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review of
Heinrich Mann's Young Henry of Navarre
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 1, 2016
full review: "Moderation, By Any Means Necessary?": https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/415192-moderation-by-any-means-necessary

THIS REVIEW ISN'T LONG ENUF BUT THERE IS A LONGER VERSION AT THE ABOVE URL.

Heinrich Mann became propelled into my top 10 of novelists thanks to my reading his Der Untertan 4 yrs ago. As I wrote in my review of it (in English translation as Little Superman):

"As soon as I started reading this bk, I found the central character insufferable. He embodies everything that I detest: hypocrisy, social climbing, spinelessness, abusiveness, fraudulence, etc.. He is, indeed, a "Servile Chauvinist Underling", as Donson puts it. I was about 1/3rd of the way thru the bk when I watched the movie & learned that this was meant to be satire. I suppose it 'shd've' been obvious to me that it was intended to be satire all along but it seemed entirely too realistic to really be caricature. &, as the back-cover of Man of Straw states: "Heinrich Mann (brother of Thomas) was imprisoned for his radical and outspoken views, and spent a long exile from the country at which he aimed his bitter satire." - & that's no laughing matter.

"Mann was condemned in Nazi Germany for writing Un-German works or some such but I don't think that the hypocrisy & opportunistic cowardice that he so thoroughly portrays is intrinsically German. It may've reached a particular nationalistic fervor in Germany but it was hardly confined to there. In fact, Mann's parody of upper middle class Germany isn't so far off from the lower middle class Baltimore that I grew up in." - http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/442159.Man_of_Straw

Ever since I read Der Untertan I've been wanting to read more by H Mann but I wanted to get his bks used from a store rather than order them online. Come what may, so to speak. NOW, I've finally read the 1st of 2 inter-related novels, Young Henry of Navarre, originally published in 1935, 21 yrs after Der Untertan. Is it an astonishing improvement? Has Mann matured remarkably by this? Maybe yes, maybe no, he's certainly changed his tact(ics).

Young Henry of Navarre is an historical novel set in 16th century France, the politics of it are certainly vivid but applying them to that dangerous time of 1935 might've been a little 'abstract' for readers contemporaneous w/ its release. The novel is about the gradual rise to power of King Henry of Navarre during wars between Catholics & Protestants. Here's some relevant background:

"During the 16th century, a revolution began in Christianity. A German monk named Martin Luther became increasingly unhappy with corruption in the Catholic Church. Luther started a movement among Christians who believed authority should not belong to clergy, but to the laypeople and their study of the Bible. Followers of the Reformation were known as Protestants."

[..]

"The Catholic League was a national group that intended to stamp out the spread of Protestantism in France. The group was led by the Duke of Guise who also had intentions of taking over the French throne. Under Guise's leadership, the League intended to replace King Henry III, the king of France, who was a Protestant.

"War broke out between the Catholic League and the Huguenots in 1562 and continued until 1598. Political unrest between the Huguenots and the powerful Guise family led to the death of many Huguenots, marking the beginning of the Wars of Religion. In 1562, the Huguenots were defeated by Guise in the first battle of the war. Guise was killed in this battle. A treaty was negotiated by Catherine de Medici that allowed Huguenot nobles to worship freely, but peasants could only worship in one town within each district.

"During the wars, Catherine de Medici was the Queen mother and held power during the reign of her sons Francois II, Charles IX and Henry III. The Huguenots were worried Catherine was planning a campaign against them with the Spaniards and attempted to capture King Charles IX. They failed, and though another attempt at peace was made, neither side trusted each other. The Huguenots faced a defeat in 1569, but began to gain ground with some Protestant nobles in France." - http://study.com/academy/lesson/the-french-wars-of-religion-catholics-vs-the-hug...

As if that 36 yr period of conflict between the 2 sects weren't enuf, after tis end only 20 yrs elapsed until the similar "Thirty Years War" (1618 to 1648):

"The spark that set off the Thirty Years War came in 1618, when the Archbishop of Prague ordered a Protestant church destroyed. The Protestants rose up in revolt, but within two years the rebellion was stamped out by the Habsburg general, Count of Tilly. After Bohemia was defeated the Protestant king of Denmark invaded the empire but was defeated by the famous general Albrecht von Wallenstein. In 1630 Sweden entered the war. Gustavus Adolphus, the King of Sweden, (the Lion of the North) whose dream was to make the Baltic a 'Swedish Lake', was the champion of the Protestants. In two battles he defeated and then killed Tilly. Gustavus Adolphus was killed in his decisive victory over Wallenstein at Luetzen (1632), and Wallenstein himself was murdered by a suspicious emperor in 1634.

"After 1635 the war lost its religious character and became purely political. Cardinal Richelieu, who was the real ruler of France, determined to arrest the growth of Habsburg power b"[y] "interfering on the side of the Protestants. The French won a long series of victories, which gave new hope to the Protestants in Germany. But by that time Germany was devastated and its economy in ruins. The war ended in stalemate and diplomats gathered to patch up affairs in the Peace of Westpahlia (1648).

"The Thirty Years War persuaded everybody that neither the Protestants nor the Catholics could be completely victorious and dreams of an empire, united under a Catholic Church had to be abandoned." - http://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/civil_n2/histscript6_n2/thirty1.html

"Thou Shalt Not Kill", remember guys? (Or shd I say "Guise"?) That's 66 yrs out of 86 yrs of war between the Protestants & the Catholics. How fucking stupid can these religious nuts get? Will the 20th & 21st centuries go down as the 100 Yrs War or some such as the Christians & Moslems slaughter each other (& all of the rest of us unfortunates caught in their crossfire) ad nauseum? Let's see how the Catholic Encyclopedia describes it:

"The Thirty Years War (1618-48), though pre-eminently a German war, was also of great importance for the history of the whole of Europe, not only because nearly all the countries of Western Europe took part in it, but also on account of its connection with the other great European wars of the same era and on account of its final results.

"The fundamental cause was the internal decay of the empire from 1555, as evidenced by the weakness of the imperial power, by the gross lack of patriotism manifested by the estates of the empire, and by the paralysis of the imperial authority and its agencies among the Protestant estates of Southwestern Germany, which had been in a state of discontent since 1555. Consequently the whole of Germany was in a continual state of unrest. The decay of the empire encouraged the other nations of Western Europe to infringe upon its territory." - http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14648b.htm

"The fundamental cause was the internal decay of the empire from 1555, as evidenced by the weakness of the imperial power, by the gross lack of patriotism manifested by the estates of the empire, and by the paralysis of the imperial authority": Right, a bigger police state is always the answer (NOT). Why, the fundamental cause cd never be that people covet that imperial power, that religious leaders covet that imperial power & that sd religious leaders don't give a flying shit who they annihilate in pursuit of sd power. But I get ahead of the story. Forget I sd anything.

Young Henry of Navarre: "In the meantime the kingdom had for many years been riven everywhere between Catholics and Protestants." [..] "fire and slaughter ranged over the countryside in the name of the two hostile creeds. The difference of creed was regarded in deep earnest, and it made utter enemies of men whom nothing else divided. Certain words, especially the word "Mass," had so terrible an effect that brother was no longer understood of brother, and became of alien blood. It seemed natural to call in the aid of the Swiss and Germans. Let them be of the right faith, and, according as they went to Mass or not, they were better than a Frenchman who thought otherwise and were given leave to burn and pillage with the rest." (p 6)

I'm reminded of The Devils of Loudon, Aldous Huxley's 1952 novel about the politics of the purported demonic possession in Loudon in . There was a predecessor to Huxley's bk: "The Devils of Loudun by Edmund Goldsmid [1887]" wch is available online ( http://sacred-texts.com/evil/dol/ ) & described there thusly:

"This is an account of the possesion of the nuns of Loudun. In 1634 the Ursuline nuns of Loudon were allegedly possessed by demons. This is one of the largest cases of mass possession in history. Father Urbain Grandier, a local priest, was interrogated under torture, convicted of being responsible for the possessions (as well as sorcery), and subsequently burned at the stake. This is a 19th century translation of the primary account of the episode, originally written in French by Des Niau in 1634."

Apparently, there's not much questioning in that acct of the mechanics of what was called "one of the largest cases of mass possession in history". Possession by what? By a mythical creature dubbed "the devil" or by sexual frustration imposed by religious control freaks?

Following Huxley's novel was John Whiting's 1960 play, The Devils, Krzysztof Penderecki's 1969 opera The Devils of Loudon, & Ken Russell's highly dramatic 1971 movie, The Devils. This latter, in particular, added fuel to my personal fire that humans are squirming to get out of unnatural restrictions, that attempts to exercise mass control thru ideologies, religious & political, result in horrors of eruption when natural forces once again escape the nets of narrow-mindedness in explosions much more destructive than the pleasures suppressed.

Huxley's 1931 novel Brave New World was lumped together for me w/ George Orwell's 1948 1984 as a bk warning of the dangers of totalitarianism, of a dystopic near-future (or present) in wch mass control destroys the individual power of free thinking. But listening to a recording of Huxley reading on the radio from Brave New World impressed upon me that Huxley's take on such matters was as fearful of drugs & promiscuous sex as it was of oppressive government. On the Panarchy site ( http://www.panarchy.org/huxley/devils.html ) The Devils of Loudon's Appendix is presented & prefaced by Panarchy's editor(s) thusly:

"In this short text, Aldous Huxley puts forward the hypothesis that the evils we ascribe to religious intolerance and obscurantism are instead a product of human nature under specific circumstances, namely the existence of a totalitarian manipulative power. That is why, totalitarian political ideologies built on anti-religious bases can easily replicate the worst aspects of monopolistic religion. As a matter of fact, with the introduction of religious tolerance, those intolerant aspects of religious practice have been put almost to rest. As stated by Huxley, elsewhere in the book : “In the course of the last six or seven generations, the power of religious organizations to do evil has, throughout the Western world, considerably declined.” At the same time, “[f]rom about 1700 to the present day all persecutions in the West have been secular and, one might say, humanistic. For us, Radical Evil has ceased to be something metaphysical and has become political or economic.” For this reason we can add that those who still fight religion as the root of every evil are totally missing the target either deliberately or by reason of crass ignorance."

Huxley's claim that "“[f]rom about 1700 to the present day all persecutions in the West have been secular" is astounding if one were to consider that the Inquisition, alone, lasted into the 19th century. However, Huxley is far, FAR from an idiot & he makes his case articulately. His appendix begins:

"Without an understanding of man's deep-seated urge to self-transcendence, of his very natural reluctance to take the hard, ascending way, and his search for some bogus liberation either below or to one side of his personality, we cannot hope to make sense of our own particular period of history or indeed of history in general, of life as it was lived in the past and as it is lived today. For this reason I propose to discuss some of the more common Grace-substitutes, into which and by means of which then and women have tried to escape from the tormenting consciousness of being merely themselves."

[..]

"In modern times beer and the other toxic short cuts to self-transcendence are no longer officially worshipped as gods. Theory has undergone a change, but not practice; for in practice millions upon millions of civilized" [m]"en and women continue to pay their devotions, not to the liberating and transfiguring Spirit, but to alcohol, to hashish, to opium and its derivatives, to the barbiturates, and the other synthetic additions to the age-old catalogue of poisons capable of causing self-transcendence. In every case, of course, what seems a god is actually a devil, what seems a liberation is in fact an enslavement. The self-transcendence is invariably downward into the less than human, the lower than personal."

[..]

"Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights, and the oratory of a demagogue who (as demagogues always are) is simultaneously the exploiter and the victim of herd-intoxication, and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs or criminals of so many."

Huxley's point is well-taken but I think that people's ways & means to "self-transcendence" isn't inevitably as "invariably downward" as Huxley claims. Disinhibition can be a tool for getting outside of other types of destructive habits such as shyness. That sd, Huxley's demagogues who are "simultaneously the exploiter and the victim of herd-intoxication" cd practically be synonymous w/ Mann's Untertan - thusly almost bringing us full-circle in an elliptical kinda way.

Mann's novel differs from the history briefly outlined thru the quotes above. EG: study.com claims that "Under Guise's leadership, the League intended to replace King Henry III, the king of France, who was a Protestant" has Henry III a protestant while Mann has him a Catholic. Mann's take on it is perhaps more complicated, w/ people changing religious affiliation according to the dictates of political expediency. Mann's bk is a novel, it gets into detail that can't possibly be historically verified including this personal scene between the child Henri of Navarre & his protestant mother:

""The King in Paris is friends with the King of Spain," his mother explained. "He lets the Spaniards invade us."

""So will not I!" cried Henri. "Spain is my enemy and always will be! Because I love you," he said impetuously, and kissed Jeanne. Tears trickled from her eyes into her half-bared bosom, which her little son caressed while he tried to comfort her. "Does my father just do what the King of France tells him? I won't," he assured her in a coaxing tone, feeling that this was what she liked to hear." - p 8

Since I loved Der Untertan as an astute observation of human nature I tend to provisionally accept Mann's fictionalized characterizations of these historical figures as being at least based in Mann's attempts to be fair & accurate w/in the novelistic restrictions/expansions. Nonetheless, I didn't read this falling for the delusion that I was reading an actual historical acct. People who read any history wd be well-advised to read w/ a similar grain-of-salt. ( )

One of the most fascinating and historically accurate works of fiction that I have read. My only complaint is that there is not an emotional layer; it's hard to connect with Henry. I cheered him on in battle and would liked to have felt his grief over the death of his mother; but the author did not permit this. ( )

A book not only about exactly traced historical events, but as well about beauty, unashamed sexuality, and friendship. First and foremost a declaration of love to France and French hedonism.

I read this book after watching the 1994 film La Reine Margot, about Henri IV of France and his queen. I remember when the movie got an Oscar for best costumes, which I totally agreed with. I am not one to care very much about costumes, but the costumes and the cinematography were like nothing I had ever seen before. It was great to see decadent monarchical families from earlier centuries when they did not have to deal with the same proprieties and concerns about political correctness that we do today. I guess if you were a king or a queen, you did not have to worry about being in the newspapers the same way you do now. I guess you could always have your priest or your confessor on your case if you did something wrong. That is one part of the movie that I enjoyed the most.
However, I should be concentrating her on the book. As I was mentioning, I was first inspired to seek out Heinrich Mann and any of his books, by association with his brother Thomas, and books by him that I had been reading. After watching the movie described above, I realized that there was a link to the same subject, and I did a special order of this book, and the subsequent volume, from one of my local bookstores, because the library did not have it at that time. Someday, I would like to read this book in the original language. But it is about 15 years ago now, so I do not remember the style too well. I was shocked by the brutality of the killing on the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre, but why should I be, because there are things going on today that are just as brutal. Things never change.