André Duchesne’s Genealogical Histories as an Element of French Protonational

Genealogical histories of French noble families constitute a large part of the works by “the father of the French history” André Duchesne, an outstanding erudite who held the positions of royal geographer and royal historiographer at the court of Louis XIII. Some of these works remain manuscript; but even the published body of these texts permit to draw certain conclusions. The analysis shows that they were conceived as a series united not only with a common subject and common methods, but with a common conception; they followed the same logic and had the same goals. Duchesne’s position determined his efforts to increase the strength of the royal power and to glorify the French monarchy. The present paper seeks to find what motives urged a royal historiographer to write a series of genealogies of French nobility. Duchesne’s works are put in the context of social, socio-cultural and socio-political processes that took place in France in the first half of the seventeenth century, such as the construction of the borders of the nobility, the attempts of the central power to put under control its structure and membership, which corresponded with the strengthening of the image and the authority of the royal power. The article argues that the reflections on the French noble estate in the early modern period also related to the identity-making processes in which the nobility was considered as a skeleton of the French society, bound both to the land and to personal relations, and topped with the figure of the monarch.