Culture and the Arts under Charles IX

Behind the king of the civil wars and St. Bartholomew’s Day hides another, lesser-known face: that of a prince with a careful humanist education, whose reign saw one of the most fertile moments of French letters and arts continue, despite the political convulsions.

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📚 A King Formed by Jacques Amyot

Entrusted to the humanist Jacques Amyot, famous for his translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives published in 1559, Charles IX’s education followed the classical programme reserved for princes of his time: Latin, Greek, history, and rhetoric, supplemented by training in the military and political arts under his mother’s watchful eye. This training bore fruit in a personal output unusual for a sovereign: a treatise entitled La Chasse royale, devoted to the techniques and art of hunting — the king’s personal passion —, left unpublished in his lifetime and printed only in 1625, along with a few courtly poems in the vein of the Pléiade, of which only rare manuscript pieces survive.

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🏛️ Fontainebleau, an Ongoing Project

The Valois tradition of architectural patronage continued at Fontainebleau, where Francesco Primaticcio, who had arrived in France under Francis I, continued until his death in 1570 to decorate the royal apartments — painted coffered ceilings, mythological galleries — in the mannerist style that had made the school of Fontainebleau famous. Catherine de’ Medici, true to the Italian taste inherited from her Florentine youth, also had the queen’s apartments redone there, continuing the work begun by her late husband Henry II.

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✒️ The Pléiade and the Beginnings of a New Thought

At court as in the kingdom’s learned circles, the generation of Pléiade poets continued to dominate the literary landscape: Pierre de Ronsard, the official poet, kept producing, while the influence of Joachim du Bellay, who died in 1560, remained vivid. It was also under this reign that Étienne de La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude circulated in manuscript form, an early reflection on tyranny and peoples’ consent to their own enslavement, destined for wide posthumous circulation by his friend Michel de Montaigne — whose first Essays, though published only in 1580, have their roots in these same years of religious troubles that marked the intellectual formation of an entire generation of sceptical humanists.

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🌸 The Legend of the Lily of the Valley

A persistent tradition, no doubt apocryphal, has it that Charles IX gave a sprig of lily of the valley to the ladies of his court in 1561 and wished the gesture to be repeated every year — the supposed origin of the custom of the 1 May lily of the valley. No source contemporary with the reign, however, corroborates this episode, and the legend, in its various versions, seems above all to owe its popularity to a reappropriation well after Charles IX’s own time, which nonetheless durably helped, in spite of him, to shape the image of a gallant prince belied by the rest of his reign.

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🧠 Key Takeaways

• Jacques Amyot, translator of Plutarch, tutor to Charles IX, gave him a classical humanist education
• Charles IX is the presumed author of La Chasse royale, a treatise on hunting published only in 1625
• The Fontainebleau building works continued under Primaticcio until his death in 1570
• Under this reign circulated Étienne de La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude and Montaigne’s first reflections took shape, in the still-active wake of Ronsard’s Pléiade
• The legend of the lily of the valley given by Charles IX in 1561, popularised much later, is corroborated by no contemporary source

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End of the chapter on Charles IX. Next chapter: Henry III, the final crisis of the Valois, and the Wars of the League.