of the Estates General or on sufferance of the Pope, judged to have “an absolute power indirectly over Kings and Princes.”Footnote 32 Barclay dedicates the twelfth chapter of his Traicté de la puissance du Pape to claims of indirect papal authority over temporal matters, demonstrating the nonsense (“l’incommodité & l’absurdité”) of Catholic claims that it is “in the hand and power of the Pope to take a kingdom from one and give it to another, as though it were possessed and held from him by précaire.”Footnote 33 It was an argument much like the one he had made earlier, in De Regno, for the absurdity of claims that kings held their authority precariously from the Estates General.
Barclay’s argument that the king holds absolute sovereign power aligned him with Jean Bodin (1530–96) and his monumental République (1576). That a king in a monarchy might be precarious is a nonsense that Bodin does not even discuss. But précaire is central to his outline not of monarchical constitutions but of monarchical government. Bodin’s theory of absolute sovereignty is more nuanced than has often been recognized.Footnote 34 That a sovereign has absolute authority says nothing of how it should be wielded. What’s more, holding absolute authority does not, according to Bodin, make one sovereign. Kings do—in practical terms, they must—delegate their authority to agents, and the means by which they do so determines the stability and order of the state. Bodin established two modes by which a sovereign king might delegate authority. He might act as a seigneur, delegating his authority as a “commission,” “like a thing held on sufferance and by précaire,” which can be recalled (revoquee) at will.Footnote 35 Alternatively—and Bodin’s preference here is clear—the king’s authority might be delegated to office-holding magistrates, an arrangement in which “the office is like a thing loaned, which the owner cannot recall until the prescribed time period has expired.”Footnote 36 The stability of the kingdom depends, for Bodin, on these legally instituted offices, which temper and circumscribe not the authority of the sovereign but the need for the sovereign to exert their authority. Indeed, Bodin draws a line connecting the use of precarious commissions and the instability that was plaguing France when he points to the prevalence of seigneurial commissions in the reign of Charles IX. “We know well enough,” he notes, “that there was never a power greater than that which was given to Henri de France, duke of Anjou, by King Charles IX…and yet one cannot say that he was sovereign…since the clause ‘AS LONG AS IT PLEASES US’ was appended to his commissioning letter.” Thus, “he has nothing except by precarious commission.”Footnote 37
The order and stability of the state hinges on the distinction between “offices” held on loan (“par emprunt”) and “commissions” that are merely “precaire.” Yet if one returns to the French translation of the Vindiciae, published in the same period, it appears that “par emprunt” was taken to be the obvious translation of the legalistic Latin “precario.”Footnote 38
Bodin’s République no doubt contributed toward disseminating this term in French, though its sense and the role it had to play in political polemic and constitutional thought remained wildly variable.Footnote 39 Toward the end of this period, which was shaped by crises of succession and resistance, in the immediate aftermath of Henri IV’s assassination, in 1610, Philippe Du Plessis-Mornay, the likely author of the Vindiciae some forty years earlier, picked up the topic of precarity once again, but from an almost antithetical position. Where the Vindiciae had vociferously maintained the precarity of the king, Du Plessis-Mornay argued in his 1611 Mystère d’iniquité (Mystery of iniquity) against the ligueur claim that it is lawful (loisible) for the pope to excommunicate and depose a king “no less than any other Christian, since he only reigns precariously [par précaire] and holds his authority in homage to [the Pope].”Footnote 40 It would seem that when the facts change, so, too, do perspectives on princely precarity.Footnote 41
PRECARIOUS LIVES: POLITICKING AND PRECARITY IN D’AUBIGNÉ’S HISTOIRE UNIVERSELLE
By the early seventeenth century, princely precarity had become an important weapon in the arsenals of Huguenot and ligueur resistance theorists and polemicists. The politique conversion of Henri IV, in 1593, followed by the Edict of Nantes, in 1598, established a degree of peace that was then cast in doubt by Henri’s assassination. Given Louis XIII’s minority, a return to regency government threatened to bring with it the instability that marked the period in which France was ruled by the sons of Catherine de Medici.
In 1616, Agrippa D’Aubigné (1552–1630) published his Histoire universelle, a prose counterpart to his fiery, passionate Tragiques, printed in the same year. He had been working on both for a number of decades, with the aim of producing not only an account of the wars but also a defense of the Protestant cause, abandoned by Henri (as D’Aubigné saw it) in the moment of his conciliatory conversion.Footnote 42 That moment of conversion marks one of two key moments in D’Aubigné’s Histoire in which rulers grapple with their precarity.
In 1593, Henri was under pressure from all sides: the Catholic League was looking to elect his uncle, Cardinal de Bourbon, in his place; hardline Huguenots sought to assert their advantage; and the “tiers parti” of Politiques applied a carrot-and-stick approach in convincing Henri to convert. François d’O, the Catholic finance minister, former mignon of Henri III, and member of this third party, hearing the king one day “sighing in confusion” (“souspirer en ses perplexitez”), accosted him roughly, telling him that the time for prevarication had passed.Footnote 43 Give it a week, d’O said, and you will face an elected king, the united Catholic nobles, the pope, the Spanish king, the Holy Roman Emperor, the Duke of Savoy, along with all of your other enemies, with no support but “your miserable Huguenots”—“if,” that is, “you do not make a swift and gallant resolution to hear a Mass.”Footnote 44 Convert, he said, and you will be “absolute king of all of France, winning more in an hour of Mass than you would in twenty battles.”Footnote 45
D’Aubigné matches this “harangue,” full of intemperate cursing (“juremens”), with one of his own. “In those same days, a certain gentleman”—D’Aubigné himself—sought to steady the king’s “tottering spirit” (“esprit qui balançoit”), which was balancing (one might say) precariously.Footnote 46 With little support, D’Aubigné struggled in vain to convince the king that “it was better to be king of a corner of France while serving God…than to rule precariously [regner precairement], having over one’s head the foot and the domination of the Pope, who would command insolently as though he had vanquished you.”Footnote 47 A soldier rather than a lawyer, D’Aubigné had taken up the arguments that would be printed by Barclay and Du Plessis-Mornay in their theses against papal indirect authority but had reframed them to appeal to a martial sensibility. “I am asking, he said, that the virtuous path”—evoking both masculine, military virtue and religious, ethical virtue—“towards making you an absolute king be harder and longer, but the other path you are being shown will never make you sovereign.”Footnote 48
D’Aubigné’s appeal was destined to fail. Henri was already by this point subject to an authority beyond his jurisdiction. In his “Debvoir des roys et des subjects” (On the duties of kings and subjects, 1877) a text more venomous and passionate than the Histoire universelle, D’Aubigné excoriates the Huguenot Politiques, who, “in fear of exile or death, or in hope of pensions,” made their pens and mouths say what served their interests, “twisting their conscience and their hearts.”Footnote 49 It was they who facilitated this “miserable resolution,” leading Henri to “spit on his achievements and, no longer ruling over himself, to rule precariously [regner precairement], persecuting those close to him for fear of being persecuted.”Footnote 50 Here, then, it is not the pope who has his foot on the king’s neck. It is his Politique counselors and, worse still, the fear they instilled in him: “And always seeing the hand and the dagger of a Chastel or a Ravaillac at his throat, he bent for fear of the blow.”Footnote 51
This crucial turning point in the life of Henri IV and in the fortunes of the Protestant cause extends the constitutional arguments about princely precarity significantly. For D’Aubigné, precarity is at once the specter of martial humiliation with which to rally a wavering monarch and a personal, ethical failing—a product of the king having lost his grip on himself, his advisors, his feelings, his fears. In his preface to the Histoire, D’Aubigné eulogizes Henri “le Grand” by praising his indominable spirit: Alexander had all the advantages of following Philip, whereas with Henri “we take a Prince from a cradle surrounded by thorns,” a prince “whose life was precarious [precaire], brought up at the feet of the Valois, who held a hostile scepter over his head.”Footnote 52 But having escaped from under the Valois, Henri nonetheless continued to live precariously, and, as D’Aubigné notes elsewhere in the Histoire, “precarious life ceases very quickly to be life at all.”Footnote 53
This account of precarious rule defines one of the essential moments in D’Aubigné’s history. Henri’s conversion marked the beginning of the end for the wars and, equally, a major blow to Huguenot aspirations, setting the apostate king on course to meet divine judgement at the hands of an infernal assassin.Footnote 54 The other key moment occurs at the very outset of war, in the years following the short reign of François II, dominated by the elder Guise brothers. The efforts of Catherine de Medici, who served as regent for Charles IX, to establish a policy of toleration seemed to be going nowhere: the Colloquy of Poissy, at the end of 1561, which brought together Catholic and Huguenot representatives, and the Edit de janvier (1562), which granted limited freedoms to Protestants, were followed quickly by the Guise-led massacre at Vassy (March 1562), which in turn lead to Huguenot military forces rallying around the Prince de Condé.
D’Aubigné’s account of this moment, at the dawn of the first of the religious wars, relays the dissensus and uncertainty that ran through the Protestant camp: some wanted to appeal personally to the king (“à la personne du Roi”), who was being held with his mother at Orléans by François de Guise, but such a venture seemed doubtful. Some thought the queen was reluctantly (“à regret”) leading her son into the absolute power (“l’absoluë puissance”) of the Guises, while others detected the political prudence, or Machiavellian slipperiness, that would come to define Catherine’s political career: “Someone replied that all regents rule precariously [regnent precairement], and yet the most cunning [les plus fines], such as Queen Catherine, always bind those who are most to be feared and never strike against the present state until it has been weakened.”Footnote 55 That Catherine had been writing to Condé, asking for his help, no doubt gave confidence to those who sought to employ the regent’s political finesse, reading her conspicuously vague letters (which she instructed Condé to burn and which refer repeatedly to messages to be relayed orally by letter carriers) as a call not to lay down arms but, rather, to liberate the king and herself.Footnote 56
Her precarity, in D’Aubigné’s account, is a product of her position as regent, while the absolute power of the Guises underscores the weakness of the sovereign. But with Catherine, precarity is not simply a constitutional matter, and not just a disinterested description of her role in government. Precarity has become something for political agents to navigate, something that fins politicians can manipulate and even profit from. Catherine’s Machiavellian strength, her virtù, is seen here to work with and within her precarity, not in opposition to it: the Guises might have “absoluë puissance,” but the finesse is entirely Catherine’s.Footnote 57
D’Aubigné’s two moments in which rulers “rule precariously” bookend the wars. But the presence of this phrase, which became the subject of debate decades later, does more than demonstrate the dissemination of the juridical language and constitutional arguments of the 1570s. Across D’Aubigné’s writing, and especially in his Histoire, precarity is understood in personal, ethical, and political terms—not as a defining characteristic of a political office, but as something akin to fortune, something to be worked with and within and, as the case of Henri demonstrates, a product of one’s actions and ethical self-management.Footnote 58 With D’Aubigné, princely precarity ceases to be a legal and constitutional concept in service of a political argument and enters the political realm proper. All regents reign precariously (“règnent précairement”)—and most kings, too—but what matters is how individual regents and rulers respond to it.
RÉGNER PRÉCAIREMENT
A number of decades separated the religious wars of the sixteenth century and the Fronde in the middle of the seventeenth, but resonances between these two moments were heard clearly by pamphleteers, memoirists, novelists, and historians writing in and immediately after the era of Cardinal Mazarin’s ministry. Anti-Italian sentiments resurged to label the cardinal a “Machiavel,” rehearsing the attacks made against Catherine de Medici in the 1570s and 1580s, while Monarchomach texts were imitated, reprinted, and repurposed to support, as John O’Brien has shown, “manifoldly divergent perspectives on monarchical authority”.Footnote 59
The “Mémoires sur la guerre de Paris”—a text attributed to La Rochefoucauld but most likely authored by Louis Ardier de Vineuil (d. 1681)—makes no explicit allusion to the earlier period of warfare, but the passage relevant to this study bears the influence of its political discourses. Near the beginning, the author, clearly aligned with the aristocratic Frondeurs, gives a brief sketch of the political disposition of the Paris Parlement at the outset of the war. There were three parties in the Parlement: the Frondeurs, “moved by the desire to stop the course of present calamities”; the party of the Mazarins, “persuaded that they owed the Court a blind obedience”; and the “party mitoyen” caught in the middle, disapproving of the first and the second.Footnote 60 Most members of the Parlement had no appetite for stirring up change until they were convinced to see themselves as mediators between the court and the people, a shift that met the disapproval of the aristocratic Frondeur author, who thought such matters should be left to the nobility.Footnote 61 The aristocratic and parliamentary Frondeurs shared the same goal (“le mesme objet”) but had different motivations (“un different motif”), the latter being driven by their own interests (“intéressez par leur fortune”).Footnote 62 Prime among the self-serving parlementaires was Longueil (1596–1677), “Conseiller en la grand’ Chambre,” who used all his artifice and skill to inspire this venom (“ce venin”) in his otherwise conservative colleagues, flattering their “grandeur” with poisoned words (“discours empoisonnez”).Footnote 63
These honey-tongued arguments (“ces douces voix”) are given in summary: “they insinuated” (“on leur insinuoit”) that taking up such a role would give them recognition and brilliance; that “charité” obliges them to support the needy and that the duty of their charge is to moderate the “extreme puissance” of kings; that they must recognize (“qu’ils devoient sçavoir”) that, “for some years, the Ministers of France have been persuaded that it is to rule precariously when their authority extends only to what is permitted” (“depuis quelques années les Ministres de France sont persuadez que c’est regner precairement, quand leur Empire ne s’estend que sur les choses permises”); that law and justice have been replaced by fear and force; that recent kings have abandoned the state and it is for them to establish order; and that they will be rewarded with divine and popular approval if all goes well, and if it doesn’t, that they will have glory in death.Footnote 64
The rhetorical framing of this phrase, “regner precairement,” is complex. First, the chief ministers of France—Mazarin principally, though one might think also of Richelieu—are themselves persuaded, or persuade themselves, or (more likely) claim to be persuaded as part of their own strategy of persuasion and justification, that they are precarious if they are bound to do only what is permitted. In making this claim, they are directly invoking Atreus, the Senecan archetype of the amoral tyrant: “Where a sovereign is permitted only what is honorable, he rules on sufferance [precario],” translated by the Huguenot theologian André Rivet (1572–1651) as “c’est regner precairement, c’est à dire par concession & dependance d’autruy, si celuy qui domine est astreint de ne rien faire contre l’honnesteté” in his Instruction du Prince Chrestien (1642).Footnote 65 In speaking this line, seen in the period to encapsulate the infamous fifteenth chapter of Machiavelli’s Prince, the ministers declare their tyranny, taking precarity—redefined as subordination not to a sovereign but to moral law and honnêteté—as a pretext, not as a sincere assessment of political status but as a rhetorical conceit, a subversion of their actual precarity (they rule at the pleasure of the king), employed to strengthen their grip on power.Footnote 66 Appeals to precarity have thus been co-opted by those they had previously worked to undermine—evidence, no doubt, of the ministers’ treacherous dissimulation and slipperiness.
But it is not the ministers who say this: it is Longueil and his coagitators. It is they who project this reappropriation of precarity discourses onto their political enemies in an effort to persuade the conservative Parlement of the ministers’ double tyranny, which is to say their absolute rule and their Machiavellian, immoral wiliness.
Except, ultimately, it is not even Longueil who constructs this conceit. The author of the “Mémoires” attributes this venomous discourse (“ce venin”) to no one in particular: “on leur insinuoit.” It is, rather, a nested sequence of projections: the archetypically Machiavellian appeal to precarity is exactly the sort of thing a counselor “motivated by an ambitious spirit” (“poussé d’un esprit d’ambition”) might invent to persuade his timorous colleagues.Footnote 67 In the “Mémoires,” precarity has not only been radically co-opted by those looking to strengthen their hand. That co-option is so complete that the critique itself has become generic, something an anonymous rabble-rouser can point to as obvious, something his audience simply “must recognize” (“ils devoient savoir”). Claims of political precarity continue to function in this text as a political weapon, as they had in the years of the Monarchomachs and the League, but the rhetorical battleground has changed entirely: ministers claimed that they themselves were (or might be) precarious to shore up their authority; parliamentarians mobilized their peers by accusing the ministers of declaring their precarity under false pretenses; and the aristocratic author of the “Mémoires” ventriloquized this attack to criticize the venomous flattery of the parliamentarians, which was at least as venomous as that of the “precarious” ministers. Talk of political precarity, in this example, is always at one remove, always the sort of thing someone else would say, and always with an eye to what can be gained—whether by co-option or accusation.
This complex chain of projection illuminates the curious gap, the scribal silence, in the copy of this text mentioned in my introduction: the “Mémoires secrets sur les guerres de Paris” held at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. The rhetorical ventriloquism on display at this point in the “Mémoires,” coupled with contemporaneous arguments about the legitimacy of the very word that is left unwritten, makes this silence especially noteworthy. How might the history of précaire outlined thus far elucidate this point of obscurity and make sense of the self-censorship recorded in St Catharine’s MS 17? And, similarly, what might this scribal silence reveal about precarity’s place at the end of the seventeenth century?
It is an otherwise neat copy, with the text of the “Mémoires” transcribed in an assiduous late seventeenth-century hand.Footnote 68 The scribe evidently took extreme care: occasional syntax and spelling errors—“sur ces” (“on these”) for “sur ses” (“on his”), for instance (fol. 14v)—are corrected in the same ink. The manuscript shows limited signs of extensive use, but what does exist is curious. First, the original title—“Mémoires sur les guerres de Paris”—is subtly overwritten both on the title page (fol. iir) and at the incipit (fol. 1r) to read, “Mémoires secrets sur les guerres de Paris.”Footnote 69 Second, on fol. 34r, a reader, writing in a different ink and in a seventeenth-century hand, has supplied in the margin a missing word: “esteindres” (extinguishes). This intervention is not, on its own, particularly revealing, except that it shows that the manuscript was subject to at least one attentive reader, and one who had access to another copy (whether printed or in manuscript). The accuracy and completeness of the manuscript were clearly important to both the scribe and this reader, and the general presentation of the copy indicates that it was commissioned for collection and curation. There are two other lacunae: one, referring to the place to which Pierre Broussel was transported after his arrest, follows the printed version and employs a long ellipsis (fol. 12r); the other, right at the end, describes the defeated leader of the aristocratic Fronde, Condé, instructing his friends to greet the king and Mazarin warmly, noting that he “showed the same warmth, for his own vested interests” (“tesmoigna la mesme chaleur pour ses interests”), as the printed edition has it. The manuscript excises the interpretation of Condé’s realpolitik motivation and leaves a gap in place of “pour ses intérêts” (fol. 74v)—perhaps a sign of continued allegiance to the aristocratic cause or, alternatively, of a wish to bury the hatchet.
Taken together, this limited evidence points to an attentive, knowledgeable, partisan audience familiar with the text of the “Mémoires.” One might suppose that the erasure of “précairement” bears the influence of Saint-Réal’s rebuke, which would mean the manuscript was produced sometime after 1691. But it seems unlikely that the scribal intervention was made for reasons of linguistic purity and le bon français, given the fidelity witnessed throughout. It might be taken to illustrate a serious political or ethical argument—that one cannot be absolute and precarious, or that Machiavellian invocations of precarity are somehow taboo, or have become taboo in the era of Louis XIV’s personal rule. But here, too, coherence is lacking: anyone making this argument would understand the move as an attack on such invocations (indeed, a double attack on both the parliamentarians and the ministers).
It seems, rather, that this silence is a joke. It is an allusion, perhaps, to those debates and arguments between the fashionable salon attendee Saint-Réal and the dull Nicolas Andry, prone to classicizing neologisms—an allusion that would situate this manuscript in an erudite and civilized society alert to literary and linguistic quarrels and to the lexis of conversation structured by maxims. The material text invites this audience to supply the missing word, to demonstrate their knowledge of both the text and the response it received, and, thereby, to participate in the shared construction of meaning. This line about precarious rule has become quotable and, at the same time, a topic of conversation. Its presence might be noted, for instance, in an epistolary novel purportedly comprised of letters from an Ottoman spy in the French court: here, Mazarin teaches the young Louis that “it is to rule only precariously” (“ce n’est regner que precairement”) when a sovereign is bound by his subjects. Similarly, La Rochefoucauld’s editor and commentator, La Houssaye (1634–1706), took it to have become proverbial: “Because, as the flatterers say, it is to rule precariously to be contented with an authority that extends only to what is permitted.”Footnote 70 The gap in the manuscript acts as a shibboleth, playfully requesting that the reader provide their credentials. It reveals an early modern culture thinking textually but also materially and socially, with textual silences that invite discussion, and with a keyword that is nowhere to be seen. Régner précairement had become a contested phrase with unstable meanings; this manuscript is a clear illustration not only of that instability but of the ways early moderns engaged with and exploited it.
But it is a joke in another sense, too. Having become so eminently quotable, the maxim was ripe for subversion and irony. “The ministers are persuaded that it is ruling when their power extends only to what is permitted” (“Les ministres sont persuadez que c’est regner quand leur Empire ne s’estend que sur les choses permises”): that’s what ruling is—doing what is allowed, being constrained, acting under pressure and on sufferance. For all the talk about absolute sovereign power, the reality, the lived experience, usually proves quite different. The ministers think they are in charge, but this is only because they have turned a blind eye to the constraints that limit them: they have convinced themselves not that they rule precariously but that they rule—period.
TALKING AND NOT TALKING ABOUT PRECARITY
In the context of civil war, defining princely precarity became a matter of political, constitutional, and confessional importance. The Monarchomach texts of the 1570s and the responses they produced bear witness to a scramble to tie down this volatile concept, newly extended to imagine power and rule by way of analogy—“quasi precario,” as the Vindiciae put it. Where recent scholarship has begun the work of revealing the Monarchomach reliance on civil law concepts and terminology, the broader cultural, linguistic, and rhetorical context of this specific development, along with the significant impact it had in the century that followed, has hitherto escaped attention.Footnote 71 This article has sought to demonstrate the reach of this otherwise neglected concept and to sketch a history for a keyword that structures contemporary political discourse—indeed, one that is often seen to have a history reaching back only into the twentieth century.Footnote 72
The image of political precarity that emerges in this history is a counterintuitive one, focused doggedly on kings, regents, chief ministers, and other political agents operating at the highest points of the social hierarchy. One might question the value of describing such figures as “differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” by the political system they operate within, though the prevalence of assassination, exile, and house arrest at least opens the door to an interpretation that takes early modern and contemporary discussions of political precarity to be talking about the same thing.Footnote 73
“Precariousness,” writes Butler, “implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at all.”Footnote 74 Kings and princes are, by this definition, precarious by virtue of being alive. And, to return to a line from D’Aubigné’s Histoire universelle already quoted in passing, there is a hint of early modern precarity located not in the rarefied, restricted social circles of princes and regents but among the oppressed, who suffer the effects of empire. Casting an eye over the Pyrenees toward Spain, D’Aubigné mentions “the Moors, reduced by Ferdinand and Isabella to a condition tolerable to serfs and to no one else,” who “daily were taught by Spanish extortion that precarious life [vie precaire] ceases very quickly to be life at all.”Footnote 75
The intention behind this study of early modern political language is not to argue that princes and political elites experienced precarity as it is understood today. When precarity emerged as a political concept, it found its use principally as a tool with which to attack political elites (and was used for the most part by other elites, even when invoking the sovereign power of the populus). But the material conditions of that precarity, and, indeed, the conceptualization of precarity, are specific to the period and its political and rhetorical concerns. Similarly, this history of précaire is not an attempt to universalize precarity and uncover its existence across time and across the social hierarchy: early modern uses of précaire are in almost all cases not concerned with a general condition of precariousness (the unavoidable state of depending on others) but with a more restricted sense of politically induced precarity, albeit with significant differences from the sense this term has in the work of Butler, Bourdieu, and others.
Marginalized and oppressed people might, in the imagination of early modern authors, be chétif, misérable, or in a state of servitude, but they are rarely précaire. Consequently, both the rhetoric and the ethics that emerge with this keyword are distinct from those found in modern precarity discourses.Footnote 76 Where “the recognition of shared precariousness introduces”—for Butler—“strong normative commitments of equality and invites a more robust universalizing of rights,” discourses of precarity in early modern France are fundamentally antagonistic.Footnote 77 Early modern precarity is related to, though not obviously a direct ancestor of, its modern incarnation: similar, though rooted in specific political conditions and circumstances, and directed at different people with different ethical and rhetorical motivations.
Quasi precario (as though precariously): the co-option of this term within a legally minded intellectual culture allowed early modern authors to think analogically to make a political point. Theirs is not a legal argument, per se, but a political one (the fact that Barclay struggles so much with Brutus’s use and misuse of these beneficia [benefices] might be in part because he reads a political tract with the eyes of a jurist).
It is not my intention to draw a clear line, either connecting or dividing, between early modern and contemporary senses of precarity. Instead, I hope to have directed attention to the rhetorical force and political potential in borrowing, co-opting, and projecting discourses of precarity across contexts. Early modern precarity is not modern precarity, though they are analogous. Early modern uses of precarity are themselves varied and contested, but one might identify a general principle—that rulers are precarious and that the power they hold might be reclaimed—that complements rather than contradicts the rhetorical and philosophical work performed with this keyword in twenty-first-century critical theory. Early moderns engaged with this keyword by extracting it from one context and applying it—imperfectly, inaccurately—in a range of settings. Something similar might be done today, placing early modern senses of précaire alongside modern precarity and allowing the two discourses to rub against one another. Where contemporary precarity points to the moral obligation to recognize the humanity of the other and provide the support their precarity demands, early modern precarity invites a parallel movement of resistance, of reclaiming power from those who immiserate, injure, and oppress. Recognizing the precarity of those under whose jurisdiction an increasingly large number of people live restores to modern discourses of precarity their early modern radicalism.
Having emerged as a political concept in Huguenot resistance theory, précaire quickly became a conceptual and rhetorical tool co-opted and redefined by an astonishingly wide array of political motivations. For Barclay, its invocation became evidence of his opponents’ ignorance of the law; for Bodin, it served to elucidate a potentially inconsequential but in fact crucial distinction upon which good governance and the stability of the state depended. With D’Aubigné, precarity became personal—something to navigate (successfully or otherwise), both a product and a test of prudence or finesse. Reading the author of the “Mémoires sur la guerre de Paris,” meanwhile, one finds political agents with the greatest finesse turning precarity—or, rather, talk of precarity—to their advantage. Across all of these contexts, precarity functions not only as a legal, constitutional, or even political concept; it is a rhetorical weapon that both reflects and gives shape to some of the most significant interventions in early modern French political thought.
Precarity’s journey from jargon to buzzword is not a linear history of a concept or idea finding expression. By the point when claims of precarity had become commonplace, the author of the “Mémoires” was presenting them as exactly the sort of thing one’s enemy would preemptively adopt as a talking point in order to neutralize criticism: invoking their own precarity, the ministers subvert the discourses and rhetorical strategies that emerged in the sixteenth century and occupy territory from which they might have been attacked. However, evidence of ministers and the like making such claims is conspicuously absent, barring the parliamentarians’ anti-Mazarin talking point that this is exactly how ministers think (even if they do not go so far as to say so). In fact, the ministers’ co-option of precarity is a fiction. A century after Hotman’s parenthetical “as the lawyers say” (“ut Jurisconsulti loquuntur”), one finds an aristocratic Frondeur painting a picture of lawyers crafting their own caricature of the dissimulating, tyrannical Machiavel. To rehearse a line about precarity is, in this context, to out oneself as a dissembler and to speak like a flatterer (“à ce que disent les flateurs,” as La Houssaye would put it). Despite Saint-Réal’s claims to the contrary, précaire and précairement were indeed “much in use” by the latter part of the seventeenth century. But how they were used, and by whom, is everything.
Luke O’Sullivan is Gerard Davis Fellow in Early Modern French at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford. His first monograph, Writing Doubt in Montaigne’s “Essais”: Thinking Relationally with Seneca and Plutarch, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2024. He is currently working on a second book project titled Life on Loan: Inventing Precarity in Early Modern France.
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