A Massacre in Four Maps
Introduction
The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 continues to attract the attention of historians for a variety of reasons. For one, little is known for certain as to its causes. Yes, whispers of a Protestant revolt in Paris following the wedding of Marguerite de Valois and Henri de Navarre (later Henri IV of France) were likely behind the Crown’s decision to execute elite ‘conspirators’ in the early hours of August 24th, but just how things got out of hand so quickly thereafter is unclear. Who was to blame for the death of perhaps five thousand Protestants, the vast majority of them civilians, in the capital alone?1 The barbarity with which these acts were committed makes for a further point of major scholarly interest. Sources describe how Parisians barged into the homes of their neighbours, torturing and killing them, and dragging their corpses through the streets. While the years leading up to the massacre can hardly be described as having been peaceful, that these city folk found it quite so easy to eviscerate the Protestant men, women, and children in their neighbourhood, many of whom they surely knew, is startling.2
In addition to these questions of causation and the potential for violence, just how it was that witnesses and commentators chose to write about the event subsequently is now increasingly recognised as a pressing topic, too.3 Some swiftly praised the bloodshed, others denounced it; most simply chose to hold their tongue. The complexities of the massacre as event are certainly evident in the variety of responses it garnered, but it would appear that its narrators often had an agenda beyond simply recalling what they saw. I don’t think it unreasonable to suggest that the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre exists, today, just as much in its later, politicised retellings, its apologia and lacunose paeans, as in the murderous acts that constituted it. For, in a certain light, the massacre resembles a kind of historiographical phenomenon. What does it mean to aestheticise violence in the language of Renaissance Humanism versus that of the Old Testament? to recount only the major stages of a traumatic event, as opposed to painstakingly recalling its every moment?
My project for the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative––which builds on work for my doctoral thesis, in which I examine the ways in which religious conflict shaped early modern Paris––is a contribution to this particular discourse. It consists, quite simply, of locating the massacre’s acts in three separate accounts on maps of sixteenth-century Paris: every building, street, bridge, square, and other urban feature mentioned in each account is marked in red.4 Two of the accounts are Catholic and ostensibly pro-massacre: an excerpt from the memoirs of Provinois clergyman Claude Haton and the anonymous 1572 pamphlet Discours du triomphe des nopces du roy de Navarre avec madame Marguerite de France, soeur du roy tres-chrestien.5 One is Protestant and vehemently anti-massacre: pastor Simon Goulart’s account, pieced together from eye-witness reports in Geneva, in his Mémoires de l’Estat de France.6 I draw inspiration from Andrey Lazarev’s essay on mental maps of Paris, in which the author draws conclusions as to the ways in which contemporaries (for the most part diarists and chroniclers) understood their city by cumulatively locating the sites they name on a map of the capital.7 The key difference with my approach is that I’ve adopted this cartographic method as a means of interpreting the massacre’s presentation through the city, not the city’s presentation per se. Read more ‘visually’ in this way, what do these three texts actually tell us?
Researcher: Tom Joashi