Mass Violence and the Self

From the French Wars of Religion to the Paris Commune

Howard G. Brown

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501730610
• eBook ISBN: 9781501730726
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Art
• Index: History

Mass Violence and the Self explores the earliest visual and textual depictions of personal suffering caused by the French Wars of Religion of 1562–98, the Fronde of 1648–52, the French Revolutionary Terror of 1793–94, and the Paris Commune of 1871. The development of novel media from pamphlets and woodblock printing to colored lithographs, illustrated newspapers, and collodion photography helped to determine cultural, emotional, and psychological responses to these four episodes of mass violence.

Howard G. Brown's richly illustrated and conceptually innovative book shows how the increasingly effective communication of the suffering of others combined with interpretive bias to produce what may be understood as collective traumas. Seeing these responses as collective traumas reveals their significance in shaping new social identities that extended beyond the village or neighborhood. Moreover, acquiring a sense of shared identity, whether as Huguenots, Parisian bourgeois, French citizens, or urban proletarians, was less the cause of violent conflict than the consequence of it. Combining neuroscience, art history, and biography studies, Brown explores how collective trauma fostered a growing salience of the self as the key to personal identity. In particular, feeling empathy and compassion in response to depictions of others' emotional suffering intensified imaginative self-reflection. Protestant martyrologies, revolutionary "autodefenses," and personal diaries are examined in the light of cultural trends such as the interiorization of piety, the culture of sensibility, and the birth of urban modernism to reveal how representations of mass violence helped to shape the psychological processes of the self.

CHAPTER ONE

Massacres in the French Wars of Religion

The Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres of 1572 marked the high tide of religious killing during the French wars of religion. The French regent, Catherine de Medici, had arranged the marriage of her daughter and the king’s sister, Margueritte de Valois, to one of the aristocratic leaders of the Calvinist Huguenots, Henri de Navarre, in August 1572 as the basis for a more secure and stable peace between Catholics and Protestants in France. Instead of building a foundation for religious cohabitation in the kingdom, however, the gathering of Huguenots for the wedding celebrations in Paris provided a provocative opportunity for militant Catholics to deal a crushing blow to their political and religious rivals. The resulting slaughter of Protestants in Paris radiated out to more than a dozen provincial towns in the following weeks. The month of massacres sparked by Saint Bartholomew’s Day breathed a fierce new life into the religious and political strife that had been tearing France apart for more than a decade.

In addition to prolonging deadly conflict, the events of 1572 proved critical to the construction of collective religious identities in France. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres were more than an escalation in sectarian violence; they marked a caesura in the wars of religion due to the profound psychological impact they had on both Protestants and Catholics.¹ This impact was not as straightforward as might be assumed simply by the scale of the violence. The psychological and cultural impact of the massacres of 1572 can be better understood by examining the ways in which information about them was disseminated and apprehended. It took effective communication of the experience of wholesale slaughter to nonparticipants, that is, those who neither witnessed nor directly suffered from the violence, to link individual suffering to larger group identities.

France in the sixteenth century was immense and diverse. Anyone who traveled across the vast kingdom would have been struck by its enormous variety of local cultures, languages, and dialects. Frenchness was an exceptionally abstract concept that had little to do with personal identity for all but mobile members of the elite. Before such thinking could become commonplace, religion provided the foundation for early forms of collective identity that extended beyond villages, towns, or regions. Shared group identities arose from the delineation and consolidation of distinct differences between Catholic and Calvinist religious beliefs and practices. In contrast to common assumptions, only part of this process occurred before sectarian violence erupted. In fact, much of the process of forming and consolidating distinctive religious identities in sixteenth-century France took place in response to violence experienced directly and indirectly.

The symbiotic process of collective violence and the reification of religious differences encouraged French men and women to identify more strongly with the suffering of coreligionists. Such shared religious identities had to be created strictly in cultural terms. Differences of race, ethnicity, sex, or class are easily deployed as the basis for shared identities. Many other social, economic, and cultural factors may hinder the development of a sense of shared identity along these lines, but the foundational elements—skin color, native language, reproductive capabilities, or wealth and education—are too obvious to be easily hidden or ignored. Such was not the case with differences between Christian believers in sixteenth-century Europe. They shared a common understanding of God as the omnipotent creator of all things, the greatest of which is humankind because the quiddity of every person is an individual soul. They also shared the belief that everyone requires God’s mercy in order for the soul to be spared eternal suffering as just punishment for sin. Thus, differences that arose among believers in the middle of the sixteenth century were not inherent from birth; they were largely chosen differences. Moreover, given the fluidity and inconsistency of religious practices at the time, acquiring a distinctive and yet shared religious identity required making such choices repeatedly. The role of violence in determining those choices needs to be underscored. Both actual violence and news about it were critical to developing shared identities beyond local communities. Identifying with the suffering of individuals in distant villages or towns meant feeling pity, and even compassion, for individuals who lived well beyond the face-to-face social world that dominated sixteenth-century lives. Various means of communication, including travelers’ accounts, personal letters, sermons, religious processions, iconoclastic expeditions, and partisan pamphlets, all served to propagate, explain, and even incite sectarian strife.

Visual images of religious violence, though little explored, also helped to make the link between personal suffering and a sense of shared identity that underpinned collective emotional responses. Mass-produced images of religious violence first appeared in France shortly before the massacres of 1572. The sudden emergence of such images contributed to shaping a new religious culture among the Huguenots. Alongside an outpouring of polemical pamphlets and partisan “histories” of the early wars of religion, these images effectively communicated persecution and suffering well beyond the reach of the traditional “social media” of the sixteenth century: sermons, hymns, feasts, and markets. Thus, printed forms of communication helped to magnify the impact of the massacres of 1572 in ways that turned the events into a distinct collective trauma. The psychological effects on Protestants led to a massive wave of abjurations and helped to make the nascent Reformed Church in France more intensely Calvinist. Thereafter, embracing the identity of Huguenot meant accepting the status of a permanent “Other” both in the local community and in the kingdom as a whole. Catholics, too, received a psychological shock from the events of 1572. Among other consequences, the failure of the massacres to extirpate “heresy” served as a catalyst to regenerate Catholicism in France as a religion that both inspired and required greater personal piety. By raising the stakes on religious affiliations and commitments, therefore, the French wars of religion stimulated the sort of psychological processes, such as introspection and fellow feeling beyond face-to-face communities, that underpin a more pronounced self.

The Reformation of Religious Identities

The various movements for religious reform that emerged in western Europe in the sixteenth century, whether branded Lutheranism, Zwinglianism, Calvinism, or even Tridentine Catholicism, reflected a widespread desire for a more intense spiritual experience. The emergence of Western individualism during the Renaissance has often been exaggerated: the vast bulk of Europeans alive in the fifteenth century had neither the means nor the opportunity to refashion themselves in ways that would have surprised their neighbors. Nonetheless, in the early decades of the sixteenth century, the economic consequences of price inflation and the concentration of political authority in princely states combined to loosen the feudal bonds of community. The printing revolution and the spread of literacy to master craftsmen and artisans also left towns less in thrall to traditional social hierarchies. These trends fueled social mobility, whether upward, downward, or sideways. They also brought greater awareness of events elsewhere, including beyond borders and across seas. Uncertainty about the future, both in daily life and in the afterlife, mounted noticeably as well. These various forces fostered movements for religious reform that could provide both a renewed sense of community and a greater confidence in attaining personal salvation. Thus, by the 1530s and 1540s in France, a significant number of the faithful sought a more intimate relationship to God and became concerned that the traditional church could no longer provide for their spiritual needs.²

This search for greater spiritual fulfillment raises the significance of the self. Charles Taylor has noted that the new “reformed religions” of the sixteenth century encouraged a more personalized, that is, more psychologically interiorized, experience of faith. He views this more intensely interiorized religious sensibility as an impetus for the development of the self in Western societies. However, Taylor considers Protestantism in largely individualist terms. He contrasts Catholicism, in which a layperson is “a passenger in the ecclesial ship on its journey to God,” with Protestantism, which is not a ship in the Catholic sense and thus has no passengers: “Each believer rows his or her own boat.”³ This may characterize Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, but it does not do justice to the complex relationship between religious change and the development of the self in the sixteenth century. First, those who opted for reformed religion did not necessarily do so for reasons of doctrinal difference. They may instead have objected to abuses, ignorance, and immorality among the clergy and may not have rebelled against the church had its leaders been quicker to put their house in order. Second, those who responded to the “gospel” did not always do so in order to attain salvation through grace; they may simply have seized an opportunity to register a righteous protest against the established order. The New Testament taught the dignity of each person, even the most humble, in the eyes of God. This message appealed less to the abject poor, those who depended on Christian charity, than to those who had a measure of independence thanks to craft skills, education, or lineage. Religious reform served to consolidate this sense of dignity, and possibly to improve social standing at the same time. Third, individuals rarely acted in isolation, but rather tended to join a reformed congregation as members of a family group, craft network, or seigneurial village. New converts were highly sensitive to the attitudes of kin and community to their religious choices.⁴ This sensitivity helps to explain why so many of the people who engaged in alternative religious practices later found them insufficiently rewarding to sustain themselves, especially in the face of serious persecution.

Taylor is not wrong to draw attention to the power of Protestantism to stimulate development of the self: at the core of Protestant teachings stood a novel theology that created a more personal, interiorized relationship to God. But adopting an alternative theology was not the only way in which the emergence of Protestantism in France created experiences that stimulated the psychological processes of the self. The conflict it generated with the vast bulk of the populace who remained loyal to the church also proved instrumental in fostering more interiorized forms of piety and the formation of religious identity. Moreover, Taylor overlooks the power of increased Catholic piety to generate a more pronounced self as well. The restricted success of Calvinism in France—at their apogee reformed churches attracted no more than one-tenth of the population⁵—indicates that its theology was only one way to respond to the strong expectation of a deeper faith and better assurance of salvation.

Catholicism developed its own reform dynamic in the late sixteenth century. This proved highly successful and eventually predominated in the seventeenth century. But sixteenth-century Catholicism was never monolithic. It remained internally divided, notably over how to respond to the threat posed both to the traditional community and to the unity of the kingdom by religious reformers. Catholics who found Protestants an especially distressing presence developed forms of militancy that also intensified their sense of identity and increased the interiorization of religious piety. Thus, the theology of Protestantism clearly encouraged deeper self-reflection on the part of individual believers; however, outbursts of collective violence that turned into prolonged sectarian conflict exponentially increased the intensity of this self-reflection. Central to this experience was the formation of a distinct religious identity as Huguenots. This identity appears more easily formed in hindsight, centuries later, when “collective identities” have become a conceptual commonplace.⁶ As cultural constructions that took shape in a single lifetime, however, turning neighbors into religious “Others” did not happen easily. Emerging religious identities derived in significant measure from the ability to communicate the physical suffering of coreligionists to fellow believers who may not have personally experienced violent persecution. Not equally, but no less importantly given the size of the population involved, was the intensification of Catholic piety in response to the prolonged presence of Huguenots in France.⁷

What did it mean to be a “Huguenot” in the middle third of the sixteenth century? To what extent did reformers in Toulouse share affinities with reformers in Troyes? How much did they know about one another? What basis did they have to empathize with distant coreligionists? Such questions provoke complicated and ambiguous answers, especially before the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres of 1572. Scholars rarely emphasize the fledgling nature of the so-called reformed religion at the start of the French wars of religion in 1561–62. Most histories of the conflict have been written as if a unified and doctrinally fixed Protestant Church existed across the kingdom by 1561. This is quite misleading. “Confessional schemas did not really operate at the time: the frontier was drawn very progressively,” states Thierry Wanegffelen; “in order to explore it, the traditional confrontational vision must be abandoned.”⁸ The differences between the many pockets of heterodox reform that sprang up like mushrooms after a rain are difficult to identify due to their often clandestine nature. As one would expect from any sudden surge in religious experimentation, the various strains of Protestant Reform in France lacked both unity and uniformity in the early 1560s.

Even the scale of conversion to Protestantism has been much exaggerated. The oft-repeated claim that France had 2,150 reformed “churches” in early 1562 has been debunked. In fact, there were only about 860 reformed congregations in France, or 40 percent of the number claimed, and even this modest number was not reached until at least a year later. Moreover, two thirds of these “churches” had only been recently constituted and so still stood on rather shaky ground. In fact, the extreme diversity of reformed “churches” forced Calvinist leaders to exclude many gatherings that they deemed illegitimate due to insufficient doctrinal consistency or institutional discipline.⁹ Heterodoxy may have inspired as much as a tenth of the population of France to dabble, at least briefly, in some form of reformed religion, but it is misleading to claim that these were all Huguenots. Even a recent historian of the Huguenots wonders “what later generations, schooled more thoroughly in the faith, would have made of some of [the ‘Protestants’]” included in estimates for the extent of Protestantism in France in 1562.¹⁰ In short, the assumption that a populous and coherent Protestant church inspired the civil wars in France neglects the powerful role that religious conflict itself came to play in the construction of Huguenot identity.

A steady rise in royal persecution of religious reformers in the 1540s and 1550s served as a barometer of their growing influence. But the difference between reformers who struggled to reinvigorate Catholicism and reformers who adopted overtly Protestant doctrines was not easy to tell. Even the growing number of public executions masks the extreme difficulty magistrates had in determining when heterodox ideas crossed a theological line and became genuinely heretical. For every twenty cases of heresy brought before France’s different parlements (the highest courts in the land), only one heretic was condemned to death.¹¹ Heterodox individuals who adopted reformed practices were known variously as luthériens, évangéliques, or members of le religion.¹² The epithet huguenots first emerged from the failed “conspiracy of Amboise” in 1560 when Protestant noblemen gave the reform movement th...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Discourse on Method
• 1. Massacres in the French Wars of Religion
• 2. The Fronde and the Crisis of 1652
• 3. The Thermidorians’ Terror
• 4. The Paris Commune and the “Bloody Week” of 1871
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Plates