Robert Merle’s The Brethren, originally published in French in 1977 and newly brought out in English by Pushkin Press, is a gentle epic of early modern France. Set in sixteenth-century Périgord, its “concentric” focus scales out to encompass the nation as a whole, and the world beyond, in a time of serious religious and political controversy.
The eponymous brethren—Jean de Siorac and Jean de Sauveterre—are two former warriors, fast friends who adopt each other legally as brothers and establish an estate at the Castle of Mespech. Significantly, they are men of Calvinist convictions who declare themselves as Huguenots during a time of bitter religious strife and civil war. The story is told by Siorac’s younger son, Pierre, then an impetuous and brave boy, who, now much older, is compiling his narrative with the help of the logbook that the brethren left behind. Though Merle considered the book to form “a complete whole,” he clearly had the rest of his series in mind (it would ultimately be thirteen volumes), since the book ends with the hero’s departure from the family home and because some of the most dramatic episodes in early modern French history—the accession of Henry IV, the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the rule of Louis XIII, and the ascendancy of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin—are just over the chronological horizon.
As with most historical fiction, part of this book’s appeal is that it makes history “come alive”—it turns the lists of names of
