Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France: The Rohan Family, 1550–1715 by Jonathan Dewald

Abstract

Dewald, Jonathan. Status, Power, and Identity in Early Modern France: The Rohan Family, 1550–1715. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0271 -06616-5. Pp. 264. $75. Perhaps it was du Bellay’s 1549 Défense that convened the writings on paper that established seventeenth-century France—fraught with nascent, unfolding conventions , and upstarts and false starts—upon stone. But none should expect the French scholar to approach history with the straight rigidity of the pillars that erected the French academies of the time, because history bends. Between paper and stone, we receive Dewald’s study of the Rohan family. His work not only thoroughly and successfully examines the particular social history of a prominent family in early-modern France, it also presents history as the resultant, organic movements of a thing thrown against diametrically opposed materials. Between time and physical space, for example, his work on seventeenth-century France eventually moves us to (re)interpret current notions of dominance and power in our society. Starting as early as the year 1000 and ending in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Dewald narrates the creation of the Rohan identity, a process that moved between imagined and real alliances with powerful ancestors; actual inner conflicts with living relatives; and political and religious principalities that threatened to out the family as untrustworthy of both credit and credibility. Dewald argues that the dominance of the Rohan family was not fed by blood, but by ideologies based on strategy, myth, persuasion, and luck. He also presents notions of change and stasis—otherwise considered as mutually incomprehensible—as opposing materials that form a symbiotic relationship, both fulfilling perpetual, requisite functions needed to guarantee their existence. It is, in fact, movements between seemingly diametric opposites that rhythmed the life of Duke Henri de Rohan, the central figure in the book. Between his father’s absence and his mother’s ballet; the politics of man, and the religions of God; between public spaces, and isolation; between war and exile; the noise of barbarous actions, and the silence of reasoned philosophy; somewhere between the tradition of sexism and sexual oppression, and the fear of powerful women, and the female sex, Dewald shows how Rohan’s reputation was written on paper, and his image carved in stone at Geneva’s St. Pierre Cathedral. Dewald’s work—for its keen attention to the multiple stimuli that influenced the Rohan’s particular history—is beneficial to social historians and contributes widely to early-modern French studies, namely to the fields of politics, economics, religion, and women and gender studies. Though Dewald does not venture to reveal specific applications of his work to current discourse on status, power, and identity, one discovers constructive interpretative frameworks to define privilège, a term that has become a part of popular cultural conversations today. Of particular importance, one notes that Dewald’s work, for the same reasons mentioned above, fully complements studies of French literature of the early-modern period. The representation of Henri de Rohan gives the courtly agitations of Madame de La Fayette’s 242 FRENCH REVIEW 89.4 Reviews 243 Princesse new meaning. The contexts of social mobility and dangerous ambition that staged the demise of La Fontaine’s grenouille, for example, are better understood. Sewanee: The University of the South Julian Ledford Duyker, Edward. Dumont d’Urville: Explorer & Polymath. Honolulu: UP of Hawai‘i, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8248-5139-2. Pp. 671. $69. Duyker’s book is a detailed account of French admiral Dumont d’Urville’s three voyages of exploration in the South Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica. The first journey was on the ship Coquille in 1823–26; the second and third, under his own command, on the Astrolabe in 1827–29 and 1837–40. These expeditions were undertaken under the official sponsorship of the French royal governments of Louis XVIII, Charles X, and Louis-Philippe, respectively. Besides being sent on missions of exploration, he was commissioned to find out about the circumstances surrounding the death of his predecessor La Pérouse and his crew in 1778. He was also entrusted with the secret task of scouting out possible locations for penal colonies similar...