When we are king of France and there are many enemies, it is better to be wary of fashionable objects; The most innocent can turn against you. By being playing with a bilboquet, surrounded by his close guard, Henri III (1551-1589) had inspired mocking pamphlets, but no more than usual. His contemptors saw in this new toy a ridiculous inverted scepter and mocked the servile follow -up of the court.
a bargain for the League, who will not stop harassing the king during his fifteen years de reign (1574 to 1589) dominated by the wars of religion. While the embers of the Saint-Barthélemy massacre (1572) are still hot, the ultracatholic party criticizes him for a lack of intransigence in the face of Protestants. It is on this yardstick that Bashing must be considered which Henri III is the target. It is described as a tyrant, surrounded by a squad of young people cultivating a very refined elegance, from the provincial nobility, the cute – the term is not depreciative; The Jesuits are called the “cute of God”. Except that the influence of this short-closed guard short-circuited the traditional influence networks, based on belonging to a religion, and the logics which prevail to attribute the most remunerative charges.
rumors and rumors and rumors and rumors and rumors Caricatures
His enemies find the king at best bizarre, at worst depraved. This sovereign plays a lot at the palm, the ancestor of tennis, but he does not hunt and shows up little, preferring the company of his lieutenants. On the other hand, he assiduously practices dance, has never given up female conquests, but did not appear with any awarded mistress. And then he has no children. The decor is planted, and it will feed all rumors. Those who designate the game of bilboquet as the implicit manifestation of the king’s homosexuality and will revisit in homophobic mode the term cute will become insistent much later, from the nineteenth e
é> century.
“By contravening a certain number of codes of the masculinity of the time, Henri III breaks the stereotypes of the King-Ravalier. This is, too, that the ultracatholics reproach him which develop an intense propaganda intended for Saper His legitimacy “, underlines Nicolas Le Roux, author of a regicide in the name of God (Gallimard, 2006). When in 1588, in Blois, He is killed the Duke of Guise , the leader of the League, his opponents are unleashed. The following year, a fanatized monk will manage to assassinate the king, who will only have time to confirm that he designates Henri de Navarre, the Protestant, to succeed him.
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