Reviewed by: L’Amiral Claude d’Annebault, conseiller favori de François Ier by François Nawrocki Susan Broomhall Nawrocki, François, L’Amiral Claude d’Annebault, conseiller favori de François Ier (Bibliothèque d’histoire de la Renaissance, 7), Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2015; paperback; pp. 763; 12 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €67.00; ISBN 9782812431678. How did an individual rise from a relatively little-known Norman family to manage the government of the French kingdom for the last four years of François I’s reign? François Nawrocki, building upon the work of his doctoral thesis, sets out to uncover the network of resources that Claude d’Annebault drew upon to sustain a lengthy career at the heart of French power. Not much has been written on this rather forgotten figure, perhaps partly because uncovering his life’s work requires reconstruction of sources widely distributed across European archives, and much of his own correspondence is no longer extant. The courtly service system of this period depended on personal relations with a monarch and allowed for the development of forms of friendship and intimacy forged by proximity and shared purpose (that is, the king’s). Despite the use of the term in the work’s title, Nawrocki warns that ‘favourite’ suggests a royal capriciousness to courtly appointments that does not reflect the reciprocal nature of this service relationship. D’Annebault’s military prowess guided much of his political trajectory, right through to his recall to Henri II’s service just before his death in 1552. His career coincided with the intensive military focus of a French court heavily invested in the Italian Wars, which pitted successive monarchs against Charles V. Even its failures aided d’Annebault’s rise. The disastrous losses of the French elite at Pavia in 1525, for example, created early access to power for a crop of counsellors in the orbit of Anne de Montmorency, d’Annebault among them. Administrative, diplomatic, and military roles first in Normandy and then in Piedmont during the 1530s solidified his reputation as a capable and reliable official, eventually rising to leading status alongside Montmorency and Philippe de Chabot, and membership of the elite French order of St Michael. Montmorency’s exile, then Cabot’s death in 1543, left d’Annebault the most powerful male counsellor to serve François I, a [End Page 228] position he maintained until 1547, working alongside François de Tournon and the king’s mistress, Anne de Pisseleu. By the end of his reign, François I had vested in d’Annebault more power than in any other councillor. Nawrocki attempts to provide some measure of the personal qualities of the man whom the king apparently trusted so deeply and for so long. He cites contemporary accounts that speak to d’Annebault’s intelligence, but Nawrocki’s own investigation of his education, epistolary expression, and literary commitment suggests functionality rather than deep intellectual engagement of the kind displayed by Guillaume du Bellay or Montmorency. His Catholic religious practices were traditional, with little evidence that he mobilized his position to advance his beliefs, as his son would later do more explicitly in alignment with the Guise family. While he promoted family members and developed his own domains during his time at the height of power, neither contemporary nor historical reports suggest a reputation for the naked ambition that other favourites of the king evidently displayed. Indeed, d’Annebault mobilized his own financial resources to serve the king, although it was an investment returned with interest. Nawrocki argues in conclusion that d’Annebault’s example demonstrates the series of networks and resources that sustained the royal system of service. Royal favour, he maintains, was a collective enterprise (p. 685) that entailed not only d’Annebault but a wide range of family members, friends, supporters, and retainers. And as such, when d’Annebault fell from grace at the commencement of Henri II’s reign, and his personnel moved to make new alliances in the Guise network, their actions also brought about the possibility of his own re-entry back into royal favour soon after. After seven hundred pages of biography, it still seems...
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Nov 1, 2019
Dominic Appiah + 3
Open Access
