void peints
Les spectacles piteux et les corps de sang teints,
Sang, dy je, bien heureux des devots catholiques.
[Leave this painting, you politique foxes,
Leave this painting, in which we see painted
Pitiful spectacles and bodies drenched in blood,
The blessed blood, I say, of our devout Catholics.]
Here in the Ligue account, the pitiful spectacle functions as a set term in which the target audience knows indisputably who is the object of our pity and who is responsible for such a situation.34 Pierre de l’Estoile’s response insists that the pitiful spectacle is dangerous propaganda; it must be skirted around by moderates and controlled lest the ignorant masses be abused. The two meanings of emotion, feeling and unrest, are all too easily brought into dangerous relation with one another.
Catholic usage and wariness of this language tells us much about the shaping of attention and affect in prose and political life of the period. But it was Protestant writers who rendered the topos in the most compelling style, often drawing across the party line on Catholic inspiration. In Protestant writing, the pitiful spectacle becomes a reflection not merely of contemporary France but a meditation on how affective sight lines can build and maintain a political community.
Protestant Pity
In the first decade of the wars, a moderate Protestant invocation of pity was almost indistinguishable from the language employed by Ronsard, forming a category described by the literary historian Jacques Pineaux as “chants d’appel” [“appeal songs”].35 Reformist writers of this period sing for peace. Estienne Valancier’s Complainte de la France of 1568 calls on the French people to stop the war and silence “les chants piteux / Que tu orras ici chanter la France” [“the pitiful songs / That you hear France sing”].36 Likewise the moderate Protestant historian La Popelinière’s Vraye et entiere histoire de ces derniers troubles of 1571, dedicated to the nobility of France, features an end poem praising the compassion of the young king and calling for peace.37 In both these invocations, it is France herself that is the object of pity, and writers speak to and sometimes for an imagined whole of France. After Saint Barthélemy, however, a more embattled form of pity makes itself heard; its language, central to Protestant polemic and to the making of a more martial literature, slices into that imagined whole.
It is not coincidental that the discourse of the pitiful spectacle is so prevalent in Protestant writing, and it is not so merely because Protestant forces suffered the greater blows during the wars. Protestant thinkers were already highly ambivalent about the status of the image. Stuart Clark describes the Protestant reformation as a “shock to early modern Europe’s visual confidence” that made vision itself the “subject of fierce and unprecedented confessional dispute.”38
Where Catholic tradition had insisted that the sight of suffering alone was enough to affect and convert the onlooker, Protestant martyrologies like Jean Crespin’s Livre des martyrs gave rise instead to a great outpouring of words. Protestant histories customarily added appendices of names of the sufferers, recording those unspectacular deaths that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. This genre of history forged Protestantism; it allowed a wider audience to bear witness to Protestant suffering, although they were not present at the scene. For Théodore de Bèze, leader of the French Protestant movement, historical writing allows for an expansion in time and space: “L’histoire est le seul moyen par lequel … l’homme peut cognoistre ce qu’il n’a oncques veu ni ouy, voire sans aucun danger, et trop mieux, bien souvent, que si luy-mesme l’avoit ouy ou veu.” [“History is the only way that man can know what he has never seen or heard, with no danger, and better, very often, than if he himself had heard or seen it.”]39 Reading grants a privileged perspective on events, and that perspective forms the Protestant community.
The texts that make the Protestant reader make clear the position from which they speak. Andrea Frisch has shown how the premodern witness is not an isolated individual but always what she calls “dialogic”; the witness’s account draws attention to its status as something “overtly constructed and made.”40 This means that the witness must establish himself as part of the same group as his readers; he is trusted not because of what he says but because of who he is.41 Thus in Jean de Léry’s Histoire memorable de la ville de Sancerre, the address to the reader carves out the author’s right to speak and to be heard based on his identity as a Protestant: “Pource que je suis, et seray jusques à la fin de ma vie, moyennant la grace de Dieu, du nombre de ceux qui font profession de la Religion, pour laquelle la ville de Sancerre a este ainsi rudiment et estrangement traictee que la presente Histoire le contient.” [“Because I am, and if the grace of God allows will be until the end of my life, one of those who profess the religion for which the town of Sancerre has been so rudely and uncouthly treated, as the present story tells.”]42 Léry hopes that those who have been there will be able to “recongoistre” [“recognize”] what they saw, but his desire is also to expand the audience beyond the immediate witnesses: “Mais il y a une autre sorte de gens auquels je desire aussi de satisfaire, afin que de cette Histoire ils puissant recueillir le fruit.” [“But there is another kind of person I would like to satisfy, so that they may harvest the fruit of this story.”]43 Written after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre at a time of horror for Protestant France, Léry’s preamble presorts writers and readers so that the right sort of history will build the right sort of religious community.
This careful construction work comes with detailed attention to sight lines and spectatorship, an attention to who sees what, and how. Léry’s history posits insiders and outsiders very clearly; he even supplies diagrams of each military position he describes. Sancerre was the site of a siege famous for its famine, which pushed a couple to cannibalism after the death of their daughter; the scene returns in innumerable texts of the period, including Christophe de Bordeaux’s Discours lamentable, described above, and Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques. Léry insists on the particularity of this French crime:
Car combien que j’aye demeuré dix mois entre les Sauvages Ameriquains en la terre du Bresil, leur ayant veu souvent manger de la chair humaine … si n’en ay-je jamais eu telle terreur que j’eu frayeur de voir ce piteux spectacle, lequel n’avoit encores (comme je croy) jamais esté veu en ville assiegee en nostre France. (147)
[For though I lived for ten months with the American savages in the land of Brazil, having often seen them eat human flesh … I have never been as terrified as I was frightened to see this pitiful spectacle, which had not yet (or so I believe) ever been seen in a besieged town in our France.]
This scene is the baseline Protestant pitiful spectacle to which many others make reference; like the histoires tragiques which sometimes draw on it, it pairs pity and terror in Aristotelian style but brings its horror home to “nostre France.” The spectacle is superlative, and signaled as such, but also paradoxically reiterable; pages later, Léry asks of still another scene, “Qui a jamais ouy ni entendu chose plus pitoyable?” [“Who has ever heard or listened to such a pitiful thing?”]44 The aural hendiadys (ouy, entendu) intensifies the urgency with which we are asked to listen. In its piling up of examples and its insistent hendiadys in describing each case, the pitiful spectacle is compassion as copia, a profusion that asks us to look back to painful memories even as we attempt to build France’s future.
Another scene from Léry’s account of the siege of Sancerre makes the pitiful spectacle into a sorting mechanism that sifts the right sort of spectator or reader from the wrong. He tells the story of Protestant townspeople up against Catholic forces, all of whom were barricaded into the castle. The townspeople go to the castle and parade old people, women,
