Religion and violence

Violence is not a random occurrence and may be part of military strategy. For war leaders, it galvanises the soldiers and forms part of a policy of terror. The Huguenot war leader François de Beaumont, Baron of Adrets^[1] was responsible for numerous massacres in Provence, which lost him the confidence of Calvin^[2] himself. He boasted of having committed 'four thousand killings in cold blood'. He said he used massacres to galvanise his troops (to vanquish is the only way not to die), for revenge, (the massacres of the Catholics in Orange was a response to the massacre of Protestants in Orange), and to terrorise the population and authorities through his reputation for cruelty. The King's lieutenant Blaise de Monluc^[3] used the same strategy; when he was fighting the Protestants in Guyenne, his troops were accompanied by two executioners whose function was to dispense justice that was both expeditious and spectacular. He even went so far as to execute an old companion at arms from the Italian wars, in spite of the brotherhood of chivalry: 'If he gets away, he will fight us in every village.'

Violence obeys the plan of divine providence. It should be seen in the context of what the historian Alphonse Dupront calls 'the culture of panic'. When the faithful, individually or collectively, are beset by anxiety for their safety, portents and prophetic signs are ways of understanding events, of justifying them, of making sense of them. A comet, an outbreak of plague, torrential rains thus can seem a sign of the divine will and preparation for redemption^[4] . For the faithful in fear of divine punishment, they must redeem themselves in responding to the portents with action. According to the historian Denis Crouzet, the unleashing of violence on St Bartholomew's Day was associated in this way with prophecy by the Parisian populace. The violence was certainly linked with well known political circumstances – the population inflamed to a white heat by hostile sermonising against the Protestants, fear of Huguenot vengeance after the attack on the chief Protestant Gaspard de Coligny^[5] and the assassination of Protestant leaders on the night of 23^rd to 24^th – but its deployment was amplified by a miracle: on the morning of St Bartholomew, the hawthorn bush in the Cemetary of the Innocents, dormant for four years, came into bloom. The people would have seen this flowering as an image of Christ's crown, and divine approval of violence. The hawthorn immediately became a place of pilgrimage. On 15 September, notes Denis Crouzet, there are still some people who kneel and pray to the hawthorn bush.

Finally, the violence of massacre was part of the way that popular culture operated. Here we observe a constant mix of revolt and celebration, of cruelty and spectacle, as the historian Yves-Marie Bercé has commented. The remains of the Huguenots who had been put to death were often paraded in noisy processions, frequently led by children; backed up by shouting, mock funerals and stones being thrown, the social and moral order which had been ridiculed by the victims was restored. The demonstrations of cruelty after they had been put to death exemplifies the 'glory of suffering' described by Michel Foucault. Thus the body of Gaspard de Coligny was decapitated, his hands, feet and genitals cut off, and thrown in the Seine. His body was then taken out of the river 'comme indigne d'estre viande des poissons' (as unworthy of being food for fish), noted the priest Claude Haton, ferocious enemy of the Protestants. It was dragged through the streets, taken to the gibbet at Montfaucon^[6] , where it remained for a fortnight. Through public spectacle, the violence of the massacre purified the community and restored its unity, just as festivities do at other times. Denis Crouzet in his work Les guerriers de Dieu (God's Warriors) emphasises the presence of children in the rituals associated with the killing of Protestants. The children threw stones at the victims, took them down from the gibbets, hauled them through the streets, burned them or threw them in the water. Sometimes they took part in parodies of a trial, debating whether they should throw the corpse by the feet or the neck. According to Denis Crouzet these children involved in massacre where not thereby imitating the violence of adults, nor were they surrendering, amidst public emotion and the suspension of moral norms, to an outbreak of misrule. On the contrary, these executions took place with the consent of the civil authorities, even at their behest. When the Bishop of Nîmes had Protestant ministers executed by children in 1562, he stated that; 'the power of God is best demonstrated by the innocents'. Thus it was not human violence that they executed, but violence attributed to God. At times, also, summary executions were carried out by the pure of spirit because it was they who were considered to be the image of Christ. Denis Crouzet does not see the same presence of children in massacres by protestants. For him, participation of children in Catholic massacres sums up the meaning of Catholic violence and shows that its objective was not just to kill the enemy, but also to carry out the will of God.

The festive and public dimension of Catholic violence, for Huguenots, qualified it as barbarous. The accounts of massacres such as those given in L'Histoire Ecclésiatique are keen to emphasise the willing participation of the general public in massacres.

According to Denis Crouzet, this Catholic violence was responded to by 'Huguenot laughter'; the Protestants, rather than physically attacking the Catholic faithful, ridiculed their beliefs in a manner that was carnavalesque^[7] . Innumerable Huguenot satires spoke of the 'messe' (mass) as the 'fesse' (bum), the agnus dei^[8]' as 'l'anus' (anus). Physical violence also had its symbolic equivalence; waves of Protestant iconoclasm were accompanied by the execution of effigies. As in carnival, the Huguenots brought into this mix of festivity and aggression the overturning of established authority and the institution of a parodic social order. Thus in Mâcon in 1562 the Protestants processed in priestly garments^[9] they had stolen from churches. One carried a relic^[10] , another a cross, and another a stoup^[11] filled with wine with which he sprayed the Catholics. Together with this, Huguenot mockery often made a cleric King of Fools; on the night of the Michelade of Nîmes, the Bishop was made to wear a fool's cap, a ridiculous hat which made him the King of Fools. When Coutances was taken by the Protestant party, the local bishop was made to wear a purple mitre^[12] , dressed in a petticoat and processed sitting backwards on a donkey; this asinade^[13] provoked the tomfoolery with which the young people of the towns and villages noisily reminded cuckolds and bad husbands of the moral norms of society. But this Huguenot laughter was not exempt from base violence. In Aubenas in 1593 two Jesuits were killed in broad daylight during the carnival. Two of the assailants took the victims' clothes, dressed up and added a squirrel tail, a symbol of luxury, then violated the bodies with cries of; 'exaudi, exaudi^[14] '. The group of murderers then parodied a funeral procession, carrying the cap of the Jesuit father in front of the bodies on the end of a pike in mockery of the figure of the cross.

Huguenot mockery was characterised by the carnavalesque because it basically encapsulated the message of the Reformation: the Catholic Church was the reverse of true piety, it was the Kingdom of Satan and it fell to the Huguenots to restore the 'true faith'. More prosaically, having recourse to this aspect of culture allowed them to channel and control their impulses.

The massacre, far from being a senseless and inexplicable act, thus obeyed military and political logic. Beyond sectarian hatred, it was equally based on awaiting the fulfilment of prophecy and on aspects of the community and the carnavalesque of popular culture pushed to extremes. It is still relevant to try to understand why massacres come about. In fact, violence in the form of massacre was not a constant presence in the wars of religion.

St Bartholomew's Day appears to have been the apogee of the incidence of massacre. Between the end of August 1572 and the beginning of October, there were perhaps 10 000 victims, including the crisis in Paris which precipitated the massacre and its echoes in the provinces. On the Protestant side, the massacre immediately created a visceral memory which reinforced Huguenot identity: the Protestants constituted the real 'people of God', while their executioner, Charles IX^[15] , was a contemporary reincarnation of the Pharaoh^[16] . The massacre also accelerated the political maturation of monarchomach^[17] ideas and the notion of the right of resistance.

On the Catholic side, violence underwent a change in register. On the one hand, it turned in on itself towards the faithful Catholics themselves with great penitential processions through the towns supporting the League^[18] , the 'white processions' (especially in 1583-1584). On the other hand, there was a reaction in the form of a more coherent political project to attack the bad king; the regicides of Henri III^[19] in 1589 and then Henri IV^[20] in 1610 were committed in the name of God and were not a punishment of the anonymous mass of Huguenots, but of those 'politiques^[21]' who had put into action a policy of civil tolerance.