inside and outside, and here those outside the circle ask to be let in. But the townspeople’s attempts to soften the hearts of their opponents does not work; far from being moved to pity, those inside the castle throw things at them. In the history of the French pitiful spectacle, this invention of the pitiless spectator is the key Protestant innovation.
Agrippa d’Aubigné
Both pitiful sight and pitiless spectator are central to the most ferociously partisan of Protestant texts, Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques. First composed starting in 1577, as he lay injured after fighting at Casteljaloux, d’Aubigné’s text was unpublished until 1616, although fragments seem to have circulated in manuscript well before. The text’s dizzying temporality is thus able to conjure up the bitter period of intense battles between Catholics and Protestants as well as its eventual end; in the preface “Aux lecteurs” d’Aubigné even claims that Henri de Navarre had read and reread the text before he took the throne in 1589.46 Its title draws on the genre of the histoire tragique, but d’Aubigné is busy recycling all sorts of references from all sides. He uses Léry’s account of Sancerre in one of his most searing passages on a cannibalistic mother; reaching across the sectarian divide, he also calls up Ronsard, to whose work he was dedicated and whose allegorical maternal France, coupled with Léry’s cannibal mother, reappears in ghoulish format in his text.47
Most strikingly, d’Aubigné’s text revels in a series of ekphrases, turning ghastly sights into words; four of the seven books (III, La Chambre dorée; IV, Feux; V, Fers; VI, Vengeances) are structured as a series of visual tableaux, satirizing an unjust justice and recounting martyrdoms and massacres.48 The presence of these tableaux might seem jarring given Calvinist rage against artifice and ornament.49 Yet in the Tragiques, visuality is redeemed for the Protestant reader. Ekphrasis and enargeia—the process of making visible—were central to the training of classical orators, and they shape what Simon Goldhill calls “a viewing subject.”50 These exercises were central to d’Aubigné’s rhetorical training and to the drive of his poetical projects. In insisting on the shaping of the viewing subject, d’Aubigné’s tableaux and their imagined affective response prompt us to a reflection on perspective.51 In the Tragiques it is pity or its absence that allows us to gauge the presence of suffering; we know the violence of the wars because we are continually provided with spectators’ reactions to it. The sight of the suffering body matters less than the emotional reaction—or mourned absence of such a reaction—to it.
The importance of the imagined spectator might seem to sit uneasily with d’Aubigné’s famous call to his readers to abandon any hope of distancing themselves from the events of the wars: “Vous n’estes spectateurs, vous estes personages” (I:170). [“You are not spectators, you are characters.”]52 The text urges Protestant readers to think of themselves positioned within the battles but at the same time asks them to look on at scenes presented through images, or indeed to look upon those who look on, making them into a hybrid and displaced spectator-actor. David Quint has suggested the Stoic who shows constancy faced with death as the ideal figure of the Tragiques, exemplified by the figure of Coligny, who is described in terms which recall Lucan’s Cato.53 To be an actor in civil wars, one must show constancy. But d’Aubigné’s text complicates this inheritance by inquiring into the proper affective stance of those who are spectators and will never be anything else. Though he urges or praises constancy from actors, he also drafts the urgent necessity of an affective response to the wars.54
It is not enough, of course, just to be roused to emotion in seeing; the Protestant suspicion of illusion means that the connections between looking and feeling and acting must be carefully delineated. The text presents a clear rift between those who see poorly and those who see right. Sometimes the evil thrive, d’Aubigné tells us, but we must not let ourselves be fooled by thinking that such earthly success is all. In Les Feux the narrator drives away worldly illusions:
Si la prosperité dont le meschant jouit
Vous trompe et vous esmeut, vostre sens s’esblouit
Comme l’œil d’un enfant, qui en la tragédie,
Void un coquin pour roy … (IV:819–22)
[If the prosperity the wicked man enjoys
Tricks you and moves you, your senses are dazzled
Like the eye of a child, who in a tragedy
Takes a wretch for a king …]
This theatrical illusion is the model for bad seeing, in which we are fooled and moved. In contrast, d’Aubigné proffers exemplars who see correctly. A son whose weeping father has been condemned to die tells him:
Mon amour est esmeu, l’ame n’est pas esmeuë,
Le sang non pas le sens se trouble à vostre veuê:
Vostre blanche vieillesse a tiré de mes yeux
De l’eau, mais mon esprit est un fourneau de feux. (IV:937–40)
[My love is moved, but my soul is not moved,
My blood but not my judgment is troubled at your sight:
Your gray-haired age has pulled water
From my eyes, but my mind is a fiery furnace.]
This correct vision makes room for emotion—the response of love—but does not trouble rationality; blood can boil and eyes can weep, but the seer is not fooled and remains untroubled. This austere and distanced appraisal is the model Protestant emotional response. Like that model son, even when they suffered losses Protestants were so certain of their position as God’s elect that they could imagine themselves to have won a heavenly victory if not an earthly one.55 Against a background of such radical indifference to earthly outcomes, Protestants rewrite the relation between affect and action. It is more important to feel properly than to have brought about earthly victory. D’Aubigné’s take on pity asks not only what sort of emotion might be the best response to suffering but also what kind of an action emotion might be. Might that affective response alone be enough to guarantee the future of the Protestant Church?
In d’Aubigné’s telling the true distinction of the Wars of Religion is less theological then emotional. From his opening address to readers, d’Aubigné stakes his claim to wrangle with the emotions of his audience. People are bored of books that teach, he writes, and they clamor for something else, for the writer to “esmouvoir” [“move”] (Au Lecteur:13) them, even if seeking to move others might suggest “la passion partizane” [“partisan passion”] (AL:167), a label d’Aubigné takes on with gusto.56 As it is for other writers of the wars, the pitiful spectacle is d’Aubigné’s prime way to move readers. The first book Miseres is described as a “tableau piteux du royaume en general” [“pitiful painting of the whole kingdom”] (AL:134), and it opens the way for long sequences of tableaux which encapsulate the bloody action of the religious wars: allegories, portraits, dreams, and so on. Throughout these scenes, d’Aubigné forms the reader’s properly directed emotion by labeling events with their affective force: readers are urged to look upon “Le massacre piteux de noz petits enfans” [“the pitiful massacre of our little children”] (I:408), or more generally on “l’estat piteux de nos calamitez” [“the pitiful state of our calamities”] (I:1207). This adjectival usage is compulsively partisan, and in its forceful repetitions it underlines the partisan structure of pity itself. In one telling couplet—“Quand esperdu je voy les honteuses pitiez / Et d’un corps divisé les funebres moitiez” [“When lost I see the shameful
