On All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1628, an elaborate sequence of religious processions and ceremonies celebrated the surrender of the port city of La Rochelle and the defeat of the Huguenot rebels who had occupied it since the previous year. After a brutal siege lasting some fourteen months, personally overseen by Cardinal Richelieu and often attended by Louis XIII himself, the rebels had finally capitulated and Louis’s status as “most Christian” king was now assured after nearly two decades of religious and political unrest.Footnote 1 The day began with a Mass celebrated by Cardinal Richelieu at the Church of Sainte-Marguerite (the only Catholic church still standing in the city) in the presence of the priests of Congrégation de l’oratoire de Jésus-Christ (who had arrived the previous day from Bordeaux), together with other courtiers and military commanders.Footnote 2 A second Mass celebrated by the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Henri d’Escoubleau de Sourdis (who had also been an artillery commander at the siege), was followed by a procession through the crowded streets by the Capucins and Récollets carrying crosses and singing the Te Deum as they marched. At the same time, a group of sixty to eighty of the Frères religieux de la charité had set out from their quartier and also approached Sainte-Marguerite, this time singing psalms. The processions all met at the church where a third Mass was celebrated, ending at 1.00 p.m.
The day’s celebrations culminated in the king’s ceremonial entry to the city. In a typical “triumphal” entrée, Louis, dressed in his royal finery, would be met at the city walls by the civic dignitaries, process through a series of classically inspired triumphal arches, and be received by the ecclesiastical authorities at the city’s main church. On this occasion, by contrast, the king arrived without overt display, dressed simply in his armor, receiving no civic ceremony or pomp.Footnote 3 Nevertheless, several hundred inhabitants of La Rochelle had been instructed to meet him at the gates of the city, and as he approached, in a cruel parody of the usual joyful response at an entrée, they threw themselves to their knees and cried out in a loud but trembling voice, “Vive le Roy qui nous a fait miséricorde” (Long live the king, who has shown us mercy). The king then continued on to the church of Sainte-Marguerite to cries of “Vive le Roy” (Long live the king) and “Vive le Roy qui nous a fait grâce” (Long live the king, who has given us grace), where he was greeted by the Archbishop of Bordeaux, accompanied by all the clergy of the city carrying their wooden crosses. (Figure 1.1 shows some of the main protagonists of this event, pictured with the city in the background.) Louis was led into the church, and, after a brief harangue from the archbishop, proceeded to a throne in front of the altar where, in a sign taken to reflect his great devotion, he enthusiastically led the singing of the Te Deum.
Figure 1.1 Pierre Courtilleau, The Capture of La Rochelle. On the left is Louis, with Cardinal Richelieu, Michel de Marillac, and the Maréchal de Schomberg behind. On the right is Henri d’Escoubleau de Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux elect, with the Oratorians of Bordeaux carrying the archiepiscopal cross behind. In the center, Sainte-Marguerite herself is portrayed in her standard yet highly appropriate iconography, trampling the head of the dragon/serpent of heresy.
Kate van Orden has highlighted the significance of both Louis’s own singing and his broader participation in the events of the following days that transformed him from “the source of a horrific siege into a beneficent monarch.”Footnote 4 But those present would also have understood both the ceremony and the wider context in other ways too. After the archbishop had given his benediction, the king’s confessor and preacher, Père Jean Souffran, gave a brief exhortation. Likening the king to a pilgrim who, undertaking a long journey through penitence and abnegation, is ultimately crowned in glory, Souffran praised the king for his perseverance in pursuing the Huguenots, continuing:Footnote 5
It is why this great David, Patron and model of all Kings, seeing the disobedience of the Philistines, the enemies of God and his Estate, resolved to humiliate them, saying in Psalm 17, “I will pursue after my enemies, and overtake them: and I will not turn again till they are consumed.”
This allusion to Louis’s reenactment of David’s own conquests was spelled out in a later account of the ceremony by the eighteenth-century ecclesiastical historian Jean-Louis Archon (“That which David did to the Philistines, so too the King has also done to the heretic rebels”),Footnote 6 but both this verse and the remainder of the psalm (which begins Diligam te Domine fortitude meo in the Vulgate) – though probably unspoken by Souffran – would also have been recognized by all those who heard it, albeit in different ways according to the confessional identity of the listener or, at one remove, the reader, since this information was also included in the widely disseminated published accounts of the ceremony.
For the Huguenots, whose own liturgy prioritized congregational psalm singing, and who would therefore probably have known Clément Marot’s rhyming translation/paraphrase of the Hebrew by heart, Psalm 17 (18 in the Huguenot numbering) opens with the quatrain (emphasis mine):Footnote 7
| Je t’aimeray en toute obéissance | I will love you in all obedience |
| Tant que vivray, ô mon Dieu ma puissance. | As long as I live, O God my strength. |
| Dieu est mon roc, mon rampart, haut & seur, | God is my rock, my rampart, high and safe, |
| C’est ma rançon, c’est mon fort défenseur. | He is my ransom, he is my strong defender. |
Louis Budé’s 1551 prose version, translated at Calvin’s request and subsequently incorporated into revisions of Calvin’s preferred biblical text, the Olivetan translation, adopts a similar strategy:Footnote 8
3. Le Seigneur est mon roc & ma forteresse, & mon libérateur, mon Dieu, ma roche …
The Lord is my rock and my fortress, and my liberator, my God, my rock …
The Huguenots, who had just lost La Rochelle (a fortress known as “the (little) rock”), and whose worldview did not associate the psalms with the earthly monarchy, could therefore take comfort in the lines of the psalmist, King David, reassuring them that it was now God who was their rock and defender. For the Catholics, the corresponding verse in the Vulgate translation (the “official” Bible of the Catholic Church) did not allude to rocks or “La Rochelle” explicitly, but the remainder of the psalm nonetheless would have confirmed to them that it was their victory that the psalmist was describing. Among too many verses to quote in full are, for example:Footnote 9
40. And thou hast girded me with strength unto battle; and hast subdued under me them that rose up against me.
…
44. Thou wilt deliver me from the contradictions of the people: thou wilt make me head of the Gentiles [i.e. the Huguenots].
But those more widely read clerics who took a particular interest in combating the heretical Huguenot translations would also have been familiar with the newer, “unofficial” Catholic versions of the psalms in prose. Plantin’s so-called Polyglot Bible, based on the work of Hebrew scholar Sancte Pagnini (1470–1541), was reissued numerous times and available in France during the sixteenth century, with the psalms also receiving their own dedicated volume in subsequent editions:Footnote 10 the widely available interlinear Psalmi Davidis hebraici of 1615, for example, presented the Hebrew text alongside the Greek and Latin Vulgate, and provided a new Latin translation of the Hebrew.Footnote 11 Unlike the Vulgate, the Pagnini edition used the Latin petra (rock) to translate the Hebrew in verse 3 (Dominus, petra mea) but also, most notably, in the peroration of the psalm (verse 46 in the Vulgate, 47 in the Hebrew) where King David thanks God for his victory, once again in strikingly apposite language:Footnote 12
46. Vivit Dominus & benedictus petra mea, & exaltet Deus salutis meae.
Jehovah liveth – and blessed is my rock [i.e. La Rochelle is mine, i.e. David’s, i.e. Louis’s]. And exalted is the God of my salvation.
…
50. Magnificans salutes regis sui, & facies misericordia uncto suo David, & semini eius; usque in seculum.
Magnifying the salvation of His King [Louis], and doing kindness to his anointed, to David, and to his seed – unto the age!
Both sides could thus appropriate the words of King David to lay claim to “the rock,” although it was obviously the king and the Catholics who could overwhelmingly reap the military, political, and religious rewards: on hearing the news that La Rochelle had fallen, Pope Urban VIII processed with all his cardinals to the French national church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, where he heard a Mass and a Te Deum.Footnote 13 And a papal brief to the king shortly afterward expressed the gratitude of the Holy See: “By your long siege of many months you have taught us that Europe oweth your French Legions no less commendation for their constancy, than for their expedition.”Footnote 14 After a decade in which papal antipathy to the French monarchy had frequently reached crisis point, and in which the integrity of the kingdom of France had come under real threat, it is hard to overestimate the sense that Louis really was a new David, and that the kingdom of Israel/France had finally been delivered from its enemies.
Confessional Identity and Ideologies of the Psalms
The availability of numerous competing translations of the psalter, and the way in which they could subsequently be heard, quoted, and preached on, are, of course, simply reflections of the broader and longer history of the psalms in early modern France and their role in the religious, political, and cultural debates of the era. Under François I (r. 1515–47), the humanist orientation of the court had trumped any confessional disagreements over the role of biblical translations, and so the Protestant versions – those of Clément Marot, for example – were generally welcomed by virtue of their confessionally neutral, “classical” framing, even if, in practice, Marot’s translations eschewed the elevated literary style that would shortly come to be associated with humanist poetry.Footnote 15 In his dedicatory letter to Francis I, for example, Marot draped the Holy Scriptures (and especially the psalms) in mythological garb, appealing:Footnote 16
With the court’s enthusiasm for the culture of antiquity, an enthusiasm which persisted into the middle of the century and beyond, it was easy enough for the royal family to adopt Marot’s translations, and even to become known for and identified with, their favorite psalms: in his posthumously published attack on the Huguenots, Florimond de Raemond describes how Henri II took Marot’s version of Psalm 42/41 as his favorite, singing it while hunting (“Ainsi qu’on oyt le cerf bruire” [Quemadmodum desiderat cervus]), as well as apparently composing a melody for Psalm 128/127 (“Bien heureux est quiconque sert Dieu volontiers” [Beati omnes]); while among other members of the court, Diane de Poitiers, Henri II’s mistress, took Psalm 130/129 (“Du fond de ma pensée” [De profundis clamavi]).Footnote 17 Indeed, in the middle of the century, the pan-confessional and generally uncontroversial nature of Marot’s paraphrases was reflected in the number of Catholic writers who attempted to complete his translations (he provided only around fifty of the 150 psalms in the psalter), ignoring the fact that Calvin and his congregation in Geneva had adopted and become closely identified with them.Footnote 18 But from around 1550, and into the 1560s, the reception, and subsequently execution, of psalm translations began to split along confessional lines – a “confessional divorce,” as Jeanneret puts it.Footnote 19 The 1553 edition of the now completed Protestant psalter (Théodore de Bèze had contributed the remaining 100 psalms) included doctrinaire texts by Calvin that undermined the “confessional neutrality” of the paraphrases, rendering them unacceptable at a court that was at the same time becoming less and less tolerant of religious and confessional diversity. And yet, while de Bèze’s own activism and associations with the psalms certainly made them less attractive from a Catholic confessional perspective, it was as much the literary quality of the paraphrases that condemned them to the newly emerging and highly influential Pléiade poets and those who followed their lead. While Marot had only half-heartedly invoked the poetry of antiquity as his inspiration, members of the Pléiade engaged in a genuine effort to elevate French poetry by returning to classical models (particularly the ode and the sonnet), by emphasizing the close connection of poetry to music (which they saw as inextricably linked), and by rejecting Marot’s accessible and popular approach in a belief that poetry should be reserved for the aristocracy and that biblical text should be revealed only to those qualified and of appropriate moral standing to interpret it.Footnote 20
Leading the charge of the Pléiade was Pierre de Ronsard, who in 1562, paraphrasing Plato’s Ion and Phaedrus, urged Catholic poets to fight back against the Huguenot debasing of the language (“songs for the shopkeepers”),Footnote 21 while at the same time responding in kind to the effective literary proselytizing strategy that they had adopted:Footnote 22
Ronsard himself never responded to the psalms of Marot by producing his own translations (he provided only a paraphrase of the Te Deum), since, by the time of his ascendancy, much of Christian literature had effectively taken a different turn, leaving its biblical roots and the psalms behind.Footnote 23 Although numerous moralizing primers continued to appear for the instruction of children, many of which took their inspiration from the books of the Old Testament, for the educated elite the Bible now no longer represented a fashionable worldview.Footnote 24 Instead, it began to see the world through the lens of classical antiquity, seeking a Neoplatonic solution to the moral and religious problems of the day: and so, just as Plato had insisted that music (which he considered essentially poetry animated with rhythm and pitch) should be well-regulated for a state to prosper, so too should be the “music” (i.e. the lyric poetry of the by now semi-official Pléiade) of France (see below for more discussion on this). Nevertheless, the poetry the members of the Pléiade and its successors produced was still intended to counteract the destabilizing influence of the opponents of the Catholic church, even if reference to the church or the Bible was minimal. Ronsard himself certainly acknowledged this practice (“Ah! les Chrestiens devroient les Gentils imiter” [Ah! the Christians must imitate the Gentiles, i.e. the Greeks/Romans]),Footnote 25 as did Cardinal du Perron, who argued at Ronsard’s funeral that he:Footnote 26
knew so well [how] to bring the riches and the treasures of Egypt to the Holy Land, that one recognizes immediately that all the elegance and all the sweetness of letters and of the humanities is not on the side of the heretics, as they pretend.
Despite the relative lack of interest in the Bible and the psalms from Ronsard himself, the 1560s saw other members of the Pléiade adopting a different strategy, attempting (as the wider religious situation deteriorated) to reconcile the biblical and humanist/Neoplatonic approaches to poetry. In their syncretic worldview, another lyric poet of antiquity – King David, author of the psalms, and a musician whose poetry, sung to the accompaniment of the harp, had calmed the afflicted Saul – could serve just as well, a new Apollo or Orpheus whose powers could be invoked to restore the religious harmony of the kingdom. Gabriel Dupuyherbault’s translation of the psalms into French prose of 1554 (reprinted in 1563) had pointed out that David was a more excellent poet than Homer, Pindar, and Euripides, while observing that his own translation was “très nécessaire en ce temps,” but the “resemblance” between the biblical king and the real and mythical poets of antiquity was, more broadly, already a familiar Renaissance trope.Footnote 27 Thus a new type of poetry developed, either taking David for overall inspiration (e.g. Du Bellay, La Lyre chrestienne), or using psalm texts as the basis for loose paraphrases that – when appropriate classical imagery could not be found – allegorized the successes of the king over his enemies and provided justification from both classical and biblical sources for his actions.Footnote 28
None of these strategies or publications, however, can be considered as a direct or comprehensive Catholic response to the complete psalter of Marot and de Bèze. It thus famously fell to Jean-Antoine de Baïf to integrate the humanist/Neoplatonic principles of the Pléiade (in fact, to take them much further) with the texts of the psalms in an ambitious project undertaken under the patronage of Charles IX together with the composer Joachim Thibault de Courville and others – the Académie de poésie et de musique.
The Académie de poésie et de musique has long been recognized for its members’ attempts to recreate the music of classical antiquity, most notably in the groundbreaking studies by Frances A. Yates and Daniel Pickering Walker.Footnote 29 Operating under a royal charter granted in 1570 and meeting in Jean-Antoine de Baïf’s house just outside the walls of Paris near the Abbey of Saint-Victoire, the Académie attempted to bring back into use “both the kind of poetry and the measure and rule of music anciently used by the Greeks and Romans,” something they hoped to achieve by completely integrating music and text in accordance with their readings of Plato, Plutarch, and others. Inspired by the famous accounts of the “effects” of ancient music (in which either the mode or the rhythm of a song was able to change behavior for the better), they also hoped to bring stability to the country and reconcile the opposing religious forces.
The mechanism by which this ancient music would act was described in great detail by the main theorist of the Académie, Pontus de Tyard (who in turn took most of his inspiration from the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino) in his Solitaire premier (1552). According to “the Platonic philosophers,” during its descent into the body, the soul loses its unity with the sovereign One, that is, God. The task of mankind, therefore, is to return the soul to its initial state of perfection, a process that involves four steps of ascent, culminating in a state of “angelic understanding.” While it is difficult to see how the three final steps could be executed, Tyard is crystal clear about the first: a “poetic fury” that awakens the drowsy parts of the soul:Footnote 30
… by the tones of Music, and soothing the perturbed part by the suavity of sweet harmony: then, by the well-accorded diversity of musical accords, chasing away the dissonant discords, and finally reducing the disorder to a certain equality, well and proportionately measured, and ordered in the gracious and grave facility of verses regulated by the careful observance of number and measure.
The practical way in which they achieved this integration of music and text was to go beyond the reforms of the poets of the Pléiade (who, while aspiring to many of the aims of the Académie, had not made such radical revisions to their conception of lyric poetry)Footnote 31 and to impose the long and short syllables used in Latin poetry – and the meters and poetic feet used by the poets of antiquity – to the French language, thereby creating what they called vers mesurés à l’antique which could then be completely integrated with its musical setting to produce musique mesurée.Footnote 32 Although some composers attempted to interpret the long and short syllables flexibly (notably Caietain), the archetypal musical setting would (in keeping with the rules of antiquity, and as preserved in the published musical settings of Baïf by Jacques Mauduit and Claude Le Jeune) treat a long syllable as exactly twice as long as a short syllable.Footnote 33 In further imitation of the Latin verse, rhyme was no longer a relevant consideration: thus a piece of musique mesurée would feature strophic verse, organized into rigidly structured poetic feet that were in turn organized into a higher structure (a “hyperfoot”), no rhyme, and a musical setting that exactly translated long and short syllables into the musical values of a minim and crotchet. Since the old imitative polyphony of the previous decades confused the declamation of the text and thereby lessened the “effects” of the music, musique mesurée was also completely homophonic, moving in block chords with no independence of voices.Footnote 34
Although subsequent publications of musique mesurée prioritized secular works (Jacques Mauduit’s settings of Baïf’s Chansonettes mesurées published in 1586, and a few works in Caietain’s Airs mis en musique of 1578), reclaiming the psalm was undoubtedly central to the Académie’s aims.Footnote 35 Baïf’s first complete translation of the psalter from the Hebrew (rather than from the Vulgate or Greek) into measured French verse was executed between 1567 and 1569, during the Third Religious War and before the “official” foundation of the Académie in 1570.Footnote 36 Never published in its original form, the autograph manuscript describes the translation as a “psalter begun with the intention of serving good Catholics against the psalms of the heretics.”Footnote 37 Yet, despite Baïf’s outward confessional hostility, the Académie must still have been a tolerant organization, since it was this 1567–9 set of translations that the Huguenot composer Claude Le Jeune began to set (probably around 1570), and which he later published in modified form in his Pseaumes en vers mesurez of 1606.Footnote 38 Baïf’s second translation of the psalter of 1573 (the year after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572) was set to music by another important composer associated with the Académie, Jacques Mauduit, although only a few settings survive, preserved by Marin Mersenne in his Quaestiones celerrebimae in Genesim of 1623.Footnote 39
Unlike Le Jeune’s settings, which show a much wider variety of scorings and a much more imaginative attempt to transcend the intrinsic limitations of musique mesurée, Mauduit’s surviving psalms (only a handful, since Mersenne assumed that the remainder would shortly be published elsewhere) are provided with Baïf’s phonetic spelling and embody what we have come to expect from musique mesurée: a texture entirely of “syllabic homophony,” just two note values (long and short), no recognizable musical meter, and poorly comprehensible text unrelated to the natural poetic and syntactic structure of the original Hebrew psalms – all combining to produce a setting that depends entirely for its effectiveness on a complete faith in the principles of the Académie.Footnote 40 (See Figure 1.2 for the superius part Mauduit’s setting of Psalm 67.)Footnote 41
Figure 1.2 Superius part to Jacques Mauduit’s setting of Baïf’s translation of Psalm 67, “Dieu se lèvera soudain.”
Ideologies of Kingship
Presumably performed at the regular meetings of the Académie, probably in the presence of Charles IX himself, Mauduit’s settings of Baïf’s texts (even more than Le Jeune’s) represent the high-water mark for the representation of Christian truths through the language of antiquity. At the same time, a figure moving in the same elite court circles, Jean Bodin, was constructing a theory of monarchy that shared common philosophical and ideological ground with Baïf’s translations, formalizing, in his Six livres de la république (1576), the principles for a Christian monarch to operate in a judicial system bound by the rules of “harmony,” i.e. within the numerically ordered and proportioned universe also built on Pythagorean principles.Footnote 42 Bodin’s aim as a politique (i.e. he saw stability as more important than victory for either confessional faction) was to develop a theory to counteract attacks on the monarchy from several quarters: from “Monarchomachs” – Protestant theorists who favored an elected monarchy, most notably reflected in Hotman’s Francogallia (1573), which envisaged a non-hereditary, elected monarchy harking back to the days of Gaul;Footnote 43 from a distrustful populace more widely, who had begun to have their doubts about a king who could so readily preside over the slaughter of so many citizens at the recent St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre; and from the earliest manifestation of the Sainte Ligue (the Catholic League; see below).
Most sixteenth-century theories of the monarchy had focused on the king as the embodiment of justice, with his primary role being to judge his subjects. Bodin, however, taking his justification from the Hebrew scriptures rather than civil law, centered his argument on the idea of “sovereignty,” power granted by God which enabled the king to make law and to act without the consent of the people.Footnote 44 Nevertheless, as the culmination of his treatise, he returned to the concept of justice, addressing the issue in the final chapters, “Concerning Distributive, Commutative and Harmonic Justice and their relation to the Aristocratic, Popular, and Monarchial states.”Footnote 45 Kate van Orden has persuasively pointed out the Pythagorean and musical connections in these chapters, but it is important not to overlook that Bodin ultimately deferred to biblical authority.Footnote 46 For Bodin, an egalitarian order, based on the principle of what he calls “commutative justice” (represented by an arithmetic sequence in which the interval between numbers remains constant), is natural to states where estates, honors, offices, and benefices are divided equally. On the other hand, an aristocracy would be based on “distributive justice” (represented by a geometric sequence in which the intervals between numbers are variable and unequal). For Bodin, the rigidity of the commutative system and the unpredictability of the distributive system led to a third preferred alternative, the “harmonic” system which could be represented by the sequence 4, 6, 8, 12 – neither an arithmetic nor a geometric progression, but one that nevertheless reflected many just proportions (4:8 = 6:12, 6:4 = 12:8, etc.).
Bodin explained why a harmonic system was most appropriate by making explicit use of musical concepts related to Pythagorean intervals. The Unity of the King (see Figure 1.3) indicated by the numeral 1, encompassing the three estates, indicated by numerals 2, 3, and 4, is described in the following manner:Footnote 47
The wise Prince will tune his subjects, one to the other, and all together with faith: thus, as one can see in the first four numbers, God has organized them in Harmonic proportion: to show us that the Royal state is Harmonic, and that he must govern Harmonically: because 2:3 makes the 5th, 3:4 makes the 4th, 2:4 the octave, and 1:4 the double octave, which contain the whole system of all the notes and consonances of music: and whoever wishes to pass on to 5, there will be an intolerable discord.
On the face of it, such an analysis – that number and harmony are at the root of all things – adopts the conceptual framework of Pontus de Tyard’s Solitaire second (1555), and it is likely that Bodin (who would have moved in the same circles as Tyard) drew heavily on his work for this model:Footnote 48 Tyard’s dialogue between Solitaire and Curieux reflects a worldview in which the internal and external worlds are described as a series of interlocking harmonies and, in turn, form the proportional and thus musical basis of the body, natural philosophy, and moral philosophy. Both Bodin and Tyard would also have known, and been influenced by, one of the most important syncretic works of the sixteenth century, Francesco Giorgio’s Harmonia de mundi, available in the original Latin (published in Venice in 1525 and in Paris in 1545), or in the translation by Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie (published 1579 as L’Harmonie du monde), Bodin’s colleague in the household of François, Duc d’Alençon.Footnote 49 Giorgio’s monumental work, an exposition of Platonic philosophy tinged with astrology and magic, is built on a similar harmonic, musical framework: the entire volume is structured in “cantiques,” each of which is divided into eight modes or “tons.” The first cantique sets out a Platonic conception of the universe, the second a more biblical conception, and the whole volume concludes with twenty “motets” (conceptual categories) each of which is then considered in terms of its “accords.”Footnote 50
Figure 1.3 Bodin’s marginal illustration of the Unity of the King: “The image of the King, and the three estates conform to nature.”
And yet, just like Tyard and the Franciscan Giorgio, Bodin did not give the final word to a Platonic conception of the universe and just governance. Going beyond the long-established tradition of medieval scholarship of the Chartres School and the Abbey of Saint Victor such as Thierry of Chartres and Hugh of Saint Victor (who had sought to unify the Platonic and Mosaic accounts of creation in their commentaries on Plato),Footnote 51 Bodin concluded his treatise by pointing out Plato’s errors:Footnote 52
It remains to be seen if it is true what Plato said, that God governs the world by Geometric proportion, because he took this basis to show that a well-ordered Republic in the image of this world must be governed by Geometric Justice. I have shown quite the opposite by the nature of the unity of the harmonious relationship of the first three numbers: and of the intellect, of the three parts of the soul: and of the point to the line, to the surface, and to the body. But one must go further: because if Plato had looked a little further, he would have noticed something he forgot in his Timaeus, that this great God of nature created the world harmonically in matter and form.
In keeping with the teachings of the Chartres school, Giorgio, too, acknowledged that the Platonic conception of the universe should be seen through the lens of the Bible, in particular the psalms (“Yet Pythagoras commands, that none timidly undertake to talk of these divine things without light: without the Light I say, of which the Writer of the Psalms sings, ‘In your light we will see the Light’”),Footnote 53 but Bodin went further, ascribing the laws of a harmonious universe not to Pythagoras but to God himself.
It could thus be argued that, by the mid to late 1570s, the vogue for a Neoplatonic reading of the universe as the key to addressing its current concerns, and the preference emulating the rulers of antiquity, had passed. Indeed, during that decade and into the next, the country would be torn apart by religious divisions whose solutions, understandably, were felt to lie in the religious domain. After the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, and the death of Charles IX in 1574, Henri III’s generous and amicable settlement with the Huguenots (the “Peace of Monsieur”) in 1576 outraged hard-line Catholics to such an extent that in the same year Henri, Duc de Guise, formalized a group of clerics and nobles sympathetic to his cause into the so-called Sainte Ligue or Catholic League. While the League’s founding purpose was ostensibly to fight against heresy, in fact their aims were much broader. In particular, they considered the Capetian line (and thus all its successors) to be usurpers, with the House of Lorraine (Guise) the rightful heirs of Charlemagne and accordingly to the crown of France. And since, to their mind, Henri III had also broken his coronation oath (to maintain the country as Catholic), the League’s primary aims (though not overtly at first) were in fact to depose Henri III, to install a Guise as king, and to bring the church of France more closely under Papal control.Footnote 54
In this context, it is not surprising, therefore, that those with a cultural and political stake in the new king Henri III began to reject the ideological framework of antiquity, arguing that a biblical model would more directly address the current political and religious realities. The Académie de poésie et de musique seems to have stopped its hyper-humanist experiments on Charles’s death, and its successor – the so-called Académie du Palais, favored and hosted by Henri III – seems to have had different aims, focusing more on philosophy than poetry or music.Footnote 55 And as the Catholic League began to gain strength and the religious tensions began to boil over into what Crouzet has described as a state of “overenchantment” – a sense of eschatological fervor stoked by the predictions of Nostradamus – Henri III and his spiritual advisors also began to adopt a more overtly combative religious strategy, founding the Order of the Holy Spirit in 1578 (discussed in Chapter 2) and the Congregation of the Penitents of Notre-Dame in 1583 (Chapter 4), among other religious confraternities.Footnote 56 On the death of François d’Anjou, Henri III’s only male heir, in 1584, the League broke cover – the Huguenot Henri of Navarre was now sole heir to the throne, and the League were determined to prevent his succession at all costs, lining up Cardinal Henri de Bourbon as a potential successor, and planning to release him from his priestly vows so he could marry the Duc de Guise’s sister, the Duchesse de Montpensier.Footnote 57 Another series of religious wars then broke out, culminating in the assassination of Henri III in 1589, the abjuration and succession of Henri IV in 1593, and the dissolution of the League shortly afterward – although the sentiments that motivated them lived on into the seventeenth century and found a home both at court (as the parti des dévots) and in places such as the Abbey of Montmartre and the Church of the Congregation of the Oratory of Jesus Christ (see Chapter 6).
More broadly, though, it was the religious turmoil of the late 1570s and 1580s, and a wish to defend the king against the League, that prompted royalist pamphleteers and judicial theorists to begin to modify the model espoused by Bodin, placing less emphasis on the “harmonical,” natural dimension of kingship and more on the divine essence of the king – the concept of “absolutism,” that the king acted as God’s agent on earth.Footnote 58 As part of this change of tone, treatises immediately following Bodin’s, such as Pierre Grégoire’s De Republica of 1578, began to emphasize the idea of divine right and to clarify the relationship between the Pope and the king – both were God’s agents, the king in the temporal domain, the Pope in the spiritual, also confirming a measure of Gallican independence and setting the stage for the conflicts with the Pope in the seventeenth century. But it was during the wars of 1585–93 that the biggest changes came about, particularly in the growing emphasis on the rights and qualities of the particular individual who occupied the office of the king, rather than on the office itself. Jacques Hurault’s Trois livres des offices d’estat (1588), for example, outlined a relatively conventional theory of monarchy in the first of the three books, and claimed that his treatise was essentially a secular work.Footnote 59
Much of Books 2 and 3 was dedicated to the personal traits of the king, and while the majority of his examples were indeed taken from “secular histories,” the Bible and psalms were also called into play: in a chapter on Les Passions de l’âme (The Passions of the Soul), for example, a Prince may express his joy following the example of David in Psalms 31 and 9 – or his grief, following Psalm 68.Footnote 60 By contrast, the title of François Le Jay’s De la Dignité des rois, et princes souverains du droict inviolable de leurs successeurs légitime: et du devoir des peuples, et subiectz envers eux (On the Dignity of Kings, and Sovereign Princes and the Inviolable Rights of Their Legitimate Successors: and the Duty of the People and Subjects toward Them) of 1589 is an obvious allusion to the issues surrounding the accession of Henri of Navarre, and its colophon “Craignez Dieu & Honorez le Roy” (Believe in God and Honor the King [1 Peter 2]) clearly identifies the volume as a religious treatise. And indeed, unlike Hurault, Le Jay took all his justification from the heavenly kingdom. Referencing Psalm 24, Deuteronomy 17, and Josiah 1, the first chapter of his book begins:Footnote 61
To lay the foundation, on which this whole work is built, the Holy Scripture teaches us that God all powerful is the builder who has made and constituted all the Princely Kingdoms and dominions of the earth. To him alone they belong as true possessions: for which he has oversight and leadership.
The preface to the chapter also makes clear the duties of the people toward kings:Footnote 62
That the people owe them honour, service and obeissance, they being lieutenants of God.
Numerous other treatises appearing in the 1580s and into the 1590s (those by Servin, Belloy, and others) continued this theme, culminating in du Rivault’s Les États, esquels il est discouru du prince, du noble et du tiers-état, conformément à nostre temps (Lyon, 1596), a work that makes the strongest possible case for divine right of kings – that the king is now himself a God:Footnote 63
Finally, to conclude this present discourse on the Prince who is the Christ and the anointed of God, it will be very useful for him to always have before himself the description that Isaiah gave of the holy, perfect and immaculate Christ, which may not be misattributed to Kings, of whom it is written “You are Gods, and the sons of the most high.”
David, the Ideal King
The process of reengaging with biblical models of kingship at the end of the sixteenth century closely parallels the “liturgifying” process that occurred in the Middle Ages, most famously described by Ernst Kantorowicz, in which the original secular coronations of the Merovingian dynasty were superseded by a ceremony of anointing.Footnote 64 Of course, both in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century, the ultimate anointed biblical king – Jesus Christ – did not always provide an ideal model of kingship for the realities of the monarchy, in which worldly strength and military might were more potent symbols than direct lineage with God. The Old Testament, however, was replete with anointed kings (in particular David, but also Solomon and Josiah) who faced the same kind of military and political challenges that the French kings faced and could provide more practical models for emulation. Thus, the Franks began to think of themselves as a chosen people in a continuous line not with the Emperors and citizens of Rome but with the prophets, kings, and people of Israel. Their kings were not a new Caesar, but, anointed with holy oil, they became the christus Domini, the rex et sacerdos, and the rex christianissimum.
The coronation ceremonies and rituals that developed to celebrate this anointing centered on Reims where the legend of the Holy Ampoule (as described in the ninth-century account by Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims) had originated. According to Hincmar, Clovis, the first king of the Franks, had been baptized and anointed by Saint Remi (409) using oil from an ampoule carried by a dove sent directly from God. This holy oil is subsequently recorded as being used for the coronations of Charles the Bald (869) and Louis the Pious (877), whilst Pope Innocent II invoked the same legend for the coronation of Louis VI (1131). (Charlemagne himself did not receive oil from the Holy Ampoule at his coronation because he was crowned in Rome. Nevertheless, the Laudes regi described by Kantorowicz highlight the importance of the anointing at this ceremony.)Footnote 65 It was the use of this holy oil from that point onward (as noted in the Reims and subsequent coronation Ordines) which enabled French monarchs to style themselves “most Christian” (i.e. most anointed), and it was the act of anointing itself which led to the use of the term sacre in preference to couronnement. Indeed, this emphasis on the religious, rather than the constitutional, character of the rite in France led to the coronation often being considered the eighth sacrament.Footnote 66
As the coronation ceremony developed, the role of David came into clearer focus, culminating in the rite preserved in the Last Capetian Ordo of 1250–70, a rite that was modified and expanded for the 1364 Ordo of Charles V.Footnote 67 In a striking parallel with that of Henri IV, Charles V’s coronation had also been held in the wake of a problematic succession (following the death of Philip VI), and so the Ordo was explicitly crafted to reinforce the biblical heritage of the new king.Footnote 68 Subsequent coronations incorporated the essential features of both rites, and the Davidic nature of kingship thereafter underpinned every subsequent coronation until the end of the ancien régime. Nevertheless, as we have seen, other than at this ritual, by the sixteenth century Francis I, Henri II and Catherine de Médicis, and Charles IX all favored a more humanistic model, François seeing himself as a new Hercules, a pious Caesar, and a second Constantine.Footnote 69 Thus the revival that began in the 1580s and continued into the seventeenth century, while in some ways simply another turn of the wheel, nevertheless had something of a novelty about it, especially since – in line with the growing conception of the “individual” in early modern culture – the monarch himself (not just his office) was now increasingly personally identified with King David.Footnote 70
A striking parallel emerges between this renewed interest in David as a model, his unique individual character, and the psalm translations that emerged from the 1580s onward. If Baïf’s 1573 psalms represent the pinnacle of syncretic humanist endeavor, subsequent translations by him and others testify to an abandonment of the classical world and an embrace of the biblical. Philippe Desportes, closely associated with the court and the Palace Academy of Henri III, lodged with Baïf during the 1580s and was undoubtedly influenced by him, yet his translation of a substantial part of the psalter in rhymed verse, begun in 1587 and published in 1591 as Soixante Pseaumes de David, mis en vers françois, eschews all mention of antiquity.Footnote 71 Likewise Renaud de Beaune, Archbishop of Bourges, charged by Henri IV with reestablishing music in the chapelle royale in 1589, republished an earlier 1563 set of prose translations at the request of Henri III in 1587, again making no reference to the literature or rulers of antiquity.Footnote 72 Instead, in his dedication to the king, he recounts the qualities of David, remarking in passing that he surpasses all the “poets and orators.” In the following year, Blaise de la Vigenère published another complete translation, Le Psaultier de David torné en prose mesurée ou vers libres (1588), adopting a new poetic technique (effectively blank verse) that retained the syllable count of French verse while rejecting rhyme, at the same time providing another remarkable dedication to Henri III in which he confirmed the king’s status as a sacral monarch of “le type & image d L’OINCT, du Seigneur, le Roy des Rois, le CHRIST ou MESSIHE” (the type and image of the anointed, of the Lord, of the King of Kings, the Christ or Messiah).Footnote 73 Others such as Dupuyherbault followed the same path, but most strikingly, Baïf himself produced a third and final translation of the complete psalter in 1587 at the command of Henri III, this time in rhymed verse, and, like the other translations produced that year, claiming no authority from classical sources or techniques.Footnote 74
Although remaining in manuscript (as far as we know), this 1587 translation must have been widely known, since it features in an anecdote that strikingly reflects the ongoing rejection of classical literary (and more broadly cultural) models. In 1586 Baïf had been awarded a prize by the Académie de Jeux Floraux of Toulouse (a society of composer-poets with lineage back to the Troubadours) for his contribution to French poetry – he was now considered an equal of Ronsard – that consisted of a silver statue of Apollo.Footnote 75 But in 1587 the Académie met again to reconsider their decision: based on the new information that Baïf had recently translated the Psalms into rhyming French verse and that he had already published the seven penitential psalms, the records of the meeting describe how the Académie had been requested to change the silver Apollo (presumably not yet made?) for something else more appropriate.Footnote 76 For that reason, they decided to change the figure to a statue of King David, which was definitely made and presented to Baïf, since it was described shortly afterward, in 1589, by the poet Toussaint Sailly in a Latin poem praising Baïf’s works. According to Sailly, paraphrased by Baïf’s nineteenth-century biographer Auge-Chiquet:Footnote 77
It represented the prophet king with his foot on the corpse of Goliath. On the giant’s forehead could be distinguished the mark made by the pebble. The attitude of David was not that of a proud conqueror, but of a man who gives thanks to heaven for his triumph, and, conscious of his faults, supplicates Jehovah to withdraw his wrath from the people of Israel. At his feet was sculpted the lyre, which he was about to grasp, and the Book of Psalms open at one of the pages which sing the praises of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
This portrayal of David as a multifaceted character – a victorious warrior who, in the midst of his triumph, still remained humble – is, in fact, typical for much of this period, a period during which no king – Henri III, Henri IV, or Louis XIII – could claim absolute security or power, even in the midst of apparent military success.
David: King, Psalmist, Musician
In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, then, numerous ideological threads converged on the figure of David. Contemporaries saw him as a lyric poet whose works – the Book of Psalms, often recounting his own deeds – took the form of “political” songs of praise, laments, prayers, and songs of victory for the kingdom of Israel; and as an ideal king, after whom the Western conception of the monarchy was itself modeled.Footnote 78 But his talents as a singer and instrumental performer – as much a key to his ability to bring harmony to the kingdoms of Israel and France as his poetic abilities – were also highly regarded: just, then, as Apollo’s lyre represented celestial harmony (as in the Orphic Hymn, “with your resonant lyre you command the axis of the heavens, Placing all in harmony”), so too did David’s harp, producing the same “effects” as the music of antiquity, exhibited most notably in the calming of Saul in I Samuel 16. According to Saint Hilaire of Poitiers (whose commentary on the psalms had first been published by Erasmus in 1523, but which also appeared in Paris in 1572, and which was adopted wholesale in Duranti’s important De ritibus ecclesiae catholicae of 1596, reissued in 1606),Footnote 79 David composed and performed his psalms on the psalterion, a ten-stringed instrument shaped like the body of the Lord that transcended the earthly limitations of other instruments and reflected the harmonious order of heaven.Footnote 80 Saint Augustine, who famously also regarded the psalms as a reflection of divine order, argued for the superiority of the psalterion over the cithara (the ancient Greek equivalent), asserting that the psalterion praised God from on high (de superioribus) while the cithara praised God from below (de inferioribus).Footnote 81 Guillaume du Bartas adopted the same kind of approach in his much later La Seconde sepmaine, a widely read philosophical tract that (like the work of both the Chartres School and Giorgio) considered the creation of the universe and speculated on the events of the second week, after the account of the first seven days contained in the book of Genesis. As part of a discussion of the Hebrew language (created on the second day), du Bartas describes how, after Moses:Footnote 82
In du Bartas’s formulation, David tunes his harp to the harmony of the spheres, and the music he plays animates the angels to dance as they sing the Sanctus, a song of praise closely related to the Trisagion from the Te Deum, and, like it, based on Isaiah 6:3 or Revelation 4:8.Footnote 83 The specific effects of David’s harp were celebrated later, on the fourth day, dedicated to his achievements (trophées), in a discussion of the comfort he had given to Saul against the evil spirits:Footnote 84
For that reason, it is spoken of the marvelous effects of Ancient Music, namely of that of David, whose instrument still divinely resounds in his Psalms, to the chaste ears and holy consciences, who hear it, an excellent remedy and alleviation for all sorts of ill.
If the harmonious “effects” of David’s harp that “still resounded” were in some respects considered central, many commentaries also saw the main significance of the psalms in their status as Christological prophecies, prophecies of the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, that had been given to David through the power of the Holy Spirit. David was recognized as being unique among Old Testament figures in that the Holy Spirit manifested itself to him directly as a result of his anointing. The Book of Samuel records:
Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers. And the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David from that day forward.
and that the Holy Spirit acted through him as he wrote the psalms:
David the son of Jesse declares, the sweet psalmist of Israel, The Spirit of the Lord spoke by me, and His word was on my tongue.
This biblical truth was recognized in many psalm commentaries from this point onward. Hilaire of Poitiers, again, describing the psalterion declared:Footnote 85
It is thus the Holy Spirit from above who sings [the praise of] God in the psalms, with the form of the body of the Lord, in which has spoken the Holy Spirit of heaven.
But beyond David’s musical and poetic prowess, and the fact that the Holy Spirit acted through him and his psalms, his character and life more generally were also held up as an ideal example of kingship itself. David’s bravery and military prowess were obvious accomplishments that a contemporary king might aspire to emulate: best known for his personal bravery in the slaying of Goliath in I Samuel 17:17–37, he also commanded his armies in many victories in II Samuel 8:1–14. Less obvious characteristics for emulation were his humility and penitence, traits he exhibited after his infidelity with Bathsheba and the subsequent death of his son Absalom. Nevertheless, all these traits were considered relevant to the French/Frankish crown from its earliest days. Jonas d’Orléans’s De institutione regia, written around 830 to serve as a guide to kingship for Pepin, Charlemagne’s son, was not published in France until 1662, but his writings were nonetheless well known in the sixteenth century. In Chapter 3, “That which the King is, that which he must be, and that which he must avoid,” d’Orléans quotes Saint Isidore’s Sententia, where David – with all his imperfections, yet with his deep humility – is described as the ideal model of kingship:Footnote 86
He who makes use of royal power justly distinguishes himself from all others in the following way: he shines all the more because of the grandeur of his rank as [much as] he humbles himself more deeply in his heart, taking to himself as a model the example of the humility of David, who did not boast of his merits, but who said, while abasing himself in humility “I will advance as a vile man, and vile will I appear before God, who has chosen me.”
This sense of humility, already noted earlier in connection with Baïf’s statue, is perhaps one of the most striking and unexpected facets of David’s character to be highlighted in the context of kingship, but it is central to many other accounts of his life. Perhaps most notable is the analysis of David’s attributes in Saint Ambrose’s Apologia prophetae David, addressed to Emperor Theodosius Augustus and intended as a model for his contemplation. Here, David’s characteristics – his strength, his respect for royal authority, his even greater respect for religion, his mercy, his patience, his temperance, his horror of cruelty, and his love for his people – are all framed in the context of his infidelity with Bathsheba, and are all seen in the context of a humility that compensated for and redeemed this sin.Footnote 87
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, then, an educated subject would have been equipped with a deep and rich sense of the ideologies associated with kingship, David, and the psalms. So when we read of Louis XIII’s actions at La Rochelle shortly before the siege was broken in 1628, paraphrased by Archon from Charles Bernard’s much longer contemporary account, the cues that a contemporary reader would have picked up on shine through unmistakably:Footnote 88
Since the King loved Music, but the serious and grave type of Music suitable for the Temples of Jesus Christ, where it must be simple and contemplative, in the moments of leisure which remained to him, having given his orders to those concerned with the progress of the siege, he kept up his spirits by composing motets; he had never learned music by rule, nevertheless there had never been any musician who lacked for less in his tones and measures. The Feast of Pentecost being the next day, and His Majesty not having brought with him his singers or musicians, he showed one of his ecclesiastics the manner of notating the psalms to be sung at first and second vespers, and so that everything would be made ready for the feast day, his zeal made him pass most of the night in this pleasurable task; one saw that day this pious Monarch, like a David in the midst of his singers, animating them by his voice, directing them with his movements in singing the psalms according to the notes which he had written: and all this with such just tuning, and such measured sounds, that everyone was charmed by their harmony.
Just as the Holy Spirit acted through David, so too – at first Vespers of the Feast of Pentecost – did it act through Louis, providing inspiration as he composed music for his biblical predecessor’s psalms. Just as Louis had, at his coronation, taken his place as a sacral monarch, a rex christianissimus, a priest in the unbroken tradition of the Catholic church, so too could he lead the clerics and ecclesiastics through the Offices as first among equals. And just as David’s music not only calmed Saul but, by means of the psalterion, resonated with the universal harmonies of the world, so too did Louis’s own compositions (clearly divinely inspired since he had received no training) as he directed his singers in the production of harmonious, measured, and even well-tuned sounds. Louis’s humility and piety were also on display – he did not insist on a full complement of singers to accompany him and he required the music only to be simple and contemplative – but at the same time, his military prowess was also apparent, giving the orders to his soldiers that would shortly result in victory.
In this brief vignette, then, we see the liturgy, the psalms, the king’s musical abilities, the king’s accomplishment as a military commander, and music as model of universal harmony, all linking an apparently minor event to the broader ideological frameworks in which royal power was conceived. And yet, as the remainder of this book will show, the conception of the king framed by this isolated vignette was by no means unique. From his coronation in 1610, to the composition of supplicatory motets later in that decade, to celebratory pamphlets and songs published in the 1620s, to ceremonial entrées in the 1630s, to the reform of chant in royal institutions, and finally to the dedication of his kingdom to the Virgin Mary in 1638, these ideological threads were woven throughout his whole reign. To begin with, though, as Chapter 2 shows, it is as an agent of the Holy Spirit that we find Louis XIII first, at his coronation in Reims cathedral, following in David’s footsteps as anointed king and “Christ.”
