Draculean Dimensions of Early Modern French Politics and Religion: Vlad III Ţepeş "the Impaler" and Jean de Léry's Political Project in Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1599/1600)

Author: Juall, Scott

Source: Exemplaria, Volume 21, Number 2, Summer 2009 , pp. 201-222(22)

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Abstract:

Jean de Léry's Histoire d'un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil) (five editions 1578–1611) primarily presents an ethnographic account of the Tupinamba cannibals of Brazil whom the traveler encountered during a French colonial mission to the New World. In the fourth edition of the work (1599/1600), however, Léry elicits Vlad III Ţepeş "the Impaler," fifteenth-century prince of Wallachia, for the first time. The late medieval tyrant was a fearless and unrelenting warrior whose armies were widely recognized as some of the most formidable of his times. Léry relates the horrors of Ţepeş's rule as part of a narrative strategy that evokes the contemporary Turkish threat to Western European Christianity and recalls several decades of civil war in France. Ţepeş and contemporary Turkish sultans therefore play a central role in Léry's political project as the horrifying French Wars of Religion came to an end. This edition of Histoire d'un voyage explores the complex dimensions of late-sixteenth-century French politics and religion just one year after Henri IV issued the Edit de Nantes in 1598. During this brief time of peace, Léry exploits the example of Ţepeş as a warning to the monarch not to resort to the kinds of draculean rule executed by late medieval and early modern oppressors in Central Europe, Eurasia, and France itself.

Keywords: WALLACHIA; OTTOMAN EMPIRE; JEAN DE LERY; BRAZIL; FRENCH WARS OF RELIGION; VLAD III TEPES; CANNIBALISM

Document Type: Research Article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/175330709X406410

Publication date: 2009-06-01

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