Jacques Auguste de Thou

[1] At seventeen, he began his studies in law, first at Orléans, later at Bourges, where he made the acquaintance of François Hotman, and finally at Valence, where he had Jacques Cujas for his teacher and Joseph Justus Scaliger as a friend.

He was at first intended for the Church; he received the minor orders, and on the appointment of his uncle Nicolas to the episcopate succeeded him as a canon of Notre-Dame de Paris.

In the following year he formed part of the brilliant cortege which brought King Henry III back to France, after his flight from his Polish kingdom.

[5] His object was to produce a scientific and unbiased work, and for this reason he wrote it in Latin, giving it as title Historia sui temporis.

[1] The second part, dealing with the first wars of religion (1560–1572) including the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (9 November 1609).

The third part (up to 1574), and the fourth (up to 1584), which appeared in 1607 and 1608, caused a similar outcry, in spite of de Thou's efforts to remain just and impartial.

He carried his scruples to the point of forbidding any translation of his book into French, because in the process there might, to use his own words, "be committed great faults and errors against the intention of the author"; this, however, did not prevent the Jesuit Father Machault from accusing him of being "a false Catholic, and worse than an open heretic" (1614); de Thou, we may say, was a member of the third order of St Francis.

[7] Three years after the death of de Thou, Pierre Dupuy and Nicolas Rigault brought out the first complete edition of the Historia sui temporis, comprising 138 books; they appended to it the Mémoires, also in Latin (1620).

A hundred years later, Samuel Buckley published a critical edition, the material for which had been collected in France itself by Thomas Carte (1733).

[7] As the reasons which had led de Thou to forbid the translation of his monumental history disappeared with his death, there was soon a move to make it more accessible.