Mack P. Holt. The Politics of Wine in Early Modern France: Religion and Popular Culture in Burgundy, 1477-1630. New Studies in European History Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Illustrations, tables. 368 pp. $105.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-47188-6.
Reviewed by Constance de Font-Réaulx (Johns Hopkins University)
Published on H-Environment (December, 2020)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University)
In the Politics of Wine in Early Modern France, the historian Mack P. Holt studies the history of relations between the elites and the popular classes in Burgundy, particularly in Dijon from 1477 to 1630. Holt follows three significant moments of early modern French history—the Reintegration of Burgundy in 1477, the Wars of Religion, and the rise of the absolute monarchy—that threatened and transformed Burgundy’s political order and enabled popular classes’ political participation. In this study, Holt focuses on vignerons, who formed a quarter of the city’s population and were a heterogeneous group composed of “day laborers, sharecroppers, and vineyard owners” (p. 108). Holt successively traces the political tensions, relations, and negotiations about the distribution of power between those who wielded power—municipal magistrates and state officers—and vignerons, who sought to influence the policing and ordering of their community by participating in ritualized settings, elections, or royal entries. For vignerons particularly, the peace brought by the end of the Wars of Religion and the rise of the absolute monarchy also coincided with the progressive exclusion of local politics. Holt’s primary intervention lies in carefully following vignerons’ political involvements in Dijon. By making vignerons key actors of local politics, Holt writes a compelling history of Burgundy’s political culture (although he eschews the term), which refuses to understand cultural changes and processes as consequences of top-down pressures.
The book is divided into three parts, each composed of two or three chapters. The first part sets the stage for later transformations brought by the Wars of Religion and the absolute monarchy. Holt introduces the three pillars of his book: elections and politics, lay religious experiences, and wine in Burgundy. In chapter 1, Holt examines how popular classes came to play a vital role in local politics in the first half of the sixteenth century. For Holt, the integration of Burgundy into the French Kingdom played a significant role in creating political opportunities for the popular classes and vignerons. As tensions and competition remained between the elites of the duchy and the monarchy, municipal elites began to exploit vignerons’ support in local elections. In return, vignerons saw in the competition a chance to participate in Dijon’s political life as makers and breakers of mayoral elections. In the next chapter, Holt analyzes the role of religion as a binder of social orders. Mass attendance and foundations of masses for the dead were vital to the community for elites and poor vignerons alike. Holt also stresses two crucial components of religious traditions on the eve of the Reformation: the Eucharist and the cult of the Virgin Mary. His close study of the decorations of the Saint-Michel Church allows the reader to visualize the unique role played by the wine industry in Dijon.
The next chapter, “Beasts in the Vines,” is of all chapters the chapter that readers of environmental history will find the closest to their interests, even though Holt’s approach is very much guided by the agenda of social and cultural history. After an overview of the history of wine in Burgundy, Holt reconstructs the religious processions organized by Dijon’s political elites and clergy in the vineyards in the hope to protect the vines and grapes from poor climatic conditions and pest outbreaks. In the 1540s, for instance, as écrivains and coupe-bourgeons—two larvae of the common maybug that attacked young vine leaves—threatened the grape harvest for several years in a row, municipal elites asked the bishop of Langres to intervene with his prayers against what they thought was divine wrath. In this chapter, Holt successfully decodes elites’ cultural beliefs and interpretations of environmental catastrophes. However, he gives little agency to vignerons. The reader only learns in passing that some vignerons picked the insects by hand to salvage their vines and grapes. The next section on the “métiers of a vigneron” unfortunately does not provide more details. There, Holt relies heavily on Olivier de Serres’s agricultural treatise, which describes the winemaking industry in general terms. Thus, Holt largely overlooks vignerons’ daily practices, knowledge of the grapes, or desperate attempts and tactics to control and reverse climatic variations and insect invasions. Instead, as social historians did before for other métiers, in an interesting section, Holt reconstructs with tax assessment for the taille how vignerons lived and interacted in the Rue Vannerie.
The second part of Holt’s book focuses on the Wars of Religion. In the three subsequent chapters, Holt examines why Protestantism did not take root in Burgundy, the rise and collapse of the Catholic League, and the progressive exclusion of popular classes from local politics. Chapter 4 has two goals. First, Holt wants to explain why the Reformation did not take root in Burgundy, which he explains by stressing the Eucharist’s cultural importance in this wine country. By calling into question the Eucharist, the Reformation was a threat to vignerons’ livelihood and Dijon’s sociability. Second, Holt seeks to explain why Dijon did not experience a Saint-Bartholomew like other French cities. Holt wants to demonstrate against Nathalie Davis’s pollution model that religious violence was not inevitable in the sixteenth century. He shows that most Protestants, when confronted about their faith, either fled or chose to abjure. There was thus not a need for violence to eradicate Protestants from the streets of Dijon. The following chapter, chapter 5, focuses on the economic disruptions brought by the Wars of Religion and the Catholic League’s formation by the Duke of Mayenne. As the wars lasted, the vigneron population drastically declined and relations between vignerons and elites became strained, as Holt explores in chapter 6. Although Mayenne lost the war, he still used his influence by commanding his lieutenant La Verne to organize Dijon’s surrender to royal troops. Once victorious, Henry IV intervened in local politics to ensure the city’s obedience. On this occasion, like in many other French towns, the king placed men he could trust in power by influencing elections, pushing the bourgeoisie, and buying the popular vote with wine.
In the final part of the book, Holt examines the consolidation and intervention of the absolute monarchy in Dijon’s local politics and administration, which coincided with vignerons’ expulsion from voting in mayoral elections. Holt contends with previous scholarship on urban elites’ resistance to the interference of the absolute monarchy. Instead of insisting on resistance, Holt’s approach examines the process of negotiation. “Sometimes,” Holt writes, “what appeared initially to be royal repression turned out to be a process of collaboration, while at other times what appeared to be noninterference and cooperation in the longer run proved to be more absolutist and interventionist” (p. 245). The book ends with the Lanturelu Riot of 1630 triggered by the crown’s tax reform for Burgundy; the crown’s decision to increase the octroi, an entry tax on all wine; and poor wine harvests, which contributed to vignerons’ declining economic fortunes. Although the elite was divided, the popular classes formed a united front. In late February, the Lanterulu riots broke out. The rioters attacked the houses of high-profile royal officers in the state parliament who they believed supported the king’s reforms, set their contents on fire, and stole goods and money. On March 1, after days of rumors and violence, the Lanturelu riots ended with the king’s lieutenant general’s troops firing at vignerons. For the king, little doubt remained about the Dijon population’s support of the rioters. At this occasion, Louis XIII questioned the city’s magistrates’ loyalty, which resulted in “swift punishments”: the king would from now on nominate the leaders of the civic militia, only six échevins instead of twenty would now sit on the city council, popular vote of male property owners would no longer elect the mayor, and vignerons would be required to move out of the city (p. 312). Although the riots halted the king’s reforms, notably the new taxes on wine, “[vignerons] were also the biggest losers in the aftermath of the Lanterlu riot.... The vignerons were now forbidden from participating at all in the mayoral elections ... [and their] political influence and ability to influence affairs in the city as they had done in the sixteenth century was on the wane,” Holt concludes (p. 316).
In general, Holt offers a well-rounded study of the politics of wine. The book’s purpose is clear and is based on impressive archival collections. However, one cannot help but wonder what the general historiographical contribution of this work is, given that Holt is much more concerned with responding to a historiography written more than thirty years ago than to recent historiographical turns. Now that historians of early modern France have gone beyond the first paradigms of cultural history and turned to the study of political economy and environmental history, Holt could have engaged with more recent scholarship, such as Michael Kwass’s Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (2014) or Kieko Matteson’s Forests in Revolutionary France: Conservation, Community, and Conflict 1669-1848 (2015) to analyze the imbrications of micro- and macro-level politics in the politics of wine. By adopting these recent historiographical turns, Holt would have contributed to renewing our knowledge of absolutism and state formation and laid the foundations for an environmental history of wine.
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Citation:
Constance de Font-Réaulx. Review of Holt, Mack P., The Politics of Wine in Early Modern France: Religion and Popular Culture in Burgundy, 1477-1630.
H-Environment, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55015
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