Francis I: The Maker of Modern France by Leonie Frieda, Orion, 352pp, £25
Good English biographies of French kings are rare. So Leonie Frieda’s life of Francis I is welcome. If he is remembered at all this side of the Channel, it is for his role in that absurd piece of summitry, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, where he and his perennial rival, enemy, and occasional ally Henry VIII preened themselves and showed off at enormous expense, with no useful outcome. Futile extravagance was a feature of Francis’s life and reign, but at least “Le Roi Chevalier”, though often foolish, wasn’t a callous brute like Henry Tudor. No wives were beheaded, and indeed, though Francis had a succession of mistresses, he appears to have been kind to his misshapen, though intelligent, wife.
Frieda claims that he was the maker of modern France. It’s natural for biographers to exaggerate their subject’s importance, and publishers respond, rarely being interested in books about nonentities. It is, however, a claim that scarcely stands up.
Francis was possessed of a more glittering personality than his two, rather dim, immediate predecessors, and it’s reasonable to applaud him as a Renaissance Prince interested in fostering the arts, even briefly employing Leonardo da Vinci and Benvenuto Cellini, and building or extending some of the gorgeous chateaux of the Loire. But he didn’t in any sense re-order the state – it’s difficult to believe that the 32 years of his reign left any enduring mark. Probably no monarch can really be said to have been the maker of modern France, but if anyone has a claim to the title it is surely Napoleon, the heir to the Revolution and creator of France’s legal code and education system.
Francis was for most of his reign engaged in war against his rivals, the Emperor Charles V (who also ruled Spain) and Henry of England. Just as Henry inherited the by-now ludicrous English claim to the French throne, so Francis inherited the ambition to establish France as a power in Italy. He met with success at first, his victory at Marignano (1515) securing the Duchy of Milan, and encouraging hopes of conquering Naples too. But all his triumphs were short-lasting. Alliances were fickle, victories melted away.
Francis, like Henry, went to war for what to the modern reader can only seem frivolous reasons, among them the pursuit of glory. His life and reign now look like an exercise in futility, for there was no good reason why France should not have remained at peace, rather than spending gold and blood to no avail. In his defence one should perhaps say that he was acting only as kings were expected to act.
The French monarch held the title “Most Christian King”. This didn’t prevent Francis from making war on the papacy, though he never did so as violently as Charles, the Holy Roman Emperor, whose troops sacked Rome in 1527, forcing the pope to take refuge in the Castel San Angelo. But the Most Christian King also made an alliance with the Ottoman Emperor, Suleiman the Magnificent, whose armies threatened the eastern frontier of Charles’s empire; and, in 1543, Francis even permitted the Muslim admiral (or pirate) Barbarossa to winter at Toulon. Barbarossa built a mosque and established a slave-market there, somewhat to the king’s embarrassment.
On the other hand, Francis was quick to repress Protestantism when it found adherents in France. “All new books were banned ‘under pain of the gallows’ ” – for their authors or publishers, and “numerous dissenters, from booksellers to drapers, were burned at the stake”. But the persecution of heresy was no more successful than the king’s wars. Protestantism continued to attract a following and the fierce Wars of Religion would divide France for the second half of the 16th century. Francis can’t be blamed for his intolerance – it was generally accepted that the security of a state required uniformity in religion.
Leonie Frieda has done her hero such justice as is possible. She tells his story in great detail and diligently recounts diplomatic manoeuvrings, military campaigns and battles. It is hardly her fault if some of this is tedious to read, and one has the sense that it was both pleasure and relief for her to turn to Francis’s personal and family life, his building works and artistic interests – in the last of these his taste being in general as commendable as his wars were deplorable. I can’t suppose that there has been a better English biography of Francis, or indeed is likely to be one.
If this book is not as continuously interesting as her biography of Francis’s daughter-in law Catherine de Medici, this is partly because Catherine herself was more interesting than Francis. She faced more demanding challenges, chiefly perhaps because the issues which divided France in the second half of the century were of genuine and enduring importance, so the story Frieda had to tell in that earlier book was much more dramatic and gripping than the one she doggedly relates here.
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