Feb/Mar/Apr Shared Read: Young Henry of Navarre

February/March/April: Young Henry of Navarre by Heinrich Mann
Young Henry of Navarre traces the life of Henry IV from the King's idyllic childhood in the mountain villages of the Pyrenees to his ascendance to the throne of France. Heinrich Mann's most acclaimed work is a spectacular epic that recounts the wars, political machinations, rival religious sects, and backstage plots that marked the birth of the French Republic.

August/September/October: Henry, King of France by Heinrich Mann

Calling this a shared read as only a couple of us put our hands up for it

MANN, Heinrich. Born March 27, 1871, in Lübeck, Germany; died March 12, 1950, in Santa Monica, California. Considered by some critics to be the only German writer of his generation to fully develop his democratic thinking, he was a prolific author of novels, novellas, plays, satires, and political essays highly critical of bourgeois values. He was also an antifascist moralist who sharply attacked authoritarian arrogance and the subservience of subject classes. He frequently clashed with his younger brother, Thomas Mann, over values and Weltanschauungen world views.

Mann published numerous essays, among them “Diktatur de Vernunft” (1923, Dictatorship of Reason), and many satirical novels, including Professor Unrat (1903, Small Town Tyrant)—filmed as Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). He was elected president of the Writing Section of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1930. During a time of heightened nationalism that swept over Europe, Mann published his essay “Bekenntnis zum Übernationalen” (1932, Confession for the Supernational), and a book-length study, Der Hass: Deutsche Zeitgeschichte (1933, The Hate: German Contemporary History).

After he, Albert Einstein, and the artist Käthe Kollwitz publicly urged the unification of the Social Democratic and Communist parties as a means of slowing the Nazi tide, Mann was forced to resign from the Academy. He fled to France (Paris and Nice) in 1933 and worked against fascism there, with Ernst Bloch, André Gide, and others.

His exile publications in France include novels and essays. Sensitive to censorship throughout his life, Mann used historical figures and epochs to exemplify modern democratic, rational principles based on “humanistic socialism,” especially in his masterpiece, the two-volume novel Henri Quatre, the King of France (Young Henry of Navarre, 1935, and Henry, King of France, 1938). King Henry, for Mann, becomes a Renaissance Bolshevik, the forefather of modern revolutionary socialism. At pivotal moments in the German novel, Mann inserted “moralités,” or conclusions in classical French, attempting to unite intellectually his native Germany with France, the land of his exile....
Threatened by the invading German army, Mann fled France in 1940 and settled in the United States, where he initially worked as a filmscript writer in Hollywood (1940-41). His penchant for abrupt changes from neutral descriptions to grotesque exaggerations created an epic alienation effect enhanced by his new experiences of the American movie world.

Mann’s autobiography Ein Zeitalter wird besichtigt (My View of an Epoch) appeared in 1946. Four years after the end of World War II, he wrote, “I anticipated what was to become of Germany. Afterwards I was accused of it as if I had been responsible” (Letter to K. Lemke, May 27, 1949). Eleven years after his burial in Santa Monica, California, his remains were flown to East Berlin. His manuscripts and papers are at the Literary Archive of the German Academy of Arts in Berlin and in the Schiller-Nationalmuseum in Marbach, Germany.
https://www.dramaaroundtheglobe.com/heinrich-mann.html

I'm 20 days late setting up this thread and have one novel to finish before I can pick up the book. Hoping that other readers arrive to this thread.

Thanks for setting this up, Kerry. I want to finish a book of short stories first, but then I am ready to start.

Great, I better get reading too.

I've put a link to the thread on the main group page :)

Thank you

I have finished the first chapter about Henri's childhood, and find it necessary to keep some genealogical tables at hand to keep track of who is related to whom. Vague memories about the French royal family from La reine Margot also help.

I have reached the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's and need a short break from the court intrigues.

I am past the halfway point now, in fact only three more chapters to go. Henri has fled from Paris and is now back in his own territories. I am still surprised by how little actual politics are going on, most of it is Henri reflecting on his situation.

I am almost finished with Die Jugend des Königs Henri IV and I was wondering what sources he used. So I went surfing the net, and lo and behold, I found a PhD thesis discussing exactly this: Heinrich Manns Roman: "Die Jugend und die Vollendung des Königs Henri Quatre" im Verhältnis zu seinen Quellen und Vorlagen by Hadwig Kirchner-Klemperer.
Written in 1957 and digitized, so I could download and read it. The wonders of modern technology! I felt pity for poor Hadwig, who had to bang this out on a typewriter, with those flimsy carbon sheets to make copies, and then go over the whole thing with a fountain pen to correct the typos. She discusses Michelet und the memoirs of Sully in detail, some others less so, and can give no information which other books he may have had to hand, because at the time she wrote this Mann's daughter was still waiting for some of them to be returned to her.
While looking for non-fiction books about Henri IV I came across a recommendation for Madeleine Saint-René Taillandier's book, which, intriguingly enough, was published a few years before Mann's novel. Did he have the money to buy this, the time to read it while on the run from the Nazis?
And if the name of Kirchner-Klemperer sounds familiar: yes, she was the second wife of Victor Klemperer and instrumental in deciphering and publishing his diaries. It's a small world.

That's really interesting.
I'm presently on a reading go-slow and haven't managed to read much of anything this month. I'm hoping to get back into this later next week.

It is a book I need to put down occasionally, the times are so brutal and the power play at the court so ruthless. So I wouldn't really recommend it to get out of a reading slump. But I'm glad I finally picked it up.

And I have finished it! The story ends with the battle of Arques, Henri III is dead, most of the Guise are dead, and Henri de Navarre is left as the only serious contender.
The thing I found most striking is that Mann sticks closely to Henri, everything is seen from his perspective.

I finally finished the book a couple of days ago. It really helps me understand both the clash of religion and also the ambitions of Philip of Spain.

Henry, King of France

I'll be diving in later this month.

Hi Kerry, thanks for the reminder. I have also pencilled this in for the second half of August.

Will start this tomorrow, to get a bit ahead. School starts mid August and will get little reading done for the first 1-2 weeks (pleasure reading, that is!).

Great to see you here, Tess!

LOL, well when I went to my bookshelf, lo and behold the book I have is Young Henry of Navarre.....a day late and a dollar short. Will read it anyway!

>20 Tess_W: I had the King Henry one for a few years before realising it was the second of two books. Hoping that I can get going on this as I've had a complete slowdown in my reading this year.

I have finally started with the second book which picks up exactly where we left off in the first part, after the battle of Arques. Henri is still campaigning across France, and Gabrielle d'Estrées has appeared.

I'm close to the halfway point. It's more difficult than the first part, because he often refers to people only by a sobriquet (for instance the cardinal of Austria) and seems to assume the reader is familiar with these people. Political events and developments are often alluded to, not named outright, and these are hard to identify. An edition with footnotes would be helpful. So far, the relationships with Gabrielle and Rosny (not yet duc de Sully) are the main focus.

I haven't started yet but will be picking it up and reading in a couple of days.

I took a break and read Henri IV – un roi français in the hope of picking up more solid information, such as names and dates. Mann is very vague with those and I was getting lost. Max Gallo's book is very short, but it provides some anchoring.

I also read Le beau XVI siècle about the queens of the Valois kings and found it very helpful in placing France among the dimly remembered events of those times. I think I'll tackle the next book in the series which focuses on Catherine de Medicis and will probably present a very different view of Henri, before I continue with Mann.

I've only managed a few pages so far. My problem is that all my reading has hit a go slow this year.
Anyway sounds like you've immersed yourself in the time period. I did start reading Green Darkness which was set in England in a similar time period and involved a Catholic/Protestant plotline but have discarded it as the story was not for me.

>27 avatiakh: Sounds like a less than ideal situation for embarking on Mann's book, as it is very, very slow-going. I found those biographies agreeably short and to the point, in that respect they are helpful for familiarising myself with the period.

And I have finished Henri IV : Machtmensch und Libertin. This was rather short at 218 pages and basically compiled from recent (at the time of writing, which was 2010) French biographies. There are no new stunning revelations, and I'm still on the fence whether to keep this or not. There are some ridiculous spelling mistakes and a rather convoluted style, at times it was difficult to work out to whom he refers. He chose to start his book with Henri's assassination, just like Max Gallo, which I found a curious coincidence.

I have finished Die Vollendung des Königs Henri IV. Still digesting it.