New Light on the Reign of Francis I
R. J. KNECHT
In the year 2000 a major art exhibition was held successively in Ghent,
Bonn, Vienna and Madrid to celebrate the 500 th anniversary of the birth
of the Emperor Charles V. Nothing comparable was done in 1994 for the
500th anniversary of the birth of his great rival, King Francis I of France.
Yet it is arguable that his impact on posterity was greater than that of
Charles at least in respect of the visual arts and learning. Francis built
some of the finest Renaissance châteaux, employed several of the most
talented artists and musicians of his day, collected works of art on an
unprecedented scale as well as many precious classical manuscripts. He
also promoted humanism by setting up royal lectureships in subjects not
covered by the traditional university curriculum. Three major French
institutions - the Louvre, the Bibliothèque nationale and the Collège de
France - owe him a substantial debt. The glamour surrounding the
subsequent reigns of Louis XIV and Napoleon may go some way to
explain the relative neglect suffered by Francis since the sixteenth
century, but responsibility also lies with the nineteenth-century historian,
Jules Michelet, who rubbished him for personal reasons and with
generations of popular historians, who liked to portray him as merely a
playboy. The fact that Francis was defeated at Pavia in 1525 and taken
prisoner may also not have endeared him to a nation bent on ‘la gloire’.
But the pendulum is beginning to swing towards a more just
appraisal of a monarch who, in his day, was acclaimed as ‘le grand roy
Françoys.’ We know much more now about his day-to-day life thanks to
the research of Monique Chatenet, an art-historian, who has already given
us a masterly study of the château of Madrid which the king built outside
Paris after his return from captivity. In the wake of an edition of letters
from the court of France around 1516 by the young Federico Gonzaga or
his secretary, Stazio Gadio, to Isabella d’Este or her husband (Raffaele
Tamalio, Federico Gonzaga alla corte di Francesco I di Francia nel
carteggio privato con Mantova (1515-1517) (Paris: Champion, 1994),
Chatenet has trawled the archives of Mantua and Modena for the whole
sixteenth century. Her findings are contained in La Cour de France au
XVIe siècle: vie sociale et architecture (Paris: Picard, 2002) a work in
which history serves to illuminate the function of royal buildings as well
as their design and construction. It demonstrates that the king was
surprisingly accessible in the early sixteenth century, yet also wanted to
be free of state business when he set off on hunting expeditions with his
‘fair band’ of ladies. The châteaux which he built from scratch
(Chambord, Madrid, Villers-Cotterêts, La Muette, Challuau) were all
maisons de plaisance where the distribution of rooms suggests
informality. We are provided with fascinating glimpses of a king who
could be at once authoritarian yet genial. We see him ordering all his
courtiers to shave their heads because he had been obliged to shave his
after an injury or driving around a park in a new sort of carriage or again
making a sketch of a building which he has in mind. Monique Chatenet’s
Chambord (Paris: Éditions du patrimoine, 2002) is not only superbly
illustrated, but also an up-to-date assessment of recent research on the
construction of that veritable Taj Mahal of the French Renaissance.
Following his return from captivity, Francis shifted the main focus of his
building activity from the Loire Valley to the Ile-de-France. He built
Madrid, began rebuilding the Louvre and developed Fontainebleau,
which allegedly became his favourite residence. It was here that he set to
work two famous Italian artists, Rosso and Primaticcio, who with their
assistants decorated many parts of the château in a distinctive style,
combining painting and stucco. But the château was not planned from the
start, it evolved over the years in response to circumstances. Thus, when
Louise of Savoy, the king’s mother, died in 1531, he took over her
lodging in the keep. As a result a monumental staircase which had been
recently built in the oval courtyard to provide access to his lodging was
swept away as redundant in spite of the fact that it now led to the
presence chamber of Francis’s new queen, Eleonor of Portugal. These
and other changes in the château’s plan are admirably described in
Françoise Boudon and Jean Blécon, Le Château de Fontainebleau de
François Ier à Henri IV (Paris: Picard, 1998). Francis I was immensely
proud of the long gallery at Fontainebleau which bears his name. He
incorporated it into his apartment, kept the key on his person and showed
it to distinguished foreign visitors, like John Wallop in 1540. Much ink
has been spilt on the interpretation of the sequence of mural paintings by
Rosso. Henri Zerner in his L’Art de la Renaissance en France:
L’invention du classicisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1996) admits that the
‘coherent discourse’, which he feels sure links the various subjects in the
gallery, has so far eluded him, but he proposes a possible link between its
programme and the book of emblems, a genre created by Alciati which
achieved great popularity in early sixteenth-century France.
The attention recently given to Francis I has not been limited to his
patronage of the visual arts. Christine Cazeaux’s La Musique à la cour
de François Ier (Paris: École des Chartes, 2002) is a richly documented
study of an unfairly neglected topic. Francis may not have been as keen
on music as his predecessor Louis XII, but he attracted some leading
musicians to his court and established on a more regular footing the
Chapel, the Écurie and the Chamber – household departments which,
between them, provided him and his entourage with music, choral and
instrumental, sacred and secular.
Historians have been no less active than art-historians in enlarging
our knowledge of Francis I. As is well known, he had to spend a great
deal of money on war and diplomacy. Taxation was insufficient to serve
his needs. He had to resort to all kinds of expedients, including the sale of
offices. Even so, the king was seldom able to balance the books and
blamed his fiscal officials for this. One of the few blots on his humane
escutcheon is his treatment of Jacques de Beaune, baron of Semblançay,
an old man of eighty or so who after giving the king years of loyal service
was tried for corruption, sentenced to death and hanged. Many other such
fiscal officials were tried for corruption, imprisoned and had their goods
confiscated. We now know all that there is to know on the subject of the
royal finances thanks to Philippe Hamon’s magisterial study, L’Argent du
roi: Les finances sous François Ier (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire
économique et financière de la France, 1994). And he has since
published an equally impressive study of the king’s fiscal personnel,
called “Messieurs des finances”: Les grands officiers de finance dans la
France de la Renaissance (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et
finacière de la France, 1999).
The most obscure part of Francis I’s reign is that which followed
the fall of the chief minister, Anne de Montmorency, in 1542. A new
generation of ministers began to influence policy. I have been taken to
task for devoting only forty pages to these years in my biography of the
king. Happily, this deficiency is being remedied by a number of young
scholars. François Nawrocki has just completed a monumental thesis on
the Admiral Claude d’Annebault, which suggests that the contemporary
English assessment of the man as a ‘blockhead’ was anything but just.
Nawrocki reveals him to have been an able administrator and diplomat
and the king’s chief minister in the last four years of his reign. He
describes the traditionally dismissive picture of these years as a ‘vision
caricaturale’ which needs urgent revision. It is to be hoped that his thesis
will soon be published. Cédric Michon, who is working on the king’s
circle of ecclesiastical ministers (and comparing them with their English
counterparts) is about to illuminate the career of cardinal Jean de
Lorraine, one of the king’s closest friends after 1530. All of this work is
beginning to pay dividends for the Renaissance, and Francis I’s reign in
particular, are the topic of this year’s aggrégation, the competitive
examination for would-be teachers of history. Text-books on the subject
are proliferating and a large exhibition glorifying Francis I is planned to
take place at Chambord in the summer of 2004. So things are looking up
for the ‘roi chevalier’.