and readers, crafting a future in which the pain of the past will make itself insistently seen and heard and in the process will become central to the history of the wars on both deeply contested sides. In this chapter, I sift through the pitiful spectacle’s appearance on the Catholic side (Pierre Ronsard, the genre of the histoire tragique, Loys de Perussiis, and Pierre de l’Estoile), before turning to the principal Protestant spectacle-shapers, Jean de Léry and Agrippa d’Aubigné, and then considering a rather different iteration of the topos in the Essais of the moderate Michel de Montaigne.3 But before we hear from the partisans, I will try to give a less impassioned account of events.
It is hard to settle on any single account of the Wars of Religion, whose historiography has from the beginning been fragmentary and partial.4 The writing of the wars involved conflicting and competing genres and voices, building to a cacophony of confused noise. The colloquy of Poissy in 1561, at which Catholics agreed to give the “parti protestant” or Huguenots a hearing, sought to establish some shared ground on forms of worship but was unable to do so. In 1562 Catherine de Médici’s regency government introduced the Edict of Saint-Germain, which allowed a very limited freedom of worship for Protestants and encouraged tolerant relations between the two communities. Yet in March of that same year members of the ultra-Catholic Guise family household attacked a Protestant service and a massacre followed, opening what would be almost four decades of violence.
Historians sometimes distinguish between a series of wars—usually eight in total—each brought to a close by an edict or treaty, initially making concessions or granting amnesty to the Protestants and insisting on the forgetting of what had come before.5 On each occasion the suppression of Protestant freedoms started up again soon afterward. In between the promised pauses, violence was widespread across most regions of France and across ranks, with hugely damaging effect on the noncombatants dragged in its wake. A particularly bloody turning point was the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of August 1572, in which Protestant leaders and nobles gathered in Paris for a wedding between the king’s Catholic sister and the Protestant Henri de Navarre were slaughtered by the Guise faction; approximately two thousand died in Paris and three thousand in the provinces.6 The death and mutilation of the Protestant leader Coligny, a key event of the massacre, figured in Protestant martyrologies and Catholic celebrations for decades thereafter; the tortured body of Coligny frequently figured as a spectacle at the center of accounts of the wars from both sides, becoming what a contemporary described as a “spectacle à tout le peuple” [“spectacle for all the people”].7 Huguenot strength was seriously diminished after the massacre, but the rancor and revenge stirred up by the events would prove central to Huguenot organization in the coming decades. In response to the increasing partisan violence on both sides, the years after Saint-Barthélémy also saw the development of a more moderate Catholic grouping who came to be known as the politiques; figures such as Michel de l’Hôpital and Jean Bodin began to look toward a secular state that would not be driven by religious factionalism.8
By the late 1570s the Catholic League, led by the Guise and now supported by Spain, opposed all concessions to Protestants and set themselves against the moderate king Henri III. In the subsequent impassioned battles between the League and the king, Henri was assassinated, as were the Guise; in 1589 the Protestant Henri de Navarre became king, to reign as Henri IV. The new king faced lengthy battles to win back his kingdom and his capital from the League supporters. Paris succumbed only after Henri’s conversion to Catholicism; some provinces took longer, but by 1598 the Peace of Vervins marked an official ending of the wars.9
Henri’s much-lauded Edict of Nantes of 1598 ushered in a series of concessions to the Protestant minority. Nantes was not the most generous of the wartime edicts, but it was the one that held at least for a while, for reasons of expedient timing perhaps as much as firm belief. It allowed for limited freedom of worship and the establishment for a series of years only of a number of Protestant enclaves known as safe cities. From that point on, Catholics and the Protestant minority were bound to share their differences, to live alongside each other and observe their distinctions instead of trying to overwhelm them. Yet in its spatialized model of forbearance, the working toleration established by Nantes also reified religious difference; what the French shared was the observation of a lived rift. Toleration was an uneasy settlement between commonality and absolute difference. Together, everyone lived its differences, although some more brutally than others.
The pitiful spectacle, too, bound Catholics and Protestants apart. It was a key weapon in the affective policing of a divided France, but it was also a shared language that suggested the cultural common ground between the two sides. Of course, Catholics and Protestants parsed the pitiful spectacle differently according to their differing views of the conflict. Yet for both sides pity demarcated their political stand, allowing writers to shape their position in relation to the conflict and to the community they imagined as their audience. In delineating the pitier (both represented in the text and looked for as the reader), the pitied, and the pitiless, this language figured the larger factionalism of the wars and in so doing established fellow-feeling as something central to the political life of the troubled nation.
Reading Spectacle
The political plaintiveness of the pitiful spectacle makes it an obvious ancestor of the scenes relayed to the modern viewer by documentary photography or reportage, popularly considered to be great motivators of humanitarian action. A critical discourse on documentary photography has raised questions about the stakes and legitimacy of photographs of suffering and the way in which they create or forestall community making. After 9/11 Susan Sontag (following Virginia Woolf) asked to whom photographs of suffering are addressed: Who is the “we” targeted by such images?10 Yet the sixteenth-century discourse reminds us that images do not only draw on an assumed community; they also anxiously make and remake their community in a necessarily continual process.
Sontag’s essay also raises concerns about what she terms the instability of compassion that arises on looking at suffering: “It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”11 The sociologist Luc Boltanski’s work on the televised spectacle of suffering takes a more flexible perspective on affective spectatorship, suggesting that the distinction between spectating and acting may not be as straightforward as that envisioned by Sontag. For Boltanski, the spectator “can point towards” action when she is prepared to report what she has seen; the sight of suffering, he suggests, demands that one speak about it.12 Far from the atomized compassionate response critiqued by Hannah Arendt, Boltanski’s model looks very much like early modern, and particularly Protestant, imaginings of the relation between seeing and doing, in which one singular report can rapidly be disseminated with great effect. In the insistently repetitive writings of the sixteenth century, emotion does not wither; it is ceaselessly renewable.
One might even imagine, Boltanski suggests, that emotion is in itself a form of report or commentary, a kind of action.13 Likewise, sixteenth-century texts ask whether to be moved is also a form of action. The texts I read in this chapter worry over the relation between pity and action in different ways, and in so doing they set up a particular problem about readership. Is the reader called to action, or is a call to feeling enough of a response? What is it we do when we read, and can we imagine reading’s compassion as an action in itself?
The question of reading is important: the pitiful spectacle calls us to look and read all at once. Sontag and Boltanski draw on visual models: photos or television. But in the Wars of Religion, spectacle is dependent on the word.14 The spectacles conjured by Protestant and Catholic writers are tightly wrought texts that engage with visual material but also with a long tradition of rhetorical arts and the literary sources that displayed them. Writers drew on ancient models for envisaging the very notion of civil war. The Catholic Joachim Blanchon writes of “cette guerre Civille ou aultrement commune misère: Laquelle je compare et me semble fraternizer, ou encores estre plus cruelle, que celle dont a traicté Appian” [“this civil war or common misery, which I compare to and seems to resemble or be even more cruel than that which Appian described”].15
