Suetonius, Henri de Valois and the art of political biography

Abstract

During the closing years of his reign, Henri III was the object of a sustained and bitter polemical attack from his adversaries, especially those who supported the League and Guise family. Amongst the numerous pamphlets appeared a number of “biographies” of Henri which sought to destroy his credibility as King. This article examines briefly the nature of the biography as a form of history in sixteenth-century France, it replaces the biographies in their polemical context and examines the possibility of their having been written by authors from the English College in Rheims or by persons who had a similar training. It then goes on to establish parallels between their structure and content and that of theLives of the Caesars by Suetonius and shows how the French polemicists were intent on discrediting Henri, often at the expense of inventing “crimes.” The article concludes that the rhetorical structure of such works owes a great deal to the Suetonian model and that they establish in Early Modern Europe a tradition of “character assassination” as a powerful element in political and polemical biographies.