{"id":18061,"date":"2021-03-24T12:23:29","date_gmt":"2021-03-24T19:23:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=18061"},"modified":"2021-03-24T12:23:30","modified_gmt":"2021-03-24T19:23:30","slug":"the-politician-is-the-malformed-monster-of-our-coexistence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2021\/03\/24\/the-politician-is-the-malformed-monster-of-our-coexistence\/","title":{"rendered":"THE POLITICIAN IS THE MALFORMED MONSTER OF OUR COEXISTENCE"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Detail of Guillaume Bud\u00e9<\/em> (c<\/em>1536), by Jean Clouet. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

23 MARCH 2021 (psyche.co)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emma Claussenis a British Academy postdoctoral fellow and an affiliated lecturer in French at the University of Cambridge. Her first book is Politics and \u2018Politiques\u2019 in Sixteenth-Century France: A Conceptual History<\/em><\/a> (forthcoming, July 2021) and she is working on her next, \u2018What Makes Life Worth Living in Early Modern France?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edited by Sam Haselby<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early days<\/strong> of my PhD, whenever I tried to explain to a fellow graduate student or relative that I was working on \u2018politics and political actors in 16th-century France\u2019 \u2013 pedantically refusing to say \u2018politicians\u2019, since politique<\/em> meant more \u2018civic administrator\u2019 in that period, strictly speaking \u2013 I would often be interrupted: \u2018I\u2019ll tell you what politicians are. They\u2019re self-interested, backstabbing, Machiavellian, hypocrite liars!\u2019 Indeed, that was<\/em> how \u2018political actors\u2019 were often described in the early modern period, when this kind of language began to be used about politicians. France was a key setting for intellectual and polemical investment in the role of the political person: a crucible in the process of politicians becoming more prominent and more problematic in Western culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There have always been politicians; many ancient philosophers describe the roles of the \u2018statesman\u2019 or \u2018political man\u2019 in positive terms. In the Renaissance, politics rose to prominence among the disciplines, with new translations and commentaries of the political theory of classical antiquity such as Aristotle\u2019s Politics<\/em>, and original works such as Machiavelli\u2019s Prince.<\/em> However, enacting this difficult expertise was thankless, sometimes explicitly dangerous \u2013 and the moral status of the politician was in doubt, especially in the context of Reformation conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In France, civil wars raged from 1562 to 1598, fought partly along religious lines like the English civil wars a century later. Early in the century, the scholar Guillaume Bud\u00e9, advisor to King Fran\u00e7ois I and the first royal librarian, wrote his own version of a prince\u2019s handbook. Printed posthumously in 1547, it contained the observation that political laws need to be tempered by \u2018mixed, ambidextrous men\u2019. Bud\u00e9 was referring to the delicate mixing of different types of law (including civil and ecumenical), in a context of factional divisions and mass conversion to the reformed faith. The idea of a fundamentally mixed person enacting politics \u2013 an \u2018ambidextrous\u2019 character, balancing \u2018Right\u2019 and \u2018Left\u2019 centuries before these were political categories \u2013 came under intense pressure as religious and social change intensified. Politics was the art of the possible: it also involved attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. Then as now, this was considered horrifying as well as hopeful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Political infrastructure was changing in tandem with shifts in thinking about politics. This period saw the development of a class of counsellors, legislators, scholars and ambassadors across Europe grappling with this increasingly dark art. Among the royal portraits produced in European courts, we find figures from this loose political class: Bud\u00e9\u2019s portrait, attributed to Jean Clouet, is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; Hans Holbein painted Thomas Cromwell and his rival Thomas More. These men, politicians avant la lettre<\/em>, were sometimes objects of public loathing. Nor were they always appreciative themselves of those who practised politics. Not long before his execution, More wrote an irritable pamphlet criticising \u2018polytykes\u2019 as \u2018pacyfyers\u2019 acting as apologists for heresy in order to maintain public peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Political action was associated with flexibility: a willingness to break any promise or moral principle if expedient<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In France, religious difference was not only considered heresy, it also challenged the established political identity of the realm, expressed in the axiom \u2018one king, one law, one faith\u2019. Although initially French intellectual elites \u2013 inspired by Renaissance practices of translation and careful re-readings of ancient texts \u2013 had been open to new interpretations of scripture, they didn\u2019t entirely anticipate the radical potential of re-reading. The theologian Jean Calvin attempted to enact that potential. Calvinist missionaries to France were instrumental in the conversion of thousands across the social spectrum. Elements of the already restive nobility also adopted the reformed faith. Bud\u00e9 himself was suspected of having converted. By the middle of the 16th century, when Henri II\u2019s early death left his sickly 15-year-old son on the throne with Catherine de\u2019 Medici as regent, the scene was set for war: the one king was propped up by multiple advisors, and by his mother; the one faith was now at least two; the law was ill-equipped to handle the consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Calvin, a trained lawyer, wrestled with the relationship between \u2018spiritual\u2019 and \u2018political\u2019 jurisdictions, the issue at the heart of the French conflict. Early in the wars, people began referring to a type of person, the politique<\/em>, who prioritised social order over spiritual unity, just as More had described \u2018polytykes\u2019 doing in the English context. After thousands of French Protestants were massacred in 1572, poems celebrating the killings dismissed politiques<\/em> who preferred peaceful coexistence to violent purges. Protestant writers, meanwhile, characterised Machiavelli as the amoral inspiration for the monarchy\u2019s betrayal of its Calvinist subjects: it is to them that we owe the Florentine\u2019s sulphurous reputation. In all these cases, political action was associated with flexibility: either toleration of difference, or a willingness to break any promise or moral principle if expedient. \u2018Ambidextrous\u2019 mixing became, in some quarters, moral abjection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last phase of<\/strong> the civil wars was fought by the \u2018Catholic League\u2019, known as the \u2018Holy Union\u2019,<\/em> against a combination of Huguenot and royalist forces whose supporters in the courts and parliaments were known as politiques<\/em>. Pamphleteers and preachers wishing to restore the \u2018holy union\u2019 of French Catholicism condemned their opponents as an unholy<\/em> union, representing politiques<\/em> as an extravagant blend of mythological creature, animal and human to exemplify the point. One broadsheet offering a portrait of a politique<\/em> described this figure as a \u2018monster\u2019, with an illustration of the politician as a mermaid: half-woman, with the head of Medusa, and half-fish with a double tail \u2013 another version of ambidexterity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The civil war portrait of a politique<\/em> as a monstrous amalgam seems antithetical to the sober, scholarly image of Bud\u00e9 by Clouet. It might then seem that the mixed politique<\/em> of the radical Catholic polemic emerges entirely in response to the fractious \u2018mixing\u2019 of Catholics and Protestants \u2013 and is a corruption of Bud\u00e9\u2019s \u2018mixed\u2019 corrector of political laws. But the politique<\/em> monster is also a composite of various Classical myths (note the reference to Medusa). In that respect, it symbolises a key intellectual and literary technique of the age: the compilation of classical narratives and figures, in order to create new, hybridised forms. Writers were anxious about the consequences of unbridled creative variation, even as they prized its aesthetic effects. Gendered anxiety also tracks across many texts of the period: bad politicians were described as \u2018effeminate\u2019, or represented as monstrous women, like the Medusa-Mermaid. This vision of dangerous, ambivalent femaleness sits alongside the \u2018motherland\u2019 (and later Marianne, the symbol of the Republic) in French political imagination. The early modern invention of the mixed \u2018political monster\u2019, forged in Reformation conflict, also betrayed the tensions inherent to Renaissance creative and intellectual practice, and the fragile masculinity of the practitioners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time I\u2019d finished my PhD and begun turning it into a book, politicians were held, if it were possible, in even lower regard, and unions of all kinds were in jeopardy \u2013 not only in Europe. French secularist policy (la\u00efcit\u00e9<\/em>), nominally developed as an antidote to \u2018one law, one faith\u2019, was held to be in crisis, or to do more harm than good. A female member of the UK parliament, Jo Cox \u2013 whose first parliamentary speech argued that \u2018we have far more in common than that which divides us\u2019 \u2013 had been assassinated. Britain had voted to leave the EU. Populations across the world had elected nationalist \u2018strong\u2019 men who exploited<\/a> anti-politician sentiment. The battle between political monster and \u2018holy\u2019 union continues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The composite political monster of Renaissance France stands in contrast to fantasies of uncomplicated unity; it is also a fantastical vision of the coalition that ended the conflict. After the wars, French leaders established an official policy of \u2018forgetting\u2019 the fighting that had torn towns and families apart. But the politique<\/em> monster is worth remembering. It was intended as a slander, a warning as to the monstrous, amoral purpose of politics \u2013 that is, to suffer compromise and betray ideals. Still, this vision of the political person is also of somebody who uneasily embodies coexistence. It\u2019s not a facile fiction of unity, but one that acknowledges the discomfort in cohesion. There could be worse monsters.
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Detail of Guillaume Bud\u00e9 (c1536), by Jean Clouet. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 23 MARCH 2021 (psyche.co) Emma Claussenis a British Academy postdoctoral fellow and an affiliated lecturer in French at the University of Cambridge. Her first book is Politics and \u2018Politiques\u2019 in Sixteenth-Century France: A Conceptual History (forthcoming, July 2021) and… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18061"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18061"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18062,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18061\/revisions\/18062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}