Lhen you are king of France and you have many enemies, it is better to be wary of fashionable objects; the most innocent can turn against you. By showing himself playing with a bilboquet, surrounded by his close guard, Henri III (1551-1589) had inspired mocking pamphlets, but no more than usual. His critics saw in this new toy a ridiculous inverted scepter and mocked the servile followership of the court.
A boon for the League, which will not stop harassing the king during his fifteen years of reign (1574 to 1589) dominated by the wars of religion. While the embers of the Saint-Barthélemy massacre (1572) were still hot, the ultra-Catholic party reproached him for a lack of intransigence in the face of Protestants. This is the yardstick by which bashing should be considered of which Henry III is the target. He is described as a tyrant, surrounded by a squad of young people cultivating a very refined elegance, from the nobility of the provinces, the mignons – the term is not derogatory; the Jesuits are called the “mignons de Dieu”. Except that the influence of this close guard short-circuits the traditional networks of influence, based on belonging to a religion, and the prevailing logics for assigning the most profitable positions.
Rumors and caricatures
His enemies find the king bizarre at best, depraved at worst. This sovereign plays tennis a lot, the ancestor of tennis, but he does not hunt and shows himself little, preferring the company of his lieutenants. On the other hand, he practices dance assiduously, has never given up on female conquests, but does not appear with any appointed mistress. And then he has no children. The scene is set, and it will fuel all the rumours. Those who designate the game of bilboquet as the implicit manifestation of the king’s homosexuality and revisit the term cute in homophobic mode will become insistent much later, from the 19e century.
“By contravening a certain number of codes of masculinity at the time, Henry III broke the stereotypes of the king-knight. This is also what the ultra-Catholics reproach him for, who develop intense propaganda intended to undermine his legitimacy. points out Nicolas Le Roux, author ofA regicide in the name of God (Gallimard, 2006). When in 1588, in Blois, he killed the Duke of Guise, the leader of the League, his opponents were unleashed. The following year, a fanatical monk succeeded in assassinating the king, who only had time to confirm that he was designating Henri de Navarre, the Protestant, to succeed him.
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