The Massacre of St. Bartholomew: Reappraisals and Documents

276 Pages·1974·14.664 MB·English

by  H. G. Koenigsberger (auth.), Alfred Soman (eds.)

THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW
ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES
INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
75
ALFRED SOMAN
THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW
REAPPRAISALS AND DOCUMENTS
Directors: P. Dibon (Paris) and R. Popkin (Washington Univ., St. Louis)
Editorial Board: J. Aubin (Paris); J. Collins (St. Louis Univ.); P. Costabel (Paris);
A. Crombie (Oxford); I. Dambska (Cracow); H. de la Fontaine-Verwey (Amsterdam);
H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris); T. Gregory (Rome); T. E. Jessop (Hull);
P. O. Kristeller (Columbia Univ.); Elisabeth Labrousse (Paris); A. Lossky (Los Angeles);
S. Lindroth (Upsala); J. Orcibal (Paris); I. S. Revaht (Paris); J. Roger (Paris);
H. Rowen (Rutgers Univ., N.J.); C. B. Schmitt (Warburg Institute, London); G. Sebba
(EmoryUniv., Atlanta); R. Shackleton (Oxford) ;J. Tans (Groningen);
G. Tonelli (Binghamton, N.Y.).
THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW
REAPPRAISALS AND DOCUMENTS
edited by
ALFRED SOMAN
D
MARTINUS NUHOFF I THE HAGUE I 1974
© I974 by Martinus NijhojJ, The Hague, Netherlands
Softcover reprint oft he hardcover 1s f edition 1974
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in a'!)' form
ISBN-13: 978-94-010-1603-2 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-1601-8
DOl: 10.10071978-94-010-1601-8
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editor's Preface VII
Introduction by H. G. KOENIGSBERGER I
PART I: ST. BARTHOLOMEW AND EUROPE
I. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew and the Problem of Spain
by N. M. SUTHERLAND 15
2. Reactions to the St. Bartholomew Massacres in Geneva and
Rome by ROBERT M. KINGDON 25
Comment by PIERRE HURTUBISE 50
3. The Elizabethans and St. Bartholomew by A. G. DICKENS 52
4. ImpGrialism, Particularism and Toleration in the Holy
Roman Empire by LEWIS W. SPITZ 71
PART II: TWO UNPUBLISHED DOCUMENTS
5. Tomasso Sassetti's Account of the St. Bartholomew's Day
Massacre by JOHN TEDESCHI 99
Brieve raccontamento del gran macello fatto nella citta di
Parigi il viggesimo quarto giorno d'agosto d'ordine di Carlo
N ono re di Francia, & della crudel morte di Guasparro
Sciattiglione signore di Coligni & grande ammiraglio di
Francia, MDLXXII I 12
Parer di N sopra il Raccontamento del grande et crudele et
biasimevol macello di Parigi et di tutta la misera Francia 153
6. The Discourse Dedicated to Count Guido San Giorgio
Aldobrandini by ALAIN DUFOUR 155
VI TABLE OF CONTENTS
Two Extracts from the "Discorso":
The Account of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew
Conclusion of the "Discorso"
PART III: MARTYRS, RIOTERS AND POLEMICISTS
7. Martyrs~ Myths, and the Massacre: The Background of St.
Bartholomew by DONALD R. KELLEY 181
8. The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century
France by NATALIE ZEMON DAVIS 203
g. The Wars of Religion in Seventeenth-Century Huguenot
Thought by ELISABETH LABROUSSE 243
Conclusion: St. Bartholomew and Historical Perspective by
THEODORE K. RABB
Notes on the Contributors
Index
PREFACE
On 18 August 1572, Marguerite de Valois, sister of King Charles IX,
was married in Paris to Henri de Navarre, "first prince of the blood"
and a Protestant. This union, which was to cement the provisions of
the Peace of St. Germain (1570) ending the third of the French wars of
religion, was the occasion of an extraordinary influx of French Calvin
ists into the notoriously Catholic capital. Hundreds of Huguenots had
journeyed to Paris to honor their titular leader and participate in the
wedding celebrations. Tensions were already running high when the
court made the fatal decision to take advantage of the situation and
assassinate the admiral of France, Gaspard de Coligny, the recognized
leader of the Huguenot armies which had helped plunge the country
into ten years of intermittent civil war, and who now threatened to
embroil the kingdom in a full-scale foreign war with Spain. On Friday
the twenty-second, as he returned from the Louvre to his lodgings,
Coligny paused in the street - some say to receive a letter, others to
doff his hat to an acquaintance or to adjust his hose - and was fired on
by a hired assassin hidden in a house known to belong to one of the
ultra-Catholic Guise faction. The arquebus shot missed its mark and
succeeded only in wounding the admiral in his hand and arm, where
upon he was carried by his followers to his bed. In the face of the outcry
raised by the Huguenots who protested against this flagrant violation
of solemn guarantees of personal safety, the king, the queen mother
Catherine de Medici and their council disclaimed all responsibility for
the deed, as if they were continuing their long-pursued policy of
steering a middle course, playing Catholics and Protestants off against
each other. Exactly when and how the crown had decided to abandon
this policy, and what precisely happened in the frantic discussions in the
royal council during the next thirty-six hours, are questions to which it
seems we shall never have satisfactory answers. But sometime between
VIII EDITOR'S PREFACE
Friday noon and late Saturday evening, the court determined to rid
itself once and for all of the menace of the admiral and a handful of
obstreperous Huguenot aristocrats of his party. In the small hours of
Sunday morning 24 August - a day dedicated to St. Bartholomew, the
patron saint of the butchers, traditionally depicted holding his own
flayed skin in his hand - armed bands broke into the houses of Coligny
and other leading Protestant noblemen and murdered them. Before
these assassinations had ended, the fanatically Catholic populace of
Paris began to run riot. To what extent was this planned? Again, we
shall probably never know for certain. The spark may have been
struck by the municipal militia hastily assembled to give support to the
assassins. In any case, given the dry tinder of religious hatred, the
violence was soon out of control, as mobs sacked the houses of Huguenot
merchants, artisans, lawyers and teachers, killing all suspected heretics
on sight, mutilating and degrading the corpses, and looting their
property. Estimates vary, but the number of victims of this massacre
may well have been in the neighborhood of two thousand. It was
several days before the royal government could restore order to the
city, and as the news spread to the rest of France, the carnage was
repeated in many of the provincial capitals: Lyons, Rouen, Orleans,
Bourges and, after a lapse of some weeks, in Bordeaux and elsewhere.
This sequence of events - the abortive first attempt on Coligny's
life, his assassination together with the murder of his principal ad
herents, and the mob violence (the "massacre" properly speaking) -
have come collectively to be known as the Massacre of St. Bartholo
mew, a phrase which even to this day is capable of producing a thrill of
horror and compassion among historians and the general public alike.
The degree to which the Massacre has remained one of the most memo
rable events of European history is attested not only by its tenacious
hold on the popular imagination but also by the steady accumulation
of scholarly activity devoted to the circumstances of the Massacre, its
causes and effects, and its persistence as one of the major historical
"myths" throughout the course of subsequent centuries.
There is little to be added to the huge quantity of information which histo
rians have by now succeeded in accumulating on the Massacre of St. Barthol
omew; and the conclusions at which the best of them have arrived (if we
discard the bias and religious prejudice which in past generations tended to
dominate their works) have finally resulted in an agreement nearly unani
mous among specialists on the subject. Whatever it is possible to discover
about the event itself, about its antecedents, the circumstances which sur
rounded it, and its repercussions - these are already well known, and it is
EDITOR'S PREFACE IX
unlikely that additional documents will substantially modify what has now
become the classic interpretation of the facts.1
There is much truth in these words of one distinguished historian,
whose recent edition of the correspondence of the papal nuncio Salviati
makes accessible an important heretofore unpublished body of docu
ments bearing on the question. Still, scholan, widening the horizons of
their research find much to say about St. Bartholomew.
In 1972, on the occasion of its fourth centennial, a five-day collo
quium was held in Paris, sponsored by the Societe de l'histoire du
protestantisme franc;ais; the proceedings have now appeared in a
separate volume published by the Society.2 In the United States, there
were two conferences commemorating the event. On 22 April, the
Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., was host to a
program organized by Dr. Philip Knachel, including a dramatization
of excerpts from Christopher Marlowe's "The Massacre at Paris," and
papers by Robert M. Kingdon, A. G. Dickens and Lewis W. Spitz.
Professor Harry McSorley was chairman and general commentator.
Two weeks later, on 5-6 May, the present editor presided over a series
of meetings at The Newberry Library in Chicago, at which papers
were offered by N. M. Sutherland, Natalie Z. Davis, Alain Dufour,
John A. Tedeschi, Robert M. Kingdon, Donald R. Kelley and Elisa
beth Labrousse. An informal panel of critics - H. G. Koenigsberger,
Ralph E. Giesey, De Lamar Jensen, Theodore K. Rabb, Orest Ranum
and Nancy L. Roelker - led the discussions which followed each of
these contributions with their incisive remarks, some prepared and
some impromptu.3
The volume now in hand brings together the principal papers read
at the Folger and Newberry conferences, plus the texts of the two
Italian documents described respectively by Dufour and Tedeschi.
1 Pierre Hurtubise, O.M.L, "Comment Rome apprit la nouvelle du massacre de la
Saint-Barthelemy: contribution a une histoire de l'information au XVle siecle," Archivum
Historiae Pontijiciae, X (1972), 187-88.
2 Actes du colloque L'amiral de Coligny et son temps (Paris, 24-28octobre I972) (Paris, 1974).
See also in the Revue d'histoire litteraire de la France, LXXIII, the issue of Sept.-Oct. 1973,
devoted to "La Saint-Barthelemy dans la litterature franc;aise," and containing the papers
read at a symposium held at the College de France on 20 April 1972.
3 In addition, Professor Philipp Fehl contributed to the Newberry meetings a stimulating,
illustrated lecture on the Vasari frescoes in the Sala Regia of the Vatican, indicating some of
the moral and technical problems confronted by an artist commissioned by an interested
party to do a history painting of so controversial and bloodcurdling an event as the Massacre
of St. Bartholomew. In his fresco of the Battle of Lepanto, Vasari had depicted the Turks
dying with human dignity, but his Huguenots are portrayed with contempt, almost as
devils. The text of this interesting paper unfortunately could not be included here. It will
appear in a forthcoming issue of the Gazette des Beaux Arts.
x EDITOR'S PREFACE
Kingdon has welded his two separate offerings into a single unified
essay. Since the authors in preparing their papers for publication took
into account many of the points raised at the conferences, it would
have been superfluous to include verbatim transcripts of the discussions
themselves, especially as the substance of a number of other remarks is
touched upon in the Introduction and Conclusion graciously con
tributed by Messrs. Koenigsberger and Rabb, each expanding upon
his comments made in the course of the Newberry conference. In one
case, however, portions of a letter by Pierre Hurtubise (who regretfully
was unable to attend the Newberry meetings) seemed appropriate for
inclusion as a final note to that part of Kingdon's essay which is
concerned with the ramifications of St. Bartholomew in Rome. The
contributions by Dufour, Labrousse and Hurtubise have been trans
lated from the French by the editor.
As the reader will see, by a coincidence in itself reflective of trends
of interest within the historical profession today, almost all the authors
have chosen to concern themselves with reactions to the Massacre in
France and abroad (Kingdon, Dickens, Spitz, Labrousse), with its
implications for the development of political philosophy and politico
religious ideologies (Kingdon, Dufour), and with the problem of
popular mentalities which underlay the actual unfolding of the event
itself (Kelley, Davis). In his introduction to the text of Tomasso Sas
setti's "Brieve Raccontamento," Tedeschi sheds additional light on the
career of that curious literary figure, Giacomo Castelvetro. And the
"Brieve Raccontamento," apart from its interest as one of the major
unpublished contemporary accounts, reveals once again how many of
the legends surrounding the Massacre reflect initial rumor, presup
position and misinformation - for example, the supposed poisoning of
Jeanne d' Albret, the traditionally assumed ascendancy of Coligny over
the impressionable young king Charles IX (convincingly refuted by
Sutherland), and the early premeditation of the assassination of the
admira1.4 To cite but one of the many intriguing questions raised by
these papers, the juxtaposition of the essays by Kelley and Labrousse
provides a study in itself of the use and non-use of historical myths for
4 It is noteworthy that Gregory XIII, now generally remembered as one of the villains of
the piece for his jubilant reception of the news of the Massacre, was described by the
moderate and tolerant Montaigne eight years after the event in these terms: "d'une nature
douce, peu se passionnant des affaires du monde, grand bastisseur; et en cela iliairra a
Rome et ailleurs un singulier honneur a sa memoi re ; ... et a la verite, a une vie et des
moeurs auxquels il n'y a rien de fort extraordinere ny en l'une ny en l'autre part, toutefois
inclinant beau coup plus sur Ie bon" (Journal de voyage en Italie, 29 Dec. 1580 [cd. Pleiade],
p. 1208).