How to Survive a Massacre in Europe’s Wars of Religion

so welcome to the the third of this series on atrocity and religion in European memory wars always inevitably produce atrocities but not all of them to the same extent civil wars when your enemy are rebels or criminals or tyrants rather than simply foreign powers are particularly liable to produce atrocities and doubly so religious civil wars in which the enemy are blasphemers or agents of the devil who's going to dare say that there are some punishments which Satan's servants don't deserve in fact by the very act of violating the norms of war you can demonstrate your own superlative zeal for the cause so the age of the religious wars in Europe was naturally an age of atrocities and in this lecture I want to look at two such atrocities in particular how they came about and what their effects have been since at the end I will even attempt an answer to my slightly silly title but first let's be clear what we're talking about we're looking at the period from 15 40s to the 1640s when Europe's fault line between Catholic and Protestant repeatedly erupted into full-scale warfare this was a consequence of the Protestant Reformation but not an immediate one you'll notice that the first of the full-dress religious wars in 1546 seven followed nearly three decades after Martin Luther's initial protest triggered the Reformation three decades in which more conventional and small-scale techniques of religious coercion like inquisitorial trials had tried and failed to keep the burgeoning divisions under control and at the same time which repeated attempts at negotiated settlements and compromises had also failed despite some very heavyweight backing in other words war came as a last resort when everything else had already been tried and bitterness was already entrenched and there are religious wars in Germany in Scotland in England in Switzerland elsewhere but today I want to concentrate on two of them so first is it gonna be working after that could we move on to the first slide the Netherlands by which I mean an area extending across the modern Netherlands Belgium decent slice of what's now northeastern France so this is one of the wealthiest and most densely populated regions of the world but it's an area which due to the accidents of dynastic marriages and inheritance was under the rule of king philip ii of spain the spanish are famously robust in their catholicism but despite formidable repression the new protestant message especially in its militant Calvinist variant was finding increasing support in the netherlands in the spring and summer of 1566 Spanish control temporarily broke down producing the event that the Dutch called the wonder year this is a surge of protestant open-air preaching and destruction of catholic imagery and that lasted as long as it took for a spanish army to get there and put an end to it and that's followed by a wave of executions six years of martial law piracy and terrorist actions undertaken by exiled and underground Protestant groups it takes six years till 1572 for this to really burst into the open when that year the Protestants ragtag Navy is welcomed into the town of den briel in Holland and that triggers a full-scale revolt against Spanish rule and so the Dutch warrant is therefore a nationalist revolt against Spain and a Protestant war against Catholic rulers at the same time during the 1570s it briefly looks as if the nationalist cause might sweep all before it as as Catholic and Protestant alike are united by Spanish atrocities in particular by the horrifying sack of the city of Antwerp in November 15 76 in which at least 7,000 civilians are killed over three days by rioting unpaid Spanish troops but in the end the religious divisions ran too deep most Netherlandish Catholics in the end remained loyal to Spain and after a grueling conflict that isn't finally resolved until 1648 the Netherlands was split between an independent Protestant North more or less the modern Kingdom of the Netherlands and a Spanish rule Catholic South the predecessor state of modern Belgium so that's the Dutch side meanwhile a conflict that may be even more destructive was playing out in France traditionally such a bastion of Catholicism as in the Netherlands it begins with a breakdown of government authority in 1560 that leads to an explosion of interest in and then conversion to Protestants for reasons that nobody adequately can explain French Protestants become known as Hugo knows during this period by early 1560 to as much as 15% of the French population and maybe half of the high nobility is affiliated with the new Calvinist churches which is not bad from a standing start these are heady exciting frightening months it seems plausible it even seems inevitable that France as a whole is going to flip and turn Protestant the government isn't going to stop it King Charles the ninth is only 11 years old and his mother Queen Catherine de Medici is chiefly interested in stitching up a compromise to hold the kingdom hooked together she's openly willing to grant toleration to the Protestants to do this but much of the Catholic population felt differently and they have a leader in the Duke of gi's who's the head of a powerful princely family who are not about to abandon Catholic France to a gaggle of Herot without a fight on Sunday the 1st of March 1560 to the Duke and his entourage stopped to hear Mass at the small town of Vassy in eastern France near tois but mass wasn't all they could hear the distinctive French language psalm singing of a Calvinist congregation in a barn next door disturbed their service the Duke and some of his soldiers demanded that they be silent they refused Jesus men tried to push into the barn stones were thrown and one of them hit the Duke himself that may be that he was looking for an excuse or that he was genuinely provoked but whatever he ordered his men to seal the barn and burn it to the ground the most reliable accounts not that anybody's account of an event like this has ever truly reliable put the death toll at or around 63 worshipers there was a newly coined word for an event like this in France since the late 1540s the old word for a butcher's chopping block a massacre had been used for this sort of mass butchery as well the massacre advaithi is a classic example of how violence can polarize what had been a tangled situation because now Protestants took up arms in self-defense and the Duke of Jesus Catholic hardliners took their chance to try to cleanse the realm of Protestants and the crown tried helplessly to hold the ring periodically over the next 35 years successive Kings imposed compromise peace settlements but they never held for long before violence erupted again at least not until the 1590s when King Henry the fourth finally managed to impose a settlement which granted real although limited civil legal and military rights to the Protestant minority the questions often asked are these really Wars of Religion they were called so at the time of course playing religion or exist in the abstract it's tangled up with politics and economics and nationalism and culture and all the other things that human beings kill each other about these weren't pure Wars of Religion not that they could ever be such a thing but they would have been inconceivable without it and we can see that if we look at the nature of the violence itself as a famous argument made by the brilliant American historian Natalie Zemon Davis established the consider a recurrent feature of the religious wars which have already mentioned iconoclasm the deliberate destruction by Protestants of objects which to Catholics were sacred we might find this unpleasantly familiar the echoes for example of the destruction of the ruins of Palmyra by the jihadists of Islamic state in 2015 are not an accident but this phenomenon is worth pausing on because in the middle of a religious war it's got two meanings neither of which is the one we might instinctively give to it today for the iconoclasts for the Protestants these items are blasphemies they are insults to god they're so profoundly offensive that if you were to leave them be you would implicitly be condoning them and so sharing in the guilt and the fact that they are found in churches makes it all the more urgent to remove them how could God's people possibly be expected to worship in the presence of these travesties these mockeries of what true religion is there are plenty of biblical verses mocking the use of idols insisting that God does not live in temples made by human hands that he must be worshipped in spirit and in truth the Ten Commandments teach as plainly as you like thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image if you want to feel some of the same sense of horror and outrage that they felt imagine how we would feel about displays of swastikas or fascist imagery today when post-war Germany cleansed churches of decorations that look like this this is one a very few photographs that survived of a church that was redecorated during the Nazi era nobody was protesting that that was a part of the rich architectural heritage of the nation and ought to have a preservation order slapped on it such things stink in God's nostrils was the logic and we show our liberation from the horrors they represent by demonstrative ly destroying them one obvious sign of this was that the iconoclasm sometimes had a ritual dimension to it we hear again and again of cases where images aren't only removed but they're burnt it's the punishment for heretics or sometimes statues of the Virgin Mary had their noses cut off and if the meaning of that isn't immediately clear remember that one of the most visible and horrifying symptoms of advanced syphilis his saddle nose deformity that is most of the nose falling off syphilis is endemic across Europe throughout this period it's naturally associated with moral corruption and especially with prostitution so much so that in some jurisdictions illicit prostitutes can be punished by having their noses cut off so to do that to a statue of the Virgin Mary to the ultimate symbol of sexual purity that is to assert very directly that this statue is not the perpetually celibate mother of God it's a mockery of her a painted strumpet made to lure the faithful from their true beloved into spiritual fornication with some rabble painted harlot these images needed not only to be exposed for what they were and the Christian community which had tolerated these things to cleanse itself but got less God's wrath be poured out onto the society which had turned a blind eye to these depravities for too long beside these sorts of concerns our modern worries about historical or artistic value would have seemed like pathetic mewling yes of course these objects were pretty that's what makes them dangerous but if you're a Catholic of course the question is reversed it's not merely the blasphemy that felt in the act of deliberately violating a statue created to honor a saint of course they're well aware it's just a piece of wood there are also relics objects physically connected to a saint even parts of their bodies points at which the kingdom of heaven touches earth through which the faithful continued to receive miracles of healing and now the Protestants are wantonly destroying these things as if they loathe everything that's holy churches that have been beautified at great cost over centuries as generations of faithful Christians had labored so that everything that believers saw or heard could lift up their hearts to heaven now it's all being ripped out and the Catholics are being told that they are the blasphemers and it came to a head over the most contentious object of all the consecrated host that was kept reserved in most Catholic churches because for Catholics according to the famous doctrine of transubstantiation although this object looked like a small white wafer it was in fact the real physical flesh of Jesus Christ's body blood and bone and it should be treated with all the reverence and in the fullest sense all the worship that is due to God himself and for Protestants this is the ultimate blasphemy this little object is literally being worshipped as God it's their duty to the true God who is so perilously mocked by this parody to snatch these wafers from the priests hand and grind them into the mud still iconoclasm does have this much going for it it is violence against objects not against people and it's true that a lot of protestant violence is directed that way but not all because that boundary is one that's easily crossed after all when a Catholic priest is celebrating this foul satanic ritual as they see it or when Catholics are holding a solemn procession with a saint statue a Protestant mob or your provocateur might try to stop them and that's the way that riots start Catholic priests monks and nuns were particularly liable to be attacked during the terrorist phase of the Dutch Revolt that I was mentioning earlier in the late 60s a group in flanders known as the would beggars staged a series of outrages in which priests were murdered several of the bodies were mutilated even either before or after they were killed most commonly by castrating knives and all too obvious comment on the way that Catholic priests compulsory celibacy was both unnatural and a cloak for their voracious lusts it's like the mutilation of the statues of the Virgin it's a statement that supposed holiness is actually a cloak for corruption and the statement is the same whether it's written on a wood or on human flesh priests are also murdered during the French religious wars this incident in which a priest was tied to the crucifix in his own church and then shot is a particularly powerful symbol of the way that violence that begins by cleansing the temple of idolatrous objects can easily spill over into cleansing it of idolatrous people so powerful the symbol in fact that we've got to wonder whether this really did happen or at least whether it happened quite the way this propagandistic pamphlet portrayed it I'm not so much questioning the account as saying that this is such a picture-perfect atrocity but if it weren't true Catholic propagandists would have had to invent it in any case the larger point stands Protestant violence began with destroying sacred objects and ended with killing sacred people and anyone who defended Catholic violence aimed in much the same way to cleanse Christian society from pollution and impurity but with one key difference the impure elements were not objects but people the persons of the heretics themselves from the start Catholic violence tended to be directed at religious cleansing by terrorizing driving out terminating the heretical infestation this is a painting of the Catholic League in Paris marching through in hunt of her effort for heretics and you can see here the fryer firing almost at random into the crowd the gangrenous limb by this view needs to be cut out of Christendom to stop the rot from spreading urgent surgical necessity means that normal niceties like due process or the presumption of innocence are luxuries that can't be afforded sometimes there was a rough process of sort there's a repeated seen in several French cities on the eve of the civil wars in which a group of Catholic vigilantes would set up an impromptu Saints shrine in the street and then challenge passers-by to cross themselves or otherwise show appropriate devotion if you refused you would likely be murdered on the spot as a Protestant and it's often overlaid with an apocalyptic urgency after all the collapse of Christian society in st. earnest and warfare looked very like a sign of the end of the age this is the beginning of Armageddon it's the final test in which Christ is going to spit out the lukewarm moderates from his mouth and demand true allegiance for Catholics to purge the realm of heretics in a moment like that was both an urgent necessity and a glorious privilege it's a chance to be a warrior for God and in that sense the actual warfare clashes between armies is almost peripheral it's events like the burning of the barn advaithi that shows what it's really aimed at in the next century one of the shrewdest observers of the English Civil War commented that the war was begun in our streets before the king or Parliament had any armies and that comment could stand for the era of the religious wars as a whole the real war has happened between two mobilized civilian populations each one desperately trying to cleanse their community of fatally dangerous pollution if Catholic apocalypticism tended to take off any constraints from their violence the Protestants are also apocalyptic but it plays out in a slightly different way and the Protestants are theologically inclined to expect and indeed to revel in persecution and victimhood Martin Luther had primed them to expect to follow in Christ's footsteps and to suffer the way he suffered they've read in the New Testament that God disciplines those whom he loves but it's a grace a privilege to suffer injustice for the sake of the gospel so maybe they didn't exactly seek suffering out but when it came they're not surprised by it and they're also not deterred by it you can arrest them you can murder them you can Massacre them and you will only stiffen their resolve and prove them right they will take up and retell the story of their sufferings and they will turn it against there are in fact a remarkably difficult community to intimidate violence just doesn't seem to work against them there would be several ways for their enemies to respond to that frustrating fact but the obvious one of course was to redouble their efforts if you can't scare them you can at least kill them all right enough generalities I want to look at two particular events during the religious wars which show the way that particular atrocities could happen in this system and how they could break it one Dutch one French from October 15 73 to October 15 74 the rebel Dutch city of Leiden was besieged by the Spanish there's a brief break in april/may 74 when some resupply is possible the siege itself isn't particularly violent the Spanish can't assault the city because the ground is too wet to dig trenches but it is tight apart from that brief interlude in the spring around 6,000 of the city's 15,000 people died during the siege mostly during the second phase of it from May until the cities receive relieved on the 3rd of October the relief of Leiden is a decisive battle during the war for Dutch independence if the city had fallen to the Spanish then South Holland would have lain at Spain's feet whereas the Dutch victory helped to provoke a wave of desertions by Spanish soldiers and effectively marks the eviction of the Spanish from the province of Holland this is partly because the victory is a genuinely impressive military achievement in a very Dutch way it happens by cutting dikes so as to deliberately flood large parts of the countryside forcing the Spanish to retreat further and enabling a fleet of rebel barges to reach the city and deliver 8,000 soldiers and some fresh supplies even so the relieving forces fought their way through to the city painfully slowly as deaths mounted there were riots against a city government that refused to surrender bitter divisions while the property of Catholic citizens was seized and redistributed but although food was tight the city wasn't on the edge of starvation the deaths were mostly due to disease or they called it plague what it actually was is anyone's guess food though wasn't about to run out there was a ration of horse meat still being distributed to every household until just before the end of the siege but this isn't quite the way the events remembered and remembered it was here I should say I'm following the terrific Dutch historian udit Pollan it became one of the great myths of the Dutch Revolt the story of how the city had hung on in the face of starvation until finally the relieving force arrived and had distributed herring and bread to the people you can see the figure on the left there holding up the loaf of the fish it's a plain echo of Christ's feeding of the 5000 in reality they've also given out cheese but that doesn't fit the story so need the plague also tends to be written out of the account that because plague looks uncomfortably like divine judgment rather than Spanish cruelty and instead the stories that are told focused on the moment of deliverance which is depicted again and again they emphasized the courage and sufferings of the people and their unity in the face of mounting hunger the city's mayor Peter van Devere becomes one of the heroes supposedly he faced down the faint hearts who wanted to surrender by telling them that they have to kill him first and offering to cut off his own arm in order to feed the hungry rather than to give in unsurprisingly these stories are much encouraged by his own family and descendants and others grabbed their share of the glory as well the city had been kept in touch with the rebel forces during the siege by carrier pigeons and the owners of the pigeons became heroes they were grants at the family who owned them were granted a new coat of arms and the surname van duvan boda of the carrier pigeons the pigeons themselves were when they died were stuffed and displayed in the Town Hall we can't see those anymore but you can still see the van der van Berta monument in Leiden most aristocratic monuments were destroyed in the wake of the French Revolution but not this one as you can see it was renovated in 1818 and as the siege faded into memory as the town's population rapidly grew so very few of its residents had even a familial connection with the siege the legends grew ever more extreme a history of the seed written in 1642 described her bones chewed first by the dogs were sucked dry by boys when a piece of meat fell on the floor at the place where they handed out the meat Babel lapped at it and wolfed it down raw the blood was scooped out of the gutters and sloped down now narratives of starvation in cities under siege are a well-worn genre going back to ancient times but these stories didn't quite take the normal tack in which there are tales of cannibalism and social breakdown instead these tales emphasize the citizens stoic self-sacrifice with nursing mothers who are unable to produce milk feeding their starving infants with their own blood the tales also emphasized social solidarity the rich and the poor alike Catholics and Protestants together sharing what little they had relics of the siege are treasured in particular cooking vessels that had been used during it and brought out again and used for the feasts which are held for the annual celebration of the relief of the third of October widens University took up the theme sermons were preached on it annually plays a stake and in the process the divisions which had racked the city during the siege quite hair brushed out of the account legend firmly insisted that everyone had suffered together cat of the Catholic Protestant rich poor a divided nation could join in commemorating their collective suffering at the hands of the Spanish this newly staged photographic image of the siege was commissioned by the City Museum in 2011 so I think we have to recognize that this still popular myth was a largely benevolent way of processing the traumatic memory of the siege by concentrating on an injustice that the whole city suffered it could knit together a religiously divided society with the soothing power of victimhood and until modern historians got hold of the legend without carping insistence on welcome values like facts everybody was happy of course the legend did also require demonizing the Spanish as a national enemy but this is what they mean when they say that history is written by the victors my second event is a darker story and this one comes from the French Wars by 1570 there had been three bouts of open warfare each one brought to an end when the crown tries to impose a compromise settlement the 1570 compromise look just as fragile as its predecessors but the young King Charles the ninth and his mother Catherine de Medici still very much his ruling alongside him had a plan in two parts first of all a marriage alliance they're going to marry the most high born of the calf a Calvinist no woman Henry of Navarre who is in fact later going to become King and convert to Catholicism in order to secure his throne but the moment he's the the the leader of the Calvinists in name at least they're going to marry him to the Kings own sister Margaret and they're gonna use this united front to take France to war against the old enemy Spain because they hope that that might unite the warring religious parties just as it was gonna happen in the Netherlands a few years later it's not a foolish plan they're not the only politicians hoping to find a way to break the religious impasse Queen Elizabeth the first in England is doing trying to do very much the same thing so in August 1570 to the great and good of both parties gathered in Paris for the wedding everybody knows that the city itself is overwhelmingly and violently Catholic it has an embattled Protestant minority protected against vigilante attacks only by the Crown's determination to impose a pacification a pacification that much of the citizenry do not want but for the moment the City Chiefs but accepts it the marriage takes place in North Dom on the 18th of August despite the Pope's condemnation of a marriage between a Catholic and a heretic and soon the assembled notables are going to disperse maybe it's gonna work then on Friday the 22nd of August Gaspard de Coligny the Protestant nobleman who's the most important military leader of the Protestants is shot in the street and badly wounded nobody knew for sure then we still don't know exactly who shot him or why but we do know that that shot was fired from a house belonging to the Dukes of gi's the leaders of the rejectionist Catholic faction instantly this plunges the capital into a crisis there's rumor counter rumor there still is about happened quite what went on between the Friday and the Sunday morning is still hotly contested for myself I am NOT persuaded that the original assassination attempt was planned or sanctioned by the king and the Queen Mother but it might have been certainly the paranoid rumors that whipped through Paris that weekend suggested that it was it's pretty obvious that this is not going to end well another round of religious war seems inevitable there's the fear that the Calvinist leaders gathered in Paris might attempt a coup my try and seize the king certainly rising fury from the Calvinists suggested that they were going to strike back in some way calling me is urged to leave Paris and mobilize his army but instead he chooses to remain he says that he's going to trust the king in the Queen Mother to keep the peace the royal family and their advisors spent much of Saturday the 23rd cloistered in a crisis meeting at the Louvre obviously we don't know exactly what happened but I can tell you what seems likely they're aware that the city is a powder keg that the presence of the Calvinists leadership makes this a very dangerous moment they're aware that rightly or wrongly they're being blamed for the assassination attempt the king's mother decide that the time has come to abandon their attempt to play both sides instead they had what seemed to them an opportunity to mount a coup of their own to act swiftly and suddenly to cut off the head of the snake to bring this endless civil war to an end at a stroke to take out the entire Calvinist leadership who are right there the rumors circulating that the Calvinists themselves were planning to seize or to murder the king only made it seem more urgent what we know is that late on the Saturday the 23rd it's decided to follow up the botched assassination of colony with a simultaneous strike against the entire Calvinist leadership to be carried out by the king's personal guard together with the Duke of gz's men overnight the city's gates are sealed boats on the Seine impounded in order to prevent any escape the murders began at around 4:00 a.m. on Sunday the 24th of the 4th of August sent by following news day sir Bartholomew ominously is the patron saint of butchers it's a festival they when norms are already half suspended the Kings Swiss Guard break into the house where the injured colony is being tended and he is swiftly murdered but the break-in and maybe the ringing of bells had already roused a neighborhood that was at hair-trigger readiness maybe this is the Protestant coup that everybody's so frightened of Catholics poured out into the streets but it turned out to be something else it's been very plausibly argued that the critical moment is when the Duke of Gea's himself comes out of calling these lodgings after the murder and there in the street in the hearing of the crowd that's beginning to gather instructed his men to move on to the rest of the Calvinist leadership and said the words Lavoie levert the King commands it for Paris's fervently Catholic population who had spent 10 or more years being restrained by the King from purging the Protestant popular and pollution in their midst this is a moment of release it's a long overdue permission to do what they had always known would have to be done the rumours swept through the city in other words the massacre that followed doesn't seem to have been actively premeditated by the king or his mother they planned a targeted strike against the leadership what they got instead was a genocide or purge this early woodcut shows that the whole story from the colonies assassination on the on the left through to his eventual murder in his bedroom at the top his body being dumped out of the window and then the killing beginning in the street the numbers are disputed but a sensible guess of the deaths in Paris on Sunday following news day in the two or three days following would be 3,000 give or take but the numbers don't convey the experience very for example the protestant merchants family of Mattawa Rousseau had imagined that the fact they've got business dealings with the Royal Court would give them some protection when the door bell was rung early that morning misawa himself went to answer it and he stabbed to death on the spot his son managed to escape into the street beat on a neighbor's door for refuge but the neighbor refused to open and the young man was butchered in the street his mother misawa's wife jumped from an upstairs window into a next door courtyard breaking both her legs in the fall she was at least luckier with her choice of neighbor because this one hit her in his cellar but the mob spotted the open window works out where she was and dragged her out into the street by her hair they cut off her hands to get the bracelets on her wrists and then impaled her on a roasting spit dragging her body through the streets before dumping is in the river a number of witnesses reported that the sin ran red with blood by the end of the day and there may be more than just a figure of speech only a minority of Paris's Catholics are actively involved in the killing but if most of their neighbors were too ambivalent or too frightened to shelter fugitives or to face down the mobs a minority is all that you need most of those who are killed were Protestants but some Catholics who did try to protect their Protestant neighbors were killed too some of those neighbors protected them because they seem to have been genuinely horrified the Duke of gi's himself the arch Catholic sheltered a number of Protestant families in his Paris house although he did also try to have some of their children rebaptised as Catholics others are more openly mercenary there are some Protestants who paid handsomely for the shelter that they received and as Madame Liu sews grisly examples shows there is pillage in looting but it tends to be secondary opportunistic this is a case of God's soldiers taking a well-earned reward for their service it's not the purpose of a killing again there's a ritual quality to these murders which is a constant theme the small children whose parents are killed in front of them and who are then stripped naked and dips in their parents blood as a kind of anti baptism it's a way of freeing them from the stain of Calvinism so that they can be allowed to live or the Protestant bookseller whose burned alive on a bonfire of his own heretical books the Protestants who are forced to recite Catholic prayers before they're killed we're past the point where you could save yourself that way although no doubt some people tried above all there's a quasi-judicial quality to some of these murders this is a crowd that wants to think of itself as fulfilling royal and divine commands not as a murderous mob colony's body is mutilated and paraded through the city rioters calling themselves his judges proclaim the sentence against him at each intersection before they dump the body in the river it's no accident that so many of these stories end in the river that's the providential means that God's provided to wash the guilty City clean by all accounts the king and the court are both surprised and alarmed maybe not horrified by what's happened my mid week the city's brought under control but by then events have already been set in motion during September and into October there are copycat massacres in a dozen other cities in Oh Leon Leon tois Bordeaux Toulouse elsewhere royal royal letters had quickly gone out urging the provincial governors to keep the peace but not quite quickly enough some of those in Paris on the morning of synthol amis day and remember everybody's there seem to have been given verbal instructions at court which they took as command or as permission to follow Paris's example and in cities which have been chafing at the open presence of heresy for a decade that's all it took a spark of legitimacy is enough the king hasn't endorsed massacres but he's hesitated and equivocated none of the provincial cities endured killing and quite the same scale as Paris but between them they more than the death toll which quite plausibly stood the wrong side of 10,000 so what does it mean well the King's eventual efforts to bring an end to the killing might indicate that this is one of those atrocities that nobody wants to claim but in fact many Catholics continued to celebrate it as a long overdue proof providentially enabled act of cleansing of wit about which the only thing to regret is that it was brought to a premature end famously notoriously Pope Gregory the 13th ordered mass to be sung in celebration when he heard the news it seemed to indicate that the king of France had finally stopped playing both sides at a turn decisively to the true faith the Pope has this commemorative medal struck when he heard here's the news showing an avenging angel striking down the heretics and with the unambiguous words and Massacre of the Hyuga nose he also commissioned these splendid frescoes by Vasari that you can still see in the Apostolic Palace if we look more closely at the one on the left we can see at the top colony's murder moving to the massacre itself it would be a generation before French Catholic stories of the massacre begin to change and you start to find the emphasis being placed on the brutality of the mob and instead tales being told of individuals like the governor of Provence who was told that the King supposedly told that the king had ordered a massacre and replied I've always served the king as a soldier but I would be dismayed to serve him as an executioner soon enough Catholic France tried to forget the massacre and subsumed it into the act of collective willful amnesia that was applied to the era of the civil wars as a whole a kind of both sides ISM that smothered individual events within a sort of distancing moral equivalency that's easy if you're Catholic for the Protestants things are different maybe the most important reaction understandably enough is shock I said that the numbers of that is still disputed unsurprisingly in the first wave of rumors the guesses trended hi 50,000 100,000 dead were spoken of the whole of France Geneva City Council wrote is bathed in the blood of innocent people and covered with dead bodies letters written by Protestants in the immediate aftermath of the massacre are numb with disbelief because they've come to Paris believing that there's going to be a new settlement instead their leaders are dead the king has turned on them they're sure it's a fully premeditated plot thousands of their brethren had been butchered this is maybe the most important consequence of the massacre I said before the way the Protestants interpret persecution as a sign of God's approval and are therefore inoculated against intimidation well up to a point the massacre broke the bravado of their martyr complex the scale and the speed of the killing left two dazed survivors questioning whether God was really on their side and while in truth the numbers of the dead are only a tiny proportion of France's Protestants the massacre virtually eliminates Protestantism from large areas of the country in rural for example in Normandy for every Protestant who's killed in the city ten converted to Catholicism that month the Protestant minorities who'd held on in a great many regions are effectively snuffed out but they're not a minority everywhere and not all of the leaders are killed especially in their strongholds in the southwest the massacre provokes not surrender but outrage and defiance the city of La Rochelle took up arms almost immediately refused to let a royal governor in within weeks it's under siege and another religious war has started as news spread across the continent Protestants everywhere are confirmed in all of their worst suspicions it became common knowledge that the massacre had been coordinated from Rome had indeed been planned at the Council of Trent the great Catholic council that had concluded nine years previously I think we can forgive them some conspiracy theories a French King who'd spent a decade trying to be a moderating influence had indeed suddenly changed sides in retrospect we can see that as a brief aberration made under extreme pressure but it's not unreasonable to think that he's at last revealing his true colors anyway the massacre quickly takes pride of place in international Protestantism lovingly curated pantheon of Catholic atrocities Christopher Marlowe staged a play about it the massacre in Paris which depicts the massacre as a long plotted Machiavellian scheme an accounts continue to be published through the 17th and into the 18th century it's treated rather like we nowadays treat the Nazi Holocaust as a terrible event which it's your duty self-consciously to remember and it fundamentally changed the nature of the war for the surviving Protestants they are not fighting to get a grant of Rights from the king anymore this is now revolution they see the king as a tyrant who has to be resisted or even assassinated he is not a good Lord who has been misled by wicked advisers radical constitutional theories notions of lawful rebellion starts surfacing amongst the Protestants after the bloodbath in Paris it looks like there is no going back this is why Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century said that without the Sun Bartholomew's Day Massacre there would have been no french revolution it's why 19th century anti-monarchists continued to recall it in paintings like this showing the Queen Mother coming out in the morning and regarding the scene with grim satisfaction be that as it may them meanings attached to this in France have changed over the centuries the trouble of course is that French Protestants were finally expelled from france by louis xiv in 1685 so there's no substantial french constituency that is still nursing the memory of its injuries instead the massacre becomes for example for Voltaire a symbol of religious intolerance and the abuse of power by churches in general during the French Revolution the stories strongly revived on these terms several plays of that ear referenced it most notably Joseph Shania's Charles the ninth which used the massacre to demonstrate that religions and kings are both equally evil the play is blocked for many years by the censor it's finally performed in November 1789 by which stage it's already notorious one critic called the play an evening of blood which in the construction of the French Revolution was a compliment Rob's Pierre's colleague kami old Emily saw the play as having been decisive in moving the revolution forward jr. was a member of the National Convention and put his principles into practice when he voted for the execution of the King the massacre hasn't exactly been forgotten since then there was an opera about it in the 1830s Mark Twain in a particularly bleak mood of irony called the massacre unquestionably the finest thing of the kind ever devised and accomplished in the world on the unarguable basis that all of the best people took a hand in it there are still painters like this Russia who draw meaning from the story noticing again at the top right that the malign brooding power of the church there were several cinematic depictions in the 20th century there's even an early Doctor Who story which like many of the early Doctor Who's is now suddenly lost we just do a few still images the best-known cinematic version is the 1994 remake of the nineteen ninety nineteen fifty-four film of Alexandre Dumas 1845 novel levin margot which has a very lengthy and graphic depiction of the massacre and distinguished in a peculiarly Gallic way by the fact that a great many of the participants don't appear to be very wearing very many clothes still for such a cataclysmic event it's modern cultural footprint is relatively modest and I think for a simple reason that neither its victims nor even its villains have that much salience anymore French Protestantism isn't extinct but it doesn't cherish its persecution in the same Way and French Catholicism has been frozen out of any kind of power for over a century now and France hasn't had either kings or Emperor's for 150 years in other words the story no longer really serves anyone's calls and it can become just a backdrop to a different kind of story as in Logan Margaux or as in the pre-raphaelite painting by Millay a Hugo on sympathy amused a which manages to turn the massacre into a story of doomed and heroic love don't let anybody tell you that romantic trivialization is a modern invention so how do you survive a massacre in the Wars of Religion well don't answer the front door while it's going on but the contrasting examples of Leiden in Paris mean we can answer that question on to slightly less superficial levels if you are a community that has suffered an atrocity you survive and recover from it by making the right use of it by not allowing it to break your nerve and instead keeping its memory alive as a means to unite you against your foes as we've seen in that sense parts of French Protestantism survived the massacre and others didn't whereas the Dutch managed to use the sufferings of Leiden and the atrocities that followed much more effectively most importantly if you are a country where an atrocity like this has taken place setting citizens against each other creating bitter memories of betrayal and murder that could be remembered for generations you survived the trauma not by trying to forget it but by the way you choose to remember it so if you're the Dutch you play down the divisions you forget the plague you emphasize communal suffering you make sure that foreigners are the common enemy and you slather the story thickly enough with myth that it becomes a uniting rather than a dividing force and once that myth has dried hard for a century or two enough will have healed underneath but the historians can be let loose to break things up without any obvious danger if you're the French you wait until bitterness has finally exhausted itself you allow it to be crowded out by more modern traumas and finally you reach a point where the story of the atrocity no longer moves anybody to call for fresh blood then and only then when it's simply become history and the dead can be allowed to rest in peace can a nation truly say that it survived a massacre [Applause]

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 56,748

Keywords: gresham, gresham college, education, lecture, public, london, debate, academia, knowledge, Alec Ryrie, History, Religion, History of Religion, Religious History, Wars of Religion, Religious Wars, Leiden, 1573, 1574, St Bartholomew's Day Massacres, 1572, The Dutch Revolt, Eighty Years' War, Vassy, Braunschweig, Giorgio Vasari, Siege of La Rochelle, John Everett Millais, La Reine Margot, Ilyas Phaizulline

Id: JjwBBBITitE

Length: 51min 25sec (3085 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 05 2020