The Arts Under Henri II, part 1
Henri II de Bourbon is one of the most important arts patron in the history of the world. Simply looking at the amount of money invested in the arts under Vigny’s regency, the 1630s, and the 1640s shows the extent of the change--under Vigny the arts were primarily patronized by the Inquisition, and only 40,000 livres per year were distributed to artists (who were primarily dealing with neo-Medievalist themes). Saint Chamand removed the responsibility of patronizing the arts from the Inquisition and increased the state’s funding of the arts to 100,000 livres per year. At the peak of France’s arts funding under Henri (1642), the French crown distributed 5 million livres, or 15% of the government’s budget, into the arts.
But this funding had its functional aspects: much of Henri’s patronage had an ulterior motive in mind. In some cases his motive was power politics, as in Henri’s funding for the French letters as a way of giving some unity to the French diaspora. But in many cases (especially with regards to funding of the arts in the Seine Valley), Henri had one great ambition: to make Paris the New Rome, the center of the world. But presenting the arts as one category would be inaccurate, as French arts policy separated the arts into several categories. As such I will discuss the major accomplishments made in four fields which became the major subdivisions of the Royal Academy of the Arts: Architecture, Music, the Visual Arts, and Letters. In this section, I will devote my attention to Architecture and Music.
Architecture and le Place de Royale
Architecture was one of the main focuses of Henri’s arts funding, mainly because it had the double purpose of revitalizing Paris after the damage incurred by the Day of the Barricades. Even 3 years after the event, multiple neighborhoods on the periphery still didn’t have working fountains and many well off neighborhoods still had wreckage in the place of many buildings. Lack of funds through Saint Chamand’s regency, as well as Paris’ usual class disagreements, had prevented any significant rebuilding of the city. Furthermore, in 1620 many areas of the Right Bank of the Seine were still marshes and church lands which were left barren, and the city walls still separated the dense quarters of Paris from the
fauxbourgs outside the the city.
Paris in 1620. Note the dichotomy caused by the city walls and the empty areas immediately around the Seine. Note, also, the use of perspective: the Enlightenment mode of mapmaking (which presumed a ‘birds eye view’ which no one could possibly see) had not yet been applied to the local level and most maps still took the perspective of a person looking on some extant hill
The architectural renewal of Paris began when Henri created the position of ‘Directeur des Urbains’ and gave it to Raoul le Tellier, a Norman disciple of Saint Chamand known mostly for his architectural prowess. The urban director was solely in charge of all public works, including fountains, bridges, the city walls, and the roads, as well as royal lands (and was given the authority to buy and sell land). Creating a directly appointed position with such power (the Urban Directors of Bruges, Paris, Lyons and Bourdeaux were all invested with more power than any other government officials in their area outside of the provincial governors) was the last step in a centuries long trend away from locally elected officials.
The municipal officials of Paris had chosen the wrong side in two consecutive conflicts--firstly siding with the ultra-orthodox League des Catoliques and secondly with the Vignards--and in both cases the social prestige of local offices fell immeasurably. Henri’s move--to wholly sidestep the obstructionism of the precedent set parliament by creating appointed royal positions--was barely mentioned amongst Parisian notables. Within weeks le Tellier’s unprecedented funding and legal powers was already showing its effects. Unemployed masons were given work repairing Paris’ fountains and within a month of Henri’s ascension the Parisian water supply was again safe to drink and provided to all the quarters of Paris. Roads were cleaned and paved, making it easier for carriages--the newest form of aristocratic travel--to move to and from the capital.
The idea of the carriage was not necessarily new: horse drawn chariots and even covered chariots were common in the classical era. But the dawn of the 17th century saw the massive expansion of the carriage as a form of transportation, showcasing the gentrification of the aristocratic classes
But it was in the mid 1620s that le Tellier ‘caught his break’. The Guise family, who had for a long time been the landlords and mayors of Paris, had gone broke after much of their liquid wealth was confiscated for their support for Vigne. Their Parisian estates, which took up a good portion of the Parisian right bank, were put up for sale, which le Tellier immediately bought at a discount. The houses on this estate were slums, built with the cheapest materials. Le Tellier recompensed those who lived in the Guise slums and tore them down, replacing them with what he called ‘Le Place de Royale’.
Le Place de Royale, a block of apartments built for the increasing group of bourgeoisie bureaucrats who staffed the Louvre, for Parisian cultural notables, and for major ambassadors (a set of categories which started to intersect starting in the 1670s, and which had become wholly indistinct in the 18th century as French hegemony came to the point that many minor countries used French notables as their ambassadors), was built with one architectural purpose--to show the greatness of France. Le Place de Royal’s style, combining the neo-classicism of the Renaissance with an French sense of austerity, became
the French architectural style of the next two centuries, and marked the beginnings of France’s transcendence of the themes of the Renaissance and thus the beginning of Enlightenment art.
The Place de Royal. The style of the apartments were so dominant in France that by 1900 nearly all of Paris was adorned with buildings of the “French neo-Classical” style. Furthermore the apartment's style was known through Europe as it became a center for ambassadors
Le Tellier’s success as the engineer of the Place de Royal (although it was Gui de Vergennes, the most talented non-military architect in France and the ‘prize jewel’ of the Royal Architect Corps, who actually designed the apartments) led to a restructuring of the French government. In the age of Vigny the French Architectural Corps, a part of the French Army, had dominated French arts funding in the Vigny period. In 1625 Henri split the French Architectural Corps, creating the Army Engineers (the military aspect of the French Architectural Corps) and the Academy of Architecture (the civil aspect), which was put under a new Ministry of Public Works and the Arts, headed by le Tellier.
The ascendency of Le Tellier to the Cabinet
The rise of French Music and the Symphony
No field transformed more under the reign of Henri than music. Even as late as the 17th century, music was mostly patronized by the Church and revolved around religious themes. After Le Tellier was appointed minister of the arts, funding for musical groups (including choirs, composers, and orchestras) trebled in two years. By 1627 every musician in Paris was patronized by the new Musicians du Roi. The Royal Musicians had several supgroups, including a group of opera singers and a massive orchestra headed by the composer Francois Villion.
The choice of Villion as the composer of the Royal Orchestra was a coup: Villion was one of the first composers of his era to completely eschew the use of religious themes and of singers, choosing instead to compose symphonies. This type of music, implicitly secular as it lacked the idea of a Voice, was popularized by the amazingly adept composer Villion. His diligence--throughout his life he composed almost 200 symphonies--and his playful style elevated the French musical scene to being the best in Europe. By the 1630s the greatness of this musical mastermind was widely accepted, and in 1632 the newly crowned King of Bavaria asked for an audience by the Musicians du Roi. Villion’s orchestra would conduct a grand tour through Europe, playing in Munich, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw and Stockholm before coming back, greatly increasing French prestige in the process.
The ‘grand tour’ of the Villion orchestra
The creation and popularization of the symphony was due, chiefly, to the influence of Henri, who had never had a large amount of religious influence in his life (Saint Chamand, who sensed “no vigour for theology" in the young Henri, chose instead to focus on the classics, a subject which Henri clearly had a passion for) and who preferred the rational structure of a symphony over the dramaticism of operas and the stolidness of choirs. Another form of music which Henri gave a large amount of thought to was the ballet: Henri composed several ballets himself and deeply enjoyed holding dances in the Louvre. Further down the road, as Henri aged into his 40s and took less and less interest in the arts, Jean-Baptiste Lully was appointed as chief royal musician, taking a role which had once been served by the king himself. The appointment of an Italian to the one of the chief French cultural positions shows us that even in 1653, Henri was no longer threatened by what had previously been France’s main cultural rival, the Despotate di Modena
Lully would use his influence as Chief Musician to create, in Paris, an Academy for Music
Conclusion to part one: perspectives on Henri’s intentions
All this is well and good, but why did the creation of an apartment block, or a musical troupe, or an artist’s guild, bring such a degree of attention to (in the scheme of things) a relatively minor municipal bureaucrat? Which brings us to a bigger question--why did Henri care so much about the arts, and why did he care so much about Paris?
Henri’s greatest goal--a goal incubated by a classical education, but also by an atypically urban childhood (for an aristocrat) and by a very innovative teacher (a teacher who, himself, was a foreigner in every European land and a man obsessed by the notion of Empire)--was the recreation of the greatness of Rome in Paris. While this was hardly a new desire (similar desires existed in Modena and Austria), Henri had an unprecedented ability to make this desire a reality. Unlike the Despots of Modena, who sought to literally create the realm of Italia as a recreation of Rome’s glory, or the Holy Roman Emperors who sought to create Roman glory through arms, Henri engaged in his goal in a wholly non-oppositional way. By maintaining a series of balancing alliances against his enemies, Henri was able to downsize the army and move that money into the arts to an extent unthought of by any head of state before or since. By funding the arts to this degree Henri was able to create French hegemony in a way that was barely even noticed until it was too late.
Death of Germanicus. Neo-roman themes were a common trend in French 17th-18th century art, eclipsing the use of Christian symbolism as the ideals of the Enlightenment took hold
As such, the fact that both Louis XII and Henri II are used as examples of “prototypical realists” is interesting and wholly off. Although Louis XII was great friends with Nicollo I di Machiavelli it seems that he never read Il Duce (although his First Minister, du Bosquet, had read it and used its theory of judicial power as the reasoning behind his centralization of the French court system). Despite Louis’ ignorance of the power of ideas, a flaw he shares with classical realism, there is little evidence to say that Louis wasn’t simply a highly competent and ambitious power-politician.
Henri, on the other hand, was a believer in many of the aspects of ‘modern’ realism--a balance of power, a ‘scientific’ way of viewing international relations, a belief in a universal human nature--Henri was a utopian through and through, and believed that a balance of power could maintain the status quo in the secular realm of European affairs as France achieved hegemony for itself in the cultural realm. This explained the Janus-like nature of Henri’s policies--in power politics, Henri was wholly conciliatory, hoping simply to maintain the peace and France’s position as First Among Equals within the international system. But in the Arts, Henri was aggressive, not only in his willingness to spend millions upon millions of livres on a patronization of the arts, but also in his willingness to support forms of the arts (an austere architectural aesthetic against the extravagance of the Baroque style, symphonies against the popularity of choir music, as we will see neo-pagan/classical themes instead of Christian symbolism and French instead of Latin) which went against the ‘grain’ of European society.
Thus, while in international relations as we traditionally see them, Henri was meek, a lamb who simply attempted to maintain the peace and the status quo. But in the broader world of culture and ideas, Henri was a true revolutionary, who put as his goal the complete subjugation of European culture under his France. Henri’s revolutionary streak was not limited to the international realm though--he also wanted to remake French society from the ground up via his cultural policies. I will discuss this desire, and the way that Henri implemented this desire via his visual arts and linguistic/academic policies, in the next section.
