On April 24, 1617, Concino Concini presented himself at the entrance to the Louvre. Nicolas de L’Hospital, Baron de Vitry and captain of the guards, stepped forward to meet him in the King’s name. The summons to arrest the royal favorite swiftly degenerated into murder: Concini was shot down by Vitry’s men. Champagnac’s account relates that the Marshal refused to surrender his sword and was slain upon the drawbridge; historians who have since examined the event differentiate the precise point of entry to the palace and observe that contemporary chronicles do not all agree upon the degree of resistance offered by Concini. The essential fact remains unaltered: the young King Louis XIII had resolved to put an end to the ascendancy of the man who governed alongside the Queen Mother, and the captain of the guards executed that command by force of arms.
The slain courtier was a Florentine. He had arrived in France in the retinue of Marie de’ Medici in 1600, when she came to wed Henry IV. His wife, Léonora Galigaï, accompanied her. Champagnac describes her as the daughter of the Queen’s wet-nurse; other historical inquiries identify her as her foster-sister and closest favorite. Concini had begun his career at Marie’s side as an ordinary gentleman. As his protectress’s fortunes rose, he amassed offices and honors: First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Marquis d’Ancre, Governor of Normandy, and ultimately Marshal of France. This last dignity was conferred upon him in 1613, despite his lacking any military service that might have entitled him to bear it. Within the kingdom, such elevated titles did nothing to quell aristocratic envy.
Upon the assassination of Henry IV in 1610, Marie de’ Medici assumed the Regency. Louis XIII, still a child, remained excluded from the management of affairs, while his mother and her chosen ministers governed the realm. Concini stood at the very center of a court wherein royal authority, princely factions, and rivalries over access to the sovereign were inextricably bound together. He championed the Regent’s policy and thereby drew upon himself the bitter enmity of several grandees of the realm. The libels attacking his ascendancy accused him of avarice, overweening pride, treason, and tyranny; following his death, these recriminations redoubled in fury. The image of the foreign favorite who had made himself master of the kingdom is thus also the deliberate creation of an orchestrated political campaign.
Champagnac asserts that Concini had raised seven thousand men to maintain royal authority—or, in his own phrasing, that authority which he wielded in the King’s name. The veracity of this figure must remain the sole responsibility of the nineteenth-century author: the tracts published against the Florentine couple were so numerous and so vitriolic that modern scholarship treats them as instruments of propaganda, rather than an unclouded reflection of the accused parties’ actual conduct. These diatribes fastened upon his Italian origins, his immense wealth, and his intimacy with the Queen, painting the couple as an existential peril to the state. The young monarch, for his part, chafed under the negligible role left to him. Charles d’Albert de Luynes, his confidant, urged him to seize the reins of power. Concini’s overthrow was thus a political assassination, but it was equally the decisive act by which Louis XIII asserted his personal rule.
Death did not put an end to the indignities. Concini’s corpse was initially buried without ceremony. The following day, an enraged mob disinterred it, dragged it through the streets of Paris, mutilated it, and burned it upon the Pont-Neuf. Champagnac records several scenes of extreme savagery; contemporaneous engravings and narratives corroborate that the body was abandoned to the populace and that its desecration was publicly staged as the rightful chastisement of a tyrant. Such accounts served to impart meaning to the spectacle: if the multitude abused the corpse, state propaganda contended, it was proof that they welcomed the change of reign. Yet nothing compels us to accept this choreographed retribution as the spontaneous verdict of an entire capital. The pamphlets dictated the public gaze quite as much as they recorded its fury.
Concini’s fall dragged his wife down with him, though the two proceedings must not be confounded. Léonora was arrested, incarcerated first in the Bastille, and subsequently transferred to the Conciergerie. Her husband was tried posthumously; the Maréchale’s trial was designed to secure her own condemnation. Both legal actions proceeded from the coup of April 24, yet the second was directed against her personal conduct. She was not accused of having fired upon her husband; rather, she was a defenseless widow whom the new regime could isolate, strip of her honors and estates, and bring before the bar of justice in her turn.
The charges cataloged by Champagnac comprised treasonous correspondence addressed to Madrid and Brussels, the crime of sorcery, and interrogations regarding the assassination of Henry IV. This last insinuation did not solidify into a formal indictment in his narrative: the author notes that, following her depositions, no suspicion remained against either Léonora or Marie de’ Medici concerning the late King’s death. The charges of witchcraft, however, were formally sustained at trial. They belonged to an age in which such beliefs carried considerable judicial weight; they were likewise exceedingly useful for legitimizing the coup d’état and justifying the confiscation of the couple’s vast estate. Magda Campanini’s scholarship demonstrates that the printed pamphlets of 1617 consistently yoked Galigaï to Concini, portraying her as his partner in crime and denouncing her as a sorceress. This association was a triumph of polemical manufacture; it in no way establishes the reality of the practices it claimed to unmask.
Champagnac introduces into his narrative the figure of Montalto, an Italian physician, along with certain Milanese exorcists whom Léonora is said to have consulted. He also attributes to the prisoner a famous retort made to her judges when interrogated as to the spells by which she had bewitched the Queen: she is reported to have answered that strong minds naturally exert an empire over weak ones. This utterance has achieved celebrity by virtue of its incisive brilliance; nonetheless, it cannot be received here as a verified transcript of her words. Recent studies of the era’s broadsides demonstrate precisely how contemporary tracts were wont to stage Galigaï’s courtroom speeches in theatrical fashion, counterfeiting her authentic voice. One cannot safely untangle the genuine memory of what was uttered from the rhetorical phrase that the narrative chose to preserve.
The judicial inquiry, as Champagnac relates it, was never detached from partisan interests. He identifies two rapporteurs: Courtin, whom he depicts as entirely subservient to the King’s new favorite, and Deslandes Payen, who reportedly refused to call for the accused woman’s execution. He further claims that several judges absented themselves, that others leaned toward banishment, and that Luynes personally swayed the majority toward the death sentence. These particulars form the author’s moral indictment of the verdict; as his chapter cites no archival court rolls, they must remain attributed strictly to his chronicle, rather than accepted as verified transcripts of judicial proceedings.
On July 8, 1617, sentence was pronounced; Champagnac writes that the decree declared Léonora guilty of divine and human lèse-majesté. Though he dwells at great length upon the accusations of witchcraft, he does not include them among the formal grounds of the final judgment. Magda Campanini’s study similarly notes that sorcery does not appear in the operative terms of the decree, even though that imputation had colored the entire trial. Escorted to the Place de Grève, Galigaï was beheaded, and her body was reduced to ashes upon the pyre. Champagnac’s chronicle underscores the silence of the assembled multitude and the tears that supposedly supplanted their former hatred. Other texts of the period likewise construct this scaffold scene with theatrical gestures and dying words calculated either to move or to condemn. The spectacle was an integral part of the execution, but it belonged no less to the political struggle that had prepared it.
From the drawbridge of the Louvre to the cobbles of the Place de Grève, the same year thus witnessed two deaths of fundamentally different character: a favorite slain outright by the King’s guards, followed by his widow condemned under color of judicial authority. Concini’s murder facilitated the exile of Marie de’ Medici and the personal assumption of power by Louis XIII; the penalty inflicted upon Galigaï lent the mantle of the law to the ruin of their house. Champagnac perceives in this double catastrophe the mark of a servile magistracy and an unbridled lust for power. The sources for his chapter permit us neither to validate each individual charge nor to embrace uncritically his ardent defense of the Maréchale. They reveal, however, how readily a court of law may be employed to transform a political adversary into a public criminal, and how urgently the surviving accounts must be read both for the historical events they convey and for the factional interests they serve.