The Bourbons: The History Of A Dynasty, by J.H. Shennan

What kind of history is this book? Having some awareness of its scope will help to answer this question. For one, this book is about the Bourbon monarchs of France, starting with King Henry IV and ending with Charles X, who abdicated in 1830 during one of France’s periodic periods of intense revolution. The author is not at all interested in the Spanish Bourbons nor is he interested in the Bourbon (or Orleanist) pretenders to the French throne in the aftermath of their family’s loss of power in 1848, which gives the reader some idea of what this history entails. It is a social history and family history of sort that combines a discussion of the Bourbons as the leaders of a dynasty and also the Bourbons as the rulers of France. It is the view of the author that these views were ultimately in stark conflict with each other, and that their roles as patriarchs and family men was incompatible with their role as rulers of a nation with the responsibility to seek the well-being and security of their people by being in charge of government. I’m not sure I buy this argument. I must admit that there are some enjoyable aspects of this book and the author has a clear goal in mind in writing about the administrative aspects of the Bourbons as rulers as well as the ways that their struggles in keeping enough family members alive long enough led to regencies that harmed the dynastic aspects of the family and that led to power being held by foreign queen mothers and ambitious regents.

This book is a short one at a bit less than 200 pages, but it feels longer than it is. The book begins with a list of illustrations and an extremely short preface, as well as a genealogy of the Bourbon kings of France. This is followed by a discussion of the antecedents of the Bourbons by discussing how the French monarchy had evolved through the Capet and Valois dynasties (1). The rest of the book is divided into three parts. The first part of the book contains a discussion of a tipping of the balance that France had found during the late Valois period after victory against the English in the Hundred Years’ War, where religious conflict and elite competition brought France to the brink of self-destruction (2), before discussing Henry IV (3), who alternatively suffered from the religious wars, sought to profit from being a peaceable and moderating figure, and ultimately fell victim to assassination. The next two chapters discuss the consolidation of the Bourbon state that happened under the next two monarchs of the family, Louis XIII, the implacable, whose insecurities were driven by his youth and an inability to find trust and love in the world (4), as well as the glorious Sun King Louis XIV (5), whose reign brought Bourbon France to its apogee of power but also brought it the hostility of the rest of Europe. The rest of the book contains a melancholy account of how it was that the rule of France slipped from the hands of the unworthy, if often personally decent, monarchs who followed the Sun King, including Louis XV, who ruled for a long time and was originally considered to be well-favored but ended up being seen as an empty suit incompetent of holding power (6), and then Louis XVI, called Louis Capet at his death (7), who sought reform but was unable to deal with the pressure of the French Revolution or its contradictory demands on him as ruler and as subject to the will of the people. A brief epilogue discusses the fate of Louis XVI’s younger brothers, who served as kings in the aftermath of Napoleon, and who were ultimately unable to stem the decline of the Bourbons or to preserve its hold on the French throne. The book then ends with endnotes, a bibliography, and an index.

Those people who look at this book seeking a popular history that tells an easily accessible story are going to be disappointed. This author is not interested in writing a tabloid history–although admittedly there are plenty of saucy moments where the author talks about the art of the Bourbon period and about the colorful and immoral lives of the Bourbon monarchs. A couple of the shortcomings of the book, though, are telling. For one, the author is of the opinion that a modern bureaucracy of a well-developed nation is impersonal in nature, which the author views as being incompatible with the personal and elite-driven nature of the monarchy as an institution, which is contradicted by the actual practice of bureaucracies, where privileged elites have never suffered from the anonymity and myriad petty cruelties of those given bureaucratic power and able to say that they are unable to help or serve others because the rules do not permit them while elites regularly are able to avoid being subject to the same treatment themselves. The French Bourbons did not fail because it was impossible to blend personal leadership with the responsibilities of leading a nation. They failed because they were not up to the challenge of accepting the responsibilities of leadership as monarchs/leaders in a similar way that many contemporary presidents and prime ministers are similarly unwilling or unable to seriously take the expectations of the people as being binding on their conduct. The author attempts to rehabilitate the silly and selfish Marie-Antoinette, but if the specifics of her being a gold-digging lesbian (as libelers alleged at the time) was certainly untrue, she was selfish and out of touch with the genuine suffering of people whose excessive taxation paid for both the profligate personal life of someone who had a yen for expensive diamonds and a nation whose military establishment and foreign policy aims were ruinously expensive for a nation with a poorly developed economic base. A dynasty that seeks to dominate Europe through expensive haute couture and military conquest but that cannot avoid grinding its common folk into the dirt with excessive taxation deserves deposition, and that is ultimately what it got.

This is the sort of book where the expectations of the reader are likely to clash mightily with the reality of what the historian seeks to offer. Readers may want a dishy tale of life in Versailles, or more information about the colorful mistresses of the Bourbon kings, the material of this book that is the most memorable and immediately appealing. What the reader gets instead of this is lengthy accounts about the intense conflict between the rulers of France and those whom they sought to advise them among the nobles of the sword (those born into high power in the various ducal houses, many of them related closely to the kings themselves) as well as the nobles of the robe (the service nobility that long served in the various ministries of French political power) with the defenders of traditional French freedoms in the Parlement of Paris (among others). While these political conflicts are indeed interesting, and the fate of the Parlement of Paris to be destroyed in the same French Revolution that ended the Bourbon hold on absolute power (but one hedged by traditional rights as well as the need to manage the ambitions of nobles and the need to provide for the security of the people) is indeed poignant, this is not a book that is well-calculated to win the support of most of its readers, who are unlikely to view faceless bureaucracies as a sign of enlightenment and may not even consider Machiavelli’s advice to rulers to focus on ends rather than means to be wise or worthwhile.