Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion 9780748694402

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Forgetting Differences

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture Series Editor: Lorna Hutson Titles available in the series: Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods and the Virtue of Vulnerability James Kuzner The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in SeventeenthCentury French Literature John D. Lyons Don Quixote in the Archives: Madness and Literature in Early Modern Spain Dale Shuger Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion William P. Weaver The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Sisters: Gender, Transgression, Adolescence Jennifer Higginbotham Friendship’s Shadows: Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640–1705 Penelope Anderson Inventions of the Skin: The Painted Body in Early English Drama, 1400–1642 Andrea Ria Stevens Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing, 1600–1642 Bradley D. Ryner Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion Andrea Frisch Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture website at www.euppublishing.com/series/ecsrc

Forgetting Differences Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion

Andrea Frisch

EDINBURGH University Press

© Andrea Frisch, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9439 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9440 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 0447 1 (epub) The right of Andrea Frisch to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgements vi Series Editor’s Preface 1.  Learning to Forget

viii 1

2.  Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance 26 3. History without Passion: National Historiography in the Age of Oubliance

63

4.  Tragedy as History: From the Guisiade to Garnier

104

5.  From Emotion to Affect

141

Conclusion172 Index 175

Acknowledgements

I have accumulated many debts of many kinds over the long period during which I wrote this book. I would like first to acknowledge the organizations and people that granted me the time, the funds, and the space to research and to write: the National Humanities Center, that scholar’s paradise where I spent a fellowship year with the financial support of the Florence Gould Foundation, and with the material support of the Center’s unparalleled staff; the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose fellowship award lifted me up at a moment of professional adversity; the University of Maryland, which provided two semesters of paid research leave during the period in which I was working on this project; the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst, which helped finance a stint at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich; the Center for Advanced Studies at the Ludwig-MaximiliansUniversität, Munich, where, thanks to the generosity of Professor Barbara Vinken, I spent a semester as I was completing the book; and my colleagues in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Maryland, who held down the fort while I took unpaid leave in order to finish the project. I am deeply grateful to the people who make these institutions run, and so very thankful that they continue to support scholarship in the humanities. I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation for the moral and professional support, the intellectual stimulation, the friendship, and the wisdom of fellow seizième-and-dix-septièmistes, Chris Braider, Leah Chang, Ned Duval, Timothy Hampton, George Hoffman, Katherine Ibbett, Ullrich Langer, Ellen McClure, Kathleen Perry-Long, Todd Reeser, Timothy Reiss, and Marc Schachter. I owe a substantial debt of gratitude to my inspiring Maryland friend and colleague Valerie Orlando for her ceaseless encouragement and for her hard work in our department. At Edinburgh University Press, series editor Lorna Hutson gave generously of her time and of her considerable intelligence

Acknowledgements     vii

as I worked to make a book out of my material, and greatly helped to sustain my confidence in the project. In Munich, I benefited from exchanges both scholarly and convivial with Susanne Friedrich, Isabel Karremann, Michèle Lowrie, and Barbara Vinken. My participation in colloquia organized by Olivier Guerrier, Paul-Alexis-Mellet, Laurent Gerbier, Stéphan Geonget, and Florence Alazard in Toulouse, Tours, and Wölfenbüttel broadened my scholarly perspective in important ways. I am grateful to colleagues who invited me to present parts of this project as it progressed, and to the audiences that generously listened to and questioned my analyses, at the University of Minnesota; the University of Pittsburgh; the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin; the Historiches Seminar at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität; the University of Geneva; University College London; the George Washington University; the Vann Seminar at Emory University; and the Duke-University of North Carolina Triangle Renaissance Workshop. There are many more people I should like to recognize here, in particular the members of the larger band of middle-aged seizièmistes in the USA whose fellowship has brought me such profit and pleasure over the past several years, but I fear that were I to try to list everyone I might leave out a deserving soul. I hope that these colleagues will accept my thanks en bloc in print until the next time I get the chance to express my gratitude and admiration in person. Finally, I owe an enormous intellectual debt to the scholars who have before me considered tragedy, historiography, and the French wars of religion (if not necessarily in tandem), not all of whom could be cited in the book. Parts of Chapter 2 appeared in a different form as “Caesarean negotiations: Forgetting Henri IV’s past after the French Wars of Religion” in Isabel Karremann, Cornel Zwierlein and Inga Mai Groote (eds), Forgetting Faith? Negotiating Confessional Conflict in Early Modern Europe (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), pp. 63–79. Several passages from my article, “French tragedy and the Civil Wars,” Modern Language Quarterly 67:3 (September 2006), pp. 287–312, are scattered throughout the book, mostly in Chapters 4 and 5. I am grateful for the opportunity to rework this material here. By taking charge of the domestic front on numerous occasions, in particular during my time at the National Humanities Center, Mathias Frisch helped make it possible for me to take myself seriously as a scholar. My children, Julia and Gabriel, make sure on the other hand that I never take myself too seriously. All three of them keep me connected to life after 1650. I dedicate this book to them.

Series Editor’s Preface

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture may, as a series title, provoke some surprise. On the one hand, the choice of the word “culture” (rather than, say, “literature”) suggests that writers in this series subscribe to the now widespread assumption that the “literary” is not isolable, as a mode of signifying, from other signifying practices that make up what we call “culture.” On the other hand, most of the critical work in English literary studies of the period 1500–1700 which endorses this idea has rejected the older identification of the period as “the Renaissance,” with its implicit homage to the myth of essential and universal Man coming to stand (in all his sovereign individuality) at the centre of a new world picture. In other words, the term “culture” in the place of “literature” leads us to expect the words “early modern” in the place of “Renaissance.” Why, then, “Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture”? The answer to that question lies at the heart of what distinguishes this critical series and defines its parameters. As Terence Cave has argued, the term “early modern,” though admirably egalitarian in conception, has had the unfortunate effect of essentialising the modern, that is, of positing “the advent of a once-and-for-all modernity” which is the deictic “here and now” from which we look back.1 The phrase “early modern,” that is to say, forecloses the possibility of other modernities, other futures that might have arisen, narrowing the scope of what we may learn from the past by construing it as a narrative leading inevitably to Western modernity, to “us.” Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture aims rather to shift the emphasis from a story of progress – early modern to modern – to a series of critical encounters and conversations with the past, which may reveal to us some surprising alternatives buried within texts familiarly construed as episodes on the way to certain identifying features of our endlessly fascinating modernity. In keeping with one aspect of the etymology of “Renaissance” or

Series Editor’s Preface     ix

“Rinascimento” as “rebirth,” moreover, this series features books that explore and interpret anew elements of the critical encounter between writers of the period 1500–1700 and texts of Greco-Roman literature, rhetoric, politics, law, economics, eros, and friendship. The term “culture,” then, indicates a license to study and scrutinise objects other than literary ones, and to be more inclusive about both the forms and the material and political stakes of making meaning both in the past and in the present. “Culture” permits a realisation of the benefits to be reaped after two decades of interdisciplinary enrichment in the arts. No longer are historians naïve about textual criticism, rhetoric, literary theory, or readerships; likewise, literary critics trained in close reading now also turn easily to court archives, to legal texts, and to the historians’ debates about the languages of political and religious thought. Social historians look at printed pamphlets with an eye for narrative structure; literary critics look at court records with awareness of the problems of authority, mediation, and institutional procedure. Within these developments, modes of research that became unfashionable and discredited in the 1980s – for example, studies in classical or vernacular “source texts,” or studies of literary “influence” across linguistic, confessional, and geographical boundaries – have acquired a new critical edge and relevance as the convergence of the disciplines enables the unfolding of new cultural histories (that is to say, what was once studied merely as “literary influence” may now be studied as a fraught cultural encounter). The term “Renaissance” thus retains the relevance of the idea of consciousness and critique within these textual engagements of past and present, and, while it foregrounds the Western European experience, is intended to provoke comparativist study of wider global perspectives rather than to promote the “universality” of a local, if far-reaching, historical phenomenon. Finally, as traditional pedagogic boundaries between “medieval” and “Renaissance” are being called into question by cross disciplinary work emphasising the “reformation” of social and cultural forms, so this series, while foregrounding the encounter with the classical past, is self-conscious about the ways in which that past is assimilated to the projects of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, spiritual, political, and domestic, that finally transformed Christendom into Europe. Individual books in this series vary in methodology and approach, sometimes blending the sensitivity of close literary analysis with incisive, informed, and urgent theoretical argument, at other times offering critiques of grand narratives of the period by their work in manuscript transmission, or in the archives of legal, social, and architectural history, or by social histories of gender and childhood. What all these books

­x     Forgetting Differences have in common, however, is the capacity to offer compelling, welldocumented, and lucidly written critical accounts of how writers and thinkers in the period 1500–1700 reshaped, transformed, and critiqued the texts and practices of their world, prompting new perspectives on what we think we have learned from them. Lorna Hutson

Note 1. Cave, Terence, “Locating the Early Modern,” Paragraph, 29:1 (2006), pp. 12–26, (14).

Chapter 1

Learning to Forget

Oubliance. n.f. C’est un mot vieilli, mais qui peut encore entrer dans le style marotique, comme synonyme d’oubli.1

Focused on France in the period 1560–1630, this study examines the impact in France of the monarchical call to extinguish the memory of the Wars of Religion on post-war national historiography and on the elite sense of History more generally. This policy of oubliance is no doubt best known through the 1598 Edict of Nantes’s call, in the first sentence of its opening article: que la memoire de toutes choses passées d’une part et d’autre, depuis le commencement du mois de mars mil cinq cens quatre vingtz cinq jusques à nostre avenement à la couronne, et durant les autres troubles preceddens et à l’occasion d’iceulx, demourera estaincte et assoupie, comme de chose non advenue. that the memory of everything that has taken place on both sides since the beginning of the month of March 1585 until our accession to the crown, and during the other preceding troubles and on account of them, shall remain extinct and dormant, as of a thing that never happened.2

Whereas the first iteration of the policy, in article 9 of the 1563 Edict of Amboise, offered a more narrowly juridical formulation that annulled injures and offenses (“que toutes injures et offenses que l’iniquité du temps et les occasions qui en sont survenues ont peu faire naistre entre nosd. subjectz, et toutes autres choses passées et causées de ces presens tumultes, demoureront estainctes, comme mortes, ensevelies et non advenues”), the version put forth in the Edict of Nantes, reiterating language first used in the 1570 Edict of St-Germain, targets something much more diffuse: memory.3 Coming after a protracted period of violent civil war that had dragged on for over thirty-five years, the Edict of Nantes met with a variety of reactions according to the political and religious interests of the factions

­2     Forgetting Differences in question; this complexity has been increasingly brought to the fore in scholarship on the period.4 We know many of the details of the legislative process leading to the promulgation and ratification of the edict,5 and we have recently learned more about how juridical institutions went about enforcing it.6 While the politics of oubliance obviously did play out in French courts and in city councils, my aim here is to complement the recent work of historians such as Olivier Christin, Jérémie Foa, and Diane Margolf, who have studied the insitutional ramifications of the policy, by focusing on “official memory” in the form of published historiographical works about the wars that were sanctioned (whether tacitly or explicitly) by the monarchy. The object of this enquiry thus differs from that of the above-named historians, as well as that of Michel DeWaele, Barbara Diefendorf, Gregory Hanlon, Keith Luria, and Penny Roberts (to name just a few of the scholars who have published seminal works on religious coexistence in seventeenth-century France).7 My goal is not, to paraphrase Mark Greengrass on the proper aims of contemporary historians of the wars, to disentangle the inner, ever-tactical logic of my source-texts from that of the “events themselves” (33).8 Coming at the material from the angle of the “high” literary culture of the period, I seek rather to illuminate dimensions of the inner logic of those source texts that have not, to my knowledge, received attention.9 The current study is concerned first and foremost with the impact that what I term the “rhetoric of amnesia” had on the theory and practice of postwar French national historiography and theatrical tragedy, two discourses that approached the challenge of “forgetting” the Wars of Religion in surprisingly similar ways in early seventeenth-century France. I set the question of oubliance into three interrelated frameworks – the legislative, the historiographical, and the theatrical (all three of which are of course political) – without intending to argue for the ultimate priority of any one of them. The inquiry begins with the royal edicts of pacification, but is not determined by them, precisely because their purview appears to have been rather opaque even (or especially) to those who were meant to obey them. My focus on oubliance as a politics of reconciliation excludes overtly polemical works except as points of comparison; however, my attention to rhetorics of amnesia and forgetting is not meant to position forgetting as the opposite of memory. Discursive modes of forgetting the wars (or certain aspects of them) themselves often involved not so much the obliteration or omission of memories as their recasting – what Harriet Flower, in her study of oblivion in Roman culture, calls “deliberately designed strategies that aim to change the picture of the past,” strategies that ultimately draw on what Jan Assmann terms the “reconstructive imagination.”10

Learning to Forget     3

In order to penetrate the reconstructive imagination at work in the age of oubliance, it is imperative to appreciate the range of the term’s uses in the period. Many senses of oubliance and related phrases as used in Renaissance France – oubli, éteindre/effacer la mémoire – are inherited from the writings of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Harald Weinrich’s wide-ranging investigation into the cultural status of forgetting in key texts of the Western tradition, which catalogs the uses of forgetting in Plato, Cicero, Quintilian, Homer, Ovid, Augustine, and Dante (among others), identifies topoi that are also prominent in Renaissance France.11 Taking up a concern with fame and renown from ancient epic poetry, French Renaissance poets frequently used oubliance in a historiographical sense to indicate the gloomy counterpart to immortality, with respect both to historical actors and to those who sing or write about them. As Nathalie Dauvois observes, in the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard, the preemininet French lyric poet of the second half of the sixteenth century, poetic song, poetic praise, and remembrance are constantly associated to one another, and indeed posited as equivalent.12 As a corollary to this, l’oubli, especially in Ronsard’s Odes, Hymnes, and Amours and, not surprisingly, in his epitaphs and elegies, is tantamount to death and is to be feared. Ronsard consistently positions his own poetry as a kind of memorial, thereby reinforcing an economy of public and collective memory in which oubliance is construed as a failure or a lapse.13 In keeping with Ronsard’s example, the valence of oubliance is overwhelmingly negative across a wide range of writings from the period, in particular in those that implicate collective memory.14 In characteristically overwrought language, François de Belleforest considers it his historiographical duty to remember the French princes who participated in the conquest of Normandy under Charles VII, “whose names it would be a sign of execrable ingratitude to attempt to enclose in the lugubrious tomb of some secret oubliance.”15 In his 1608 collection of “plusieurs histoires et autres choses mémorables tant anciennes que modernes,” Adrien de Boufflers (a page of Henri III) writes of “oubliance, true murderer of honor and glory” (165);16 warns that services rendered can end up unjustly “sealed within the tomb of oubliance” (214); explains that the cabbalistic books of the Hebrews were “as if resucitated from oubliance” by the prophet Ezra (259); and insists that the story of a killer rabbit must not become “prey to oubliance” (908). As the foregoing examples make clear, in strong contrast to the pagan belief in the potentially cleansing properties of the waters of Lethe, oubliance in a Christian context virtually always connoted neglect and had a strongly negative valence, regardless of confession. Théodore de Bèze’s translation of “Psalm 74” implores God not to forget his humble

­4     Forgetting Differences servants in “oubliance éternelle.” In the Institutes, Calvin observes how easy it is for Man to “tomber en oubliance de Dieu” (I, 6, 3). Boufflers offers a series of examples of this kind of forgetting as well: a Roman who insulted Pope Pius V was “punished for his weighty oubliance” (I, 223); Ammon’s “oubliance” is punished by “various wounds, diseases, and other maladies” (I, 452); Antiochus is similarly punished, “brought low from the heights to which his oubliance had carried him” (I, 454). This sense of “oubliance” as the dereliction of a sacred duty was routinely extended to the political realm, where the secular and religious obligations of the Christian prince frequently overlapped. According to the advocate Adam Théveneau, writing in 1607, it was imperative that a prince not forget to observe certain religious rites when undertaking any significant political enterprise: “oubliance in this regard is disastrous and a bad omen for a Christian prince.”17 Oubliance can, however, also refer to a simple lapse of memory or neglect of duty, usually less fraught with consequences than in the theological register, but requiring a similar conscientious vigilance. Théveneau describes Alexander at his siege of Nice cursing the “oubliance” of his preceptors for having neglected to teach him how to swim; he concludes, therefore, that princes should be taught to swim (519). Nicole Loraux proposes that classical thought on the upheavals of civil war is best situated within a broadly anthropological framework, rather than narrowly a political one, and there is ample material one could enlist in support of a similar view with respect to sixteenth-­ century France.18 At its most extreme, the civil wars led man to forget his humanity; much poetry of the period decries a conflict that pits blood against blood, children against parents, wife against husband, brother against brother.19 The apparently limitless extension of the realms of both memory and forgetting make it difficult if not impossible to separate that which is to be forgotten about the period of the wars from that which must be remembered, since the conflicts themselves were thoroughly enmeshed in the structures and dynamics that defined French politics, society, and everyday life of the period. Indeed, one of the dominant motifs in poetry about the French Wars of Religion was that of a monde à l’envers, a world in which nothing is in its proper place. Ronsard describes this phenomenon in terms of social and economic functions in his 1562 Discours des misères de ce temps: “L’artisan par ce monstre a laissé sa boutique /Le pasteur ses brebis, l’Advocat sa pratique, /Sa nef le marinier: sa foyre le marchand.”20 For the Catholic Ronsard, this is but one aspect of a thoroughgoing societal upheaval, in which authority is dead and everyone lives as he chooses, thereby turning the world upside-down.21 The Protestant Agrippa d’Aubigné

Learning to Forget     5

puts forth a similar view in his grand poem on the horrors of the wars, Les Tragiques (1616): during the troubles, he suggests, injustice was the overriding principle of French justice.22 The French civil wars implicated virtually every domain of human existence, whether directly or indirectly; it is therefore no easy matter to determine in any rigorous way what did or did not constitute a reminder of the conflicts. Given the extent and the extremity of what was to be forgotten, how were the politics of oubliance to be translated into a royally sanctioned practice of collective memory? Perhaps surprisingly, the Athenian amnesty of 403 is rarely invoked in learned discussions of the edicts issued over the course of the Wars of Religion. Those who do mention it, such as Antoine Loisel or Pierre Beloy, hold up the ancient precedent primarily as a philosophical model or as a political expedient, offering virtually no guidance as to how French subjects were to learn how to forget from this model. In his 1599 commentary on the Edict of Nantes, for example, Beloy cites a series of both classical and biblical examples of amnesty, in order to show how amnesty can be turned to the advantage of the ruler who declares it.23 But neither Loisel nor Beloy draws from these examples any strategies for the practice of erasing memories. Thus, the royal vision for the actual performance of forgetting – as distinct from the promise to do so – remained ill-defined. Philip Benedict suggests that the polemical, confessionally charged historiography of the late sixteenth century gave way to works that “emphasized personal rivalries and poor political decision-making as the causes of conflicts and that moved the narrative of events toward a common ground.”24 While I agree with the broad outlines of this thesis, I believe there is more to say about the cultivation of a “common ground” upon which the official history of the Wars of Religion could flourish. Alongside the growing attention to secular politics, which in turn buttressed the budding ideology of reason-of-state, there existed a body of writing that addressed the role of emotion in the contemplation of this volatile history. Seen from the vantage point of the royal historiography and theatrical tragedy of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Crown’s project of “governing passions” entailed significant changes in the ways in which the public’s emotional relationship to textual and theatrical representations of the troubled past – and the national past in general – was both represented and shaped.25 André de Nesmond’s 1600 parliamentary address, entitled “L’Amnestie, ou l’assoupissement des injures passées,” offers an extensive meditation on what was perceived to be at stake in the call to abolish the memory of “toutes choses passées d’une part et d’autre,” and will serve here to introduce the main lines of analysis pursued in

­6     Forgetting Differences this book.26 Nesmond – a student of François de Belleforest, a classmate of the Cardinal du Perron at Toulouse, a disciple of Jacques Cujas at Valence, and a frequent envoy of Henri IV during the Wars of Religion – was just twenty years younger than Michel de Montaigne, and was a president of the parliament of Bordeaux from 1591 until his death in 1616. A devoted but not fanatic Catholic, he reportedly bought up anti-Catholic tracts and donated them to the Jesuits to be refuted.27 He presented his remonstrance on the Edict of Nantes on behalf of Henri IV to the Chambre de l’Edit at Nérac. In Nesmond’s oration, the command to erase the memory of the past is not construed as a narrowly juridical act whose impact was largely restricted to legal proceedings. Over the course of a long speech that runs through multiple perspectives on memory and forgetting, Nesmond characterizes the faculty of memory in terms of broader cultural and philosophical traditions whose scope and influence far exceed the juridical domain.28 He subsequently calls upon a host of metaphors and analogies from a wide variety of sources in an attempt to articulate how oubliance is to be practiced, not only with respect to the public record, but also within the individual psyche and in society more generally. If there is one thing about which Nesmond is unequivocal, it is that the civil wars were memorable. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the parliamentarian observes that the memory of being wronged is especially tenacious, and to some degree trumps the naturally forgetful nature of Man (“De sorte que l’injure estant une fois imprimée, l’oubliance ne s’en persuade pas si facilement,” 75). He is thus led to reflect on the paradox that although forgetting seems to be the most natural and ordinary thing in the world, when it comes to injures and outrages the wax of our heart hardens with resentment, imprinting these things with anger’s fire and thereby rendering them firm and lasting [bien que l’oubliance des choses nous soit comme naturelle & ordinaire . . . en faict d’injures & outrages la cire de nostre coeur s’endurcit par le ressentiment, elles y sont empreintes avec le feu du courroux pour s’affermir & durer longuement (73)]. If these most memorable of experiences are to be the target of oubliance, a forgetful history of the wars written under its influence must somehow confront and come to terms with the traditional link between historiography and memorability, and, indeed, with the overwhelming cultural prestige of memory itself. While the potential desirability of forgetting is by no means completely ignored in the sources upon which Nesmond draws in his oration, memory is clearly the default prescription in the great majority of situations, the all-purpose remedy for the defects of the human condition. Nesmond observes that virtually all “anciens & graves auteurs” who have attempted to establish precepts

Learning to Forget     7

for leading a good and honorable life have included the act of remembering as a recurring “refrain,” necessary above all because humans forget so easily (84). Lucretius’s De rerum natura subsequently illustrates the refrain of the pedagogue admonishing his student not to not forget, while the advice of Varro and Columella that farmers keep records is for Nesmond an attempt to “banish oubliance, that plague upon our lives and the cause of our misfortunes” (84). These ancient exhortations not to forget include a citation from Book 2 of Virgil’s Georgics that urges the vintner to remember to let the ground dry out well before setting vines,29 as well as the stinging tail of Martial’s epigram to a cobbler that warns, “be advised, remember to confine yourself within your own natural skin.”30 Memory, it seems, is everywhere beneficial, in contexts ranging from the quotidian to the deeply consequential. Acknowledging that memory could even be considered salutary with respect to past misfortunes, Nesmond also considers the potential benefits of remembering the troubles of the previous decades. Citing the ancient Greek physician Aretaeus, he draws an analogy between those who suffer from epilepsy and his fellow Frenchmen who have suffered the ills of civil war: anyone who has seen something so hideous as an epileptic seizure or “la misere de nos troubles passez” would rather die than repeat the experience. The Stoic tradition is then invoked with a well-known quote from Seneca’s Hercules Furens, according to which misfortune, while hard to bear, is sweet to remember.31 Reframing his praise of memory in terms of a disparagement of oubliance, Nesmond takes a citation from Manlius (that Pierre Gassendi will later construe as exemplary of Horace’s carpe diem) as a grim warning to those who “s’oublient de vivre.”32 Subsequently turning again to Lucretius, he cites from the end of book six of the De rerum natura, which details the gruesome effects of the plague that devastated Athens during the Peloponnesian War. A kind of delirious oblivion is there figured as the repulsive effect of an illness, equally or perhaps more debilitating than losing a limb. Clearly not interested in pondering the Epicurean stance on death as (painless) oblivion, Nesmond wants to show how forgetting ever threatens to insinuate itself into the full range of human experience. This somewhat motley collection of citations adds depth and texture to the notion of a learned humanist “culture of memory” for which oubliance functioned primarily as an ever-present menace to happiness, piety, learning, and even survival. The extended presentation of the benefits – and indeed the necessity – of memory provides a sense of the rather inhospitable cultural terrain upon which the policy of oubliance was set, and helps us to appreciate the potential opacity of the term

­8     Forgetting Differences in 1600. Beyond providing ample evidence of the multiple and indeed potentially contradictory uses to which ancient citations were routinely put by humanist writers, Nesmond’s 1600 remonstrance reveals the depths of complexity that lie beneath any parliamentary citation of ancient precedents in his era.33 “De l’amnestie” is littered with quotations of ancient sources, mostly Latin and some Greek. The ancient source material is in and of itself richly polyvalent: Lucretius’s De rerum natura, for example, is difficult to categorize in terms of modern genres or disciplines; it shares space with the writings of Tacitus, whom we moderns can more or less identify as an historian, as well as with Sophocles, who was known primarily as a tragedian. Moreover, as is the case in Michel de Montaigne’s more famous Essais, the relationship between a given quotation and the material that surrounds it is often far from obvious.34 Ultimately, Nesmond’s citational technique occupies a cultural terrain somewhere in between the low road of the dilettante and the high ground of the exquisitely erudite scholar.35 Rather than offering a rigorous review of ancient ideas about the faculties of memory and forgetting, or trying to make an ideological point, he casts a diverse set of ancient reflections on a variety of subjects in terms of memory and forgetting.36 Functioning neither as vehicles of idealized exempla nor objects of painstaking philological inquiry, Nesmond’s quotations of the ancients are a form of what Friedrich Nietzsche, in his essay “On the use and abuse of history for life,” called a “usable past.”37 This approach to the ancient past has its counterpart in French national historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Informed by relatively sound critical historical scholarship (both in Nesmond’s time and in Nietzsche’s), the “usable” national past is not the same thing as the celebratory beaux récits of the Middle Ages, which were of course also nothing if not usable; nor is it the self-conscious pragmatism of Machiavelli.38 It has frequently been pointed out that coming to terms with the polyvalence of the heritage of antiquity was a more general problem of middle-aged Humanism: the more Renaissance Humanists learned about the ancient past, the less unified, exemplary, and timelessly valid it appeared.39 In the context of discussion of the Edict of Nantes, however, this problem acquired a more explicitly theoretical dimension, since the policy of oubliance necessarily implicated the broader question of the relationship between the past (or a past) and the present. Much of what is considered historiographical material from the sixteenth century is styled as an “histoire memorable” or as a “recueil des choses memorables” or as a set of “faits memorables”; both past events and the report of them are thus bound up in complex ways with that which is (to be) remembered.

Learning to Forget     9

The call for the erasure of memory necessarily entails the modulation of a historiographical enterprise construed as the “narration des actions & des choses dignes de memoire” (a definition of Histoire that, incredibly, remained unchanged in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française until its most recent edition40). Provoked by the challenge of reconciliation in the wake of the Wars of Religion, a new kind of historiographical rhetoric (if not a systematic theory) was needed as an alternative to both the discredited mythologizing of the poets, on the one hand, and the rigorous but endlessly proliferating and thus ultimately indigestible fruits of philological erudition, on the other, both of which founded their legitimacy on a claim to preserve memory.41 Despite its Montaignian assemblage of polyvalent and contradictory examples, Nesmond’s oration does give us some insight into what kind of historical memory was required in the age of oubliance. Although many of the ways in which he characterizes memory involve public memory, he ultimately makes a clear distinction between that which is remembered, on the one hand, and that which is enacted or expressed (whether orally or in writing), on the other. Citing Tacitus, Nesmond suggests that the Edict of Nantes aims to suppress both: nous sçavons qu’il est facheux de s’en taire, mais plus mal-aisé d’en perdre le souvenir avec la voix, Memoriam quoque ipsam cum voce perdidissemus si tam in nostram esset potestate OBLIVISCI quam tacere.42

The “souvenir” referred to here is clearly distinct from a legal proceeding, from the historical record, and even from oral exchange. It would certainly be going too far to suggest that a truly private memory is invoked here; nevertheless, both Tacitus and Nesmond implicate a kind of historical memory that can be divorced from writing. Though the line between individual and collective memory is neither clean nor precise in the period under consideration here, it is clear that in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France, the memory of the past (as contrasted to the memory work required by many rhetorical and pedagogical techniques) is first and foremost an affair of the larger group that is to remember (or forget).43 Thus, despite his recourse to the image of memory as a wax imprint on the individual heart, there are elements of Nesmond’s oration that suggest that the memory that the Edict of Nantes and its predecessors mean to erase is primarily public and collective. The fact that the edict was frequently read in public long after its initial promulgation, including at the session of the Parlement at which Nesmond delivered his address, gives us a sense of the performative dimensions of oubliance. The gesture of erasure that the edict solicited had to be publicly enacted and periodically renewed: “the reading of the

­10     Forgetting Differences edict charges us anew to seal our mourning about the wars in the tomb of eternal oblivion.”44 It was therefore repeatedly reiterated in public to all French subjects and even to the king himself that they should not remember but rather forget past offenses (72). “De l’amnestie” supports Olivier Christin’s contention that the royal policy of pacification was to be realized through the enforcement of legislation, and not through any serious attempt to reconcile religious differences.45 In fact, Nesmond fairly quickly arrives at an explicit statement of this same principle with respect to amnesty: citing Cicero’s critique of the Epicurean belief in our power to control what we remember, Nesmond concludes that philosophical precepts are not sufficient to induce the forgetting of the past. For this reason, a royal edict is necessary (75–6). It is clear that the ultimate aim of Nesmond’s speech is to encourage obedience to the king; nevertheless, his identification of royal legislation as the primary motor of oubliance still leaves open the question of how such a program was to be put into practice. Ultimately, the specific target and the precise mechanism of oubliance remain incredibly vague in Nesmond’s remonstrance on the subject, in large part because he offers such a multitude of possible interpretations. Nesmond’s forgetting is not limited to the narrow (if hazy) category of “offenses,” for example. Offering a summary statement of what the policy would entail early in the oration, the parliamentarian asserts that when it comes to sedition and civil war, the surest and best course of action is not to speak about them, keeping out of sight and out of earshot anything that could recall or refresh the memory of them (“en fait de seditions & guerres civilles . . . le plus assuré & le meilleur est de s’en taire, ostant de devant les yeux & autour des oreilles tout ce qui en peut rappeller & rafraichir la memoire”). The forgetting that Nesmond prescribes here is so vast that it is hard to get a sense of what it would entail, or what it might exclude. As Nesmond insists, it is a thorny matter indeed to distinguish between honorable and dishonorable actions in the thicket of war; it would be thornier still to attempt to pluck individual acts and events from the social and institutional ground in which they are rooted in order to specifiy precisely the extent of what is to be forgotten. One is left wondering just how such an all-encompassing erasure of the past could be accomplished in practice. How could this rhetoric of amnesia be translated into a course of action? Michel de Montaigne observed in the 1580s that there is nothing that imprints a thing so vividly on our memory as the desire to forget it. (Pierre Villey dates this passage from the “Apologie de Raymond Sebond” to the years 1576–78, after no less than four iterations of the exhortation to erase memories of the wars had been issued.) Montaigne’s

Learning to Forget     11

view on this particular matter seems only to have hardened as the wars continued. He is unusually categorical in his negative assessment of the human potential to erase painful memories and retain pleasurable ones. Anticipating Nesmond’s stance on the matter, Montaigne rejects Epicurus’s view of memory in favor of Cicero’s: Et cela est faux: Est situm in nobis, ut et adversa quasi perpetua oblivione obruamus, et secunda jucunde et suaviter meminerimus. Et cecy est vray: Memini etiam quae nolo, oblivisci non possum quae volo.46

Even if everyone agreed that suppressing the past was the right path (and of course, they did not), royal decree could not simply instantiate a having forgotten; it could offer only the paradoxical enunciation of a desire to forget. Students of nationalism are familiar with Ernest Renan’s insight in his famous 1882 speech “What is a Nation?,” according to which forgetting and even historical error are essential factors in the formation of a nation.47 Renan himself never really investigated the mechanisms by which a group forgets. By contrast, Nesmond is grappling with a particularly explicit attempt at communal forgetting, one that is in fact mentioned by Renan: “every French citizen,” Renan says by way of example, “is required to have forgotten the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres.”48 Whereas Renan’s nineteenth-century French citizens, in the present perfect, were to have already forgotten the events of 24 August 1572 (when Nesmond would have been nineteen years old), in the decades following the Wars of Religion, oubliance could not be cast as a fait accompli; rather, it was an ongoing process that required the elaboration of new ways of thinking about the past. Nesmond is not unaware of the logical tension inherent in the explicit call to perform a forgetting of the past; indeed, he acknowledges that his own remonstrance violates the proscription that it is intended to endorse, since it inevitably invokes the civil wars (89). Nesmond’s sensitivity to being seen as violating the terms of oubliance is an indication of just how far he believed the extinction of memory was supposed to extend, since his own references to civil war are frequently quite general and could hardly be considered inflammatory; it is difficult to see how they would lend themselves to a renewal of the conflicts. Yet even such delicate handling of the topic appears to fall under the purview of the edict’s call to abolish memories, a goal that Nesmond suggests can only be accomplished by removing from view anything and everything that could strike the senses and provoke memories, and by never speaking about the conflicts (“le plus asseuré moyen est d’oster de devant les yeux les objects qui peuvent frapper les sens & exciter la memoire & de n’en

­12     Forgetting Differences parler jamais,” 89). Given such statements about the need to radically limit public contact with virtually anything related to the troubles, how are we to grasp what can be said about the period of the wars? An example from late in the speech suggests that oubliance could in practice lead to a thoroughgoing disintegration of the polity. Citing Thucydides, Nesmond describes the effects of the plague we already saw in Lucretius, and expresses the desire that such dire effects befall the French: Ils se regardoient . . . sans se recognoistre, quoy qu’ils fussent parens, amis & alliez. Pleut à Dieu que la contagion & pestilence de nos troubles passez nous eust porté les mesmes effects, & que la memoire des mal-heurs se fust ensevelie en mesme tombeau d’oubliance. (96) They looked at one another . . . without recognizing each other, although they were relatives, friends and allies. Would that it had pleased God that the contagion and pestilence of our troubles had brought with it those same effects, and that the memory of our misfortunes had been sealed in the same tomb of oubliance.

The all-encompassing oblivion reported by Thucydides swallows up memories not only of past wrongs, but also of past bonds and alliances. As this example shows, forgetting everything – “tout,” as the edicts of pacification, and Nesmond, would have it – would threaten the community of Frenchmen as much as would dwelling on past conflicts. If the point is an obvious and even simple one, its practical consequences are many and complex. If the French no longer recognize the terrain of the past as collectively theirs, on what basis do they move forward as a polity?

(Re-)learning to Remember in the Age of Oubliance There is a moment at which the focus of “De l’amnestie” shifts away from the mere endorsement of oubliance and towards an engagement with an “art” of forgetting, one that of course requires a new art of memory. Although the re-reading of the Edict of Nantes on the occasion of Nesmond’s speech enjoins listeners to yet again seal away their mourning in the crypt of eternal oblivion, Nesmond grants himself permission to unlock the crypt’s doors and say just a few words in a low voice (“il nous sera loysible d’en ouvrir les portes & d’en toucher un mot à petit bruit,” 90). These hesitant whispers at oblivion’s gate provide a powerful image of the challenge of representing the national past in conciliatory terms.

Learning to Forget     13

Essentially evacuating the question of guilt or innocence as well as that of victory and defeat, Nesmond establishes an interpretation of postwar society that escapes the purview of many of the numerous theories of memory, forgetting, and reconciliation elaborated with respect to major conflicts of the twentieth century, which have tended to focus either on the traumatic memories of victims, or on the acknowledgement of the wrongs of the perpetrators.49 Citing Lucan, Nesmond defines civil conflict as war without enemies (bellumque sine hoste) and asserts that “il est miserable d’en sortir victorieux” (miserum est civili vincere bello, 76). Underlining the difficulty of fashioning a juridical response to civil conflict, he likens war to the dark of night, which “embrouille, confond & cache tellement les intentions de ceux qui la suyvent & pratiquent, qu’on ne sçauroient aisément distinguer les actes de passion & vangeance particulière d’avec les actes de simple hostilité” (81). It is not possible to discern which of the countless acts of violence committed over the course of the troubles should be considered criminal, and which are to be taken as instances of the normal conduct of war. Thus, oubliance cannot be assimilated to pardon; Nesmond explains that a pardon presupposes a more or less clearly defined offense, and posits an authority with the right to pardon that offense. He then points out that the edicts of pacification issued by Henri III and Henri IV expressly forgo the term, preferring instead those of oubliance and amnestie.50 Nesmond’s remonstrance thus renders problematic virtually any mode of reconciliation predicated on designating winners and losers (or, alternatively, perpetrators and victims). In contrast to those who would propose modes of reconciliation that seek first to settle scores, Nesmond not only insists on the futility of determining the legal and moral status of the acts undertaken by his fellow Frenchmen during the Wars of Religion; he also questions the utility of such an undertaking. Even if one could distinguish private vengeance from ordinary acts of war, this would not be “utile” since it would not lead the way to peace. By shifting his focus away from the identification and punishment of potentially guilty parties and toward the larger goal of peace, Nesmond again frames his justification of the edict’s legitimacy in terms of collective, rather than individual, justice.51 In order to explain how such justice could be carried out, Nesmond follows two lines of logic, predicated on basic principles of tragedy as it was understood in the period, that propose a moral symmetry among the actors involved.52 One of these lines concerns the monarchy. The king cannot be above the law of oubliance, since he would ultimately do great harm to his kingdom, and thus to himself, if he were to punish his people.53 Nesmond illustrates this principle with a citation of a poem by

­14     Forgetting Differences Seneca, in which a man embroiled in civil war, having discovered that he killed his brother, believes he has no choice but to kill himself in order to avenge his brother’s death (77). The citation serves to shift the metaphoric parameters of Nesmond’s vision of civil war, since the polity goes from being an armed body with the king as its head, to a set of warring factions bound by familial ties. In this framework, any act of violence raises the specter of self-harm via the tragic logic according to which one inevitably ends up destroying precisely what one seeks to preserve, and which turns out to be a part of oneself. Nesmond will go on to develop this vision of the polity in civil war by further extending a specifically tragic notion of common suffering. The prince has suffered as much as the people, and virtually all of the people have suffered equally.54 For this reason, Nesmond believes that the aftermath of the French Wars of Religion offers a (rare) situation in which the Stoic rhetoric of common suffering can in fact provide consolation. Explicitly linking the notion of the suffering endured by the French during the Wars of Religion to ancient tragedy by citing Sophocles, Nesmond initiates an extended meditation on the relationship between the civil wars and specifically tragic themes.55 Sophocles’s tragic framework appears to figure France’s troubles as a particular instance of a general phenomenon: everyone suffers some kind of misfortune. But Nesmond immediately sets this universalizing rhetoric into the more narrowly defined context of civil war, in which both parties suffer equally, and equally extremely. Ultimately, he refers specifically to France’s own civil wars: one of the signal qualities of “nos maux,” as Nesmond sees it, is that those responsible destroyed themselves in the process of destroying their enemies. This constitutes another specifically tragic motif: that of the tragic actor bringing about his own ruin. The next part of Nesmond’s remonstrance brings us into the realm of tragedy’s potential effects on an audience. Making a link to Plato’s rejection of Lydian and Phrygian musical modes because of their deleterious effect on listeners, he states that all memory of the wars must be banished from thought: à pareille & plus forte raison [il faut] bannir de la pensée tout le ressouvenir de nos troubles, qui ne peut exciter en l’ame que des affections tragiques, plaintives, cruelles & sanglantes, & exciter en nos coeurs l’affection de vangeance: & ce faisant, rompre derechef nos cicatrices & faire ouvrir nos playes . . . (87) for the same reason it is all the more necessary to banish from our thoughts all memories of our troubles, memories that can only provoke tragic, plain-

Learning to Forget     15 tive, cruel and bloody emotions, and move our hearts to vengeance, and in so doing, rip our scars and tear open our wounds . . .

Framing the potentially explosive effect of remembering the wars in terms of “tragic” emotions, Nesmond implies a mode of tragic spectatorship that entails active participation: even an exclusively mental representation of the troubles would inevitably lead to renewed violence and suffering. Extending this logic to theatrical tragedy, Nesmond cites the well-known example of the tragic poet Phrynichus, who was punished for having staged a play about the Persian sack of the Athenian colony of Miletus shortly after the event. As Herodotus recounts it: When Phrynicus produced his play The Capture of Miletus, the whole audience at the theater burst into tears and fined Phrynicus a thousand drachmas for reminding them of a calamity that was their very own; they also forbade any future production of the play.56

We can see here the possible stakes of effacing memories of the wars for tragic dramatists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: the civil wars were clearly framed as paradigmatically “tragic,” and yet, at the same time, the policy of oubliance would seem to forbid employing them as the subject of a theatrical tragedy. Just as the most memorable of recent events appeared to be off limits to historiography, the most tragic experiences of the French collectivity seemed to be forbidden on the tragic stage. Nesmond explains that the Kings of France who endorsed oubliance had sought not merely to embrace clemency and mercy, but to “further imprint and engrave upon the heart of their subjects that amnesty and oubliance of things past” (“empreindre plus avant & graver au coeur de leurs sujets cette AMNESTIE & oubliance des choses passes,” 72). The image of amnesty becoming engraved on the heart is of course a metaphor, but like most metaphors, it reveals something substantial about the way in which the policy of oubliance was imagined. Taking oubliance to heart, Nesmond’s rhetoric suggests, would entail something other than simply keeping the troubles out of the law courts, absent from history books, or off the theatrical stage; it would require a reorientation of French “affections tragiques.” In what follows, I highlight ways in which the royal policy of oubliance, consolidated with respect to the sixteenth-century French Wars of Religion, shaped representations of French national history in both historiography and tragedy into the seventeenth century, eventually leading to a reformulation of the way in which the matter of history (whether treated scientifically or poetically) should “move” its audience. In order to establish that the policy of oubliance posed a profound and

­16     Forgetting Differences virtually unprecedented rhetorical problem for the writing of national history, the next chapter offers an analysis of royal edicts of pardon and pacification in terms of their relation to theological debates about royal pardon in the wake of the Reformation. The initial turn to oubliance, I argue, was provoked by a loss of faith in royal authority; at the same time, the policy made it difficult to rhetorically rebuild that authority by means of a historiographical discourse founded on memorability. This in turn had consequences for the way in which the “history” of Henri IV could be recounted, and for the kind of historiography that would be exploited to buttress royal authority. As a strategy for reconciliation, oubliance is first and foremost a matter of reception; my subsequent discussion of historiographical techniques in Chapter 3 therefore focuses on the effect such techniques sought to have on readers, rather than on the relationship between historiographical representation and reality. The texts studied here do not shy away from controversial events; what is of interest, however, is not so much what they include or leave out, but how they frame the very enterprise of writing a history of the Wars of Religion. I consider historiographical texts in both verse and prose that incorporate the civil troubles into their representation of the French past, paying special attention to the relationship between memory and history that they posit, as well as to the rhetorical techniques for representing the past that they either endorse or employ. On the whole, these techniques are designed to create distance between readers and their own recent past, making of them spectators to rather than participants in history. To this end, conciliatory historians of the immediate postwar period, appropriating the stance of the critical historiographer, explicitly disavow passion. At the same time, however, they employ a wide range of affective terms associated with tragedy and the tragic in their representations of the French civil wars, and ultimately solicit an emotional response to their account of the troubles. Chapter 4 pursues the analysis of the precise type of emotional response that this historiographical rhetoric of tragedy aimed to elicit. The war historians’ hesitancy to move readers to action, even while moving them to tears, shifts the weight of the Ciceronian movere away from the aim of producing a passionately motivated social and political engagement, and towards an affective state that is meant to inhibit this very kind of activity. The goal of reconciliation was thus furthered by the elaboration of an increasingly passive, though highly “emotional,” form of spectatorship. This chapter traces the evolution of conceptions of audience response in the theory and practice of theatrical tragedy that addressed the Wars of Religion from the beginning of the conflicts

Learning to Forget     17

on through to the end of the sixteenth century. Seen in relation to royal efforts to extinguish memories of the civil wars, what in hindsight might look like an increasing interest in aesthetic response appears as a profoundly political transformation of the reception of history. Chapter 5 examines the consolidation in French tragedy of the early seventeenth century of what Thomas Pavel has described as an “art of distancing” (“art de l’éloignement”) characteristic of French neoclassicism. By relating developments in the theory and practice of theatrical tragedy to the specific concerns of oubliance, this chapter aims to shed new light on the emergence of the neoclassical aesthetic and thereby to re-evaluate both its aims and its potential. I believe that the conciliatory posture encouraged by the exhortation to extinguish memories of the wars, buttressed by rhetorical supports intended to provoke a reorientation of French emotions about the national past, leaned ever further away from a Renaissance Humanist penchant for exploiting pathos in the service of political action, and towards a neoclassical aesthetics and an absolutist politics for which emotion frequently functioned as an alternative to political action. By seeking to unify the French polity around a set of shared emotions, the imperative to forget the violently divisive differences of the period of the Wars of Religion paved the way for the more thoroughgoing forgetting of difference that grounded the absolutist ideology of cultural uniformity.

Notes   1. Carpentier, L. J. M., Le Gradus Français, ou dictionnaire de la langue poétique (Paris: A. Johanneau, 1825), s. l, p. 853.   2. Unless stated otherwise, all translations from the French are mine. A scholarly presentation of the French edicts of pacification, including the Edict of Nantes, cited here, and that of Amboise, cited next, is available at http:// elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/editsdepacification/ (last accessed 17 December 2014).   3. I discuss the evolution of this language in the edicts of pacification in more depth in Chapter 2.   4. Nancy Lyman Roelker’s classic study One King, One Faith (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996) is a fine overview of the competing points of view. Michel De Waele’s work, in particular his recent Réconcilier les Français. Henri IV et la fin des troubles de religion, 1589–1598 (Québec: Presses de l’Université de Laval, 2010) emphasizes the multiple constraints that shaped royal responses to the conflicts in the period leading up to the edict’s promulgation.   5. See, among the book-length studies, Janine Garrisson’s L’Édit de Nantes (Paris: Fayard, 1998); Bernard Cottret’s 1598, L’Édit de Nantes (Paris: Perrin, 1997); Michael Wolfe’s The Conversion of Henri IV (Cambridge,

­18     Forgetting Differences MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); as well as the work of N. M. Sutherland and Robert Kingdon on the religious wars in France and their aftermath.   6. This last question is the subject of Diane Margolf’s recent study, Religion and Royal Justice in Early Modern France: The Paris Chambre de l’Edit, 1598–1665 (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2003). Jérémie Foa is keen to make a strong distinction between “the history of peace” as it was practiced in the provinces and “the history of theories of peace” that tend to center on the state. Foa, Jérémie, “Making peace: The commissions for enforcing the pacification edicts in the reign of Charles IX (1560–1574),” French History, 18 (2004), pp. 256–74, (258). This is the view of Olivier Christin, who writes that “many of the published works that historians of ideas consider decisive in bringing the Wars of Religion to an end merely worked out a theory from what other people were actually doing.” “Peace must come from us” (Ruth Whelan and Carol Baxter (eds), Toleration and Religious Identity. The Edict of Nantes and its Implications in France, Britain and Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), pp. 92–103), (101). For a more sweeping overview of the pragmatics of peaceful coexistence despite confessional difference in the early modern period, see Kaplan, Benjamin J., Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).   7. I have in mind in particular the following works: Christin Olivier, La paix de religion: l’autonomisation de la raison politique au XVIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1997); De Waele, Michel, Réconcilier les Français: la fin des guerres de religion 1589–1598 (Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010); Diefendorf, Barbara, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Foa, Jérémie, Le Tour de la paix. Missions et commissions d’application des édits de pacification sous le règne de Charles IX (1560–1574) (unpublished doctoral thesis, Université Lumière Lyon 2, 2008); Hanlon, Gregory, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Luria, Keith P., Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in EarlyModern France (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005); Margolf, Religion and Royal Justice; and Roberts, Penny, Peace and Authority During the French Religious Wars, c. 1560–1600 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). I shall, however, have several occasions to cite the work of Philip Benedict, some of whose areas of research overlap with mine here. Though I do consider some of the texts analyzed by Orest Ranum in his classic study Artisans of Glory, my point of departure, methodological framework, and conclusions are very different from his (Artisans of Glory. Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth-Century France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980)).   8. Greengrass, Mark, “Europe’s wars of religion and their legacies,” in John Wolffe (ed.), Protestant-Catholic Conflict from the Reformation to the Twenty-first Century. The Dynamics of Religious Difference (Palgrave Macmillan: Houndmills, 2013), pp. 22–45.  9. The incredibly valuable recent collection on La Mémoire des guerres de

Learning to Forget     19 religion. La Concurrence des genres historiques (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Jacques Berthold and Marie-Madeleine Fragonard (eds), (Geneva: Droz, 2007)) contains an essay on royal historiography and an essay on tragedy, both of which I will have occasion to refer to in subsequent chapters. Michel De Waele touches on historiography in “Les Mémoires de l’immoralité. De la ‘mort d’État’ à l’époque des Guerres de religion,” Tangence, 66 (2001), pp. 9–21, focusing in particular on Pierre Matthieu and Jacques de Thou. 10. Flower, Harriet, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 2; Assmann, Jan, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 14. 11. Weinrich, Harald, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (German original 1997), trans Steven Rendall (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2004), esp. pp. 9–38. Weinrich’s panoramic history of ideas includes a few pages on Michel de Montaigne that identify him as the first Western writer to propose that “knowing by heart is not knowing” (43), but does not otherwise address France in the period under examination here. For reflections on Montaigne’s views on memory and forgetting as they relate to France’s civil wars, see my “Montaigne and the ethics of memory,” L’Esprit Créateur, 46:1 (Spring 2006), pp. 23–31. 12. “chanter, louer et se souvenir sont constamment associés, donnés comme équivalents.” Dauvois, Nathalie, Mnémosyne (Paris: Champion, 1992), pp. 9–10. 13. For a fuller treatment of Ronsard’s poetics of memory in relation to the policy of oubliance, see my “Les Discours de Pierre de Ronsard: une poétique de l’oubli?,” Tangences, 87 (2008), pp. 47–61. 14. In a fine complement to the present study, Nicolas Russell examines transformations of and challenges to traditional discourses on the human faculty of memory in sixteenth-century France, arguing that the invention of the printing press and the early stages of the scientific revolution, among other circumstances, made memory less important in intellectual endeavors, leading some to question the reliability and stability of memory. Transformations of Memory and Forgetting in Sixteenth-Century France: Marguerite de Navarre, Pierre de Ronsard, Michel de Montaigne (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2011). 15. “le nom desquels il seroit une ingratitude execrable, si on taschoit de l’enclorre au tombeau caligineux de quelque secrette oubliance.” Belleforest, François, Les Grandes Annales et histoire générale de France, dès la venue des Francs en Gaule jusques au règne du roy très-chrestien Henry III (Paris: G. Buon, 1579), p. 1156r. 16. De Boufflers, Adrien, Chois de plusieurs histoires et autres choses mémorables (Paris: Pierre Mettayer, 1608). 17. Théveneau, Adam, Les Morales de M. A. Theveneau, advocat en parlement. Où est traité de l’institution du jeune prince, des vertus qui luy sont requises quand il est prince et quand il est roy . . . avec un discours de la vanité du siècle d’aujourd’huy (Paris: Toussaint Du Bray, 1607), p. 111. 18. Loraux, Nicole, “La Guerre Civile grecque et la représentation

­20     Forgetting Differences a­ nthropologique du monde à l’envers,” Revue de l’histoire des religions, 212:3 (1995), pp. 299–326, (303). 19. “Le sang contre le sang, Enfans contre le Pere, Femme contre l’Epoux, Frere contre le Frere.” La Taille, Jean de, Remonstrance pour le roy, a tous ses subjects qui ont pris les armes (Paris: Frédéric Morel, 1563). Across several books and articles, Frank Lestringant has studied the general theme of Man’s cruelty to Man, and the motif of cannibalism in particular, in writings on the French Wars of Religion. See his editions of the Tragiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1995) and of Verstegan, Richard, Théâtre des cruautés des hérétiques de notre temps ([Antwerp, 1587] Paris: Éditions Chandeigne, 1995), as well as Le Cannibale, grandeur et décadence (Paris: Perrin, 1994); L’Expérience huguenote au nouveau monde (Geneva: Droz, 1996); and Une sainte horreur ou le voyage en Eucharistie (Paris: Paris University Press, 1996). 20. Ronsard, Pierre de, Discours des misères de ce temps (Paris: Gabriel Buon, 1562), ll. 167–9. The Discours was frequently reprinted from 1562 to 1572, either in separate editions or in the collected works (where it first appeared in 1567). 21. “Morte est l’autorité; chacun vit en sa guise; /Au vice déréglé la licence est permise; /Le désir, l’avarice et l’erreur insensé /Ont sens dessus-dessous le monde renversé.” Ronsard, Discours des misères de ce temps, pp. 175–8. 22. “Le sage justicier est traisné au supplice /Le mal faicteur luy faict son procès; l’injustice /Est principe de droict; comme au monde à l’envers.” This is from Misères, the first book of Agrippa d’Aubigné, Les Tragiques, (Maillé: Jean Moussat, 1616), ll. 233–5. The passage contains several other images of social inversion during the wars. 23. Beloy, Pierre, Conference des edicts de pacification des troubles esmeus au Royaume de France, pour le faict de la religion [. . .] (Paris: Pierre L’Huillier et Jamet Mettayer, 1600). 24. Benedict, Phillip, “Shaping the memory of the French Wars of Religion: The first centuries,” in J. Pollmann and Erika Kuijpers (eds), Memory Before Modernity (Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 111–25, (121). 25. The reference is to Mark Greengrass’s book about the reign of Henri III, Governing Passions: Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576–1585 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 26. Nesmond, André de, “L’Amnestie, ou l’assoupissement des injures passées. Remonstrance faicte en la chambre de l’edict à l’establissement d’icelle en la ville de Nérac l’an MDC,” Remontrances, ouvertures de palais et arrestz prononcés en robes rouges (Poitiers: Antoine Mesnier, 1617), pp. 70–110. 27. I have drawn this biographical information from the oraison funèbre delivered by the notoriously less temperate Père François Garasse and published in Nesmond, Remontrances, pp. 1–26. 28. A useful overview of prominent Western concepts of how memory functions can be found in the anthology by Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead (eds), Theories of Memory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). For the medieval period in Western Europe, see Carruthers, Mary, The Book of Memory, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [1990]). Frances Yates’s classic 1966 The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) is essentially

Learning to Forget     21 a study of Renaissance permutations of the rhetorical art of information storage and retrieval in the service of (occult) knowledge. For an excellent overview of the forms and uses of (especially political and social) memory in Western Europe in the Early Modern period, see Judith Pollmann and Erika Kuijpers’s introduction to Memory before Modernity. Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller and Jasper van der Steen (eds), Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 1–23. 29. “His animadversis terram multo ante MEMENTO/Excoquere” (Georgics, ll. 259–60; Nesmond’s emphasis). 30. Nesmond cites Epigram XVI from Book Three: “sed te, mihi crede, memento/nunc in pellicula, Cerdo, tenere tua.” English available at http:// www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/martial_epigrams_00eintro.htm (last accesssed 17 December 2014). 31. “Quod fuit durum pati /Memnisse dulce est” (ll. 656–7). The context is Amphytrion’s attempt to overcome Theseus’s resistance to recounting what the latter saw on his journey to the Underworld with Hercules. 32. The passage from Manlius is “victuros agimus semper nec vivimus umquam” (De astronomica IV.5); François Bernier translates Gassendi’s Latin gloss as “nous travaillons toujours pour vivre, & nous ne vivons jamais” – forgetting is simply not part of his equation. “De la félicité,” François Bernier, Abrégé de la philosophie de Mr. Gassendi, 8 vols (Lyon, 1678), vol. I, p. 44. Nesmond’s remonstrance includes another “epicurean” passage from Martial: “Non est crede mihi sapientia dicere vivam, /Sera nimis vita est crastina; vive hodie” (Nesmond, p. 85; Martial, Epigrams bk I, 15). 33. For an exhaustive guide to French parliamentary rhetoric in the period, see Marc Fumaroli’s L’Âge de l’éloquence: rhétorique et « res literaria » de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz, 1980). 34. There have been many studies of Montaigne’s citational practice. Since the point of departure of the majority of them is that his style is sui generis, however, such studies rarely undertake sustained comparisons with other writers of the period, and their framework is not particularly helpful for interpreting how citation works in texts like Nesmond’s, which appears to be quite removed from debates about authorship and intellectual property. Similarly, applying postructuralist insights into the philosophical implications of citation as the very paradigm of Derridean dissémination would oblige one to position the polysemy of Nesmond’s citations as simply another instance of a general rule, rather than as indicative of the concerns of a particular historical moment. 35. This is a somewhat different (and far cruder) map than those proposed by Terence Cave, Thomas Greene, or Antoine Compagnon, all of whom assume that the person doing the citing has a scholar’s knowledge of the source text. Cave, Terence, “Thinking with Commonplaces: The Example of Rabelais,” in Neil Kenny and Wes Williams (eds), Retrospectives: Essays in Literature, Poetics and Cultural History (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), pp. 38–49; Greene, Thomas, The Light in Troy. Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982); Compagnon, Antoine, La seconde main ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979).

­22     Forgetting Differences 36. This is not the same thing as turning a philological critic’s eye on the classical material in order to enlist it as evidence. The relation between the material cited and the effect sought (which I take here to be reconciliation, not merely obedience to the king) is far more oblique in Nesmond’s parliamentary speech than it is in a work like Jean Bodin’s Methodus. For a discussion of the use of historical evidence in this period as it relates more explicitly to political science, see Soll, Jacob, “Empirical history and the transformation of political criticism in France from Bodin to Bayle,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 64:2 (April 2003), pp. 297–316. 37. First published in German in 1874, Nietzsche’s essay can be consulted in English in Nietzsche, Friedrich, Untimely Meditations, Daniel Breazeale (ed.), trans R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Donald Kelley also enlists this term in his discussion of sixteenth-century French historiography in Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). See Chapter 3. 38. On medieval French historiography, see especially Spiegel, Gabrielle, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). On Machiavelli’s uses of the past, see Pocock, John Greville Agard, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) and Hampton, Timothy, Writing from History. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990), ch. 2. 39. In addition to Hampton, Writing from History, see Lyons, John, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), as well as the earlier work of Karlheinz Stierle. An excellent mise au point of scholarship on the “crisis” of exemplarity in the Renaissance is François Cornilliat, “Exemplarities: A response to Timothy Hampton and Karlheinz Stierle,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 59:4 (1998), pp. 613–24. More recently, on the larger theme of historia magistra vitae, see Schiffmann, Zachary, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 40. The first (1694), 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th (1932–5) editions are available through the University of Chicago at https://artflproject.uchicago.edu/ content/dictionnaires-dautrefois (last accessed 17 December 2014). The definition in the ninth edition (in progress) still contains the phrase, but leads off with “Relation, connaissance des faits relatifs au passé des sociétés humaines; suite, ensemble de ces faits.” Available at http://atilf.atilf.fr/ Dendien/scripts/generic/showps.exe?p=main.txt;host=interface_academie9. txt;java=no; (last accessed 17 December 2014). 41. The latter circumstance has received a wonderful analysis in Ann M. Blair’s Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), which although broad in scope pays special attention to the sixteenth century in Europe. Schiffman’s analyses of Bodin in The Birth of the Past also address this issue. 42. “We know that it is difficult not to speak about [the wars], and even more challenging to lose our memory along with our voice. We should

Learning to Forget     23 have lost memory as well as voice, had it been as easy to forget as to keep silence” (Tacitus, Cornelius, Agricola, trans Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (London: Macmillan, 1877), p. 81). Available at (last accessed 17 December 2014). 43. See Russell, Nicolas, “Collective memory before and after Halbwachs,” French Review, 79:4 (2006), pp. 792–804. Paul Ricoeur addresses the relationship between individual and collective memory from Aristotle to Halbwachs in Memory, History, Forgetting (trans Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 96–132). Despite their contrasting views on the precise relationship between individual and collective memory, both Halbwachs and Ricoeur recognize the power of the group to influence and sustain memories in the individual. 44. “par la lecture qui se faict de l’Edict nous sommes chargez de nouveau d’ensevelir le deuil de nos miseres au cercüeil eternel de l’oubliance” (90). 45. Christin, Olivier “From repression to pacification. French royal policy in the face of Protestantism,” in Philip Benedict, Guido Marnel, Henk van Nierop and Marc Venard (eds), Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands, 1555–1585 (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1999), pp. 201–14. 46. Villey, Pierre (ed.), Les Essais de Montaigne [1924] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), pp. 494–5). Both Latin citations are from Book I of Cicero’s De finibus. “And this is false: It is in our power to bury our adversities in perpetual oblivion, and to remember our prosperities with pleasure and delight. And this is true: I remember even what I would not; I cannot forget what I would,” Montaigne, Michel de, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans Donald Frame (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1958), p. 365. 47. Renan, Ernest, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1882), p. 7. For an analysis of Renan’s more or less subconscious, “everyday” nationalism, see Billig, Michael, Banal Nationalism (New York: Sage Publications, 1995). Benedict Anderson comments on the paradox of Renan’s formulation, which seems to assume (not to mention incite) memory of the very thing he claims his readers should have forgotten. See Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 199–205. 48. “tout citoyen français doit avoir oublié la Saint-Barthélemy”; Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?, p. 9. 49. The paradigm for the first type is of course the memory of the Holocaust and World War II more generally, on which the literature is vast. Aleida Assmann offers a helpful summary of the various positions that this view allows for in “Die Last der Vergangenheit,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/ Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Ausgabe, 4 (2007), H. 3. See also Assmann’s full-length books, especially Der Lange Schatten der Vergangenheit – Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: Beck, 2006). Susan Rubin Suleiman addresses the specifically French memory of the war in Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). A more recent development in this domain

­24     Forgetting Differences is reflections on second-generation “postmemory,” examined in, among others, Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory in Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller (eds), (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); and Aleida Assmann and Geoffrey Hartman, Die Zukunft der Erinnerung und der Holocaust (Constance: Konstanz University Press, 2012). Whereas this first paradigm tends to focus on memory at the expense of reconciliation, the second paradigm, probably best exemplified for a Western audience by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (established in 1995), reverses that hierarchy, whilst maintaining the fundamental distinction between perpetrators and victims that Nesmond calls into question with respect to oubliance. On South Africa (on which the literature is also vast), see Desmond Tutu’s fundamental No Future Without Forgiveness (New York, London, Toronto: Doubleday, 1999) as well as the various perspectives in the recent collection Negotiating the Past. The Making of Memory in South Africa (Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee (eds), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Such commissions were subsequently established in a number of countries; for reflections on this phenomenon in the Latin American context, see the collection La Mémoire et le pardon. Les Commissions de la vérité et de la réconciliation en Amérique latine (Arnaud Martin (ed.), Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009). 50. “Ainsi nos Roys laissans en leurs Edicts le mot de PARDON, qui presuppose de l’offense, & se ravalans presque au pair avec leurs sujets ont debonnairement usurpé le mot D’OUBLIANCE, & AMNESTIE” (77). Neither is oubliance the same thing as tolerance. Indeed, nowhere in his lengthy remonstrance does he so much as mention religious difference, much less make pronouncements about the status of the “religion prétendue réformée.” In “Pourquoi l’édit de Nantes a-t-il réussi?” (Grandjean, Michel and Bernard Roussel (eds), Coexister dans l’intolérance. L’Édit de Nantes (1598) (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1998), pp. 447–61) Bernard Cottret gives a useful summary of French historiographical scholarship on the edict. He points out that one of the explicit goals of the edict was to restore the preeminence of the Catholic religion in France, and that its reputation as an edict of “tolerance” was a product of 3rd republic historiography. Though twentieth-century French historians such as Francis Garrisson, Roland Mousnier, and Janine Garrisson unequivocally rejected the notion that the Edict of Nantes granted religious freedom to the Huguenots, French politicians, as Cottret points out, still cite it as a watershed moment for the history of modern religious tolerance (e.g., Mittérand in 1985). 51. “Il est force . . . de faire injustice és petites choses, à qui veut venir à chef de faire justice és grandes, & de faire tort en détail qui veut faire droit en gros & en commun” (82). Nesmond explicitly attributes this principle to Jason of Thessaly (probably referring to a mention of Jason in Aristotle’s Rhetoric (at 1373a)). When he hastens to add that the tyrant of Pherae spoke “bien sur autre propos,” it is clear that one of the lurking charges that the parliamentarian must fend off in his defense of the edict is that of the arrogation of excessive power on the part of the king (82). 52. This is obviously in stark contrast to polemical works, abundant in the

Learning to Forget     25 second half of the sixteenth century and by no means absent in the early seventeenth, that do not hesitate to assign the roles of perpetrator and victim (and which give rise to very different forms of tragic theater). The most obvious example would be the continually expanding Protestant martyrology compiled by Jean Crespin and Simon Goulart, which went through five editions between 1554 and 1619, and the Catholic “antimartyrologies” that countered it (such as Florimond de Raemond’s notorious Histoire de la naissance, progrez, et décadence de l’hérésie en ce siècle (Paris: Guillaume de la Noue, 1605); the Jesuit Garasse’s Rabelais réformé par les ministres (Brussels: Christophe Girard, 1619); and Jacques Severt’s Antimartyrologe (Lyon: Simon Rigaud, 1622)). For a fuller discussion of the “martyrologics” of Crespin, see Lestringant, Frank, Lumière des martyrs. Essai sur le martyre au siècle des Réformes (Paris: Champion, 2004). 53. “si les Roys se deliberoient de prendre vengeance de leurs sujets, bien tost ils n’auroient plus à qui pouvoir commander” (77). See Chapter 2 for a fuller discussion of royal punishment, as well as pardon, with respect to the edicts of pacification issued during the wars. 54. “Outre l’exemple du Prince & que les injures sont communes avec luy, qui est un puissant motif pour l’oubliance, elles sont encores communes avec tant de gens, qu’on peut vrayement usurper pour la consolation d’un chascun [Cicero’s dictum non tibi hoc soli]” (80). 55. “Sophocles disoit que toutes les afflictions, courvées, accidens & mal-heurs qui nous arrivent sont un joug que la nature attache indifféremment sur le col de tous les hommes & que jamais personne n’endure tout seul” (80). 56. Herodotus, Histories, trans David Grene (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), bk 6, sect. 21, pp. 416–17.

Chapter 2

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance

In his exhaustive study of an “event without a history,” as he calls it, Denis Crouzet sets the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in the context of French Renaissance dreams of community.1 According to Crouzet, at the time of the massacre, the French king, Charles IX, was at the center of several competing visions of French concord. The most dramatic of these visions imagined the king as the agent of divine justice in its Old Testament form: a series of writers advocated the use of violence to rid France of heresy and thus reunite the French. Others, most notably the chancelier Michel de l’Hôpital, advocated tolerance. Crouzet shows how l’Hôpital’s dreams of reconciliation resonated with a broader neoplatonic and neopythagorist vision of the king (and queen) as the agents not of divine retribution, but of universal harmony.2 Though I hesitate to reduce Crouzet’s lengthy presentation any more than I already have, I nonetheless think we can usefully schematize the sixteenth-century responses to the Huguenot question he presents in terms of the old dichotomy of violence vs persuasion. Taken to its logical conclusion, the violent response to heresy would have involved the putting to death of every last heretic. However, the telos of the persuasive approach to religious discord – the dissolution of meaningful religious differences that Catherine de Medicis sought – is not all that different, since it does not grant Protestants the possibility to continue to exist as Protestants. (Theodore de Bèze recognized this immediately at the Colloque de Poissy in 1561.) Thus, both responses to the Huguenot question ultimately aim toward the elimination of the Huguenot community as such. Rather than adopting Crouzet’s alternatives of violence or persuasion, I shall here examine another privileged discourse of reconciliation in sixteenth-century France that sets a rhetoric of vengeance or pardon, on the one hand, against a rhetoric of oubliance, on the other. A close examination of the royal edicts of pardon and pacification issued during

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     27

the Wars of Religion shows that over the course of the civil wars, under pressure from a primarily theological critique, the French sovereign’s right to pardon gradually lost its effectiveness as a political strategy. In legislation on the civil wars, and in polemical literature of the period, the image of the king thus evolves from that of an agent of clemency and pardon (or, alternatively, of revenge and justice), who is both legitimized by and caught up in a personal, political, and historical past, to that of an agent of amnesty, whose gesture of forgetting embodies both a turning away from the past and a wager on the future. This profound reorientation of the rhetoric of political reconciliation will necessitate a reframing of the relationship between the French past and its present that becomes especially visible in verbal portraits of Henri IV after his accession to the throne.

Vengeance and Pardon In the earliest sixteenth-century precedents to Nantes, the thirst for vengeance that underpinned what Denis Crouzet terms the rhetoric of “Old Testament violence” was not contrasted with a desire for peace and love among warring factions, but rather with the ideal of royal clemency (termed interchangeably “clémence,” “grâce,” or “pardon” in the texts in question). We might thus usefully oppose the “Old Testament” method of dealing with the Huguenots not to a Platonic vision of unity, but to a New Testament vision of a forgiving God. One thing I would like to draw attention to here, though, is the fact that while the clement New Testament God may forgive – he may bestow grace and grant pardon – he is never represented as forgetting in any positive sense.3 Indeed, forgetting God or being forgotten by God is understood by both Jews and Christians of all confessions to be the worst thing that could possibly befall someone. Consequently, we must distinguish the notions of clemency and pardon that we do indeed see in the legislation of the 1550s and 1560s from that of the oubliance that is the main concern of this book. According to Jean Bodin, punishment is the province of the law and pardon is that of the sovereign.4 The right of grace is the fifth and last of what Bodin calls the “marks of sovereignty” in his 1576 Six livres de la république. Bodin specifies that this right cannot be delegated; it is an exclusive right of the king. As the Catholic lawyer Jean Papon had already noted in 1568, “only the King has the right to remit crimes, and to grant grace and pardon.”5 (This is more or less a direct statement of the juridical practice of the time, as Cotgrave’s dictionary suggests.) The

­28     Forgetting Differences French sovereign’s right of grace is, of course, intimately bound up with his status as “roy tres chrestien” and head of the Gallican church. As Alain Tallon notes, however, in the sixteenth century, “the late medieval ‘very Christian king’ who lent his body to a monarchy willed by God was replaced by an ‘eldest son of the Church’ modeled on the affective personal relation between the Son and the Father.”6 The eldest son of the church enjoys a privileged link to its Father, serving as a Christ figure, and thus as a mediator between the French people and God. According to such a view of the sovereign, royal pardon is analogous to divine pardon. This analogy is perfectly coherent with the Catholic doctrine of the keys, which grants to God’s representatives on earth the power to open the door to eternal salvation through the granting of ritual absolution, or to lock it closed to those whom they determine are unworthy. Such an analogy clearly lends an extra-juridical force to the judicial institution of royal pardon. As Natalie Zemon Davis’s classic book on pardon tales explains, royal grace was instantiated via a series of wellregulated public acts that culminated in a juridical document, the lettre de remission.7 Nonetheless, given the quasi-divine status of the king, such a pardon was understood to have resonances beyond the juridical realm – just as, according to Catholic doctrine, the granting of absolution by an ordained priest following confession was believed to mediate a forgiveness whose efficacy extended far beyond the institutional context of the church. As Davis observed in passing, during the Wars of Religion Calvinists “mounted a critique of pardons that started with the supplicant’s soul and ended with the practice of the state” (60). I would like to develop this observation here, because I believe that the evolution of the discourse of royal pardon is central to the evolution of royal rhetoric about the civil conflicts in sixteenth-century France. François II issued two blanket pardons of Protestants in the years just before the 1562 massacre at Vassy, an event traditionally taken to mark the beginning of the Wars of Religion in France.8 In the first, the 1559 Edict du Roy, contenant la grace et pardon pour ceux qui par cy devant ont mal senty de la Foy, the King claims that many of the people who have gotten involved in Protestant activities were probably too theologically naive to know what they were doing, thereby exculpating potential “heretics” without excusing what the Crown saw as their religious deviance.9 More importantly, however, François acknowledges that there are by this time so many people implicated in heretical activities in ways large and small that it would be impossible to punish them individually, as would be required by law, without destroying France. In order to deal with a situation that he admits is beginning to exceed the regulatory capabilities of juridical institutions, he will exercise royal

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     29

clemency, and with the edict grants “pardon, remission et abolition generale de tout le passé.” François’s gesture of pardon is here figured as above and beyond the law, since he says outright that he is not enforcing “noz ordonnances.” Pardon appears here not merely as the king’s privilege or his right; it is quite obviously a strategy to which he feels he must take recourse in light of the law’s inability to police “heretical” behavior. Moreover, it is given on the express condition that those who have dabbled in Protestantism return to the Catholic fold. A second such blanket pardon, after the 1560 conspiracy of Amboise, makes the quid pro quo more explicit. It grants “pardon, remission & absolution generalle . . . pour tout le passé des crimes & cas concernants le faict de la Foy & religion.”10 The edict describes Protestant armed troops headed for Paris to make a declaration of their faith to the king, an undertaking he calls “une voye scandaleuse . . . une damnable voye” and announces his intention to “punish those who obstinately persist in such evil and scandalous undertakings, and punish them according to the full rigor and severity of the law” (“chastier ceux qui obstinément demeureront en telles meschantes & scandaleuses entreprises, & les punir selon la rigueur & severité de la loy”). The punishment, we read further on in the edict, is death by hanging and strangling on the spot, without any legal proceedings. Protestants who abandon the “scandalous enterprise” and go home peacefully, by contrast, will be treated with “compassion” and “misericorde.” François’s pardon is thus positioned as a lever to induce change in the behavior of the Protestants. The pardon will be witheld – indeed, transformed into the worst of ­punishments – if the Protestants do not heed the conditions specified in the edict. It is overwhelmingly obvious that François is using the discourse of royal pardon as a political tactic here, his self-proclaimed compassion and miséricorde notwithstanding. The political potency of royal pardon as it is framed here is predicated on the model of economic exchange provided by Catholic doctrines of penitence and absolution, doctrines that had been under severe criticism in the wake of the Reformation. As is well known, the two central points of contention between the Catholic and Protestant factions in the sixteenth century were the nature of the Eucharist and the mechanism of justification.11 Luther’s “Ninety-five Theses” dealt almost exclusively with the latter, offering a scathing critique of indulgences, and proposing that the sinner obtains God’s mercy by faith alone. Luther’s critique of indulgences introduces the two fundamental themes with which I shall be concerned here: that of human mediation between the Christian believer and God, on the one hand, and that of pardon as an economic transaction, on the other. Both of these dimensions of the Lutheran

­30     Forgetting Differences c­ ritique were to be developed in France by Jean Calvin. Calvin considers the question of pardon to be the most fundamental one a Christian asks: If there is anything in the whole compass of religion which it is of importance to us to know, this certainly is the most important – viz. to perceive and to rightly hold by what means, what rule, what terms, with what facility or difficulty the forgiveness of sins is to be obtained.12

The question of pardon is thus central to the entire edifice of Calvinism. The Protestant rejection of the Catholic analogy between royal and divine justice obviously works to delegitimize the discourse of royal pardon. To put it simply, the domain of pardon moves to a place outside of the king’s jurisdiction. This is due to the fact that for Calvin, pardon has become an affair between God and an individual’s “innermost heart,” and thus utterly inaccessible and unknowable, even to the sinner himself. As his repentance becomes increasingly internalized, it becomes more and more difficult for anyone to make a moral judgment about the sinner. Catholic priests do not have the power to pardon the sinner in part because they do not have the power to judge the true extent of his repentance (which for Calvin is not exhibited by an act but indicates an inner state): “the certainty of binding and loosening is not subjected to the will of an earthly judge” (550, “la certitude de lier ou délier n’est point sujette à la connaissance d’un juge terrestre,” 116). Calvin pursues the legal analogy and also recalls the inexhaustibility of human sin when he notes that the priest is limited in his knowledge, “so that he can only judge of what is laid before him, investigated, and ascertained” (553, “il ne juge que des choses qui lui sont rapportées, dont il s’est enquis, et dont il est bien informé,” 119). In other words, not only does the priest lack the capacity to judge upon which the Calvinist capacity to pardon is predicated, he also exercises this faulty faculty on necessarily insufficient evidence. For Calvin, then, the juridical model of pardon does not apply in the theological realm: lacking both the evidence and the capacity truly to judge their fellow men, humans are necessarily incapable of granting pardon. The influence of Calvin’s discourse on pardon went far beyond the question of its juridical legitimacy, however, since its reconception of the mechanism of grace also changed the manner in which pardon functioned. In his study of French Catholic debates regarding the rite of confession in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Jean Delumeau looks at the conflict between “attritionists,” whose position derives from the Scotist view that simply going through the rite of confession and receiving priestly absolution is sufficient to obtain God’s pardon, and the “contritionists,” who, following Aquinas, insist that the sinner must exhibit something like true repentance and a true (i.e., selfless) love

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     31

of God in order to receive priestly absolution and thus God’s pardon.13 Translated into political terms, we could say that the attritionist perspective is analogous to an apology for self-interested reasons; contrition, by contrast, would be a true regret, motivated by a love for the one that one has offended. Both attitudes are, however, positioned as a condition of pardon, and pardon as the appropriate recompense for a given attitude. Both postures are thus part of the tradition that construes pardon as an economic exchange. The sinner must alter his behavior in order to obtain pardon. Lutheran and most especially Calvinist doctrine reverses this temporal sequence, or more accurately, dispenses with it entirely: God’s pardon is given freely – or not – at the beginning of time, and no concrete, external act on the part of the believer makes any difference. In contrast to Catholic doctrine, which he cites mostly from the Sententia of Peter Lombard, Calvin insists in the Institutes that God’s pardon is not predicated on a penitential quid pro quo: while God is certainly the agent of the forgiveness of human sin, “repentance cannot be the cause of the remission of sins” (536, emphasis mine; “la pénitence n’est pas cause de [la] rémission [des péchés],” 102). Calvin justifies this view from several angles: such a transaction is unthinkable in part, for example, because the Christian could never give a full accounting of his iniquities, since he is sinful in his very nature. Moreover, construing God’s pardon as a reward for some human act – be this good works or confession followed by acts of penitence or the buying of indulgences – entails a compromise of God’s sovereignty, since it makes acts of divine mercy dependent upon prior human acts. These arguments are what lead Calvin to emphasize that God’s pardon must necessarily be “gratuit,” an act of forgiveness completely outside of a dynamic of reward or punishment. Thus, the very concept of divine pardon, for Calvin, carries with it the element of gratuitousness: qu’est-ce que la rémission, sinon un don de pure libéralité? Car un créditeur n’est pas dit remettre, qui par sa quittance confesse le paiement lui avoir été fait, mais celui qui sans rien recevoir, libéralement et franchement biffe la dette. (121) what is forgiveness but a gift of pure liberality? A creditor is not said to forgive a debt if he discharges it after acknowledging that the money has been paid to him; but when, without any payment, through voluntary kindness he cancels the debt. (556)

For Calvin, then, pardon is an act that by definition disrupts the model of economic exchange that structures the Catholic doctrine of penitence. The sinner does not earn God’s pardon, but receives it gratis.

­32     Forgetting Differences By framing legislation on conflicts with Protestants in terms of heresy, François II invited a theological response to juridical acts. Calvin had already attacked Pope Julius III’s 1550 Jubilee indulgence in a sermon on Acts 5:25–32 delivered the same year that contrasted God’s “plenière rémission” with that of the “Antichrist.”14 Protestant versions of the “grand pardon de plenière rémission” appeared in French in Geneva as early as 1532; listed among the books censured by the Sorbonne in 1551 is a Grand pardon de plenière rémission pour toutes personnes, durant à toujours, printed in Geneva in 1550, and again in 1555.15 An anonymous Grand pardon de plenière rémission, “pour toutes personnes, & durant à perpetuité” and “nouvellement imprimé avec privilège perpetuel,” published at Lyon in 1561, presumably reprints earlier Protestant reworkings of papal pardons in both Germany and France. In the context of the French troubles, such writings illuminate the ways in which theological debates shaped political discourses of justice and reconciliation. The disruption of the model of pardon-as-exchange has profound consequences for the political efficacy of the royal right of grace. Royal pardons were of course rarely if ever entirely gratuit; rather, they were predicated on precisely the kind of exchange that Calvin explicitly rejects. The royal quid pro quo depended crucially on acts of repentance that could be publicly witnessed and juridically regulated. By removing the economic calculation from the discourse of pardon, Calvinist theology saps pardon’s strength as a political strategy that could influence public conduct. The 1561 Grand pardon shows quite clearly to what degree, and for what reasons, the language of edicts like those of François, themselves modeled on papal decrees, had become politically impotent. The first page is titled “Pardon general, ottroye aux Chrestiens.” It begins: Le vray Pardon & Remission de tous pechez est fait par l’abondante misericorde de Dieu: qui nous pardonne noz pechez par un seul Jesus Christ en l’effusion de son sang . . . The true pardon and remission of sins is granted by the abundant mercy of God, who forgives our sins only through Jesus Christ by the shedding of his blood . . .

Christ is described as having already “abolished and entirely annihilated our iniquities, injustices, abominations and obligations . . . and he himself offers to us this pardon” (“aboli, & du tout aneanti nostre folie, injustice, abominations & obligations . . . Auquel pardon luy-mesme nous invite”). The anonymous author then cites St. Peter’s announcement of the “great Pardons and Indulgences bestowing full forgiveness of punish-

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     33

ment and guilt, given . . . to all faithful Christians on earth” (“grands Pardons & Indulgences de pleniere Remission de peine & de coulpe, données . . . à tous fidèles Chrestiens estans sous le ciel”). In other words, all “faithful Christians” – clearly, here, Protestants are meant – have already been pardoned. Their sins have been gratuitously remitted through the sacrifice of Christ. They have done nothing to deserve this, of course; as Calvin’s discussion indicates, divine pardon does not imply that the sinner has done or will do anything whatsoever, other than keep his faith. The pamphlet points out both the illegitimacy of François’s edicts of pardon, as well as their utter meaninglessness from the perspective of Protestant theology. Since the Protestants reject the economic, quid pro quo model of pardon – in addition to considering illegitimate the king’s right to pardon the gravest offenses – they cannot easily be persuaded to act publicly in certain ways in order to merit such a pardon. This makes it difficult for the king to use the leverage of pardon to effect political change. The end of the 1561 pamphlet states that the pardon was “donnée en la supreme & souveraine Cour de Paradis, dez l’Origine du monde,” which reiterates the fundamental contrast between human and divine justice preached by Calvin. While the Council of Trent confirmed the utter necessity of institutionalized ritual mediation between the sinner and God for salvation, Calvin rejected such mediation as illegitimate, indeed pernicious. The clear and unbreachable ontological line Calvin drew between the human and the divine meant that no earthly institution – be it the church or the monarchy – could arrogate God’s power of grace to itself. Such a stance had inevitable consequences for the discourse of royal pardon in France. The judgments of men, according to this view, rather than mediating the judgments of God, must be seen as fundamentally separate from and indeed often opposed to them. In his 1566 Apologie pour Hérodote, a wide-ranging satire of sixteenth-century society, the Protestant printer Henri Estienne – in a chapter cheerily entitled “Des homicides de nostre temps” – tells the story of one Jean Guy, condemned to execution for having stabbed his father to death.16 At first, Guy directs his energies towards obtaining a royal pardon by claiming that his father was agitated and in fact caused his own death by precipitating himself onto Jean’s sword. Members of the Protestant Coligny household, however, exhort him to renounce his appeal for a secular pardon and to ask God for pardon instead (298), thus encouraging him to abandon secular for divine justice. Estienne makes the hierarchy between divine and earthly justice all the more clear in a later chapter that deals mostly with the miserable sudden deaths of court figures and judicial functionaries

­34     Forgetting Differences who had been instrumental in persecuting Protestants (416, 418). Such stories, says Estienne, “redound to the exhaltation of God’s judgments” (“redondent à l’exaltation des jugemens de Dieu,” 419). The judgments of men, according to this view, rather than mediating the judgments of God, must be seen as fundamentally separate from, and indeed frequently opposed to them. In a similar vein, in his 1566 defense of Reformed church discipline, Antoine de Chandieu answers the objection that church discipline usurps the power of the magistrates by pointing out that “according to that standard one would have to accuse the Apostles and the whole of the primitive Church of sedition.”17 Though Chandieu insists that there is nothing in church discipline that would contravene obedience to a magistrate, it is clear here that a distinction is being made between royal justice, on the one hand, and divine justice on the other. As the historian Paul Monod points out, the Vindiciae contra tyrannos (1579) “began with the argument that kings are not substitutes for God but are his servants.”18 On this view, the right of grace is no longer a divine right of kings, but the sole purview of God. By the mid-sixteenth century, then, French Protestants had increasingly refused to invest royal justice with divine powers, in particular with regard to the question of grace and pardon. They therefore did not tolerate the analogy between God and the king that confused divine forgiveness with a gesture of royal grace necessarily predicated on political calculation and historical circumstances. Moreover, they were not alone in questioning the legitimacy of royal pardon during the Wars of Religion. Even Jean Bodin, the foremost theorist of royal sovereignty in the sixteenth century, was troubled by the fact that the king had arrogated to himself the power to grant forgiveness of the unforgiveable.19 In the Republique, Bodin was worried precisely about the fact that “les Rois Chrestiens, le jour du vendredy Sainct, ne donnent grace que de ce qui est irremissible” (329). In 1576, this necessarily included the atrocities of the civil war, absolution for which, the Catholic Bodin insists, one must turn to God and not the king. Thus, Bodin will warn that the prince’s right to pardon should not be extended beyond certain limits: “the sovereign prince cannot extend grace in the case of a penalty established by the law of God” (“le prince souverain ne peu donner grace de la peine establie par la loy de Dieu,” 329) – for example, “premeditated murder deserves the death penalty according to the law of God” (“le meurtre faict de guet à pend, merite la mort par la loy de Dieu,” 329). Bodin goes on to lament the number of remissions that are nonetheless granted in just such cases (“O combien il s’en voit de remissions!” 329). And when the sovereign pardons the unpardon-

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     35

able, warns Bodin, “plagues, famine, war, and the ruin of republics” are sure to follow (“les pestes, les famines, les guerres, et ruïnes des Republiques,” 330). Bodin thus positions as a potentially destructive force the royal pardon of just the kind of acts that had been frequent during the civil wars – certainly in the case of the assassination of the Protestant Admiral de Coligny and of the massacres of 24th and 25th August 1572 – and which had been just as frequently pardoned by the king. Such critiques render the discourse of royal pardon increasingly impotent with respect to the Protestant “rebels” in the second half of the sixteenth century in France. It is in part as a consequence of the erosion of the discourse of royal pardon, I believe, that the political discourse of amnesty is used with more and more frequency in royal policy on religious conflicts. Sixteenth-century royal responses to the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and to the atrocities of the civil war in general, will no longer rely primarily on a rhetoric of punishment or of pardon. The impossibility of either eliminating the Huguenots or converting them seems to have led beyond the traditional alternatives of clemency or vengeance, and towards the development of a rhetoric of oubliance.

Forgetting St. Bartholomew’s Day Initially, Charles IX’s legislative response to the troubles retained the framework that offers only punishment or pardon as alternatives. The 1562 edict known as the Edict of January, billed as an “edict of tolerance,” stipulates that all property stolen from the Church must be returned, and that anyone caught engaging in iconoclastic activity would be executed, “sans espérance de grâce et de rémission.” The goal of this edict is clear: restitution and the restoration of a prior state, under the threat of punishment without possibility of reprieve. The focus is on the past, and the strategy for returning to it is framed in juridical terms. This edict is not qualified as “perpetual and irrevocable”; sealed with yellow wax, it leaves the door open to future modifications.20 The criminal acts targeted by the Edict of January are fairly specific. This initially seems to be the case in the 1563 Edict of Amboise (sealed with yellow wax), which is also concerned largely with restitution and settling scores. By now, according to the latter edict, ecclesiastics are expected to have been “remis en leurs Eglises, maisons, biens, possessions et revenus, pour en jouir et user, tout ainsi qu’ils faisaient auparavant les tumultes.” But the scope of this edict will go far beyond specific

­36     Forgetting Differences acts of iconoclasm or instances of “heretical” behavior to encompass virtually everything that has happened during the troubles: Et pour autant que nous désirons singulièrement que toutes les occasions de ces troubles cessent . . . avons ordonné et ordonnons . . . que toutes injures et offenses que l’iniquité du temps, et les occasions qui en sont survenues, ont pu faire naître entre nosdits sujets, et toutes autres choses passées et causées de ces présentes tumultes . . . demeureront éteintes, comme mortes, ensevelies et non advenues. And insofar as our singular desire is that all the occasions for these troubles cease . . . we have commanded and command . . . that all injuries and offenses due to the iniquity of the times, as well as their consequences, along with all other things occasioned by the current conflicts . . . shall remain extinguished, as if dead, buried and never having existed. (My emphasis)

While the language here is still, strictly speaking, juridical – it is a matter of public acts (“injures et offenses”), more or less technically defined, and their juridical nullification (a cursory reading of sixteenth-century legislation suffices to confirm that “éteintes” and “ensevelies” are juridical terms) – the object of that juridical discourse has expanded to the point of utter abstraction, to encompass “toutes autres choses passées et causées de ces présentes tumultes.” There is nothing technical, precise, or delimited about this language (though “tumultes” was usually intended to designate a rebellious act, such as the “tumulte d’Amboise”). Whereas pardon and amnesty bear on specific acts and specific persons, oubliance was to apply to everyone and everything – to “tout.” The reach of such an injunction necessarily exceeds its grasp; “everything” simply cannot be subject to legislation, nor does a euphemism like “ces présentes tumultes” constitute an entity sufficiently delimited and defined to become the object of the law. How would it be possible to situate either ontologically or temporally those “choses” that the edict stipulates are to be considered juridical nonentities? This turn to abstraction does not necessarily suggest that Charles is making a grab for absolute juridical power by bringing “everything” under the purview of the law; rather, it points up precisely the limitations of juridical discourse in the face of civil war, limitations that had recently become apparent with respect to royal pardon. As Michel de Montaigne will point out a few years later, no law is precise enough so as not to require interpretation before it can be applied to a specific situation; yet here, Charles seems to leave virtually everything to interpretation. It is not a matter, as it will be in Montaigne’s discussion, of the unpredictable vagaries of human history always keeping the law off balance, but rather a case of a law whose

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     37

object is everything in general and thus nothing in particular, a law everywhere in force but nowhere obviously applicable. With this phrase then, which Charles will reiterate in a modified form in all of his edicts of pacification, we are witnessing a turn toward the extra-juridical.21 This turn can be seen as an acknowledgement of the failure of juridical institutions in the face of civil war. As historian William Monter has pointed out, as the 1560s wore on, the French monarchy chose “simply to discontinue judicial repression,” thus marginalizing the role of parlements in dealing with the Protestants.22 And indeed, as Monter notes, criminal arrêts from 1569 and 1570 “contain page after page of barredout decisions condemning Huguenots for ‘infringement of royal edicts’ . . . over 1,100 sentences were thereby nullified at Bordeaux alone, and other parlements reveal comparable consequences” (235). Charles’s early edicts bear exclusively on laws and legal actions. The edicts of the 1560s are in fact aimed solely at public acts, and not at all at private attitudes. In 1570, however, the realm of the public and the juridical is linked to that of the potentially private and the u ­ nlegislatable – that is, to memory and forgetting. The juridical erasure of past acts was now to encompass a more diffuse extinction of the memory of those acts. This rhetoric of oblivion eventually becomes more prominent in royal discourse on the Wars of Religion, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and the Huguenots themselves, and its rhetorical purview will ultimately extend far beyond the juridical realm.23 Once it appears, the command to forget the past will work its way from the margins of this legislation to its center. The formulation I cited from the Edict of Amboise is reiterated in the 1568 Peace of Longjumeau, where it constitutes the eleventh of fourteen articles. By 1570, however, the clause I have been discussing is altered in a striking way, and occupies the first position among the forty-five articles that comprise the Edict of St-Germain, which ended the third war. Sealed with green wax and characterized as “perpetual and irrevocable,” this edict explicitly introduces the question of memory into the politics of pacification. Its first article reads: Que la mémoire de toutes choses passées d’une part et d’autre, et dès et depuis les troubles advenues en notre dit Royaume, à l’occasion d’iceux, demeure éteinte et assoupie comme de chose non advenue. May the memory of everything that has happened on both sides since the beginning of the troubles in our Kingdom and on account of them be extinguished and dulled as of things that never happened. (My emphasis)

Thus, whereas in both the Edict of Amboise and the Peace of Longjumeau, it was a question of forbidding the pursuit of retribution

­38     Forgetting Differences for past offenses, it is now a question of effacing the very memory of those offenses, and on both sides.24 Charles’s 1573 Edict of Boulogne also has a version of the injunction to forget as its first article, but this time the events of St. Bartholomew’s Day are explicitly addressed: “Premierement, que la mémoire de toutes choses passées depuis le 24e jour d’Août dernier passé, à l’occasion des troubles et émotions advenues en notre Royaume, demeurera éteinte, et assoupie, comme de chose non advenue.”25 Though the ideology of oblivion would appear to have been crystallized in the royal discourse on the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres, the rhetorical focus on memory is peculiar neither to the reign of Charles nor to the years surrounding that event. Both Henri III and, more famously, Henri IV will continue to foreground the crucial role of forgetting in putting an end to the civil wars. In the 1576 Edict of Beaulieu, which codified the Peace of Monsieur, Henri III positions the command to efface all memory of the conflicts as the first of sixty-three articles. In keeping with the more generalized discourse of forgetting to which I have been drawing attention, Henri displaces the specific reference to the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre to a separate article midway through the edict. But even when specific public acts are at issue, the emphasis on memory remains. Article thirty-six of the Edict of Beaulieu reads: Défendons de ne faire aucune procession, tant à cause de la mort de feu notre cousin le prince de Condé, que journée Saint-Barthélemy, et autres actes qui puissent ramener la mémoire des troubles. We forbid any sort of procession motivated by the death of our late cousin the Prince of Condé, or on St. Bartholomew’s Day, as well as any other acts that might revive the memory of the troubles.

Henri’s formulation – indicating that what must be avoided at all costs are any acts that could stir up memories of the conflicts, and not (only) those that renew the conflicts themselves – supports the view that while Charles’s initial experiments with clemency were basically attempts to declare the events of the civil war judicial nonentities, by 1576, what is at stake is nothing less than the suppression of collective memories. The 1577 Peace of Bergerac leads off with the same phrase we see in the Edict of Beaulieu, and repeats in a separate article (37) the explicit prohibition of any sort of commemoration of St. Bartholomew’s Day. Thus, almost from the moment it happened, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre appeared in royal legislation not so much as Crouzet’s “event without a history,” but rather an event of which there shall be no official memory.

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     39

That the act of forgetting was considered the centerpiece of this legislation is suggested by a parliamentary address given in 1582 by the jurist Antoine Loisel, entitled “De l’amnestie ou oubliance des maux.”26 With particular reference to the edicts of Bergérac, Flex and Nérac, Loisel notes that the king, not content with merely publishing the edicts, has required his subjects to swear to abide by them (“le Roy ne s’est pas contenté de les faire publier & enregistrer en ses Cours souveraines comme les autres, ains s’est particulierement obligé à l’observation d’iceux par serment expres et solonnel,” 5). It is thus imperative, says Loisel, that all French people understand what is in the edicts. This is not easy, since, as Loisel notes, the previous twenty years of civil war have seen so many peace edicts that the French can barely count them (“en vingt ans que nous nous sommes dechires les uns les autres . . . en vingt ans, dis-je, de nos guerres, nous avons tant veu d’Edits de pacification que nous en avons quasi perdu le compte,” 6). Thus, Loisel proposes to explain the essence of the most recent legislation in his speech.27 This essence turns out to be the forgetting of all past injuries, which Loisel explicitly terms the foundation of all of the articles of the edicts (“l’oubliance des injures passees, d’autant mesmement que c’est le fondement de tous les autres [articles], et duquel dependent environ une quarantaine d’articles de ces Edits,” 9). That it is not simply a question of a juridical amnesty is made clear further on, when Loisel emphasizes the peculiar horrors of civil war. Because the experience of civil war is so utterly devastating, and because punishment only renews the cycle of vengeance and prolongs the conflict: reste ce seul remede d’oubliance & abolition des injures & offences reciproquement souffertes, effacer tout le plustost que l’on peut, & faire en sorte qu’il n’en demeure rien aux esprits des hommes ny d’un costé ny d’autre, n’en parler, & n’y penser jamais. (17) the only thing left is the remedy of forgetting and of abolition of injuries and offenses suffered on both sides, to erase everything as soon as possible, and proceed in such a way that nothing remains in the minds of men on either side, not to talk about it, and never to think about it. (My emphasis)

Anticipating the formulations of his fellow parliamentaire Nesmond, Loisel construes amnesty as amnesia. Oubliance thereby becomes a potentially all-encompassing discourse of forgetting that, while it obviously has its roots in the political and juridical realms, aims far beyond both of them.28 As Loisel knew, royal pardons for heresy in the form of royal edicts had been issued since before the wars had even begun, but in the absence of any public confession on the part of those pardoned by the king – that

­40     Forgetting Differences is, the Protestants – those pardons were powerless. Thus, he insists that pardon is inappropriate in the context of civil war, since the gesture presupposes a party that is without guilt: “Pardon is not at all what is required in the context of civil war, since each party tends to think it is in the right, regardless of the reality, and none is ever willing to confess its transgressions.”29 The royal strategy of settling past scores, whether through clemency or punishment, had simply failed, both materially and rhetorically. It is no doubt for this reason that Nesmond, in his 1600 oration, characterizes the oubliance of the edicts of pacification as a last resort, a strategy employed when nothing else works. Like Loisel, Nesmond urges his fellow Frenchmen to embrace the policy on the grounds that amnesty is the only possible remedy for the “actions and troubles” associated with the civil wars (“l’assoupissement de toutes les actions & troubles irremediables par autre moyen que par l’AMNESTIE”).30 The strong distinction made between pardon, on the one hand, and oubliance, on the other, exceeds the framework provided by French medieval precedents for reconciliation after civil war, since these were inevitably modeled on a (Catholic) Christian conception of pardon, even when they entailed (juridical) amnesty.31 There are no real precedents for the sweeping injunction to forget the past in French legislation before the sixteenth century.32 The command to efface memories contrasts sharply with the conciliatory rhetoric of civil peace treaties during the reign of Charles VI.33 The ideal sought after in those treaties is that of love and friendship. For example, a 1413 peace agreement begins: “First of all among the seigneurs of royal blood, there shall be love and unity, and they shall promise and swear to be good and true brothers and friends.” A subsequent truce between Bourbon and Bourgogne brings “greater joy and a sense of great love for each other”; they are described as having a “great and brotherly love for one another.” Similarly, a 1435 royal document requests the Duc de Bourgogne to drop his hostility towards the king for not having avenged the death of his father Jean: “any hatred and rancor that he may have towards [the king] on this account, he shall lift from his heart so that peace and love shall be between them.”34 Brotherly love is both the first premise and the aim of these late medieval exhortations; the process of reconciliation they propose never implicates forgetting as such. Where such accords do invoke amnesty (but never the erasure of memory), the act of judicial forgiveness is unfailingly predicated on a premise of friendship, rather than the other way around. Though there is evidence that local peace agreements were in fact cast in terms of pacts of friendship during and after the Wars of Religion,35 royal policy consistently privileged amnesty in the increas-

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     41

ingly diffuse form that culminated in the first article of the Edict of Nantes.36 In his comprehensive historical study of peace treaties from ancient Egypt to the present day, Jörg Fisch posits a generalized spread of the rhetoric of amnesty in Western Europe at the dawn of modernity (the period from 1500–1648 witnessed an “allgemeine Verbreitung der Amnestie,” 92).37 According to Fisch, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period with which I am primarily concerned, the term for amnesty in such treaties is usually doubled by one that explicitly indicates forgetting, such as oblivio or oubli. Fisch emphasizes that the term “amnesty” has by the seventeenth century a de facto legal status in the Western European nations; the parallel term signifying oblivion is added in order to evoke the extra-legal domain of memory and forgetting, which is perforce beyond the reach of the law.38 Though Fisch never mentions the peace edicts of sixteenth-century France, I believe they constitute the earliest examples of the attempt to legislate memory and forgetting in modern Europe.39

Exemplary Forgetting: The Parallel Lives of Julius Caesar and Henri IV Unlike royal pardon or amnesty, which locate political agency in the sovereign, the policy of oubliance places the burden of reconciliation on French subjects. The rejection of pardon underlines the fact that the law of oblivion was not merely a command on the part of the king to be followed by the people; it was a law to which the king himself was subject, as André de Nesmond observes when he notes that the French monarchs who issued the command to erase memories of the wars willingly “forgot” their rank in order better to forget the offenses of the civil wars.40 Indeed, in order to play the exemplary role that Nesmond assigns to him, the king must be the first to forget past offenses, and thus the first to obey the law (79). There was no better exponent of the Edict of Nantes’ rhetoric of amnesia than Henri IV himself. Henri’s claim to the throne was ultimately predicated on a renunciation of his past – or more exactly, a renunciation of the renunciation of the renunciation of his past. Baptized Catholic, he converted to Protestantism as a young man. A few months after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres, he converted to Catholicism in a private ceremony that was to include, as per Catholic ritual, a confession of his past transgressions and a plea for God’s mercy. When he returned to the Protestant fold four years later (in 1576), Henri

­42     Forgetting Differences claimed that his ­previous conversion to Catholicism was actually invalid because he never detailed his past errors as would have been required in order to make the conversion legitimate.41 In other words, Henri simply disavowed his past act and his disavowal was based on the claim that he had never ritually reviewed his past. The story of Henri’s conversion(s) neatly illustrates the paradox facing those who sought to perform the erasure of the civil war past in general, and of Henri’s protestant past in particular: this gesture seemed to require a prior recollection of the history that was to be renounced. Royal historiographer Pierre Matthieu, for example, apparently felt obliged to engage the debate surrounding Henri de Navarre’s succession first and foremost in confessional terms; he opens his Histoire des derniers troubles (1594–1606) with an account of Henri’s conversion to Catholicism in 1594. This account involves a rehearsal of Henri’s renunciation of his religious past that necessitated reminders of his former Protestantism. In order to construct a historical narrative of conversion, Matthieu first had to recall the past that he subsequently depicts Henri as having overcome. The edicts of amnesia themselves supply vivid examples of exhortations to forget that ultimately constitute reminders of the past, with their constant references to the recent “troubles,” and, after the St. Bartholmew’s Day massacre, their frequent evocation of “le 24 août 1572” as something that must be forgotten. But the paradox emerges from the fact that both the edicts and Matthieu’s history embed the gesture of forgetting into a narrative of before and after (the wars, the king’s conversion, St. Bartholomew’s Day, etc.). It is in fact this narrative structure, rather than anything inherent in the act of forgetting, that imposes the representation of that which is to be forgotten onto the solicitation of amnesia. Genres less bound by the underlying chronological constraints of such a narrative, by contrast, proved to be much better suited to the enterprise of forgetting the past, and in particular Henri de Navarre’s confessional history. It is helpful to consider postwar attempts to narrate the biography of Henri IV in light of efforts to reconstruct the larger history of France in the sixteenth century. Both Jean Lemaire de Belges, in his putatively historical 1512 Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye, and Pierre de Ronsard, in his overtly mythological 1572 Franciade, followed medieval precedents in positing a Trojan origin for the French that passed through the Gauls.42 Although Ronsard famously never finished his epic poem and, consequently, never connected all the dots that led from Hector’s son, Francus, to the reigning French monarch, Charles IX, his project, like Lemaire’s, was a genealogical one that aimed to link

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     43

French kings in an unbroken line. These annalistic versions of French cultural origins stood in tension with the widespread trope of translatio, according to which the riches of human civilization had been moving inexorably – if somewhat irregularly – westward, from Egypt to Greece to Rome and, in the Renaissance, to whichever European monarchy the historian belonged. If the genealogical project required a few mythical figures to provide its point of departure, it had in the principle of monarchical succession a fairly straightforward means of establishing historical continuity. The motor of cultural transfer was subject to more variation in the translatio model, from the medieval notion of elegantly recombining and thus “translating” previously existing elements to Joachim Du Bellay’s more aggressive image of plundering the riches of Rome in the 1549 Deffense et illustration de la langue françoyse.43 There is significantly less concern for unbroken continuity in the translatio scheme; indeed, for Du Bellay, the notion of a fallow period during which his Gaulish ancestors were more interested in words than actions (in “bien faire” over “bien dire”) is central to the notion of innovation through cultural revival that his manifesto propagates. One historical figure in particular stands out at the intersection of these two paradigms of cultural transfer from past to present in Renaissance France: Julius Caesar. Caesar belonged to both major visions of the French cultural past in the Renaissance, and as such, could anchor either a continuous or a discontinuous narrative of cultural transmission. As the author of De bello gallico, Caesar was both ancient Gaul’s conqueror and its best historiographer, serving simultaneously as a precious source for and an insuperable obstacle to research into a Franco-Gallic past. In the context of a Gallic history, Caesar’s writings are a unique repository of information even as his military victory over the Gauls interrupted their cultural continuity. At the same time, as an ancient military hero and Octavian’s predecessor, Caesar is also a major figure in the translatio model. This historiographical duplicity will be exploited by biographers of Henri IV who use Julius Caesar as a privileged term of comparison for the French monarch in the wake of the Wars of Religion. Whereas genealogical arguments for Henri de Navarre’s claim to the crown took up a past-oriented, narrative approach, comparisons of the Bourbon to Julius Caesar were grounded in a vision of historical discontinuity that allowed for chronological gaps and omissions. This type of comparison between historical figures widely separated in space and time entailed the suppression or deliberate forgetting of differences implicitly judged to be irrelevant (or perhaps problematic) for the

­44     Forgetting Differences purposes of the comparison. Of course, comparisons between Caesar and the French sovereign were not new. Around 1520, for example, François Desmoulins composed a manuscript version of Caesar’s Gallic Wars that took the form of a dialogue between François I, the “second conqueror of the Swiss,” and Caesar, “the first to subjugate the Helvetes” (358).44 This manuscript, which has never been printed, presents Caesar as an authority on all matters imperial, a wise guide for the young French king. Subsequently, Caesar will frequently be put forward as an authority on the arts of extramural war. But as Martial Martin notes, if punctual comparisons had long been made between Caesar and the French king, it is only with respect to Henri IV that the parallel is proposed to extend over the entire lifetime of the two figures concerned.45 This is perhaps because the figure of Julius Caesar could further the royal program of forgetting the past in ways that no other sovereign could. In the era of civil war and its aftermath, poetic renderings of France’s putative ancient Roman heritage – and in particular, of the French king’s relation to the complex figure of Julius Caesar – can be seen as an attempt to not only erase the Protestant phase of Henri IV’s past, but to reorient representations of the king more generally. It is undeniable that although Caesar enjoyed a largely positive reputation in the European Middle Ages, much of the literature from the Renaissance suggests that humanist interpretation of Caesar’s legacy repeatedly gravitated towards Livy’s reported uncertainty of whether it was better for the state that Caesar had been born, or not. As the victor in Rome’s bloody civil wars, Caesar was at once the overambitious destroyer of the Roman republic (as portrayed by Lucan) and the savior of Rome (as his own account in De bello civili has it). Caesar’s own major writings only emphasized an apparently irresolvable two-­ sidedness: De bello Gallico was universally admired both for its style and as a repository of brilliant military strategy. The De bello civili, by contrast, was much less read than Lucan’s epic poem on the same subject, notorious for its portrayal of a cynical and brutal Caesar. Despite this persistent duality, as the work of Margaret McGowan amply documents, during the religious wars, a negative view of Julius Caesar came to dominate the French cultural landscape. Rome consistently appears in the literature of this period as a site of civil war, and thus as an ominous model of ruinous self-destruction; a darker tinge clings to the image of Caesar. In the era of Charles IX and his successor, Henri III, Caesar stood first and foremost as a symbol of the tyrannical overextension of monarchical power in the name of factionalism. The Protestant monarchomachs in particular – Buchanan, Bèze, Hotman, Goulart, Du Plessis-Mornay – all held a largely critical view of Caesar;

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     45

indeed, the famous 1579 monarchomach treatise attributed to Du Plessis-Mornay, Vindiciae contra tyrannos, was published under the pseudonym of Junius Brutus. The critical accounts of Caesar focus on his conduct during the civil wars, adopting a Lucanian perspective that takes a dim view of Caesar’s political ambitions. The critique of Caesar was moreover by no means the exclusive province of the Protestants or the politiques. Jacques Amyot’s widely read and admired French translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, published in 1559 under Charles IX, contains a “Comparaison d’Alexandre le grand avec Jules César.” Plutarch’s own confrontation of Alexander and Julius Caesar having been lost, this text offers a highly critical perspective on Caesar from the French sixteenth century (if not from Amyot himself; the identity of the author of this part of the text is uncertain). Presented rhetorically as a balanced argument first for the superiority of Alexander, and then, in utramque partem, for that of Caesar, the comparison resounds overwhelmingly to the detriment of Caesar. In Thomas North’s 1570 English version (translated from Amyot’s French), Caesar “distained his life with a continual violent desire to subdue his country, committing a greater fault in his last wars [. . .] than if he had lien with his own mother” (220–1).46 There is nothing in the text as virulently negative about Alexander; the only real criticism of the Greek concerns his unmerciful treatment of some Indian soldiers, and his extermination of the Cosseians, both presented as isolated incidents, exceptions to the rule of Alexander’s virtue. As such, they are immediately juxtaposed to examples of his clemency. Caesar’s flaws, by contrast, are constitutional and have far-reaching consequences: “Caesar pricked forward by his natural wit, and tyrannical manners of his time, was possessed (in an unlucky hour for him and his country) with the intolerable vice of selfwill and ambition, which was cause of his death” (216); “Caesar never seemed to care for any man, but for himself” (ibid.); Caesar “hid in his heart” a “strange hatred against all those who hindered his doings, without regard of any man” (224); “Caesar filled all his country with fire and tears” (221). What is disparaged here is not a singular event or a punctual decision, but an overall character. It is thus difficult to imagine that Caesar could serve as a privileged exemplum for the King of France in the period we are considering. It is therefore not surprising that one is hard-pressed to find even punctual comparisons between Charles IX and Julius Caesar in the literature of royal propaganda during Charles’s reign (which spanned the first four wars, from 1562–74). How, one must ask, could Caesar’s image become a privileged reference point for the King of France and a means by which to avoid the subject of civil war? Why, instead of turning to

­46     Forgetting Differences the Gauls, and then to the Catholic Merovingians and Carolingians as their sixteenth-century wartime predecessors had done, did seventeenthcentury producers of royal propaganda under Henri IV, Louis XIII and Louis XIV look to Caesar, whose reputation had been so thoroughly sullied in the preceding decades? Julius Caesar was not only generally emblematic of the classical past for the poets and playwrights of the Renaissance; he was also the privileged example of an entity that demanded to be both remembered and forgotten, embraced and rejected, already in the age of Augustus. As David Quint notes in his essay on remembering and forgetting in the Aeneid, “the career of the living Caesar is a scandal for Augustus and his poets, but the dead and apotheosized Caesar is a source of divine inspiration and guidance to his heir” (35).47 The same could be said of Henri IV: the scandal of his past as a Protestant warrior fighting against the crown had to be forgotten in order for him to come to stand as the agent of the reunification of the French kingdom. It would be simply tautological to claim that the figure of Julius Caesar enjoyed a better reputation in a culture of expanding monarchical absolutism. The rehabilitation of Caesar was not a product of the concentration of monarchical power, but was, first and foremost, one of the many conditions that contributed to that process. We can observe this phenomenon in progress in writings that compare Henri IV to Caesar, to the mutual benefit of the reputation of both men. Henri IV and Julius Caesar were the subjects of no less than three lengthy “vie paralleles” between 1598 and 1615. Whereas Renaissance poets such as Ronsard (in his Discours des misères de ce temps) had emphasized the links between both Henri III and Charles IX and their Catholic ancestors, Henri IV’s Protestant past and his troubled succession rendered this strategy impracticable. From the beginning of the Wars of Religion up until to his conversion to Catholicism and his entry into Paris in 1594, Henri had been regularly represented as the mortal enemy of his country based on his leadership of the Huguenot faction against royal troops under his two predecessors. The establishment of a sustained parallel between Henri IV and Julius Caesar, a parallel that increasingly abandoned narratives of historical continuity in favor of timeless exemplars of virtue, made it possible to minimize or indeed occult altogether the most controversial aspects of Henri’s past. Unlike the genealogical link to Gaulish ancestors, the parallel with Caesar was overtly ahistorical in character and, more to the point, implied that loyalty to the French crown was no longer anchored in the memory of a continuous Gallic past. At the same time, the biographical arc of the parallel created an illusion of completeness, of offering a full

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     47

account of Henri’s life from beginning to end (and in this far exceeding the more selective boundaries of Plutarch’s Lives). As the ancient conqueror of Gaul, Caesar was uniquely qualified to serve as the term by virtue of which the biography of Henri could make a detour around the Wars of Religion, imposing a template that appeared to accommodate the whole of Henri’s career as long as the question of religion, and eventually, that of civil war, was pushed to the sidelines. In these parallel lives of Henri and Caesar, the history of France’s wars, and of her converted king, becomes an entirely military and indeed imperial one, devoid of religious polemic, that redounds to the glory of both Caesar and Henri. The seventeenth-century rehabilitation of Caesar is thus in some sense a by-product of the reorientation of poetic representations of the king under Henri IV, motivated by the drive to forget confessional conflicts. The lengthiest and most detailed of the key texts, Antoine de Bandole’s Paralleles de Cesar et de Henry IIII, appeared in 1600 as one of several paratexts to Blaise de Vigenère’s French translation of Caesar’s Commentaries.48 Bandole’s prose runs through the explicit process of oubliance that I have been describing here, since his prelude to the extended comparison between Henri and Caesar does in fact contain the historical details that will be forgotten once Caesar becomes Bandole’s point of reference. Having reached the moment of Henri III’s death in his ten-page preliminary sketch of the religious wars, Bandole acknowledges that France had up until that point taken the future Henri IV for a heretic, chased him and his family away and stripped him of his possessions (8).49 However, he deems hypocritical those who claim to fight on religious grounds, and states unequivocally that these wars were fought merely under the pretext of religion, that in fact they were “guerres d’état” or wars of state between France and Spain (17). Drawing the lesson from all of this, Bandole concludes, “as long as the French remember the past, they will not get taken in by foreigners” (“Tant que le Français se souviendra du passé, il ne se laissera gueres piper aux étrangers,” 22). Whereas even the royal historiographer Matthieu describes a conflict that originated in “l’heresie [. . .] source de nos malheurs,” Bandole makes Spain responsible for the wars. Having dispensed with religion as a mere pretext, and having blamed the Spanish for fomenting discord within France on its basis, Bandole is now in a position to propose a heroic genealogy for Henri that is nothing like the series of medieval kings held up for Charles IX. Abandoning all pretense to providing a continuous chronology, he proclaims: “thus did Henry follow Caesar, Caesar Alexander, Alexander Achilles, Achilles Theseus, and Theseus Hercules” (“ainsi HENRY a suivy Cesar, Cesar

­48     Forgetting Differences Alexandre, Alexandre Achille, Achille Thesee, & Thesee Hercule,” 28). If the link between the French king and Hercules already had a venerable history, and the parallel between Caesar and Alexander had long since been consecrated by Plutarch, it was indeed something new to jump from Caesar directly to a contemporary French sovereign. Bandole will go on to dismiss the rhetoric of genealogy altogether in order to draw a detailed and necessarily anachronistic parallel between the careers of Henri and Caesar: Laissons aux Poëtes la recherche de a genealogie de Cesar, & à l’Historien l’origine de la maison d’Henry [. . .]. Changeons seulement le nom de Cesar à Henry et les noms d’Arioviste et de Vercingetorix aux chefs de la Ligue: le nom de ceux qui se liguerent contre Cesar, aux Espagnols, Italiens, Savoyards, Lorrains, et autres qui se sont bandez contre Henry [. . .] et l’on verra la vie de l’un tellement peinte dans le tableau de l’autre, qu’on ne peut voir un qu’en les voyant tous les deux. (32–3) Let us leave to Poets the task of researching Caesar’s genealogy, and to historians that of researching Henry’s origins [. . .]. Let us simply substitute Henry’s name for Caesar’s, those of the leaders of the Ligue for Arioviste and Vercingetorix, and the Spanish, Italians, Savoyards, Lorrains and others who banded together against Henry, for those who joined together to fight Caesar [. . .] and you will see the life of the one depicted in the tableau of that of the other, to such a degree that looking at them both, you can see only one of them.

The following sixty-plus pages juxtapose elements both sublime and trivial from Caesar’s and Henri’s lives, drawing parallels that sometimes come off as a bit generic (“Cesar était fils d’un brave pere [. . .] Henry est sorti d’un Brave,” 33) or inconsequential (both men were not picky eaters, 79), but that unfailingly serve to push the question of French civil strife ever further into the background. Already at a young age, [Cesar] fut élu en charge pour conduire le Romain contre l’ennemy [. . .] [Henri] fut soudain le chef de son party pour le deffendre contre les armées enemies . . . (34–5) Caesar was elected to lead the Roman army against the enemy [. . .] Henry quickly became the leader of his party in order to defend it against enemy armies . . .

Never mind that these “armées ennemies” were French royal troops, and that Henri was fighting them as leader of the Huguenot faction! True to his project of finding a Roman analogue for all of the figures in Henri’s public life, Bandole assimilates the Protestant notables Condé and Châtillon to Thermus and Pompilius (35); rumors that Henri was involved in a plot to kidnap Charles are for Bandole the sixteenth-

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     49

century French version of tales of Julius Caesar’s alleged involvement in the Catiline conspiracy. This is the case, despite the fact that for Henri the rumors most certainly contributed in bringing about the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres, which Bandole does not mention in this context (36). And so on and so forth, as each event from Henri’s public life is anticipated in history and consistently preceded in the text by an event from Caesar’s, thus imposing an interpretive grid onto Henri’s biography that excludes not only religion but also, rather improbably, civil war. In a move that pushes the phenomenon of civil war to the margins of both Caesar’s biography and Henri’s, Bandole ultimately motivates the panegyric parallel between Caesar and Henri IV on the grounds that they both conquered France (or Gaul as it were), remarking that: La France invincible était tout bandée contre Henri, et néanmoins voyant que César l’avait conquêtée, il se résout d’être César ou rien . . . (28) the whole of invincible France had banded against him, yet seeing that Caesar had conquered France, [Henri] resolved to be Caesar or nothing . . .50

Rather than constituting a civil war fought over religion, then, the battles of Henri IV are here cast as analogous to a series of victories over external enemies whose religious and national identity is of as much consequence as that of the Druids: César ne pouvait assez louer la sagesse et la prudence des Druides qui s’assembloient à Chartres [. . .] Henri a eu dequoy louer l’Assemblée du Clergé qui se fit en cette ville-là . . . (51) Caesar couldn’t say enough good things about the wisdom and prudence of the Druid assembly at Chartres [. . .] Henri had cause to praise the Clerical Assembly that took place in that same city . . .

Subsequently, Henri’s discussion of his faith with French prelates after having been designated as heir to the throne will be likened to Caesar’s discussion of the religion of the Druids.51 Thus is one of the most momentous – and momentously controversial – events of the wars, Henri’s conversion to Catholicism, preinterpreted as a mere echo of a minor passage in the De bello gallico. In perhaps one of its most emblematic passages for our purposes, Bandole’s account shows us a Henri who physically enacts Renan’s injunction to have already forgotten the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres: just as Caesar stood pensively on the banks of the Rubicon, Henri hesitates on the banks of the Loire en route to meet Henri III, having been urged by one of his companions to “remember St. Bartholomew’s

­50     Forgetting Differences Day” (“avoir souvenance de la St. Barthelemy,” 69). And just as Caesar chooses to forge ahead, uttering his famous phrase “Iacta est alea,” Henri refuses to look back: “Le dé en [est] jetté” (69). Here, Julius Caesar’s initiation of civil war is put into parallel with Henri de Navarre’s reconciliation with the French crown, thereby neatly overwriting the negative reading of Caesar that had predominated throughout the period of France’s Wars of Religion. The questions of Henri’s Protestantism, of religion more generally, and of civil war will recede even further into oblivion in the extended parallels between Henri IV and Julius Caesar published in the wake of Bandole’s text. The Duc de Sully’s Paralleles de César, et de Henry le Grand, written in verse and published in 1615, and the 1611 Royalles Ombres, où Henry le Grand, Alexandre et César racontent succinctement leur vie au poète Orphée by the playwright Nicolas Chrestien, published for the one-year anniversary of Henri’s assassination, will make short work of the historical preamble Bandole had sketched at somewhat more length. Like Bandole, Sully takes off from the premise that no two great men have ever resembled each other as much as Henri and Caesar do, such that “one could form a single discourse out of [the description of] Caesar and Henry” (“on pourrait [. . .] de César et Henry former mesme discours,” 2).52 This leads him to sum up their experience of civil war with the terse formulation: “both, caught up in partisan conflicts, saw their closest relatives perish” (“tous deux dans les ardeurs des partis differents /Virent bientôt mourir leur plus proches parents,” 4). From there, the delicate question of Henri’s Huguenot warrior youth is easily negotiated: Cesar n’estant encore qu’en son adolescence Fut nommé Chef de part avec toute puissance. Henry fut d’un party général reconnu Bien qu’il ne fût à vingt ans parvenu . . . (5) Caesar was designated the all-powerful leader of his party in his adolescence. Henry was recognized as his party’s general before he reached the age of twenty . . .

The over 100 lines that juxtapose the sites of Caesar’s battles to those of Henri focus, in the manner of Bandole, on Caesar’s conquests and on Henri’s battles with Spain and with the Ligue (7–12). There follows another list-like juxtaposition of the brave soldiers who served the two leaders, in which Coligny, Condé and Sully himself – all prominent Protestants – share the terrain with Crassus and Marcus Lepidus (13– 15). Ultimately, for Sully, Caesar was able to:

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     51 [Oter] le souvenir des animosités, Et [imposer] silence aux coeurs irrités. Sans s’arrêter l’esprit aux querelles civiles Il forma pour desseins plus grands et plus utiles . . . (18–19) Banish the memory of [those] animosities, and silence angry hearts. Without dwelling on civil disputes He formulated grander and more useful plans . . .

Similarly, Henri’s achievement was to have “extinguished the memory of France’s misfortunes” (“Estaint le souvenir des malheurs de la France,” 20). Clearly, Sully’s poem itself contributes to this goal, by overwriting Henri’s charged past with a “usable” classicized version devoid of religious or more generally civil conflict. In yet another variation of this approach to the life of Henri IV, Nicolas Chrestien’s Royalles Ombres stages a competitive discussion between the shades of Alexander, Caesar and Henri, thus breaking even more dramatically with the constraints of historical chronology. After gathering the three figures together, Chrestien will enlist more or less the same techniques of comparison exploited by Bandole and Sully, with Henri’s accomplishments now not merely equalling, but even exceeding the achievements of his ancient peers. This text shows us just how well the detour via Caesar could serve the program of forgetting the conflicts embodied in the recently assassinated monarch when Henri’s shade, seeking to best Caesar (who has already bested Alexander), cites as one of his signal achievements his victory at Coutras. In 1587, the troops of a decidedly Huguenot Henri defeated the royal army of Henri III there, before the two joined forces to combat the Catholic Ligue. Yet Chrestien’s Henri IV brags, “Coutras would be witness to the fact that my manly courage /Could temper rage with audacity” (“Coutras sera témoin que mon mâle courage /De la témérité sût émousser la rage,” 21). In the context of Chrestien’s poem, this internal conflict between French factions becomes just another in the series of Henri’s victories over his enemies, which are in turn assimilated to the enemies of France. The most troublesome aspects of Coutras are simply omitted, the battle rewritten as another glorious chapter in a biography that, unlike Pierre Matthieu’s, has now become glorious from beginning to end. There is no longer a before and an after; Henri is eternally grand. The Edict de Nantes consolidated a long series of royal efforts to reorient the status of the civil war in public discourse, from an occasion for juridical vengeance, retribution, and restitution (or, alternatively, clemency and pardon) to an atrocity that utterly exceeds the grasp of legislation, and that is thus ultimately best forgotten. In the wake of the

­52     Forgetting Differences assassination of Henri IV, one of the notable features of biographical works about him is their exploitation of this rhetoric of forgetting – or, more alliteratively and more powerfully, this ideology of oblivion, not only in order to rehabilitate the Huguenot past of the departed sovereign, but also to minimize the larger civil conflicts of which he was an integral part. This rhetoric is especially evident in the numerous oraisons funèbres published immediately after his death. The panegyric nature of the oraison funèbre, like the selective, restricted view of the vie parallèle, allowed supporters of the crown to pick and choose those parts of Henri IV’s life to be memorialized (and thus, it is assumed, remembered). The focus on the life of a single historical actor permitted the construction of a one-sided view of history that simply excluded other perspectives. A 1610 oraison funèbre, delivered at Troyes by a Sorbonne theologian, makes this process explicit. Like the other texts we have been examining, Denis Latracey’s funeral oration seeks to put forward the view that Henri de Navarre was always already Henri le Grand. “Les grands, pour petits qu’ils semblent à leur venüe au monde, y viennent ja grands” (14); examples include Alexander, Hercules, and Theodosius.53 Latracey picks up more or less verbatim the standard biography as we have seen it in the parallels with Julius Caesar, simply glossing over the fact that France’s recently assassinated hero was engaged in civil war against historical actors whom an encomiastic national history would also position as heroes.54 But then an interesting thing happens, as Latracey takes a step back in order to comment on his own role in shaping this picture of Henri. In the middle of what had become the stock sentences from Henri’s official life story, Latracey acknowledges that this view of the deceased king is incompatible with a similar perspective on his immediate predecessors, in particular Henri III: The Battle of Coutras was the Orient of his hopes, I will skip over all that in silence, so as not to offend the memory of our other Kings who preceded him, I only want to tell you how God miraculously brought him to the throne.55

Latracey cannot tell us all that he knows about the Battle of Coutras without compromising the very ideology of monarchy upon which his glowing account of Henri IV is based. The principle that everything the King of France does is grand by virtue of his being the King of France – a crude but accurate formulation of a nascent royal absolutism – provides no conceptual or narrative framework within which to tell the story of the defeat of one of those kings at the hand of the other.56 Latracey here makes explicit the tacit mechanics of exclusion according to which genres like the vie or the oraison funèbre allowed for and even encouraged a narrow view and a monologic presentation of memories of the

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     53

troubles, thereby demonstrating how generic conventions could be exploited to fashion a unified vision of the past. In his Histoire des derniers troubles de France, historiographer Pierre Matthieu tells Henri, “la France ne nourrit jamais prince plus doux, plus clement, plus pardonnant et plus oublieux d’injures quand il s’en peut venger, que vous estes.”57 Royal panegyric in the age of Henri IV positioned the sovereign as laudable and memorable above all for his acts of clemency and for his adherence to the politics of oubliance. And yet, something of Henri’s very greatness was necessarily lost in accounts of his past that distorted the nature of the conflicts he had faced. In another funeral oration from 1610, Antoine de Nervèze, a nobleman who later wrote romance novels set during the period of the wars, shows a highly developed sensitivity to the complexity of putting the politics of oubliance into literary practice in a portrait of the king. The majority of this longish (50-page) pamphlet stays in the present and very recent past, offering general reflections on rulership; there is no account of Henri’s pre-1590 life, thereby dispensing with the problems of both Coutras and conversion. Rhetorical difficulties nonetheless arise, this time with respect to the event of Henri IV’s assassination: Mais que dirons nous des qualitez d’un si grand Roy, sur le dommage d’une si grande perte, & l’abomination de celuy qui nous l’a causée. Tout est egallement fort en ces trois poincts, où la gloire du premier se confond avec la douleur du second, & tous les deux avec l’horreur du troisieme qui ne se peut bien exprimer . . . si la relation du meutre au meurtrier ne nous obligeoit de nommer l’un en parlant de l’autre, il seroit necessaire d’en esteindre la memoire.58 What shall we say about the qualities of such a great King, about the damage of such a great loss, and about the abomination of he who caused us that loss. All three possess an equal force, such that the glory of the first is inextricable from the pain of the second, and both of these from the horror of the third, which cannot easily be expressed . . . if the relation of the murder to the murderer did not oblige us to speak of the one in speaking of the other, it would be necessary to extinguish the memory of the murderer.

Nervèze senses a necessary relationship between Henri IV’s greatness and his assassination, and between both of these things and the emotional impact of his death. Offering a specific example of the problem of selective forgetting that André de Nesmond’s oration introduced by way of Thucydides, Nervèze suggests that he is in some sense obliged to memorialize Henri’s assassin if he is properly to memorialize Henri in all his grandeur, and thereby to do justice to the magnitude of France’s loss. The same problematic applies, mutatis mutandis, to accounts of the French civil wars that would construe oubliance as a license to gloss

­54     Forgetting Differences over the deep conflicts and horrific violence of the troubles. A note to Jean Baudoin’s 1610 translation of Tacitus’s Annals (taken up from Annibal Scotus’s 1589 Latin edition) underlines the paradox at the heart of the act of memorializing only the gesture of “pardon et oubliance” that forgives a crime, while failing to give an account of the crime itself. Explaining the circumstances of Claudius’s decision to pardon Caractacus, he translates: If an enemy prisoner is immediately put to death by the victor, he will be forgotten [“ensevely par l’oubliance”]: but if he is kept alive, he will serve as an example of and perpetual witness to the victor’s kindness and clemency.59

As this observation indicates, the memorability of the act of clemency requires that the crime to be forgotten in a juridical register be remembered in some other register. Henri IV’s clemency is meaningless without adversaries whom he can forgive. Whereas encomiastic summaries of the life of Henri IV managed the trick of praising his ability to banish memories of conflicts, all the while memorializing those conflicts as heroic conquests, authors of full-dress histories of a series of wars that had been well documented from their inception will have to tell a bit more of the story.

Notes   1. Crouzet, Denis, La Nuit de la Saint-Barthélemy: un rêve perdu de la renaissance (Paris: Fayard, 1994).  2. L’Hôpital’s position is more complex than Crouzet suggests, since he explicitly accepts a version of the very un-neo-Platonic principle of religious diversity.   3. Harald Weinrich’s study of the valence of forgetting in Western European literature includes a brief discussion of theology (via Augustine and Dante). See Weinrich, Harald, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, trans Steven Rendall (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).   4. “la peine [est] réservée à la loy, et la grâce au souverain.” Bodin, Jean, Six livres de la république (Paris: Jacques du Puis, 1583), bk 1, ch. 10, p. 331. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the French are mine.  5. “le Roy seul a droit de remettre crimes, de bailler graces et pardons.” Papon, Jean, Recueil d’arrestz notables des courts souveraines de France (Paris: Iaques Macé, 1568), p. 530r.   6. “au roi très chrétien de la fin du moyen âge qui prêtait son corps à une monarchie voulue par Dieu se substitute un fils aîné de l’Eglise qui a pour modèle la relation personnelle d’affection, de dilection entre le Fils et le Père.” Tallon, Alain, Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), p. 82.   7. Davis, Natalie Z., Fiction in the Archives. Pardon Tales and their Tellers in

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     55 Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). As her title indicates, Davis’s preoccupation was not with the juridical dimension of pardon, but rather with the links between the sometimes elaborate tales of extenuating circumstances composed by those who sought royal pardon, on the one hand, and the strategies of narrative fiction in sixteenthcentury France, on the other.   8. For an overview of the Wars of Religion, see Holt, Mack, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); for a more comprehensive reference work, see Jouanna Arlette, Jacqueline Boucher and Dominique Biloghi (eds), Histoire et dictionnaire des guerres de religion (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998).  9. Edict du Roy, contenant la grace et pardon pour ceux qui par cy devant ont mal senty de la Foy (Paris: Vincent Sartenas, 1559). In this edict, François II speaks of the preachers who came from Geneva and “infected” that part of the French population too simple to be able to “discerner les doctrines,” and of the “plusieurs & diverses punitions” that such preachers were made to suffer. Now, he says, there are enough French who have participated in some way or other in Protestant activities that: si l’on venait à faire la punition selon la rigueur de droict, & de noz ordonnances, seroit faicte une merveilleuse effusion de sang d’hommes, femmes, filles, jeunes gens constituez en fleur d’adolescence, dont les aucuns par inductions & subornations, autres par simplicité & ignorance, & autres par curiosité plus que par malice, sont tombez en telles erreurs & inconveniens.



He wants to avoid such bloodshed, he says: “ne voulans que le premier an de nostre regne soit au temps advenir remarqué par la posterité comme sanglant & plein de supplices de la mort.” He will thus exercise “clemence et misericorde.” But after his statement of a general pardon, he singles out groups that are in fact not included: “Toutefois nous n’entendons en la presente abolition comprendre les predicants” as well as anyone who has plotted against the royal family or “l’estat.” 10. [Condé, Louis I de Bourbon], Mémoires de Condé (London: Rollin, 1743), vol. 1, pp. 11–14. On the possible influence of Michel de l’Hôpital on these edicts, see Petris, Loris, La Plume et la tribune: Michel de l’Hospital et ses discours (1559–1562) (Geneva: Droz, 2002), pp. 127–30. 11. A handy collection of the primary texts (in English translation) on the justification controversy can be found in Olin, John, A Reformation Debate: Sadoleto’s Letter to the Genevans and Calvin’s Reply (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 89–130. An excellent study of the political ramifications of the eucharistic controversy is Christopher Elwood’s The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 12. English translations of the Institutes are from the one-volume edition of the 1845 Beveridge translation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 1989) and will be indicated by page number only; the cited passage is on pp. 535–6. Beveridge was of course working from Calvin’s 1559 Latin edition, which I have also consulted. I will give modernized French versions of Calvin’s

­56     Forgetting Differences Institutes from the 1560 Institution chrestienne, since it was the most widely circulated edition in France in the period under consideration here: S’il nous est besoin de connaître quelque chose en toute notre religion, il est requis principalement que nous entendions ceci: c’est par quel moyen, en quelle sorte, par quelle condition, et en quelle facilité ou difficulté est obtenue la rémission des péchés.



Calvin, Jean, L’Institution chrétienne, 4 vols, Jean Cadier and Pierre Marcel (eds), (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1955), vol. III, sect. iv, p. 101. Subsequent references are to page only, since all come from Book Three. 13. Delumeau, Jean, L’aveu et le pardon (Paris: Fayard, 1990). 14. [Dieu] publie son grand jubilé non pas tel que celuy que cest Antichrist de Rome a faict publyer ceste année . . . nous recevons de luy non seulement plainiere remission de noz pechez, mais [aussi] . . . une rejouyssance spirituele, cependant que nous serons en ce monde, moyennant toutesfoys que nous nous rengeons à luy et à son obeyssance, congnoissans combien il nous sera plus prouffictable d’obeyr à luy qu’aux hommes.



Blake, William and Wilhelmus Moehn (eds), Supplementa Calviniana (Neukirchener Verlag: Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1994), vol. 8, pp. 167.2–8. The 1550 Jubilee was proclaimed by Paul III but overseen by Julius III after Paul’s death in late 1549. See Lea, Henry Charles, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols (Philadephia: Lea Brothers, 1896), vol. 2, p. 214. 15. The same text is reprinted in Martin Chemnitz’s Traitté des indulgences, contre le decret du Concile de Trente. Briefve consideration sur l’an du Jubilé. Le vrai et grand pardon general de pleniere remission des pechés (Geneva: Pierre de La Rovière pour Jacques I Chouet, 1599), p. 232. Jean-François Gilmont synthesizes the bibliographical research on these pamphlets, many of which have not survived, in his Bibliographie des éditions de Jean Crespin, 1550–1572 (Geneva: Droz, 1981), p. 123. See also Higman, Francis, Censorship and the Sorbonne (Geneva: Droz, 1979), pp. 181–9. 16. Estienne, Henri, Introduction au traité de la conformité des merveilles anciennes avec les modernes. Traité préparatif pour l’Apologie pour Hérodote (Paris: n.p., 1566). Natalie Davis also mentions this story; see Davis, Fiction in the Archives, pp. 62–3. 17. “par mesme moyen il faudroit accuser de sedition les Apostres & toute l’Eglise primitive.” Chandieu, Antoine, La confirmation de la discipline ecclesiastique, obseruee es eglises reformees du royaume de France: auec la response aux obiectio[n]s proposees alencontre (Geneva: Henri Estienne, 1566), p. 7. 18. Monod, Paul, The Power of Kings. Monarchy and Religion in Europe, 1589–1715 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 49. 19. In a 1999 essay on pardon in a post-Holocaust world, Jacques Derrida proposed that “pure” forgiveness is impossible, since the gesture of forgiveness is only fully meaningful when it is directed towards that which is considered unforgiveable. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York and London: Routledge,

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     57 2001). “On Forgiveness” is a translation of “Le Siècle et le pardon,” which first appeared in Le Monde de débats in 1999; what’s translated here as “forgiveness” is thus the French word “pardon.” Derrida observes that the “Abrahamic” tradition of forgiveness to which his discussion refers is equivocal: “Sometimes, forgiveness (given by God, or inspired by divine prescription) must be a gracious gift, without exchange and without condition; sometimes it requires, as its minimal condition, the repentance and transformation of the sinner” (44). In the context of sixteenth-century France, these two alternatives map closely onto Protestant and Catholic theologies of God’s forgiveness. 20. For a brief explanation of the difference between an édit, an ordonnance, and a déclaration, and the respective materials used to validate them see http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/editsdepacification/diplomatique (last accessed 15 January 2015). 21. Thus, my concerns here are quite different from those of Margolf, whose recent study of the Paris Chambre de l’Edit focuses precisely on the role of the law courts in adjudicating disputes regarding events that occurred during the wars. See Religion and Royal Justice in Early Modern France, especially chapter 3, “Memory, litigation, and the Paris Chambre de l’Edit” as well as the prior article that lays out that chapter’s basic arguments (“Adjudicating memory: Law and religious difference in early seventeenth-century France,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 27:2 (1996), pp. 399–418). Margolf admits that “this type of lawsuit never dominated the court’s business” and concludes that “the general pattern in lawsuits of this kind suggests that dismissals outweighed condemnations or acquittals” (Adjudicating, p. 404). This certainly reinforces one’s sense of the determination of the monarchy and its functionaries to enforce an ideology of forgetting, and indeed, indicates their success in doing so. 22. between 1560 and 1590, French parlements rarely executed anyone for the crime of heresy, even during wartime. The Parlement of Paris ordered barely a dozen public executions for simple heresy throughout the entire period of the religious wars [the Parlement of Toulouse was, of course, a different story] . . . With rare and temporary exceptions, royal courts now condemned . . . for “sedition” rather than for religious offenses, as Simon Goulart noted with considerable irritation when preparing an updated 1582 edition of Crespin’s martyrology.



Monter, William, Judging the French Reformation. Heresy Trials by Sixteenth-Century Parlements (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 212–19. 23. And of course in the juridical realm itself, the provisions of the edict entailed far more than simply desisting from initiating legal proceedings bearing on griefs caused by the wars, since it also ordered the removal from the registers of all French parlements the records of any proceedings intiated against those of the religion prétendue réformée (RPR) on the basis of religion from the time of Henri II forward: Déclarons toutes sentences, jugemens, arrêts, procédures, saisies, ventes, et décrets faits et donnez contre ceux de ladite religion prétendue réformée,

­58     Forgetting Differences tant vivans que morts, depuis le trépas du feu roi Henry deuxième, notre très-honoré seigneur et beau père, à l’occasion de ladite religion, tumultes et troubles depuis avenus, ensemble l’exécution d’iceux jugemens et décrets, dés à présent cassez, révoquez et annullez, et iceux cassons, révoquons et annullons. Ordonnons qu’ils seront rayez et ôtez des registres des greffes des cours, tant souveraines qu’inférieur. Comme nous voulons aussi être ôtées et effacées toutes marques, vestiges et monumens desdites exécutions, livres et actes diffamatoires contre leurs personnes, mémoire et postérité: et que les places esquelles ont été faites pour cette occasion démolitions ou rasemens, soient rendues en tel état qu’elles sont aux propriétaires d’icelles, pour en jouir et disposer à leur volonté. (Article LVIII)

24. Enguerrand de Monstrelet’s collection of documents from the era of Charles VI helps bring into relief the novelty of the memory clauses in the sixteenth century, where what is forbidden are not actual acts of war and retribution, but acts of commemoration. The 1414 treaty that ends the earlier conflict also provides for a juridical amnesty, but that amnesty never exceeds the boundaries of what can actually be legislated; it certainly does not extend to the realm of memory. The primary concern that this agreement expresses – one consistent with the rhetoric of reconciliation in this period – is for “peace”: Nous avons voulu, avons fait, ordonné & commandé, voulons, faisons, ordonnons & commandons paix estre ferme & estable en nostredit Royaume entre noz subjects, & que cessent rancunes & malivolences . . . [forbids the taking up of arms]. Et à nourrir, entretenir ladicte paix, pour l’honneur & reverence de Dieu, vueillans à la rigueur de justice preferer misericorde, avons fait, donné & octroyé & de nostre dessusdite plaine puissance & auctorité Royalle, faisons, donnons & octroyons abolittion generalle à tous [including foreigners, and those who aided and abetted the Duke of Bourgogne]. Excepté cinq cens personnes non nobles de nostredit Royaume, qui ne sont pas subjectz vassalz ou serviteurs de nostredit cousin de Bourgogne . . . Excepté aussi ceux qui par nostre justice ont esté nomméement banniz. (I, 211v)



There follow a list of material conditions that the Duc de Bourgogne and his party in particular must respect. Basically, they cannot take any action that could be construed as a renewal of the armed conflict. There are also a series of clauses (the edict is not articulated) that bear on administrative protocols – who gets to appoint whom, etc. The end sums things up thus: it is forbidden for anyone to “faire ou attempter de fait, d’escrit ou de parolles ou autrement, qu’on sentist reprobation pour l’occasion des choses passées . . .” (De Monstrelet, Enguerran, Chroniques, 3 vols (Paris: Chez Guillaume Chaudiere, 1572), vol. I, p. 213r). 25. In an article on the activities of Michel de Montaigne during the wars, Anne-Marie Cocula dismisses this rhetoric in a footnote: “Cette clause qui peut, aujourd’hui, surprendre et choquer, a un motif juridique: il s’agit de renoncer à toutes les poursuites judiciaires contre les protestants . . .” (“L’Engagement de Montaigne, 1580–1590,” Des signes au sens: lectures du livre III des essais (Paris: Champion, 2003), pp. 11–32, (16)). Coligny was, in fact, charged with sedition post-mortem.

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     59 26. Loisel, Antoine, De l’amnestie ou oubliance des maux faits et receus pendant les troubles, & à l’occasion d’iceux. Remonstrance faite en la ville d’Agen, à l’ouverture de la Cour de Justice en 1582 (Paris: Robert le Mangnier, 1584). Nancy Lyman Roelker characterizes Loisel as a “link between the crisis generation [in parliament] and their sons and successors” (Lyman Roelker, Nancy, One King, One Faith. The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 30). For a very fine analysis of the conflicting philosophical allegiances underpinning this address and three others that Loisel delivered during the wars, see Parsons, Jotham, “The political vision of Antoine Loisel,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 27:2 (1996), pp. 453–76. 27. In “Amnesty and oubliance at the end of the French Wars of Religion,” Michael Wolfe makes the puzzling claim that “one probable source of Henri IV’s amnesty program was Antoine Loisel” (in Cahiers d’histoire, XVI:2 (1996), pp. 45–68, (49)). As I have noted here, there was ample royal precedent for such a program during the wars, and Loisel makes it clear that he is explicating previous legislation. For easy reference, André Stegmann has gathered most of the relevant edicts in his Edits des guerres de religion (Paris: Vrin, 1979). 28. By contrast, as Nicolas Offenstadt shows, medieval peace accords are accompanied and assured by a “multiplication des dispositifs de contrôle de la parole” according to which “les pouvoirs . . . définissent avec précision l’injure prohibée” (Offenstadt, Nicolas, Faire la paix au Moyen Âge (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), pp. 57–8); a far cry from Loisel’s sense that one should forget simply everything about the Wars of Religion. As we shall see in Chapter 3, there was significant uncertainty among historians under Henri IV regarding what they were permitted (or prohibited) to write about the wars. 29. “De pardon on n’en veut point en troubles ou guerres civiles. Car bien souvent chacun pense avoir le droict de son costé, quoy que ce soit on le veut ainsi penser, & ne confesse on jamais gueres sa faute.” Loisel, De l’amnestie, p. 16. 30. Nesmond, André de, “L’Amnestie, ou l’assoupissement des injures passées. Remonstrance faicte en la chambre de l’edict à l’establissement d’icelle en la ville de Nérac l’an MDC,” Remontrances, ouvertures de Palais et arrestz prononcés en robes rouges (Poitiers: Antoine Mesnier, 1617), pp. 70–110, (79). 31. Offenstadt’s research reveals that the medieval practice of “oubly” is consistently modeled on the “pardon chrétien,” with the king in the position of the divine and a clear identification of guilty parties. Faire la paix, p. 50. 32. Offenstadt writes that in the French Middle Ages, “la paix passe par l’oubli et le silence,” and that the peace treaties of the civil wars of the early fifteenth century in particular “construisent . . . une véritable économie de l’oubli.” Faire la paix, pp. 49–50. However, there are important differences between the material Offenstadt cites and the edicts of pacification issued during the Wars of Religion. Offenstadt’s examples call for “oubly” in a juridical sense, as a matter of the “‘silence perpetual’ du procureur,” but never formulate amnesty in terms of the more diffuse effacement of memories evoked in the sixteenth-century edicts.

­60     Forgetting Differences 33. The collection of these treaties published in Monstrelet’s Chroniques was re-issued in 1572, the year of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres. In the editorial letter to the King (Charles IX) that opens the collection, Pierre l’Huillier explains that “cette histoire traite d’un siècle, auquel la France était malade presque de même maladie que nous l’avons vue” (n.p.). 34. “Premier entre les seigneurs du sang royal, sera bonne amour & union, & promettront & jureront estre bons & vrais parens & amis” (I, 165v); “plus grande joye & semblant de grand amour les uns avec les autres” (II, 99r); “tresfraternelle & tresgrande amour ensemble” (II, 98v); “toute haine & rancune qu’il peut avoir à l’encontre de luy à cause de ce, il oste de son cueur & qu’entre eux ayt bonne paix & amour” (II, 109v). De Monstrelet, Chroniques. 35. See Christin, Olivier, “‘Peace must come from us’: Friendship pacts between the confession during the Wars of Religion,” in Ruth Whelan and Carol Baxter (eds), Toleration and Religious Identity. The Edict of Nantes and its Implications in France, Britain and Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), pp. 92–103. See also Christin’s La paix de religion. L’autonomisation de la raison politique au XVIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1997), which studies strategies of peaceful coexistence among religious factions in mid-sixteenth-century France and Germany from the (urban) ground up. 36. In “An edict and its antecedents: the pacification of Nantes and political culture in later sixteenth-century France,” Mark Greengrass sets the Edict of Nantes into the context of the legislation that preceded it, pointing out the themes of pax civilis (political as opposed to a religious peace); friendship and affection; the kingdom as a sick body whose humors must be balanced and whose passions must be curbed (a theme Greengrass studies in depth in Governing Passions); and amnesty, the modalities of which he does not investigate. Whelan, Ruth and Carol Baxter (eds), Toleration and Religious Identity. The Edict of Nantes and its Implications in France, Britain and Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), pp. 128–46. 37. Fisch, Jörg, Krieg und Frieden im Friedensvertrag (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979). 38. By the eighteenth century, argues Fisch, amnesty is a conventional part of European peace treaties; he cites Kant’s 1797 Metaphysik der Sitten: “Dass mit dem Friedensschlusse auch die Amnestie verbunden sei, liegt schon im Begriffe desselben” (quoted in Fisch, Krieg und Frieden im Friedensvertrag, p. 105). By the twentieth century, this political conventionality has effected a qualitative change: “Amnestie ist nun reiner terminus technicus für die Straflosigkeit” (114). In this period, the explicit references to a more generalized forgetting are dropped, and the result is a discourse that is purely juridical. The fact that twentieth-century amnesties are usually directed toward specific persons with regard to specific acts only serves to reinforce the narrowly juridical character of contemporary amnesty. 39. There is of course an ancient precedent for the rhetoric of forgetting in the post-civil war Athenian amnesty of 402 bc. This instance of willed forgetting is treated in deconstructive terms by Nicole Loraux in The Divided City, trans Corinne Pache (New York: Zone Books, 2000); French original: La Cité divisée (Paris: Editions Payot, 1997).

Clemency, Pardon, and Oubliance     61 40. “oublians aucunement leur grade & dignité pour oublier plus aisément leurs offenses” (Nesmond, L’Amnestie, p. 78). 41. For an account of Henri’s successive conversions, see Wolfe, Michael, The Conversion of Henri IV (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 42. On Jean Lemaire de Belges, see Stephens, Walter, Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). On Ronsard’s Franciade, see the introduction to Ronsard, Pierre de, The Franciad (1572), trans Phillip John Usher (New York: AMS Press, 2010). 43. On Renaissance translatio, see Stierle, Karlheinz,“Translatio studii and Renaissance,” in Wolfgang Iser and Sanford Budick (eds), The Translatability of Cultures (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 55–66. 44. Clark, Carol, “Some Renaissance Caesars” in Miriam Griffin (ed.): A Companion to Julius Caesar (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) pp. 356–70. 45. Martin, Martial, “Les Vies parallèles de César à la fin du XVIe et au début du XVIIe siècle,” Cahiers de Recherches médiévales et humanists, 14 (2007), pp. 57–70. 46. Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, trans Sir Thomas North, 10 vols (London: Dent, 1910); vol. 7. 47. Quint, David, “Painful memories: Aeneid 3 and the problem of the past,” The Classical Journal, 78 (1982), pp. 30–8, (35). 48. According to Antoine-Alexandre Barbier, “Antoine de Bandole” is none other than Jean Baudouin (see Chapter 3). Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes et pseudonyms, 2nd edn (Paris: Barrois l’Aîné, 1822), Tome 1, p. xiii. I will continue to use the name Bandole here, since it appears that most contemporaries believed there was such a person. 49. Bandole, Antoine, Les Paralleles de Cesar et de Henry IIII. Par Anthoine de Bandole, avec Les Commentaires de Cesar, et les annotations de Blaise de Vigenere (Paris: Jacques Rebuffe, 1625). 50. Cf. Martin, “Les Vies parallèles,” p. 11: Paradoxalement, là où César jouait sur les divisions de la Gaule dans sa conquête, le parallèle se fonde sur le projet d’unification (ou de “réunification”), identifiant le conquérant étranger et le roi légitime dans un même effort de guerre.

51. “César décrivant les exploits qu’il fit en cette année, traite de la Religion des Druides: Et Henri conférant avec les plus grands et doctes Prélats de la France, de la Religion, étant à Saint Denis protesta devant les manes de ses ancêtres Rois de France de n’en suivre jamais d’autre que celle qu’ils avaient suivie” (54–5). 52. De Sully, Maximilien Béthune, Parallèles de César et de Henry le Grand (Paris: Toussaint du Bray, 1615). 53. Latracey, Denis, Oraison Funèbre...prononcée en l’Eglise de Troyes, le 17.06.1610, par Maistre Denis Latracey, Docteur en la Faculté de Theologie de Paris, et Chanoine de ladicte Eglise (Paris: Pierre Ramier, 1610). 54.

nostre grand Roy apres avoir veu son Pere mort, sa mere fugitive, ses parents condamnez, ses serviteurs exilez, se trouve à l’aage de 14. ans les armes sur le

­62     Forgetting Differences dos, au milieu d’un parti affoibly par trois batailles perdues, n’ayant recours qu’à sa seule valeur & proüesse; il s’y gouverne si bien, qu’il soustient en mesme temps neuf armées Royales, qui lattaquoient de divers costez, & en fin termine ces guerres par des traictez honorable . . . Latracey, Oraison funèbre, p. 15

55. La bataille de Coutras a esté l’Orient de ses esperance, je passe le tout soubs silence, pour ne point offenser la memoire de nos autres Roys qui l’ont precedé, & vous veux dire seulement comment Dieu l’a porté miraculeusement à la Couronne . . . (15)

56. Keith Cameron discusses polemical biographies of Henri III that exhibit the same one-sidedness I want to highlight here, but in the service of character assassination rather than encomium, with the aim of portraying an “antihero” rather than a hero (287). “Suetonius, Henri de Valois and the Art of Political Biography,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 2:2 (Fall, 1995), pp. 284–98. In “Hardouin de Péréfixe et les enseignements absolutistes d’Henri IV,” in Grégory Champeaud and Céline Piot (eds), L’image d’Henri IV à travers les siècles (Nérac: Editions d’Albret, 2011), pp. 95–143), Thierry Issartel observes that Hardouin de Péréfixe lauds Henri IV by denigrating Henri III. The problem, it turns out, was not religious difference or factional warfare, but rather moral degeneration and bad finances. Thus, Henri IV “a restauré l’ancienne vertu qui avait été abandonnée” (125). 57. Matthieu published his history several times at Lyon between 1594 and 1606; no pagination for the dedicatory address. 58. De Nervèze, Sieur, Discours funèbre à l’honneur de la memoire, de tresclement, invincible & triomphant, Henry IIII. Roy de France & de Navarre (Paris: Antoine du Brueil, 1610), pp. 10, 11. 59. Les oeuvres de Cornelius Tacitus et de Velleius Paterculus, trans Jean Baudoin (Paris: J. Gesselin, 1610), p. 415.

Chapter 3

History without Passion: National Historiography in the Age of Oubliance

J’en suis content, et d’autre part marry, d’ouyr rafreschir la memoire de ce que, pour l’honneur de ma patrie, de mon Roy, et des siens, je desireroy estre ensevely au plus profond du puys de l’oubliance.1

In the article on the city Mâcon in his 1697 Dictionnaire historique et critique, Pierre Bayle devotes a long, convoluted remarque to the question of whether he should include material about the Wars of Religion in his work.2 He begins by paraphrasing the sixteenth-century edicts of pacification that urged the French to extinguish memories of the conflicts: “it would be desirable that the memory of all of those inhuman acts had been abolished in the first place, and that all the books that spoke about it had been thrown into the fire.”3 Those who hold that memories of the conflicts should have been erased and documents referring to them burned are certainly right when they warn that such reminders are “extremely liable to nurse an irreconcilable hate in people’s minds.” Emphasizing his aversion to polemic, Bayle says that he would be perfectly happy if nobody ever remembered that kind of event, particularly if suppressing a painful past led to better conduct in the present; “but given that these things are amply recorded in a too-great number of works for the hope that affecting to say nothing about them in this one could do any good, I did not want to constrain myself.” In light of the extensive written record of this painful past, the efforts of any individual author to suppress it could only be a vain pretense; thus Bayle’s dictionary includes extensive material about the wars. Having acknowledged that the memory of the Wars of Religion was very much alive, thanks at least in part to the numerous books published on the subject, Bayle can only express surprise that: les Francais de différente religion aient vécu après les édits dans une aussi grande fraternité que celle que nous avons vue, quoiqu’ils eussent éternellement entre les mains les histoires de nos guerres civiles, où l’on ne voit

­64     Forgetting Differences que saccagemens, que profanations, que massacres, qu’autels renversés, qu’assassinats, que parjures, que fureurs . . . French people of different religions lived in as great a fraternity as they did after the edicts of pacification, even though they always had in their hands histories of our civil wars, which contain nothing but sackings, profanations, massacres, overturned altars, assassinations, perjury, fury . . .4

Whatever precise characterization one might ultimately give to Bayle’s rather tepid “assez grande fraternité,” it is undeniable that both the scale and intensity of violence of inter-factional conflict in France diminished considerably in the wake of the Edict of Nantes. What role, Bayle seems to ask, could histories of the wars have possibly played in supporting this relative détente? This chapter attempts to explain how histories of the wars may have furthered the forgetting of differences after the French Wars of Religion. When he wonders whether accounts of the wartime atrocities will inevitably lead to more such atrocities (and he himself laments in the Mâcon entry that “un mauvais exemple en attire un autre presqu’à l’infini, abyssus abyssum vocat,” 35r), or whether they will by contrast serve as a guarantee that gruesome history will not repeat itself (thus functioning as what he calls a “songes-y bien”), Bayle runs up against the limitations of classical Humanist historiography in the face of the Wars of Religion. To put it succinctly, much Renaissance historiography was in the business of producing memorable writing about memorable things that were to provide morally informed instruction for engagement in political and social affairs. As Bayle’s inconclusive reflections about the potential effects of accounts of the wars suggests, France’s troubles were not easily integrated into the framework of this mode of history, which appeared to offer only two paths: either the effacement of all memories of the wars, as something utterly indigne de mémoire, on the one hand, or their constant recollection, as either positive or negative examples, on the other. Moreover, Humanist stylistic techniques for bringing the past to life, designed for ancient history and refined in research on France’s medieval past, were ill-suited to the project of oubliance. In the first part of the seventeenth century, however, historians of the wars adopted rhetorics of both history and historiography that provided alternatives to these traditional modes of writing history.5

Researching the Past in Sixteenth-Century France In 1573, Guy du Faur de Pibrac, Charles IX’s designated apologist for the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres, offered a version of the ideol-

History without Passion     65

ogy of oblivion that directly targeted historiography.6 After describing some of the more horrifying events of the fourth war of religion (and extravagantly blaming them all on the Protestant Coligny), he reverses course: But there can be no good in reopening that wound and reviving the memory of these civil conflicts that every man who loves his country [patria] believes he should forget forever! . . . May it please Heaven that all of our misfortunes be plunged into eternal oblivion! May it please Heaven that all memories suppress them, that nobody speak of them much longer, that the discretion and silence of all men now living let our descendants remain ignorant of the causes, the motives and the events related to our discord ...!7

As Charles IX himself had done in his edicts of pacification, Pibrac here endorses a communal forgetting that extends far beyond a merely juridical amnesty. No longer fixated primarily on the conflicts and on their potential renewal, Pibrac’s exhortation to extinguish memories expands its purview to subsequent investigations of the causes of the wars, to the motives of those involved, and finally, and much more broadly, to research into anything related to the wars. It is hard not to see in this official communication an effort to deter the juridico-historical examination of the recent past, in order to prevent it from receiving the kind of historiographical scrutiny to which ancient Rome, the early Christian Church, or Gaul had recently been subject. In 1599, just one year before André de Nesmond delivered his speech on oubliance, the Catholic conseiller du Roy Pierre de Beloy published a commentary on the Edict of Nantes that includes a long section on the “Loy d’amnestie et d’oubliance.”8 Echoing Pibrac’s desire for historiographic censorship, Beloy notes that it is sometimes better to “bury” evil deeds than to research the past in too great detail (“il [vaut] mieux ensevelir le mal . . . que d’en faire une trop exacte recherche du passé”). Yet well before 1599, detailed research into the past had become the hallmark of Humanist historiography; the critical rigor of such research had only been enhanced within the French school of jurist-historians whom Donald Kelley credited with laying the foundations of modern historical scholarship. What would become of these historiographical methods in the aftermath of civil war, in the age of oubliance? Mark Greengrass points out that: royalist historians . . . of the civil wars whose works were published in the aftermath of 1598 were shaped by a particular sensitivity about what they might say about those conflicts of the immediate past, aware that what they wrote could have a potentially incendiary impact on the present. (26)9

At the same time, however, as Phillip Benedict rightly observes:

­66     Forgetting Differences certain events simply could not be avoided in any coherent attempt to tell the story of the local or national community . . . And since the imperatives of critical history advanced among the learned as the century advanced, the manner in which these events were told became increasingly constrained by respect for documentary evidence and its critical evaluation.10

To this, we could also add the fact that in the decades following the Edict of Nantes, the history of the wars was not a matter that required painstaking philological research in obscure archives; rather, the events of the period were well known and highly controversial among readers who had either experienced them or learned about them in any of the numerous and conflicting pamphlets, books, and images that had circulated throughout the latter part of the sixteenth century and on into the seventeenth.11 These were not the obscure details of the Gaulish constitution, but the major events of the recent past. As Jacques De Thou wrote to Isaac Casaubon, “j’ay souvent désiré que tout cela se pût passer par le silence; mais les morts des Grands, et les changemens qui arrivent aux Estats, ne permettent que si grandes choses passent par la loy de l’oubliance.”12 Marin de Gomberville, future novelist and member of the Académie Française, put it more succinctly: “Was there ever an action so famous as that of Saint Bartholomew’s Day?”13 In 1566, Jean Bodin had advised the budding historian that “if any account has so many witnesses that it cannot be disproved, although it may seem unbelievable, there is every likelihood of its truth, especially if authors disagree about the rest of the story.”14 In a historiographical community that had striven to elaborate a method that would minimize flattery and obsequiousness in favor of a more objective rendering of events, the all-too-memorable period of the civil conflicts could not simply have been subject to a monarchical damnatio memoriae, as a history to be erased from the public record or deformed beyond all recognition. Rather than pass over such well-known events in silence, or simply abandon history for propaganda, historians of the period struggled to accommodate the triple constraints of notoriety, accuracy, and oubliance, which would entail finding a way to talk in a single text to a putatively unified French audience both about Henri IV’s Huguenot past as the enemy of France, and also about his reign as Catholic king and France’s savior.15 As Gomberville put it: il n’est nullement permis de taire que la Reine sa Mere, & Beze l’ayant jecté dans le party des rebelles, il porta toujours les armes contre le service du Roy, jusqu’à ce qu’il vint trouver Henri troisième à Tours . . . Mais alors que l’historien viendra à la mort de Henry troisieme, il faut qu’il face éclater hautement la Justice des armes de ce grand Roy.

History without Passion     67 It is simply impermissible to pass over in silence the fact that [Henri de Navarre], having been lured to join the rebels by his mother and by [Théodore de] Bèze, consistently took up arms against his King, until he went to join Henri III at Tours . . . But once the historian reaches the moment of Henri III’s death, he must shout in praise of the justice of the arms of this great king [Henri IV].16

Even if he is ultimately keen to support the image of Henri IV as the great savior of the French people, Gomberville’s prescriptions suggest that any national history worthy of the name could not shy away from the conflicts that had shaped French society in the preceding century. Gomberville’s instructions bring out what J. M. H. Salmon identified as one of the fundamental tensions within the Ciceronian principle of historia magistra vitae inherited by Renaissance Humanists: “history could not simply teach virtue if it maintained the standards of objective truth that Cicero recommended.”17 The impulse to (try to) tell the truth about the French Wars of Religion stood at cross purposes to the interests of exemplary history, thereby highlighting the tension between two historiographical trends within French national historiography of the sixteenth century. The philological strand had taken up the “standards of objective truth” in order to establish historical phenomena as facts or events in the first place. The impetus for such an enquiry within the national historiography of sixteenth-century France came from the desire to establish the forgotten “true” history of the French people, and to put to rest the myth of Trojan (and therefore Roman) origins.18 Such an enquiry was not particularly concerned with the potential exemplarity of historical actions within a larger moral framework (although the work on France’s “original” forms of government obviously sought to transform French politics and society). Historians that took up this line during the period of the Wars of Religion, like Jean Bodin and Louis Le Roy, underlined the relativity, multiplicity, and variety of human history, and continually struggled to fit this variety into neat, reductive schemata. This was not, on the whole, a historiography of the “memorable,” neither with respect to the matter of history, nor with respect to the historiographical rendering thereof. In contrast to this historiography of contingent, ever-proliferating facts that eluded firm systematization, historiography that understood history as a school of virtue assumed the existence of common moral values that allowed for the potential exemplarity of memorable historical acts or actors that were to be described in a memorable fashion. Although the judgment about the moral valence of history obviously depended upon a prior establishment of historical facts and events, historiography that sought to assign an unambiguous ethical value to

­68     Forgetting Differences historical phenomena subordinated contingent historical truth to the more general laws of moral philosophy. Ideally, the morally instructive, the memorable, and the historically true coincided, but the emphasis here was on that which was digne de mémoire by virtue of a potential to confer a practical moral benefit on the reader, in the form of examples for martial and political action conveyed in a memorable style.19 Early historiography of the Wars of Religion adapted elements of both of these historiographical methods. In spite of the clear differences between them, however, neither of them proved able to meet the demands of oubliance. Eventually, conciliatory historians of the conflicts attempted to wed the accuracy and historical distance of the philologist to the memorable moral tableaux of the exemplarist historian. They accomplished this not by means of new formulae for writing and researching history, but via the reformulation of the appropriate response to representations of the past.

The Matter of History As Nicholas Popper has recently observed, “At the outset of the sixteenth century, authorial fides was considered the most reliable index of the quality of evidence within a [historical] source.”20 As philological investigations began to show that ancient sources could and did sometimes err, however, other criteria were required in order to determine the credibility of the material to be found in works of history. Popper traces a methodological response to this challenge from François Baudouin to Francis Bacon that sought to “drain history of its polemical nature” (390) not by attempting to debunk errors and falsehoods, but rather by seeking “to determine what was worth saving in all sorts of sources” (395). Destined for a long and successful run in the natural sciences and, eventually, in later historiography, this approach simply assumed that the modern historian was fundamentally cut off from the interests of the past and for this very reason able to assess the relative credibility of his imperfect sources. The commitments of the “New Historians” who appropriated the critical methods of mos gallicus jurisprudence in sixteenth-century France are well known through works like Bodin’s 1566 Methodus. Like Baudouin and Bacon, Bodin placed an emphasis on emotional distance and authorial disinterest, aiming to uncover the “true” rather than the memorable. He rejected eloquence outright: “it is practically an impossibility, for the man who writes to give pleasure, to impart the truth of the matter also” (55, syntax altered). What is usually passed

History without Passion     69

over without comment in recent scholarly discussions of Bodin’s treatise, however, is the fact that he more or less excluded contemporary or very recent history from “methodical” consideration.21 “For those who permit histories of present-day affairs to circulate publicly, it is really difficult to write the truth, lest the report should injure the name of someone or damage his reputation,” he observed in the Methodus (46). The preferred alternative is to work on the relatively distant past; what’s more, the most reliable account will be produced by a historian writing about a foreign state, and not his own. Bodin’s subsequent discussion of method bears only on this second kind of historian, who writes about times and places about which he is assumed more or less a priori to be disinterested.22 In the wake of the French Wars of Religion, the problem of authorial interest was not so easy to discount. Thus, while Bodin can conclude that “one can write of all matters most reliably when he has spent a great part of his life either in affairs of state or in warfare” (50), this is precisely the kind of experience that could disqualify the early historian of the civil wars in France, since it would inevitably situate him as a participant in the conflicts.23 Attempts to recount the history of the recent past – and in particular that of a past that seemed to implicate virtually all members of French society – inevitably brought the question of the historian’s own interests to the fore. Ultimately, then, Bodin’s guidebook failed to address what would become one of the most pressing historiographical problems of his time: how to write the history of the troubles. Jacques Amyot was situated on the other side of the historiographical spectrum from Bodin, but his position proved equally problematic for early historians of the wars. In the preface to his widely read translation of Plutarch’s Lives (first edition 1559), Amyot articulates some of the more traditional humanist assumptions about history and historiography that had to be reconsidered in the wake of the civil conflicts. First and foremost among these assumptions is that of the virtual equivalence between history and memory, an equivalence that Amyot characterizes in exactly the terms that the royal edicts of pacification will subsequently take up. In order to argue for the value of history, Amyot invites us to imagine in what horrible obscurity and bestial ignorance we would be thrown, if the memory of all that had happened, or that happened before our birth, was entirely “abolie et esteinte,” abolished and extinguished. Humanists like Amyot were anxious about forgetting the past; the enterprise of recovering or retaining that which was “digne de mémoire,” and of perpetuating its memory, was a cornerstone of this strain of Renaissance historiography.

­70     Forgetting Differences Like Bodin’s historiographical method, Amyot’s was designed to be applied to ancient history. For a public called upon to extinguish memories of the wars – memories that, as Gomberville and Bayle remind us, were very much alive – such rhetoric could have little force. The inappropriateness of this type of historiography for accounts of the French civil wars extended far beyond its ostensible relation to memory, however. For Amyot, as for countless Humanist historians before him, history was an “eschole de prudence” that prepared the political and social elite for action in the present via representations of the most notable acts of the past. It is superior to philosophy as a spur to action because of its vivid specificity. The best histories are written in a style: so lively, as in the very reading of them we see our minds to be so touched by them, not as though the things were already gone and past, but as though they were even then presently in doing, and we find ourselves carried away with gladness and grief through fear and hope, well near as though we were then at the doing of them.24

History conveyed in this manner is far more likely to “esmouvoir” as well as “enseigner” (xxv), and thus more apt to lead to practice and to action in the world, rather than to mere contemplation.25 Amyot also takes up the well-worn claim (among historiographers, anyway) that history is superior to experience itself as a school of virtue: “Experience is the schoolmistress of fools: because life is so short, and experience is hard and dangerous.”26, 27 The best histories are therefore those that convey examples as vicarious experiences; this provides all of the vividness with none of the risks, such that “we be not in any pain or danger, but only conceive in our minds the adversities that other folks have endured, our selves sitting safe with our contentation and ease.”28,29 Amyot goes on to cite the well-known verses of Lucretius on the pleasure that can be derived from watching a shipwreck while sitting safely on the shore, thus adding an affective element to the list of effects that a good history will have on its readers. Pleasure is indeed central for Amyot, who cites the Horation exhortation to join pleasure to utility in the first lines of his Preface. The characterization of the reading of history as a kind of vicarious experience goes back to Polybius. In one of the many direct addresses to the reader that punctuate his histories, Polybius explains his method thus: I have recounted these things for the benefit and improvement of the readers of these commentaries. For there are two means easily to correct our faults, one of which is our own misfortune, and the other the example of other ­people’s miseries. No doubt the first is more effective, but not without harm

History without Passion     71 to the person it befalls; and though the second is less overwhelming, it is nonetheless better, since one is not in danger . . . therefore if we think about it, we find that experience via the memory of the faults of others is an excellent doctrine for a truly good life; without a doubt it is the only way to make us good judges of what is reasonable without risking anything.30

One’s own, first-hand experience always carries the risk of peril; how much better it is to learn in the comfort of one’s own study, from the “miseres d’autrui.” This is of course a widespread topos in the Renaissance, but it is anchored first and foremost in the pedagogical claims of historiographical discourse. Polybius’s praise of history as a source of pain-free instruction articulates precisely why the period of the Wars of Religion did not easily lend themselves to historiographical treatment in Polybian terms. It hardly made sense, in the context of an account of the recent past of one’s own community, to make a sharp distinction between the shipwreck of “experience” and the supposedly safe harbor of “history”; nor was it to be expected that vivid representations of the calamities of a not-yet-completely-extinguished civil war, with their obvious capacity to elicit strong negative emotions, would give rise to much pleasure on the part of a French reader in the early decades of the seventeenth century. While historians of France’s civil wars could not simply abandon the rhetoric and methods that had been developed to treat ancient and medieval history, neither could they unproblematically apply these to the history of the troubles. Although no historian proposed a systematic, theoretical solution to the difficulties of writing history in the age of oubliance, practical attempts to write this history gave rise to a series of tactics that redefined the rhetorical framework into which la mémoire des choses passées was set.

Neutralizing Neutrality Henri Lancelot Voisin de la Popelinière appears in many recent accounts of the evolution of European historiography as an exponent of the new critical methods inherited from the jurists and systematized by Bodin.31 La Popelinière himself stressed the novelty of his historiographical enterprise, and likened it to advances made in mathematics and the natural sciences in the wake of the encounter with the New World. Like the Catholic Bodin, the Protestant La Popelinière appears to elaborate many of his criteria for history writing with the historian of the relatively distant past in mind. Unlike Bodin, however, he attempted to confront these criteria not only with the problem of very recent history in general,

­72     Forgetting Differences but, more specifically, with the challenge of writing the history of France’s civil wars. La Popelinière’s manner of framing history underwent some notable changes over the course of his several publications, which included a history of the civil wars of the sixteenth century (the 1571 Vraye et entière histoire des troubles) that gradually expanded to become a history of France (first published in 1581), as well as a theoretical work, the 1599 Histoire des histoires (which includes the treatise on histoire accomplie that has drawn the attention of modern historians of historiography).32 The evolution of La Popelinière’s historiographical rhetoric, which drew on that of the more traditional humanist school represented by Amyot as well as on that of theorists like Bodin, anticipates some of the ways in which royal historians of the French Wars of Religion negotiated the challenge of writing history in the age of oubliance. In the letter to French nobles that prefaces the Vraye et entière histoire (which detailed events up through 1570), La Popelinière, under cover of anonymity, remains committed to the pedagogical potential of the history of the civil wars. Noting that some would prefer to suppress accounts of the troubles, insofar as thay are reminders of “nos misères passées” that could serve to reopen old wounds and thereby perpetuate animosities, La Popelinière defends his publication by proposing that this history can teach the French how to avoid such tumult in the future. He fears that the French have not only failed to learn from past examples, but that they are also on the verge of missing the lessons of their own experience as they sweep the memory of their misfortunes under the rug; they should at the very least acquire some wisdom for their suffering (“[il faudrait] du moins qu’il soit sage par le mal qui luy est avenu”). La Popelinière thus admits the irrelevance of any separation between history and experience in his account, clearly unmoved by Polybius’s view that history offers most of the advantages of experience with none of the risks. The temporal distance inherent to Humanist historiography simply disappears: “n’en cherchons les exemples de si loin, nous n’en avons que trop à notre porte.” The risks of such an approach to recent history, however, soon become apparent. Perhaps influenced by his work on a translation of an Italian treatise on military strategy that he published in the same year, La Popelinière goes on to situate the Wars of Religion within the larger framework of Western military history in the Vraye et entière histoire.33 Having explained in the volume’s prefatory letter that his history will provide instruction on “les moyens de bien faire la guerre,” he refers throughout the book to Greek and Roman precedents as points of comparison for the events of the French civil wars. Remaining nonpartisan

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to a fault, he in fact proposes that the wars have become so drawn out because too many people have remained neutral; had everyone strongly defended the party they supported from the beginning, the war would have been over fairly quickly and many lives would have been saved (Book 14; n.p.).34 I am not in a position to judge the quality of La Popelinière’s reflections in terms of martial strategy; in terms of the immediate political context, however, his dismissal of wartime neutrality in the name of historiographical neutrality can only be seen as singularly incendiary. In his extended critique of “les Neutres,” La Popelinière takes a dim view of anyone who was content to remain a “vain et oiseux spectateur de nos Tragedies.” In spite of his obvious desire to present history in an objective manner, his disdain for those who hesitate on the sidelines rather than engage in armed conflict brings to mind nothing other than the overtly polemical words of the Protestant Agrippa d’Aubigné, who thundered to readers of his civil war poem Les Tragiques (1616), “vous n’êtes spectateurs, vous êtes personnages.”35 La Popelinière’s commitment to history as a guide for practice meant that his dispassionate analysis of military strategy amounted to a manual on how to pursue rather than extinguish the civil conflicts of sixteenthcentury France. This becomes all the more obvious in his 1581 Histoire de France.36 Characterizing his earlier Vraye et entière histoire as an attempt to “joindre la connoissance de lettres à la pratique des armes” in the notice to readers that prefaces the later work, La Popelinière offers a series of examples of ancient military strategies that were successfully employed during the Wars of Religion. Indeed, he remarks, the men of the sixteenth century are in a position to surpass the ancients in the art of war, as they have in other pursuits. If La Popelinière’s unconstrained belief in “progress” has endeared him to historians of modernity, his application of this view of history to the civil wars of France, in which, as he underlines in this notice, he was a deeply involved participant, received a less than enthusiastic response among his suffering compatriots. La Popelinière reports that the result of the Count of St. Paul’s neutrality under Louis XI was that he was hated by both parties, and a similar fate greeted the Histoire de France. George W. Sypher has summarized the contemporaneous reactions, which culminated in La Popelinière’s consenting to sign a formal confession of error before the Protestant authorities, and which left the historian “out of favor until Sully commissioned his account of the French invasion of Bresse and Savoy in 1600” (45). By virtue of its very neutrality, which entailed recounting the violent words and actions of both sides in the service of

­74     Forgetting Differences an objective analysis of the best way to conduct warfare, the Histoire de France constituted a potentially explosive intervention into the conflicts. La Popelinière responded to this condemnation by adjusting the horizon of reception he anticipated for his “neutral” works of history. He had dedicated his account of the civil wars, which he claimed to represent “au vif” alongside “les memorables accidens des plus renommees nations du monde,” to King Henri III, in order that, by means of a consideration of the past, he could better prepare for the future.37 After being forced to more or less renounce this historiographical position, which is in many respects quite close to that proposed by Amyot, with its vivid, memorable deeds of renown held up as guides for action, La Popelinière chose a significantly different form of address in the Au lecteur of his next publication, the 1599 Histoire des histoires. In the wake of “l’accident de nos longues guerres,” and in order to “fuir la disgrace d’aucuns,” La Popelinière addresses a “judicieux lecteur,” choosing to pledge his book “à tous, sans le dedier à un seul,” and to write not for a contemporaneous reader, but rather “au profit de la postérité.” Seeking to extricate himself from the particular situation in which he was writing, La Popelinière imagines an audience of “judicious” readers who have no specific identity that might compromise their objectivity with respect to recent history; this public will ultimately be equated with a vague, not-yet-constituted “posterity.” Following Bodin, he promises to allow his judicious reader the freedom to draw his own conclusions, “parlant à l’Academique et en suspens.” This skeptical orientation is undoubtedly one of the principle reasons why La Popelinière is counted among the precursors of “modern” historians. In the context of early civil war historiography, however, the skeptical stance affords the historian a rhetorical position from which to speak with equal vehemence about both sides of the conflict, all the while proclaiming his neutrality. As such, this position is worth considering as a historiographical phenomenon that engages the policy of oubliance in interesting ways.

Redefining Posterity In one of the very few words he devotes to contemporary history in the Methodus, Jean Bodin states outright that “It is better to avoid all fear of the present and entrust one’s account to posterity” (47). Under both of the regimes of historiography we have sketched here – the critical compendia of a Bodin as well as the memorable examples of an Amyot – the history of the present (or of the very recent past of living memory)

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can never be addressed to the present; the lack of distance between the historian and the matter of history must be compensated for by a corresponding increase in the distance between the matter of history and the reader, lest history and experience become indistinguishable. As a result, the address to posterity – a commonplace of classical historiography – undergoes a subtle yet fundamental transformation in royal historiography of the French Wars of Religion in the early seventeenth century. Lucian had long ago articulated the link between historiographical truth and the address to posterity. His works were popular in French translation in the sixteenth century, and his recommendations regarding historiographical method were taken up almost verbatim by La Popelinière. Lucian writes: Do not write [history] with an eye to the present time, with the intention that those now living praise and honor you; think rather of eternity, as if addressing your history to those who will live in the future, and ask them what your writing is worth. Seek that it is said one day of you: truly that man was free and assured in what he said, not having followed flattery, or servitude, but the truth in all things.38

For La Popelinière: la vraye Mire de l’Historien, n’est la consideration de son temps . . . [Mais] toute la Posterité, à laquelle il doit envoier, vouer et consacrer ses escrits. Elle ne faudra d’en bien juger, voire les recognoistre suffisamment, et sans passion. Aussi ne recherera-t-il d’elle, que cette honorable et vertueuse recommendation: ce personnage fut libre, franc, resolu et constant . . . sans flaterie, sans passion serve, ny vile qui l’aie pu destourner de la Verité. The true Historian should have not the consideration of his own time in view . . . but rather all of Posterity, to which he should send, dedicate and devote his writings. She will not fail to judge them well, indeed to appreciate them appropriately, and without passion. Thus the Historian will ask for nothing from Posterity other than this honorable and virtuous recommendation: that person was free, frank, resolute, and constant . . . eschewing any flattery or passion that would have made him stray from the Truth.39

The address to posterity frames the problem of historiographical distance from the point of view of the reader, rather than that of the historian. Although he insists that “la vraye Histoire, se dresse de choses veues” and therefore that the historian who speaks of the affairs of his own time speaks with more assurance, La Popelinière stipulates that the ideal reader of perfect history is not a contemporary: the best historian will orient himself to posterity, who will always be better able to judge his merits.40 It is not clear how a future reader would be in a position to judge the truth of an account of the distant past, in particular in light of

­76     Forgetting Differences La Popelinière’s own preference for first-hand accounts. The absence of flattery would in itself not guarantee objectivity, as the many polemical accounts of the Wars of Religion attest. This suggests that the role of “posterity” in the construction of perfect history is perhaps less straightforward than it appears at first glance. Whereas the address of ancient or medieval historiography to posterity was axiomatic for the Renaissance historian who saw himself and his readers as embodying that posterity, by the sixteenth century it had nonetheless become clear that “posterity” was not the unproblematically unified, unanimous horizon of reception that a Lucian or a Polybius had posited. In the context of early civil war historiography, it seems clear that the address to posterity was a way in which to avoid soliciting an engaged, potentially polemical response on the part of contemporary readers, and to invite them to instead project themselves imaginatively, both individually and collectively, into the role of a distanced spectator with no stake in the matters under discussion. For the ancient historians, in particular Polybius, whom La Popelinière frequently cites, the notion of posterity designated a community of shared values, values that would withstand the test of time whilst the contingent, petty interests of everyday life would fade into oblivion. This conception of posterity constitutes the very foundation of exemplary history. But the advent of historical relativism obviously problematized this notion of posterity, which could no longer be a universal category: posterity, too, turned out to be historical and particular. The inescapable contingency of posterity became especially evident during the French civil wars, when even a national, particular history could not be certain of the nature of its posterity, in light of polemic histories that had established several competing audiences for accounts of the wars. With the future uncertain and the polity not yet stable, this critical participant in the historiographical transaction could no longer be taken for granted. To whom, exactly, would one address a history of the civil wars? What or whom did “posterity” in fact designate? No historian of the wars really defined the term; the address to posterity simply responded to a perceived need to distance readers with respect to the wars. The tactical nature of the appeal to posterity comes into stark relief in Pierre-Victor Palma Cayet’s 1608 Chronologie novenaire contenant l’Histoire de la guerre sous Henri IIII. The chronographe du roy, who had already published a history of the peace under Henri IV since 1598, recounts in the preface to the 1608 volume how some “seigneurs de qualité” had approached him with a request to go back somewhat further in time and write a history of the period of Henri’s battles to accede to the throne beginning in 1589. Palma Cayet reports

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the ensuing exchange at some length, explaining that he told these men that: plusieurs Roys et Princes se trouveroient offensés, que j’entreprinsse durant leur vie d’escrire comme la bonne ou mauvaise fortune les auroit traictez, durant ceste derniere guerre civile . . . several Kings and Princes would be offended that I would undertake to write about their good or bad fortune during the last civil war, while they are still alive . . . (n.p.)

He subsequently insists that he wrote the history we are about to read at their command, and not voluntarily. But our chronographe is not content merely to absolve himself of the responsibility for writing about the conflicts. Further on in the preface, he will confront the royal call to abolish memories of the wars and explain, in terms that have nothing to do with the good gentlemen who commanded the work, how his history in fact respects this policy: Mais à quel propos (pourront me dire quelques-uns) de rememorer à present, tout ce que les Roys Très-Chrestiens, Henry III & Henry IIII, ont faict contre les Princes de la Ligue des Catholiques leurs subjects; c’est un fait passé. Par la paix il est dit, qu’il ne s’en faut plus souvenir? Il est vray, mais il n’est pas deffendu laisser par escrit a la posterité comme ces choses sont advenües [...] car mon désir n’est que de profiter à la postérité, affin que si les François tombent à l’advenir en pareils troubles . . . que ce qui est advenu de nostre temps leur serve d’exemple . . . But for what reason (someone could ask me) should we remember in the present, everything that those most Christian kings, Henri III and Henri IV, undertook to contain the Catholic League, whose members were his subjects? It’s in the past. And the edicts of pacification tell us that we should not remember such things. This is all true; but it is nevertheless not forbidden to put down in writing addressed to posterity how these things transpired: because my only desire is to benefit posterity, such that if similar troubles befall the French in the future, that which transpired in our time can serve as an example to them . . .

Palma Cayet intuits that the the appeal to the pedagogical potential of history cannot justify an account of the civil wars addressed to his contemporaries; he thus uses the notion of posterity to imagine a future readership that will have forgotten them, unless he records them in writing. By using the name “les François” to designate these future readers, Palma Cayet patches over the disjunction between the French of his own epoch, who know all too well “ce qui est advenu de nostre temps,” and the French of the future, who will look to the history of this time as belonging to a past that is no longer part of their own experience.

­78     Forgetting Differences It would not be wrong to call posterity the pretext for Palma Cayet’s record of that which he and his contemporaries were supposed to forget, but this would not exhaust the significance of the term from the perspective of a rhetoric of historiography. In his treatise on “perfect history,” La Popelinière identifies the true aim of history as the teaching, by means of the representation of “l’inconstance des choses humaines,” the best way to comport oneself “en si divers accidens,” rather than that of simply conserving “la memoire des choses passées” (38). La Popelinière believed in the fundamental unity of human nature, in spite of the diversity of appearances; this belief ultimately founds his project of comparative history (39). The unity posited here, as in other forms of history-as-pedagogy, pertains to the actors of history with respect to its readers. In Palma Cayet’s characterization of his account of the wars of the Ligue, however, the center of gravity of this unity shifts, so that it comes to implicate primarily readers with respect to one another. What is sought here is not a fusion of reader and text, but a fusion of reader with reader, such that what comes to the fore is the common effect the account of history is to have on its public. The invocation of posterity in these accounts of the Wars of Religion is thus a means to introduce a certain necessary distance between history and the reader of history. And the introduction of this distance, in turn, reverses one of the fundamental impulses of humanist historiography. Whereas much thought and energy had been expended on the ways in which historiography could reduce the distance between the past and the present, in the attempt to make the “memorable” moments of the past the equivalent of a vicarious experience from which one could draw lessons directly applicable to the conduct of one’s own life, oubliance required a rhetoric of history that enabled readers to imagine the recent past as relatively distant.41 Rather than serve as a term that links the present (and the past) to the future, then, “posterity” serves in Palma Cayet’s chronology as the privileged addressee of a historiography that seeks to make a break with the past, and thereby to turn the troubles of the French into the misères d’autrui. The rhetorical gamble is that a history addressed to the distant, dispassionate, judicious readers of some ill-defined future time will avoid reopening still-fresh wounds and reanimating still-simmering conflicts. Whatever flaws this historiography might have, it cannot be reduced to either the polemic that preceded it or the outright propaganda that followed. Official histories like Palma Cayet’s allowed a historiographical memory of the troubles to survive the immediate postwar period whilst respecting the politics of oubliance.42

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History without Passion The address to posterity was not the only means of creating a sense of distance within the historiography of the civil wars. Objecting to the moralizing judgments of historians, judgments which for him too often obscured their account of what actually happened in the past, Jean Bodin wrote that “History ought to be nothing else than the image of truth, and, as it were, a record of events which is placed in the clearest public view for the decision of all” (51). La Popelinière took up this position in his account of the civil wars, announcing that his intent was not “to judge these factions, nor to weigh the merits of the two parties, but only to record truthfully the deeds, the reasons, and the means which each one has used to maintain itself.”43 The idea that the historiographer should withdraw as much as possible from his text, in order to allow history to speak for itself, was clearly intended as a methodological intervention that would address what Bodin saw as the problem of slanted, tendentious historiography. Yet the technique could quite easily be turned to polemic ends. Cécile Huchard has recently studied the widely circulated, ever-expanding, and manifestly partisan collections known as the Mémoires de Condé, the Mémoires de la Ligue, and the Mémoires de l’Estat de France, Protestant compilations of primary documents presented to sixteenth-century readers as the raw data of “true” history. The task of deriving a coherent historical narrative from this data was ostensibly left to the reader, in good Bodinian fashion, but as Huchard shows, the mere choice and disposition of materials (“authentic” though they undoubtedly were) imposed a certain interpretation of events.44 In the age of oubliance, Pierre Matthieu, future historiographe du roy under Henri IV, will appropriate Bodin’s methodological prescription in yet a different way in his Histoire des dernière troubles.45 Rather than claim to sort and weigh his sources with a dispassionate eye, which was clearly Bodin’s intended method and the pretense of the Protestant collections, as well as La Popelinière’s remarkably untimely practice, Matthieu engages rather passionately with the volatile mass of historical data he transmits. As others have pointed out, Matthieu’s history endorses the authority of Henri IV and unequivocally condemns positions Matthieu himself had embraced as a ligueur.46 Yet on the whole, the work conforms to Henri Hauser’s characterization of it as a “pure compilation mêlée de résumés de pièces et de digressions nombreuses.”47 It is by dint of this very profusion and confusion that Matthieu sought to create the impression of the appropriate distance between himself and his material, and therefore of a certain objectivity.48

­80     Forgetting Differences In the preface to his history, Matthieu affects the stance of a professional historian informed by the latest methodological advances, refusing eloquence in favor of a style that will allow him to represent the truth, “toute simple & toute nue.”49 Apparently aware of the Bodinian mistrust of authorial intervention, Matthieu claims to offer his material “sans choix, sans triage” (1.18v). Summarizing his approach, Matthieu proclaims that “l’histoire doit être sans passion” (preface, n.p.). For Matthieu, admitting to having sifted and assessed the evidence would have carried with it certain risks, as it indeed had for La Popelinière. The historian of the civil wars “de fraîche mémoire” simply could not openly assume the role of gatekeeper without risking the charge of being either too “Huguenot” or too “Ligueux,” as Gomberville characterized most histories of the wars from this time.50 It was in any case easy enough at the beginning of the seventeenth century to discover what role a historian might have played in the conflicts about which he was writing, were he to identify himself (as La Popelinière, we should recall here, chose not to by publishing his histories anonymously). This is certainly the case for Matthieu, who, as a member of the radical Catholic Ligue that vehemently opposed Henri III’s designation of Henri de Navarre as successor to the throne, had in 1589 published a Guisiade (a theatrical tragedy in which “au vray, et sans passion, est représenté le massacre du Duc de Guise”) that represented Henri III as a companion of the devil.51 Clearly, in such an atmosphere, the historian – in particular this historian – could not appeal to his own character, and even less to his firsthand knowledge, as the guarantee of the truthfulness of his history. However, instead of paring down his material to the bedrock of what could be expected to gain widespread assent, as Popper suggests Baudouin and Bacon did, Matthieu, more interested in projecting his own historiographical neutrality than in interpreting the evidence, goes to the other extreme and includes a disjointed and disorienting mix of sources, themes, and points of view. The Histoire des dernières troubles reprints pamphlets, overtly invents dialogues, stages debates (e.g. “pour et contre la Ligue”), and, yes, gives a more or less chronological account of the Wars of Religion in the process. In practice, then, the programmatic claim to write “sans passion,” “sans choix,” and “sans triage” licenses Matthieu to reproduce a great deal of the polemical history that had been circulating prior to the composition of his official history, which is in fact full of passionate moments. As in the case of La Popelinière, the passions in Matthieu’s Histoire are first and foremost the passions of historical actors, and therefore always distinct from those of the distant historian that Matthieu affects

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to be. Several passages of Matthieu’s history consist in direct discourse to the participants in recent civil war history, who are cast as irrational, impulsive actors to whose escapades Matthieu is situated as a mere witness, a spectator who addresses reproaches to the misguided protagonists of the tragedy of civil war, and even to the events of the wars themselves. Here’s what Matthieu has to say about the Ligue’s barricade of Paris in 1588, for example: Maudite et fatale journee qui as effacé la beauté et le lustre du 12. jour de May . . . quel crayon sera assez noir pour te marquer en nos Ephemerides? . . . Il n’y a amnistie qui oublie la souvenance de ton ingratitude: il n’y a abolition qui efface ta felonnie: il n’y a deffense de recherche qui cache ta vergogne: il n’y a assez d’eau en la Seine pour laver les ordures de ta vilennie: il n’y a assez de bois pour brusler les registres et les memoires de ceste sedition . . . (3.59r)

This is clearly not historiography without moral judgement, nor is it an attempt to erase memories of the event it so vigorously condemns. Rather than accuse Matthieu of outright mendacity when he claims to write “sans passion,” however, we might consider ways to interpret the phrase that could accommodate such interventions on the part of the historian. For all his talk of leaving judgment up to the reader, Bodin had nonetheless sought to interpret and organize the multiple and sometimes contradictory data of history, with a view towards generating guidelines for action, just as did Amyot. In the Methodus, he had suggested that “similar instances of memorable matters should be placed in a certain definite order, so that from these, as from a treasure chest, we may bring forth a variety of examples to direct our acts” (28). Likewise, La Popelinière attempted to respect this impulse to order history in his Vraye et entière histoire and in his Histoire de France with the aim of rendering the recent past usable in the traditional humanist sense, as a source of data from which the best examples for action could be derived – indeed, in his case, examples for the conduct of war. Matthieu, by contrast, depicts the past as the contingent spectacle of precisely the kind of martial “passion” that both the historian and the reader are to reject, a response that he consistently models via his direct praise or, more frequently, blame of the actors involved. For La Popelinière, authorial interventions like Matthieu’s are as unworthy of a true history “que les mignardises et paremens effeminez, mal seans à un robuste guerrier.”52 By framing the history of the wars as the horrific spectacle of noble ambition gone awry, rather than as a selection of the most noble acts therein, Matthieu seeks to foreclose precisely the kind of “active” response to history that Amyot, Bodin, and La

­82     Forgetting Differences Popelinière had solicited. No longer a school of (military) virtue, history, in Matthieu’s hands, becomes a spectacle of vice.53 Matthieu himself, beyond the fray, functions as a sort of tragic chorus that addresses the doomed protagonists. After recounting the origins of the Ligue in 1576, for example, Matthieu interjects: Pardonnez moi, Princes, Prelats, Seigneurs, Gentils-hommes Catholiques, si je vous dy que ce colosse que vous bastissez vous ruinera, ce feu que vous allumez vous bruslera, ces cousteaux que vous forgez se tremperont en vos entrailles, et vous ne laisserez de vous ny de vostre Ligue qu’une pitoyable et honteuse mémoire. (1.7v) Pardon me, Catholic Princes, Prelates, Lords, and Gentlemen, if I tell you that this colossus that you are constructing will ruin you, this fire you have lit will burn you, these knives you forge will lodge in your own entrails, and you will leave nothing behind of yourselves or of your Ligue but a pitiable and shameful memory.

By consistently pointing out the fatal consequences of the passions of the actors of history, Matthieu pulls away from history’s claim to motivate action. This is not to say that Matthieu’s history does not have a political drift – quite the contrary. It is an openly royalist work, full of effusive praise of Henri IV and stern condemnations of the Ligue, that, moreover, sees the will of God as working through the French sovereign. But this is precisely why Matthieu does not propose any models or precepts for action, beyond the rhetorical acts of praising and blaming. As Matthieu explains in his epistle to Henri IV, what can be found in the Histoire are nothing less than “the terribly admirable, yet just exploits of God’s justice, which overturns the plans of men when they are on the verge of being carried out” (“les terriblement admirables, mais justes exploits de la justice de Dieu, qui renverse les conseils des hommes à un pas près de l’execution”). This vision of an ever-looming threat of tragic reversal could not be further from La Popelinière’s industrious review of military strategy; rather than a how-to for the military commander, Matthieu offers a warning to anyone bold enough to think he can intervene in history. Matthieu returns to this paradigm throughout the Histoire. Of the conspiracy of Amboise, for example, he writes, “God showed that he does not like those who cause trouble for the state . . . he overthrew this enterprise” (“Dieu monstra qu’il n’aime les remueurs d’Estat . . . il renversa ceste premiere entreprinse” (1.3v)). Though there are passages in which he develops the semblance of a narrative of secular, human causality, he sums up the entire history of the wars as the inevitable consequence of the diversity of religion, which can only lead to war:

History without Passion     83 on ne peut empescher, et faut que ceste diversité de Religion apporte avec une division des esprits, la division des inimitiez, qui ne s’appaisent que par la ruine de l’un ou l’autre party. Le triomphe des Israelites est la perte des Egyptiens. (1.2r) it is necessary and unavoidable that the diversity of religion carries with it a division of minds, the division of enmities that is only appeased by the ruin of the one or the other party. The triumph of the Israelites is the defeat of the Egyptians.

Matthieu does not blame the Huguenots for the conflicts; rather, at the outset of his history, he casts the wars as the inescapable fate of a polity in which two parties hold contrasting religious beliefs with equal fervor, characterizing the very existence of factions as “fatale et malheureuse” (1.2r). This leaves the secular actor very little room for maneuver. Intensifying the fatalistic atmosphere of his Histoire, Matthieu lends a precipitous quality to many of the episodes he recounts, such as in this breathless rendering of the trial of the Prince de Condé after the affair of Amboise: Le Prince de Condé fut fait prisonnier: Madame Renee fille de France Duchesse de Ferrare, poursuit sa delivrance: Son procès s’instruit: Il se justifie: On le condamne à avoir la teste tranchee devant le logis du Roy . . . La mort du Roy luy apporta la vie et la liberté . . . (1.4r) The Prince of Condé was taken prisoner; Renée de France, Duchess of Ferrara, tried to free him; His trial went forward; He defended himself; He was condemned to be beheaded in front of the king’s lodgings . . . The death of the king gave him back his life and his liberty . . .

Rather than sound intricacies of intent, motivation, or circumstance, Matthieu simply reports these events as inevitably occurring. Condé is depicted as entirely passive, at the mercy of forces beyond his control that continually reverse his fate. Even the king is not portrayed as an agent here: instead, it is François II’s sudden death, which Matthieu leaves unexplained, that changes the course of Condé’s destiny. Certainly, such a view of historical causality could easily be enlisted to support increased royal power over the nobility, as long as the king was depicted as having the angel of God on his shoulder (as he indeed is in Matthieu’s prefatory letter to Henri IV). What I wish to draw attention to here, however, is the fact that Matthieu’s obvious attempts to bolster royal authority entail a certain manner of reading history. Whereas Polybius’s account of Rome’s encounter with “Fortune” had generated a long tradition of exemplary historiography oriented toward action in the world, Matthieu’s vision of the civil wars as the inevitable unfolding of a fatal progression of events, over which humans have no control,

­84     Forgetting Differences styles history as a “vray tableau de l’inconstance des choses du monde” (1.5r). The vision of history as a series of vicissitudes is at bottom a Stoic one. While I certainly do not wish to deny the part that sheer political opportunism plays in Matthieu’s execution of his historiographical project, the rhetorical means he calls upon to advance his own cause have longer roots and larger ramifications. Matthieu characterized his history as an “ouvrage simple, mais de bonne foy” (“Au roy”), thereby mimicking exactly Michel de Montaigne’s description of his essays in his note to the reader.54 Matthieu’s historiographical “method” of including many points of view, presenting them unsystematically, commenting on them in animated yet frequently contradictory ways, and leaving to the reader the task of making sense of it all suggests a deeper affinity between the historian and the essayist. This affinity stems no doubt in large part from a neo-Stoic outlook that had wide appeal in France during the Wars of Religion in the wake of the 1584 publication of Justus Lipsius’s De constantia.55 In Shipwreck with Spectator, Hans Blumenberg remarked that “one can almost feel how the skeptic [Montaigne] approaches the secure position of the spectator” in the essay “On phisiognomy.”56 The passage from Montaigne’s Essais that Blumenberg has in mind is in fact a meditation on France’s civil wars: Comme je ne ly guere és histoires ces confusions des autres estats que je n’aye regret de ne les avoir peu mieux considerer présent, ainsi faict ma curiosité que je m’aggrée aucunement de veoir de mes yeux ce notable spectacle de nostre mort publique, ses symptomes et sa forme. Et puis que je ne la puis retarder, suis content d’estre destiné à y assister et m’en instruire. Si cherchons nous avidement de recognoistre en ombre mesme et en la fable des Theatres la montre des jeux tragiques de l’humaine fortune. Ce n’est pas sans compassion de ce que nous oyons, mais nous nous plaisons d’esveiller nostre desplaisir par la rareté de ces pitoyables evenemens. Rien ne chatouille qui ne pince. Et les bons historiens fuyent comme une eau dormante et mer morte des narrations calmes, pour regaigner les seditions, les guerres, où ils sçavent que nous les appellons.57 As I seldom read in histories of such commotions in other states without regretting that I could not be present to consider them better, so my curiosity makes me feel some satisfaction at seeing with my own eyes this notable spectacle of our public death, its symptoms and its form. And since I cannot retard it, I am glad to be destined to watch it and learn from it. Thus do we eagerly seek to recognize, even in shadow and in the fiction of theaters, the representation of the tragic play of human fortune. Not that we lack compassion for what we hear; but the exceptional nature of these pathetic events arouses a pain that gives us pleasure. Nothing tickles that does not pain. And good historians avoid peaceful narratives as if they were stagnant water and

History without Passion     85 dead sea, in order to get back to the seditions and wars to which they know we summon them.58

Montaigne’s reflections gather many of the elements that I have just highlighted in Matthieu’s historiography. Though Montaigne does invoke “instruction” here, we are made to understand that it is not the kind of instruction that one derives from direct experience: unable to intervene in any meaningful way, Montaigne has stood by as an observer during the wars, just as we contemplate the “tragic play of human fortune” in the theater. And rather than put forward the potential exemplarity of the “confusions” he thereby witnesses, Montaigne describes a purely affective response, consisting of compassion, pleasure/ displeasure, and pity, which we can immediately recognize as the emotions associated with tragedy. He then associates the kind of spectacle he has just described with the kind of historiography people actually like to read. Blumenberg maintains that: Montaigne does not justify the spectator of shipwreck by his right to enjoyment; [but] rather . . . by his successful self-preservation. By virtue of his capacity for this distance, he stands unimperiled on the solid ground of the shore. He survives through one of his useless qualities: the ability to be a spectator. (17)59

Matthieu appropriates in his turn the stance of the spectator to the Wars of Religion. The author of the Histoire des dernières troubles exhibits a Stoic tendency to situate himself as a spectator to the theater of the world, rather than as an actor in it.60 More importantly, this is also the position he invites his reader to adopt. Matthieu’s promise to transmit the events of the wars “sans choix, sans triage” initiates a contract with the reader, who must also refrain from privileging certain points of view or favoring one side over another: “vous les considérerez sans obligation, ni servitude; vous les jugerez sans haine, sans faveur ni sans vanité; vous les prendrez comme une viande qui est préparée plus pour votre santé que pour votre goût” (1.18v). We find no trace of Amyot’s pleasure here, since pleasure will not serve to further the health of Matthieu’s public. Politically – in addition to serving his own self-interest – Matthieu’s rhetoric of spectatorship aims to situate the elite readers that Henri IV was attempting to reconcile to and under his power as spectators to the king’s virtue. Historiographically, the impact of this rhetoric is potentially far broader. The fact that Matthieu situates not only himself, but also the reader of his Histoire des dernières troubles in this position suggests that the rhetoric of spectatorship serves not only the historian’s

­86     Forgetting Differences self-preservation, but also the preservation of the larger community of the French. In Matthieu’s account of the troubles, the rhetoric of historiographical spectatorship replaces the rhetoric of vicarious experience that had been a fundamental element of exemplary historiography. What was in Amyot a proof of the advantages of history over experience becomes in Matthieu a metaphor for a strategy for survival in an inconstant, threatening world. This too, then, is one of the historiographical effects of the politics of oubliance.

Tragic History Of course, Pierre Matthieu needed neither Stoic philosophy nor a copy of the Essais of Montaigne to imagine the events of the wars as a tragic spectacle. His own work as a tragedian, which, as we have already mentioned, included the composition of a tragedy dramatizing events of the Wars of Religion, would inevitably have exposed him to a view of the world as a spectacle of inconstancy. In the dedication of his French translation of Hecuba in 1544, Guillaume Bochetel claims that tragedy was invented “pour remonstrer aux roys et grands seigneurs l’incertitude et lubrique instabilité des choses temporelles.” In his Art de la tragédie, published in 1572, the soldier-poet Jean La Taille explained that the true subject of tragedy is nothing other than “les piteuses ruines des grands Seigneurs, que des inconstances de Fortune.” Fritz Walbank has shown that: the link between tragedy and history . . . is in fact a fundamental affinity going back to the earliest days of both history and tragedy, and insisted upon throughout almost the whole of the classical and later periods down to the Byzantine scholiasts.61

Tragic structure and appeals to the emotions can even be found in tragic history’s best-known critic, Polybius.62 With respect to tragic history, national history in sixteenth-century France can usefully be thought of in counterpoint to comparative history such as that outlined by Jean Bodin in his 1566 Methodus. Unlike the admirable exemplary figures of Plutarch’s Lives or the more comprehensive historical data sought by Bodin and La Popelinière, both of whom thought history should extend beyond the narrow range of great and memorable deeds, the examples of tragedy are exceptional rather than normative. Whereas Bodinian historiography aspired to exhaustive inclusion, usually with the aim of deriving general principles about history and human behavior, Polybian “particular” history, as the biography of a

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community, was more concerned with issues of chronology, continuity, and internal coherence.63 The biographies of Henri IV studied in the previous chapter thus ultimately do provide a starting point, if not a fully workable model, for histories of France written in the wake of the civil wars. Yet another such biography, the Sommaire discours de la naissance, du progres de la vie heroïque, et du lamentable trespas de Henry IIII Roy de France et de Navarre, also published just after Henri IV’s assassination, offers a concise example of the way in which tragic history was used to compensate for the shortcomings of heroic, exemplary history in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Its author is none other than Pierre Matthieu. While Matthieu’s version of Henri IV’s biography contains most of the stock phrases we have already seen, it provides considerably more detail. In fact, Matthieu addresses a well-known event not even mentioned in the numerous other biographical texts: La Tragedie dont on le faisoit l’argument, et qui avoit la France pour Theatre, et les estrangers pour auteurs, eut une effroyable issue les 23. et 24. décembre 1588 en la ville de Blois, par la mort de deux Princes freres, qui remplit le Royaume de feu et de sang . . .64

In the Sommaire discours, the well-worn technique that preserves a rhetoric of heroism by means of omission extends to the conflict between Henri III and the Ligue, whose leaders, the Duc and Cardinal de Guise, were assassinated on the orders of the king just before Christmas in 1588. Like the other biographers we have considered, Matthieu is careful to avoid any formulation that would make either Henri III or Henri IV look anything less than heroic (hence the Battle of Coutras is, for Henri IV, the usual “Orient de ses esperances”). But here, Matthieu embellishes the tactic by enlisting the rhetoric of tragedy. This tragedy plays out in the theater of France, and the king is but one of the actors in the drama, whose authors are not even French. The expanded frame within which Matthieu situates the assassination of the Guises shifts the ground of events away from the heroic biography of either Henri III or Henri IV, which affords the historiographe du roi some significant rhetorical advantages quite beyond the obvious one of blaming foreigners for France’s internal strife. The implied passivity (and thus innocence) of both Henris within the tragic framework allows Matthieu to write about this event without casting it as a nefarious royal deed. Moreover, by turning this event into France’s tragedy, Matthieu simultaneously fuses the warring French factions into a single entity, “France,” and solicits an emotional response from his public – a public that “France” also embraces. The rhetoric of tragedy thus becomes the

­88     Forgetting Differences means by which Matthieu posits a more or less unified public whose members share a common emotion about a violent, and violently controversial, event in the history of the Wars of Religion. As Michel de Waele has shown, royalist propaganda of this period cultivated an affective bond between Henri IV and his subjects as a way to consolidate the relative peace in the years following the Edict of Nantes.65 Matthieu’s history participates in the efforts to address and reorient emotions in the wake of the Wars of Religion, but it does so not only by its overt displays of love for the king. Drawing on his talents as a tragedian, Matthieu depicts the troubles as a series of passionate actions that themselves are to provoke a primarily emotional reaction. “C’est horreur de s’en souvenir,” he writes (5.3), thus neatly encapsulating the way in which the cultivation of an affective (rather than an active) response to the memory of the wars allowed him to transcend the apparent paradox of writing the history of that which was to be subject to oubliance.66 Matthieu in fact figures his own response to the memory of the wars as one that precludes action: l’hazard de tant de batailles, la ruine de tant de peuples, l’embrasement et le sac de tant de villes, la mort de tant de Princes . . . la seule souvenance m’oste l’esprit, estouffe ma parole, et rend ma plume inutile en ma main . . . (1.1v) the danger of so many battles, the ruin of so many peoples, the burning and the pillaging of so many cities, the death of so many princes . . . the mere memory of it boggles my mind, suffocates my speech, and renders my pen useless in my hand . . .

This metaphorical syncope breaks the link between history and action in the account of what Matthieu terms “ceste toille des esmotions civiles” (1.1v). Matthieu’s particular exploitation of a rhetoric of tragedy, whose effect was to position the readers of the history of the Wars of Religion as spectators, rather than participants, and to rhetorically unify them in terms of a shared affective orientation, reappears in at least two royally sanctioned histories published in the first half of the seventeenth century. In the “Preface à la France” that introduces his 1642 translation of Enrico Davila’s history of the French civil wars, Jean Baudouin, one of the first members of the Académie française and historiographe de France from 1644, addresses the risk that this publication could reopen old wounds: Je viens l’exposer [la période des guerres] à vos yeux, non pas pour renouveller vos anciennes playes, mais plûtost pour vous faire cognoistre combien est grande vostre felicité presente, à comparaison de vos misères passées.

History without Passion     89 Vous n’estes pas moins heureuse aujourd’huy, que vous estiez infortunée autres-fois, en un temps où vous serviez comme de proye aux pretextes de la RELIGION et aux partialitez de la LIGUE. O que vostre condition a de douceurs, à comparaison des amertumes de ce siècle-là! Alors les Estrangers vous faisoient la loy; maintenant ils la recoivent de vous. Alors vous gemissiez sous la Servitude; maintenant vous respirez dans la Liberté, qui vous est naturelle: Alors vos Alliez, naiz à vostre perte, prennoient faussement les Armes pour vous; maintenant ils sont perdus, si vous ne les posez, après les avoir prises contr’eux. Quoy plus? Alors vous craigniez tout, & n’esperiez rien; maintenant vous pouvez tout esperer & ne rien craindre. Car en effet, si le souvenir du passé vous donne encore quelque apprehension de l’advenir, asseurez-vous qu’ayant vostre grande Reyne pour Deïté tutulaire, vous n’aurez plus desormais à combattre ces effroyables dangers, où vous ont mise autres-fois les Guerres Civiles. Vous sçavez combien estranges en ont esté les violences, qui vous les font haïr à bon droit, par dessus toutes les choses du monde. Mais pour les avoir encore plus en horreur, vous me dites, ce me semble, que vous serez bien aise d’en mieux peser les particularitez & les circonstances dans cette Histoire . . . (My emphasis)67 I come to exhibit the period of the wars before your eyes, not to refresh old wounds, but rather to make you realize how great is your present happiness, in comparison to your past miseries. You are no less content today, than you were unfortunate then, at a time when you were prey to the pretexts of religion and to the partisanship of the Ligue. O how sweet your present condition, in comparison to the bitternesses of those times! Then foreigners made your laws; now they receive their laws from you. Then you groaned under the weight of servitude; now you breathe freely in liberty, which is natural to you; then your allies, born to undermine you, falsely took up arms for you; now they are lost, unless you put down the arms you took up against them. What else? Then you feared everything, and hoped for nothing; now you can hope for everything and fear nothing. Because in fact, if the memory of the past still makes you apprehensive about the future, you can reassure yourself that with your great queen as guardian angel, you will no longer have to combat such horrific dangers, of the kind you faced in the time of the civil wars. You know how strange was their violence, which makes you justifiably hate them above anything in the world. But in order that you be even more horrified by them, you are telling me, I sense, that you would be quite pleased to better weigh their details and circumstances in this History . . .

Baudouin guards against the possibility that a history of the civil wars could reignite tensions by establishing a stark opposition between France’s happy present and its miserable past, thereby situating the matter of Davila’s history in a past that is unequivocally cut off from the present. Proposing a series of contrasts between France past and France present that involve both her political situation and her affective response to it, Baudouin relentlessly repeats the contrasting temporal markers “alors” and “maintenant” in order to underline the gulf between the present and the past. He then summarizes the effect of these

­90     Forgetting Differences oppositions in affective terms: “Then you feared everything, and hoped for nothing; now you can hope for everything and fear nothing.” This very general appeal to emotions that are directed either at “everything” or “nothing” divorces affective reaction from any particular action, a divorce that comes into even sharper view near the end of the passage, where the historian seeks to reassure France that nothing like the Wars of Religion will ever happen to her again. Characterizing the period of the wars as strange and unusual rather than exemplary or instructive, Baudouin attributes to his readers only one possible response: horror. This solicitation of an affective response serves not to teach any particular political lesson but rather to consolidate the reader’s moral revulsion with respect to the wars. Davila’s history, which is frequently characterized as baroque, is full of gory details, and Baudouin invites readers to rub their noses in it all.68 There is thus no project to hide information about the wars in the body of Baudouin’s translation, nor to portray any of the actors as anything other than the self-interested dissimulators the Italian historian made them out to be. In stark contrast to Baudouin, moreover, Davila himself characterizes the wars in terms that recall Amyot: they are “des entreprises si grandes, & des actions si memorables, qu’elles me semblent merveilleusement propre à l’instruction de ceux qui les sçavent considérer.” “Ils est à croire,” Davila continues, in language that directly quotes the edicts of pacification in Baudouin’s French, “que la peine qu’on se donnera de les deduire par ordre, & d’en renouveller la memoire, ne sera pas moins utile à l’advenir, qu’elle l’a esté par le passé” (2).69 Baudouin’s prefatory frame, by contrast, attempts to neutralize this dynamic by conjuring up a historical spectator who simply looks on in horror at events in which he is no longer supposed to feel implicated. For the historiographe de France, they are utterly irredeemable in terms of history as a source of lessons for active public life. Instead, we see that the history of the civil wars is to provide a “historical” object around which the French, addressed as a single, unified entity in the name of “France,” can experience a shared emotion predicated on their common moral and political distance from the past. It is of course impossible to overlook the political logic of this way of framing the history of the civil wars. The more strange and horrible the past is made to appear, the more France will be made to desire the benevolent protective powers of the monarchy that supposedly delivered her from that past. Nevertheless, we should not allow the work’s obvious royalist bent to completely overshadow the larger relationship to unpleasant national history that its rhetoric entails. We have here an attempt to kill the past, as it were, to make it appear dead, to regard it

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only as a miserable, macabre spectacle of which the spectator is ultimately relieved not to be a part. We might think of this gesture as the emotional and psychological expression of the politics of oubliance: Baudouin’s translation of Davila obviously does not extinguish memories of the civil wars, but his prefatory frame offers “France” a way to render that memory less volatile, and thus less likely to reignite conflict. The ways in which the Wars of Religion “affected” national historiography are of course even more visible in panoramic histories of France or of the French monarchy that include the period of the wars as a part of the larger French past. In 1643, François Eudes de Mézeray, secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie française and future historiographe de France, published an Histoire de France depuis Faramond jusqu’au règne de Louis le juste. In his foreword to the volume on the period of the civil wars, Mézeray engages in a great deal of historiographical throat-clearing, drawing attention to the fact that the history of the wars could not be recounted in the same manner in which he had presented the reigns of François I and Henri II: Après avoir décrit les grandes & illustres actions de François I, & de Henry II. mon dessein est de faire un récit fidele des longues & fâcheuses guerres civiles de la Religion & de la Ligue, qui ont troublé la France depuis François II. jusqu’à Henry le Grand : . . . il me suffit d’avoir pour moy ma conscience, qui ne me reprochera rien, & pour toute recompense de mon travail, la seule gloire de dire la verité telle que j’ai pu la developper dans ce Volume; Estant aussi éloigné de tout interest du present, que je le suis des passions de ce temps-là, . . . Vous verrez donc . . . un chaos confus où toutes les passions agissent pesle-mesle, avec une égale fureur... Vous aurez sans doute bien souvent les larmes aux yeux, quand vous lirez tant de tragiques évenemens: vous serez touchez de pitié au recit de quelques-uns, vous fremirez d’horreur à la veuë de quelques autres, vous aurez de l’étonnement de voir qu’en une cause où tous ont la Religion pour pretexte, il y ait si peu de Pieté & de Foy, tant de barbarie, de perfidies & de massacres. Mais si vous considerez enfin que c’est par ce chemin que la Providence a conduit Henry le Grand dans le Thrône, vous vous consolerez de tous ces mal-heurs, & benirez l’heureux évenement dont vous aurez justement abhorré les causes. (1–2)70 After having described the grand and illustrious actions of François I and of Henri II, my aim is to offer a faithful account of the long and regrettable civil wars of religion and of the Ligue, which disturbed France from [the time of] François II until [that of] Henri the Great . . . it is enough for me to have my conscience, which assures me that I am beyond reproach, and as the sole reward for my efforts, the glory of telling the truth as far as I was able to in this volume, being as distant from any present interest, as I am from the passions of those days . . . you will see therefore . . . a confused chaos in which all passions rage willy-nilly, with equal fury . . . you will no doubt frequently have tears in your eyes, when you read about so many tragic events; you will be moved to pity by the stories of some, you will shiver in horror at the sight

­92     Forgetting Differences of others, you will be startled to see that where everyone claims religion as his pretext, there is so little piety and faith, and so much barbarity, perfidity and massacre. But if you consider that it was via this path that Providence led Henry the Great to the throne, you will be consoled, and you will bless the happy event of which you will justifably abhor the causes.

We can see here that the more distant past, that of François I and Henri II, poses no problem for the historiographer who simply frames this period in terms of the heroic deeds of the sovereign. The challenge of writing the history of the wars, by contrast, causes Mézeray to stop and offer a self-conscious statement of his position as historian. We should note that this is where the rhetoric of historical truth comes in: the gesture of offering a faithful account (“récit fidèle”) in some way compensates for the absence of illustrious actions. Whereas in earlier volumes, figures like François I and Henri II were glorified, now, it is the truth that shall be glorified. As we have come to expect, Mézeray explicitly distances himself from the “passions” of the period of the wars, those passions that act willy-nilly, with equal fury on all sides. At the same time that the historian denies any affective involvement with past events, however, he anticipates that his history will elicit strong emotions on the part of the reader. The use of the vocabulary of tragedy, already present in Baudouin’s preface, serves to frame the civil wars as a horrific spectacle that will leave the reader with tears in his eyes, now moved to pity, then shivering in horror, finally stupefied at the sight of what went on during the Wars of Religion. We are clearly at some distance from a conception of history as magistra vitae; what Mézéray proposes is a tragic spectacle with respect to which the reader–spectator remains exterior. Although this spectator is supposed to be “moved,” his emotions do not prepare any action; rather, the provocation of these emotions appears to be the final aim of Mézéray’s historiographical intervention. In this royal historiography of the mid-seventeenth century, the wars were to become subject to rhetoric that we would consider highly emotional. However, the objects of this historical affect were placed outside the purview of the audience’s political agency; the moral lessons of historiography were to be registered not in emotions that produced actions, but in emotions rather than in actions. In this way, the ideal of passionate action directed towards political goals, promoted by humanist theories of exemplarity and exploited in works of polemical history, was gradually displaced by a rising allegiance to historical and aesthetic distance that inhibited an active reading of history even as it encouraged what we would now call an “emotional” one. Whereas throughout much of the sixteenth century, a text’s claim to esmouvoir

History without Passion     93

linked emotion to political action through humanist theories of historiography that aimed to minimize the distance between a text and readers who were presumed to be ideologically unified, as the wars dragged on, one finds in historiography attempts to inhibit the active engagement encouraged by the earlier model of reception. Under Henri IV and Louis XIII, royal historians of the wars found the historiographical relationship between emotion and action to be politically problematic, since it was so easily turned to polemical purpose. The reformulation of the role of emotion in historiographical reception both emerges from and reinforces the distance between readers and the matter of history that historians of the wars had striven to introduce. Efforts to write the history of the wars in the age of oubliance thus led to subtle yet fundamental shifts in the broader conception of the relationship between readers or spectators on the one hand, and the matter of history, on the other. These shifts, occasioned by the desire for communal reconciliation, obviously proved useful to the ideologies of cultural and political absolutism. Yet they could also nourish a more critical historiographical impulse, even in a history as romanesque as that of Mézeray.71 Unlike Matthieu, who situates himself as a dumbfounded spectator alongside his readers, or Baudouin, who implicitly shares the response he wants to attribute to all French readers of Davila, Mézeray distinguishes in practice between the orientation to the past appropriate to the reader, on the one hand, and the one he assumes as a historian, on the other. Whereas his readers are expected to do nothing more than weep and tremble with horror before being overcome with gratitude for Henri IV, Mézeray does not perform such a response within his history. Instead, he offers a fairly independent and frequently quite critical view of some key events. Like Davila, Mézeray offers a detailed account of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Unlike Davila, he lists the names of many of the dead, and does not hesitate to claim that the bloodshed was premediated by Charles IX and Catherine de Medicis. Mézeray even depicts Charles wielding a harquebuse on the Seine fending off Protestants attempting to investigate the tumult, and writing to the Provinces to give them permission to attack Huguenots.72 Mézeray thereby extends the conciliatory rhetoric of revulsion that grew out of the royal politics of oubliance to its logical limit by explicitly applying it to the French monarch who oversaw the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. More provocatively, he intimates its potential to undermine the institution of the monarchy in general. When he recounts how Charles died, without having reconciled his people, Mézeray notes that “it would be desirable that sovereigns pride themselves as much on accomplishing the fine plans of their predecessors as they do on consolidating and amplifying their ­authority”

­94     Forgetting Differences (“Il seroit à souhaiter que les Souverains se piquassent aussi-bien d’accomplir les beaux projets que leurs Predecesseurs font en mourant, comme ils se piquent de recueillir leur autorité & de l’amplifier” (182)). This is hardly an “artisan of glory” at work.73 If the trends in official historiography that I have been describing could and did serve to bolster the ideology of royal absolutism, then, this was neither a necessary nor an inevitable outcome of the politics of oubliance. Never a mere tool of royal propaganda, the rhetoric of official historiography under Henri IV and Louis XIII strove to be an instrument of that “assez grande fraternité” that Bayle found so surprising.

Notes   1. “Eusèbe Philadelphe” (Nicolas Barnaud), Le Reveille-Matin des Francois, et de leurs voisins (Edimbourg [Lausanne]: Jean et François Le Preulx, 1574), p. 5. On this text, see Fanlo, Jean-Raymond, “Des voix de la nation à celles de l’eglise: le premier dialogue du Reveille-matin des François,” Bulletin de l’Association d’étude sur l’humanisme, la réforme et la renaissance, 46 (1998), pp. 47–62.   2. I would like here to thank Ellen McClure for first bringing this entry to my attention.  3. Article Mâcon, note C. This article first appeared in the 1697 edition of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (Rotterdam: Reinier Leers, 1697). All subsequent citations of Bayle are from this note.   4. Ibid., p. 463.  5. In a recent book, Zachary Sayre Schiffman takes up the theses of Thomas Greene on the Renaissance sensitivity to anachronism, of Timothy Hampton on the crisis of exemplarity in Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and of Ann Blair on information overload in order to argue for a qualitative change in the orientation towards the past on the part of European Humanist scholars. Essentially synthesizing a previous body of research on historiography that includes the seminal work of Kelley, Schiffman locates in French historiography of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries many of the most important phases of a panEuropean turning away from the notion of a “living past.” In the present chapter, I am attempting to bring the problem of the historiographical memory of the Wars of Religion to bear on this reorientation. The Birth of the Past (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).   6. Pibrac, Guy Du Faur, L’Apologie de la Saint-Barthélemy, (Ad Stanislaum Elvidium Epistola; 1573), trans Alban Cabos (Paris: Champion, 1922). As the full title indicates, the text is actually a letter to Elvide (Helvidius; a Polish official). Pibrac was a friend of Michel de l’Hôpital, and probably shared his politique views. Nonetheless, he was asked to compose a defense of the massacres of 24 August, directed primarily to the Polish, in order to bolster the legitimacy of Henri III (then still the Duc d’Anjou) as a candidate for the King of Poland (there was a significant Protestant presence in

History without Passion     95 Poland at this time). Obviously, it was unnecessary to defend the massacres in Rome, where Gregory XIII had a medal struck to commemorate the event. Though Pibrac’s original is in Latin, a French translation appeared in 1573, and was widely circulated in France.  7. Sed nihil attinet ulcus istud modo tangere, et civilia mala commemorando renovare, quorum memoriam deleri oportere arbitrantur omnes patriae cives amantes . . . Utinam adversa nostra perpetua oblivione obruantur! Utinam de illis sileant omnes litterae, nullusquae sermo perennis sit! Utinam reticentia et silentio eorum hominum qui vivunt, discordiarum nostram causae, rationes et eventa apud posteros ignorentur . . .!

(Pibrac, L’Apologie de la Saint-Barthélemy, pp. 17–18). Cabos’s edition provides a modern French translation along with the Latin original, which guided me in my English translation.  8. Conférence des edicts de pacification des troubles esmeus au Royaume de France pour le faict de la religion & traittez ou règlemens faicts par les rois Charles IX & Henri III & de la déclaration d’iceux, du Roy Henri IIII de France & de Navarre. Publiée en parlement le 25 février 1599 . . . Par Mre Pierre de Beloy, conseiller du roy & son advocat général au parlement de Tholose (Paris: Pierre L’Huillier & Jamet Mettayer, 1600).  9. Greengrass continues: “The writing of history [in seventeenth-century France] was a selective process by which the ‘religious’ and ‘violent’ components were progressively underwritten [i.e. minimized]” (27). The material I study here does not really bear this out. Greengrass, Mark, “Europe’s Wars of Religion and their legacies,” in John Wolffe (ed.), Protestant-Catholic Conflict from the Reformation to the Twenty-first Century. The Dynamics of Religious Difference (Palgrave Macmillan: Houndmills, 2013), pp. 22–45. 10. “Shaping the Memory of the French Wars of Religion: The First Centuries,” in Judith Pollmann and Erika Kuijpers (eds), Memory before Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 111–25. 11. The abundance of partisan and indeed polemical histories of the events of the French Wars of Religion offers ample testimony to the challenge facing those who sought to write conciliatory history in their wake. As Philip Benedict notes in “Shaping the Memories . . . ,” in the early years of the wars, the history of the conflicts was written largely by Protestants on the defensive (see “Shaping the memory of the French Wars of Religion: The first centuries,” in Judith Pollmann and Erika Kuijpers (eds), Memory before Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 111–25). On the ways in which news of the wars circulated, see also Benedict’s Graphic History: The Wars, Massacres and Troubles of Tortorel and Perrissin (Geneva: Droz, 2007). Protestant polemical histories included the martyrologies of Crespin; the collection of documents known as the Mémoires de l’estat de France sous Charles neufiesme (1576–1577) and the Mémoires de la Ligue (1587–1599), all of which were continually expanded and updated. On the Mémoires de l’Estat de France, see Huchard, Cécile, D’Encre et de Sang. Simon Goulart et la Saint-Barthélemy (Paris: Champion, 2007) and Graves Monroe, Amy, Post tenebras lex. Preuves et propagande dans l’historiographie engagée de Simon Goulart (1543–1628) (Geneva: Droz, 2012). Polemical history

­96     Forgetting Differences remained alive and well in the early seventeenth century, even if there were some obstacles to its wide circulation within France. 12. The letter is dated 17 June 1611. De Thou, Jacques-Auguste, Histoire universelle (The Hague: Henri Scheurleer, 1730), vol. 10, p. 420. 13. Discours sur les vertus et vices de l’histoire (Paris: Toussaint de Bray, 1620), p. 115. One must take with a grain of rhetorical salt Agrippa d’Aubigné’s question to readers of his 1616 Tragiques: “Où sont aujourd’huy ceux à qui les actions, les factions et les choses monstrueuses de ce temps-là sont connues, sinon à fort peu et dans peu de jours nul? Qui prendra après nous la peine de lire les rares histoires de notre siècle?” (Lestringant, Frank (ed.), (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 53). Clearly, plenty of people did read the sixteenth-century histories; they did not, however, respond in the way that Aubigné, adhering to a traditionally humanist vision of exemplary historiography, would have wished: “Et qui sans histoire prendra goût aux violences de nostre auteur?” (ibid). 14. Bodin, Jean, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History [1566], trans Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), p. 47. All subsequent citations are to this edition. 15. Hélène Merlin-Kajman brings to the fore the complexity of the notion of a unified public for literary works in France in the wake of the Wars of Religion in Public et littérature en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1994); her analysis could be fruitfully applied to works of history in the same period. Merlin-Kajman maps the question of the constitution of the public onto the axis of the public vs the particulier or private: for Merlin-Kajman, the Edict of Nantes obliged the combattants in the Wars of Religion to keep their conflicts out of the public domain and thus off the political stage; she suggests that this “private” realm, initially excluded from political life, eventually becomes the basis for the Habermasian “public sphere” that will emerge in the eighteenth century. 16. Gomberville, Marin Le Roy, sieur de, Discours des vertus et des vices de l’histoire, et de la manière de la bien escrire (Paris: Toussaint du Bray, 1620), pp. 107–9. 17. “Cicero and Tacitus in Sixteenth-Century France,” The American Historical Review 85:2 (1980), pp. 307–31, (310). Machiavelli of course drew attention to precisely this problem, questioning how it was possible to learn anything valid about politics from histories that left out everything that did not suit their moral purpose, but his theses were widely rejected in France. The most rabid of his critics, Innocent Gentillet, even held “Machiavellianism” responsible for the French civil wars in general, and the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in particular. Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner . . . Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin (1576). On Gentillet, see D’Andrea, Antonio, “The political and ideological context of Innocent Gentillet’s AntiMachiavel,” Renaissance Quarterly, 23:4 (Winter 1970), pp. 397–411, and especially Victoria Kahn, who views Gentillet’s criticisms of Machiavelli in terms of a debate about the way in which history should be read. “Reading Machiavelli: Innocent Gentillet’s discourse on method,” Political Theory, 22:4 (November 1994), pp. 539–60. 18. See, for example, François Hotman’s 1573 Francogallia and Estienne Pasquier’s Recherches de la France (which he worked on from 1560

History without Passion     97 until his death in 1615). This quest, and the methodological innovations that attended it, have been well documented by Donald Kelley in The Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship. George Huppert considers the ideological motivations of these jurist-historians in The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in Renaissance France (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1970) in terms of “the needs of nationalism and Protestantism, both of which required a reinterpretation of the medieval past” (181). 19. For a fuller discussion of the use of historical examples in early modern Europe, see Lyons, John, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) and Hampton, Timothy, Writing From History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 20. Popper, Nicholas, “An Ocean of Lies: The Problem of Historical Evidence,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 74:3 (2011), pp. 375–400, (394). Such questions have been the focus of a large and distinguished body of scholarship, from Arnaldo Momigliano’s pioneering and wide-ranging essays (a sampling of which can be found in Studies in Historiography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966) and The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990)) to François Hartog’s influential work on Herodotus, originally published in 1980 (The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans Janet Lloyd (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009) to works focused more centrally on the sixteenth century such as those of Kelley, Huppert, and Schiffmann. 21. Bodin’s political writings have received considerably more scholarly attention than has his Methodus. But see Couzinet, Marie-Dominique, Histoire et méthode à la Renaissance. Une lecture de la Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem de Jean Bodin (Paris: Vrin, 1996). As Couzinet rightly points out, Bodin was seeking a method that would allow him to “exposer un savoir déjà acquis, de manière à le rendre disponible pour régler l’action” (30). As I argue here, while Bodin did open up history to previously neglected materials, and while he did seek to organize the presentation of those materials in innovative ways, he nevertheless conceived of history as a guide to action. Couzinet’s characterization of his stance brings out precisely those aspects of his method that make it ill-suited to historiography in the age of oubliance: “On ne lit plus pour trouver des modèles littéraires, mais d’abord pour ne pas oublier et ensuite pour agir” (33). 22. It is true that Bodin heaps praise upon Guicciardini (74–7), which seems to leave open the possibility that a historian of contemporary events can take the appropriate distance from his subject, though the means of doing so are never explained. 23. Bodin makes the contrast explicit when he notes that although Sleidan’s account of religious disputes in his own time were “distasteful to many, nothing, however, ought to seem troublesome to a man interested in ancient times and affairs of state” (Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, p. 57). 24. I provide the English of Thomas North, who translated Amyot’s Plutarch

­98     Forgetting Differences in 1579. Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, Englished by Sir Thomas North in Ten Volumes (London: Dent, 1910), vol. 1, p. 19. Page references for Amyot’s 1559 French are to Vie des hommes illustres, trans Jacques Amyot (Paris: Jean-François Bastien, 1784), tome premier, p. xxxii. 25. Cf. Schiffman’s neat synthesis of the basic framework: “humanists championed argument by example rather than precept as the most efficacious means of moving the will toward responsible action in the world” (Schiffman, Birth of the Past, p. 163). 26. North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 16. 27. Amyot, Vie des hommes illustres, p. xxx. 28. North, Plutarch’s Lives, p. 19. 29. Amyot, Vie des hommes illustres, p. xxxii. 30. I have consulted and therefore translate from the French of Louis Meigret (Meigret, Louis, Les Cinq Premiers Livres des histoires de Polybe (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1558)): Croyez bien que j’ay bien voulu reciter ces faitz pour le proufit & amendement des lecteurs de ces commentaires. Car comme il soit deus moyens pour corriger aisément noz fautes, dont l’un est son propre mal, & l’autre l’exemple des miseres d’autrui, il n’y ha point de doute que le premier ha plus grande efficace, mais ce n’est pas sans le dommage de celui à qui il avient: & combien que le second n’a pas si grande vehemence, il est toutefois meilleur, d’autant qu’on est hors du peril . . . . Parquoy si nous considerons bien, nous trouverons que l’experience par la memoire des fautes d’autrui, semble estre une tresbonne doctrine de vraye vie: sans point de doute c’est celle seule qui fait les bons juges de la raison sans faire perte. (18)

31. On La Popelinière as historiographer, see Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History; Schiffmann, Zachary, “Renaissance historicism reconsidered,” History and Theory, 24:2 (1985), pp. 170–82; and Wylie Sypher, George, “La Popeliniere’s histoire de France: a case of historical objectivity and religious censorship,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 24:1(1963), pp. 41–54. 32. La Popelinière, Henri Lancelot Voisin de, “L’Idée de l’histoire accomplie,” L’Histoire des histoires, avec l’idée de l’histoire accomplie (Paris: M. Orry, 1599). Page numbers refer to the reprint by Desan, Philippe, L’Histoires des histoires (Paris: Fayard, 1989), vol. 2. 33. Des Entreprises et ruses de guerre, et des fautes qui parfois surviennent ès progrez et exécution d’icelles, ou le Vray pourtrait d’un parfait général d’armée (Paris: 1571) is La Popelinière’s translation of a treatise by Bernadino Rocca. 34. La Popelinière, Henri Lancelot Voisin de, La Vraye et entière histoire des troubles (Cologne: Arnould Birckman, 1571). On the several editions of this work, see Gilmont, Jean-François, Le livre et ses secrets (Geneva: Droz, 2003), pp. 217–30. 35. d’Aubigné, Agrippa, Les Tragiques, Frank Lestringant (ed.), (Paris: Gallimard, [1995] 2003), p. 82. 36. La Popelinière, Henri Lancelot Voisin de, L’histoire de France, enrichie des plus notables occurances survenues ez . . . depuis l’an 1550 jusques à ce temps (La Rochelle: Abraham H., 1581).

History without Passion     99 37. “afin que par la consideration du passé, vous puissiez bien prevoir à l’avenir.” Histoire de France, Au roy (n.p.). 38. My English rendering of the 1583 French. N’écris donques pas en regardant seulement au temps present, en intention que ceux qui sont ores vivans te loüent & honorent: mais sois ententif [sic] à l’éternité, comme proposant ton histoire à ceux qui doivent vivre cy apres: & demande à ceux-là le salaire de tes écrits. A fin qu’on di[s]e aussi quelque jour de toy: vrayment cest homme là estoit libre et plein d’une asseurance en propos. N’ayant suivy rien de flateux, ny servile: mais la vérité en toutes choses.



Bretin, Filbert, trans, Les oeuvres de Lucian de Samosate, philosophe excellent, non moins utiles que plaisantes (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1583), p. 283. 39. La Popelinière, L’Histoire des histoires, avec l’idée de l’histoire accomplie, p. 47; my translation. 40. “L’aune et vraye mesure, que [l’historien] y doit prendre pour bien s’y conduire, est de buter, non au respect des presens, ains de la Posterité, qui d’ailleurs jugera tousjours plus droitement de son merite.” La Popelinière, L’Histoire des histoires, avec l’idée de l’histoire accomplie L’Idée de l’Histoire accomplice, p. 46. 41. For Frank Ankersmit, after the introduction of the Cartesian ego, reading a text: could no longer be seen as . . . immersion or subsumption in the text that reading could still be for sixteenth century humanists. Reading was essentially done by a transcendental self, no longer able to lose itself in or merge with the text as the premodern(ist) reader was required to do; reading was now done by a self that would always remain separate from and outside the text.

Sublime Historical Experience (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 88. Though I am tracing here a movement very similar to the one Ankersmit describes, I hope to show that there was more to the story than that old black magic known as “Cartesianism.” 42. Although he also claimed to write for posterity, Jacques de Thou seems to have confronted the possibility of a reading in the present for his Historia sui temporis (1604–1608). The fact that de Thou wrote in Latin, and refused a French translation, however, suggests that he was addressing himself to an international audience of elites rather than to a French public grappling with oubliance. As Anthony Grafton remarks, “as soon as the first part of his [History] appeared in a tentative edition, de Thou sent copies of it across Latin Europe” (The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 136); his works belong more to the Republic of Letters than to French national history. Whatever de Thou’s place in the development of modern historiographical method, then, it is fair to say that his history was probably not what Pierre Bayle had in mind when he conjured up the image of the seventeenthcentury Frenchman with a history book in his hands. (The second volume, which dealt with the period of the first wars of religion, was put on the Index of Prohibited Books.) A far more likely candidate is Pierre Matthieu’s Histoire des dernières troubles. On the intricate publishing history of de

­100     Forgetting Differences Thou’s history, see Kinser, Samuel, The Works of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967). 43. La Popelinière, Histoire de France, II.31, p. 101r. 44. “Des Mémoires de Condé aux Mémoires de l’Estat de France de Goulart: Le rôle des compilations pamphlétaires,” in Jacques Berchthold and MarieMadeleine Fragonard (eds), La Mémoire des Guerres de Religion. La Concurrence des genres historiques XVIe-XVIIIe siècles (Geneva: Droz, 2007), pp. 87–106. See also Huchard, D’Encre et de sang. 45. A holder of degrees in both law and theology, Matthieu published a series of juridical works in the late 1580s before becoming associated with the Catholic ligue. After publishing no less than four theatrical tragedies, Matthieu turned his attention to historiography, bringing out a Histoire des dernières troubles in 1594, and, as historiographe du roy, a two-volume history of France under Henri IV in 1604 and 1605. Matthieu acquired the title of historiographe de France in 1610, and eventually produced a monumental Histoire de France from François I to Henri IV (Geneva: 1630). 46. Lobbes, Louis, “L’oeuvre historiographique de Pierre Matthieu ou la tentative d’embrigader Clio,” in Danièle Bohler and Catherine Magnien Simonin (eds), Écritures de l’histoire (XIVe-XVIe siècle) (Geneva: Droz, 2005). 47. Hauser, Henri, Les Sources de l’histoire de France (1912), vol. 3, p. 53 cited in De Waele, Michel, “Histoire et fin de conflit: Pierre Matthieu et la fin des guerres de religion,” in Frédéric Charbonneau (ed.), Histoire et conflits. Cahiers du CIERL 3 (2007), pp. 5–18, 9n14. 48. As Michel De Waele notes, Matthieu’s is an “objectivité qu’il faudrait relativiser,” which he does by highlighting the historian’s sociopolitical engagement. Histoire et fin de conflit, p. 9. 49. Matthieu, Histoire des dernières troubles, n.p. 50.



si l’on en retranche un fort petit nombre, on verra que tous ceux qui ont escrit nostre Histoire depuis l’an 1515 sont si huguenots ou si ligueux, qu’ils ne meritent pas le nom d’Historiens veritables & desinteressez. Je me garday bien aussi de marcher sur la foy & sous la conduite de personnes si suspectes.

Gomberville, Marin Le Roy de, preface to Nevers, Louis de Gonzague, Les mémoires de Monsieur le duc de Nevers, prince de Mantoue, pair de France, gouverneur et lieutenant général pour les rois Charles IX. Henri III. et Henri IV. en diverses provinces de ce royaume (Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1665), n.p. 51. I discuss the play in Chapter 5. For a discussion of Matthieu’s political about-face that sees the Histoire des dernières troubles as the former ligueur’s “oeuvre rédemptrice” with respect to Henri IV, see De Waele, Michel and Félix Lafrance, “La rédemption par l’histoire: le cas de Pierre Matthieu (1563–1621),” Canadian Journal of History, 47:1 (2012), pp. 29–58, esp. 42ff, as well as Lafrance’s 2008 Université de Laval master’s thesis, “Pierre Matthieu et l’empire du présent: Clio dans les geurres de religion françaises,” which nonetheless acknowledges the “masse incroyable de détails et d’information” contained in Matthieu’s history (12). 52. La Popelinière, L’Histoire des histoires, avec l’idée de l’histoire accomplie, p. 57.

History without Passion     101 53. As Félix Lafrance notes, “En exposant tous les excès de passions et les comportements sordides des Guise et autres seigneurs, il montre à la noblesse ce qu’est la vertu: obéir à son souverain et accepter avec respect la place que Dieu offre” (“Pierre Matthieu et l’empire du présent,” p. 138). While Lafrance sees this as a typically humanist gesture of teaching by example, I seek to underline a contrast between the relative passivity Matthieu’s vision of history seeks to foist onto the nobility, on the one hand, and humanist models for action, on the other. 54. Many years ago, Roger Trinquet discovered a series of what he called “échos maladroits” of the Essais in Matthieu’s history, in addition to the references to Montaigne’s work that Matthieu himself listed. Trinquet was primarily interested in establishing the Essais as a source of lieux communs in the years immediately following their first publication. “Pierre Matthieu, lecteur de Montaigne,” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et Renaissance, 19:2 (1957), pp. 349–54. 55. See especially Du Vair, Guillaume, Traité de la constance et consolation és calamitez publiques . . . écrit pendant le siège de Paris de 1590 (Paris: Mamert Patisson, 1594). 56. Blumenberg, Hans, Shipwreck with Spectator. Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans Steven Rendall (Boston: Massachussetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997), p. 16. 57. Villey, Pierre (ed.), Les Essais de Montaigne [1924] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), p. 1046. 58. Montaigne, Michel de, Donald Frame, trans, The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1958), p. 800. 59. While there is debate among Montaigne scholars about the mayor of Bordeaux’s attitude toward political engagement, the dominant reading sees him as Blumenberg does here, as a quietist committed to staying out of trouble. For an overview of the debate about Montaigne’s own politics, see Laursen, John Christian, The Politics of Skepticism (Leiden: Brill, 1992), esp. ch. 5. Recent contributions include Fontana, Biancamaria, Montaigne’s Politics: Authority and Governance in the Essais (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). For a bracing, philologically dense reading that nuances the quietist characterization, see Goyet, Francis, “Montaigne and the notion of prudence,” in Ullrich Langer (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 118–41. 60. Mark Greengrass has recently explored a series of lectures given at the Palace Academy under Henri III on the virtues of a neo-Stoic rhetoric of the taming of the passions as a tool for governing war-torn France. There is, by contrast, no indication that Matthieu’s engagement with Stoicism was anywhere near as formal, sustained or extensive. Greengrass, Mark, Governing Passions. Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576–1585 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 2. 61. Walbank, Fritz, “History and Tragedy,” Historia. Zeitschrift für alte Geschichte, 9:2 (1960), pp. 216–34, (233). 62. See McGing, Brian, Polybius’s Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. pp. 71–5. More recently, Francesca Santoro l’Hoir has explored in depth examples of tragic diction and devices in Tacitus’s Annals. Citing the likes of Cicero, Quintilian, Pliny the Younger, and Aulus Gellius, she

­102     Forgetting Differences demonstrates that Tacitus and his Roman readers frequently used Greek tragedy as a reference in their discussions of history. Santoro L’Hoir, Francesca, Tragedy, Rhetoric, and the Historiography of Tacitus’ Annales (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), esp. pp. 1–11. My thanks to Michèle Lowrie for pointing me to Santoro L’Hoir’s book. 63. If Polybius appeared to confound the two in his history of the Roman empire, this was because, as he explains in his preface, in his time, Rome’s dominance, granted by fortune, had “réduit presque tous les affaires du monde en un, & les ha contreint de tirer à une & mesme fin.” The extent of Rome’s empire licenses him to dub his work “une histoire universelle,” not merely another “histoire particulière” (Meigret, Louis, Les cinq premiers livres des histoires de Polybe (Lyon: Jean de Tournes, 1558), p. 2). 64. Sommaire discours de la naissance, du progres de la vie heroïque, et du lamentable trespas de Henry IIII Roy de France et de Navarre (Lyon: François Matignan, 1610), p. 5. 65. De Waele, Michel, Réconcilier les Français. Henri IV et la fin des troubles de religion (1589–1598) (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Laval, 2010), part 3. 66. Cf. Pierre Droit de Gaillard, who characterizes the wars as “d’infinis malheurs survenus, qu’il faut oublier et que l’on ne peut ramentevoir sans horreur” Brieve chronologie (n.p., 1599), p. 107v. 67. Histoire des guerres civiles de France. Ecrite en italien par H. C. Davila. Mise en français par Jean Baudouin (Paris: Rocolet, 1642). A second edition appeared in 1647. Not much has been written on Baudouin, but see the issue of Dix-septième siècle devoted to his baroque style (216:3, 2002). 68. In “Publicizing the Private: The Rise of ‘Secret History’,” Peter Burke discusses the widespread use of the “rhetoric of the secrets of the archive” in seventeenth century Europe, noting that “in the Western tradition the first secret historian was perhaps Tacitus” (Christian Emden and David Midgely (eds), Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. 57–72, (59)). Burke posits as one of the motivations for the rise in interest in secret history the weakness of “official history”; but in Baudouin’s translation of Davila, we see the king’s historiographer offering up to a French public the most Tacitean history of the civil wars imaginable, right under Richelieu’s nose. 69. Davila’s original has “l’Opera, che à dichiararli, & à rammemorarli ordinatamente si spende, riucirà non meno profittevole per l’avvenire, di quella, que sia riuscita per il passato” (Venice: Francesco Salerni, 1676), p. 2. 70. De Mézeray, François Eudes, Histoire de France depuis Faramond jusqu’au règne de Louis le juste: enrichie de plusieurs belles & rares antiquitez & de la vie des reynes, .... Tome troisième /par le Sieur de Mézeray (Paris: Chez Denis Thierry, Jean Guignard et Claude Barbin, [1651] 1685). This work was reprinted several times and apparently enjoyed a wide readership. 71. In Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVII” siècle (Paris: Boivin, 1943), René Pintard saw an evolution over the three volumes of Mézeray’s history, beginning with a quasi-medieval sensibility that allowed miracles and anachronisms in his account of antiquity and the French Middle Ages, and ending with a more critical view in the last volume, which is the one that concerns us here. In his wonderful study, Cultures his-

History without Passion     103 toriques dans la France du XVIIe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), Steve Uomini questions what he terms a “prévention largement partagée [qui] identifiait la divergence croissante entre une histoire-récit rétrograde et une histoire-science anticipatoire” (8) in seventeenth-century France by studying texts that are hybrids of history and fiction. He divides his study into three periods: a “tragic” era (1600–40); a “romanesque” era (1620–60); and the age of the anecdote (1640–80). Uomini’s main concern is the hazy, unstable distinction between the vrai and the vraisemblable in the period. 72. Mézeray, Histoire, p. 150ff. Matthieu’s rendering of la St. Barthélemy, which comprises all of one sentence, is breezy by comparison: Voicy venir ceste grande et terrible journee, pleine de sang, de larmes, et de douleurs, où pesle-mesle tant de François furent esgorgez, où le Roy de Navarre ne se voyant asseuré entre les chastes embrassements des premieres nuicts de son mariage, fut contraint changer la forme de sa creance. (I.6r)

73. The reference is to the book by Orest Ranum, which counts Mézeray among those who wrote history merely to please the court. As Christian Jouhaud reports, when Jean Chapelain and Colbert discussed potential candidates qualified to write an appropriately laudatory history of the king in 1662, Chapelain wrote that while Mézeray “ne manque ni de diligence ni de sagacité . . . il ne paraît pas toujours équitable aux puissants, et s’érige de lui-même en juge sévère des desseins et des actions des grands.” Cited in Jouhaud, Christian, Les pouvoirs de la littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), pp. 160–1.

Chapter 4

Tragedy as History: From the Guisiade to Garnier

Pierre Matthieu was certainly not the first to characterize the French Wars of Religion in terms of tragedy. The intersection between history and tragedy was a commonplace in French writing about the wars from all sides, and in many different genres. An anonymous 1562 “Advertissement à la Royne mere du Roy” complains to Catherine de Médicis about the treatment of the Huguenots, using a theatrical metaphor to warn the queen mother that she risks becoming the main character in the tragedy represented by a France at civil war: Si vous ne vous esveillez de ce sommeil, il vous sera mortel, et dressez par vostre tollerance un Theatre en France pour y veoir de vos propres yeux jouer la plus lamentable tragedie, dont on ayt jamais faict mention, en laquelle Dieu veuille que vous ne soyez point le principal personnage . . .1

Despite its somewhat garbled syntax, the meaning of this warning is clear enough: if she does not take action, the queen mother risks becoming the protagonist in a most lamentable tragedy, one that will play out in the theater of France before her very eyes. The metaphor was clearly considered a durable one: this same passage, with a few very minor changes, also appears in 1587 in a diplomatic communication from Henri de Navarre to Henri III.2 In his Remonstrance faicte en la grande chambre . . . sur la reduction de la ville de Paris (1594) the jurist Antoine Loisel laments the fate of “le peuple, aux despens duquel ceste tragedie se jouoyt.” Matthieu notes that he finished writing his Histoire des derniers troubles de France in a year that saw “des sanglantes tragedies, des monstrueuses rebellions, des meurdres, des assassinats . . . la France doit estre le Theatre où l’on representera des spectacles effroyables” (111v). Even La Popelinière, despite his bent for comparative history, characterizes the wars as “le plus estrange et miserable guerre qu’il ayt jamais vue” in which took place “les plus courtois et cruels actes dont il ayt jamais ouy parler” and remarks that the eyes of Europe saw “sur

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l’Echafaud et Theatre de la France . . . jouer la plus estrange et miserable Tragedie, que nation aye jamais representé.”3 It might be argued that these examples are merely iterations of the longstanding Stoic metaphor of the world as a stage, and that civil war is inevitably tragic.4 Even if this is in some sense true, however, we cannot assume that the same metaphor will mean the same thing at all times and in all places. The sixteenth century was a turbulent time for drama in France. The religious tensions associated with the Reformation found frequent expression in the farces, moralités and sotties that dominated the early part of the century.5 As Jelle Koopmans notes, in late fifteenthand early sixteenth-century France, “drama does not merely stage a conflict but is part of a debate: it clearly has a pragmatic function.”6 The relationship between world and stage characteristic of medieval theater was considered politically volatile: as is well known, in 1548, the Parlement of Paris forbid the representation of mystères – long, quasiepic performances that mixed comic and tragic, sacred and profane – in Ile-de-France, on account of their potential to cause unrest (though they continued to be performed in the provinces).7 Even though tragedy was increasingly associated with the theater of antiquity in learned circles, a Humanist such as Lazare de Baïf, in the preface to his 1537 translation of Sophocles’s Electra, defined it as “une moralité composée des grandes calamités, meurtres et adversités survenues aux nobles et excellents personnages.” Similarly, Robert Estienne’s 1543 Dictionarium latinogallicum definies tragedy as “une sorte d’ancienne moralité ayant les personnages de grands affaires, comme rois, princes, et autres, et dont l’issue était toujours piteuse” (my emphasis). Moreover, religious satire in the medieval style sometimes presented itself under the banner of tragedy or the tragic, as in Henri de Barran’s 1554 Tragique comédie françoise de l’homme justifié par Foy, or Jean Crespin’s 1558 Marchand converti, tragedie excellente (a translation of a 1540 morality play by Thomas Kirchmayer), which were contemporaneous with the classically influenced sacred tragedies of Théodore de Bèze and Louis Des Masures.8 Thus, on the eve of the Wars of Religion, the term “tragédie” surely evoked a multitude of associations, many of them far removed from that of a high-style dramatic poem composed for small groups of students and courtiers. In a period when both the theatrical mode and the tragic genre were undergoing rapid change and were so obviously embroiled in social, political, and intellectual controversy, we must be mindful of the multiple potential resonances of the characterization of France as the “theater” of “tragedy.” At the same time, given that the civil wars were such a frequent point of reference for examples of the tragic, we are also

­106     Forgetting Differences led to inquire how the experience of civil war itself influenced the evolution of the theory and practice of tragedy. The rhetoric of shared “tragic” emotion cultivated in early ­seventeenth-century royal historiography of the French Wars of Religion had its counterpart in the theory and practice of theatrical tragedy in the same period. The common aims and claims of history and tragedy in sixteenth-century France gave rise to common difficulties in the face of the imperative of oubliance. Like history, tragedy was framed as a pedagogical discourse superior to the precepts of philosophy on account of its vivid particularity and consequent capacity to excite emotion in the service of (virtuous) action. Equivocation about the historicity of tragic subjects allowed for the steady parade of historical material on the sixteenth-century tragic stage. The rhetorical overlap between history and tragedy granted theatrical tragedy the capacity to intervene in political debates on some of the same grounds that historiography did, and rendered it a potentially volatile site of the memory of civil war.

French Tragedy and the Wars of Religion It is an underappreciated fact that the revival of ancient tragedy in France coincided with the outbreak of her civil wars. The two poets usually cited as the first to have composed antique-style tragedies in the vernacular were Estienne Jodelle and Jacques Grévin; Jodelle’s Cléopâtre captive dates from around 1553, and Grévin’s Mort de César from 1560.9 Humanist poets did not hesitate to forge a link between the tragic mode and contemporary history. Grévin likened France at war to a tragic stage: La France est aujourd’hui le public eschaffaut Sur lequel la discorde insolente et hardie Joue, à notre malheur, sa triste tragédie, Où la fureur sanglante et la mort ne deffaut.10

In an élégie that prefaces the 1561 edition of Grévin’s theatrical works, Pierre de Ronsard observes that while the subject of a comedy can be drawn from any time and place: celuy du Tragicque est de peu de maisons. D’Athenes, Troye, Argos, de Thebes & Mycenes Sont pris les argumens qui conviennent aux scenes. Rome t’en a donné que nous voyons icy Et crains que les François ne t’en donnent aussi.11

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In keeping with the humanist poetics of the members of the Pléiade, for whom French literature was to be the descendent of Greco-Roman letters, Ronsard here figures the relationship between antique and French tragedy in terms of a westward translatio. Yet Ronsard is ambivalent about the inheritance he claims, because it ultimately involves not just poetry, but history. Expressing fear that contemporary French history has acquired tragic dimensions, he asks whether France really wants to join the exclusive group of nations that supply not only the literary models for tragedy, but also the subjects for it. Ronsard’s fears follow from the unstated premise that theatrical tragedies dramatize the historical tragedies of the people who compose them, a premise that raises some fundamental questions about the relationship between history and poetry, and in particular between history and tragedy. The issue is not quite whether tragedy should be historical (or “true”) – a point much debated in the Italian literary criticism of the cinquecento – nor does it bear narrowly on the social status of tragic characters, whom virtually no Renaissance poet would draw from everyday life. Rather, Ronsard’s gingerly consideration of the French civil wars as material for the tragic stage indicates an uncertainty about the ways in which theatrical tragedy should implicate the contemporary history of its audience, a question that necessitated a basic reflection on the nature and function of tragic poetry in an age in which ancient Greek, ancient Roman, and medieval Christian conceptions of history, drama, rhetoric, and tragedy were in perpetual competition. The theme of the Wars of Religion provides a compelling starting point to a path through this thicket of influences. Hardly a preconstituted site for the performance of oubliance as theater, French theory and practice of theatrical tragedy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries functioned as one of the arenas in which orientations toward the civil wars were explored and consolidated. The Wars of Religion were therefore themselves a factor in the evolution of conceptions of tragedy and the tragic in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France.12 While ideas about tragedy played a part in supplying a rhetorical grid for historians of the conflicts, histories of the wars also had an impact on the way in which dramatic writers of the period understood the nature and function of tragedy. Historiographical and theatrical texts thus colluded both to reflect and to construct the boundaries of tragedy in the midst of the Wars of Religion. While it is tempting to propose that the characterization of the Wars of Religion in terms of tragedy amounted to an aesthetic sublimation of the conflicts according to the principle that “theatrical simulation of war and death is to be preferred to actual war and death,”13 such

­108     Forgetting Differences a hypothesis presupposes an aesthetic distance between tragedy and ­spectator that was not necessarily part of the rhetoric of tragedy in sixteenth-century in France. Indeed, for Jodelle, at a time when “la Fortune avoit trop tragiquement joué dedans ce grand echafaut de la Gaule,” it simply made no sense to “faire encore par les fauls spectacles reseigner les veritables playes.”14 For Jodelle, it seems, theatrical spectacle had the power to draw real blood, in the style of what medievalist Jody Enders has called “death by drama.”15 This orientation to tragedy and the tragic is also evident in the Catholic partisan Arnaud Sorbin’s 1568 Regrets de la France sur la misere des troubles, a long prosopopée in which mother France laments the destruction her children have wrought upon her. In order to illustrate his view of the wars as an exceptional event, Sorbin turns to Greek tragedy, with its monstrous exceptions to the civilized rule. Like La Popelinière, Sorbin uses the rhetoric of the jamais vu: “Mais qui a veu jamais une tant fiere race, /Qui de nuire à sa mere eust au jamais l’audace?” Alluding to a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Sorbin’s France laments that even the children of King Pelias, who unwittingly killed their father because of a ruse of the sorceress Medea, are not as cruel as her own “enfans inhumains,” who are filled with an “errante fureur /Comme celle d’Oreste.” She wishes that Atropos would have killed her rebellious progeny the moment they were born, “mais las! Je m’apperçoy que point la destinée /Ne se peut eviter, quand elle est arrestée.” Sorbin’s France characterizes the rage of the heretic rebels as worse than that of Diomedes or Busire (whose conflicts with Hercules are referred to in tragedies by Seneca); their consciences torture them in a way that is worse than the punishments doled out to Sisyphus, Ixion, and Tantalus (all frequent references in Euripidean tragedy). Tragedy here serves as a reference point for the extremes of human conduct, coupled with a sense of the inevitability of fate or destiny, and functions as a mode of understanding rather than of sublimating contemporary historical experience. Sorbin’s poem makes manifestly clear that in 1568, the representation of the civil wars in tragic terms did not necessarily entail the emotional yet distanced reponse to them that emerged in seventeenth-century royal historiography. Indeed, the message that Sorbin’s personified France conveys to her favored (Catholic) sons is not at all a conciliatory one, nor does it encourage distanced spectatorship: “Combatez mes enfans (si besoin est ) pour moy, /Combatez mes enfans pour vostre jeune Roy.” “France” later calls explicitly upon princes, nobles, the clergy, and the “pauvre peuple Gaulois” to defend her against “heretics.” The young king himself, she says, can rely on God to make him victorious and thus the “vengeur des mes malheurs, sur les peuples mutins . . . Tu leur feras

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sentir la rigueur de la loy.” Extreme crimes call for extreme punishment, and such punishment is here baldly assimilated to revenge. For Samuel Sorbin’s tragic France, the memory of the conflicts est si piteuse, & dure, Qu’encor qu’elle n’occist, elle faict qu’on endure. Elle faict que l’on meure, avec autant de morts, Qu’on a de souvenirs de ces barbares torts, De ces meutres sanglans, de ces mutinieries, De ces rebellions, & tragiques furies . . .

Such vivid, powerful memories of “tragic fury” do not afford the safe distance between the spectator and the civil wars that Baudouin and Mézeray sought to create. Not only do these memories incite murder, they also threaten to kill (however metaphorically) with their proximity. We are back to the paradigm of historiographical representation as a kind of experience; but rather than conserving the benefits of vicariousness, the representation of the wars as tragedy appears instead to enhance the risks of an account of things “so lively . . . [that] we find ourselves carried away with gladness and grief through fear and hope, well near as though we were then at the doing of them.”16 We should not be surprised, therefore, to learn that many of those who enlisted a tragic vocabulary to record the events of the French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century did so with a view towards provoking an active, engaged, and indeed impassioned response.

Historiographical Tragedy Thanks in part to the broadly influential inheritance of Ciceronian rhetoric, history and tragedy had much in common in sixteenth-century France.17 The Aristotelian distinction between poetry (as fiction) and history (as truth) is of less importance here, since sixteenth-century theorists were much more committed than their later seventeenth-century counterparts would be to the idea that theatrical tragedies should treat historically true subjects. Jacques Grévin’s 1561 “brief discours pour l’intelligence du théâtre” asserts that “la Tragedie n’est autre chose qu’une représentation de verité, ou de ce qui en ha apparance” (n.p.).18 The playwright consequently justifies what he considers the generic innovation of excising the choir by an appeal to the supremacy of historical truth over theatrical practice: il me semble que ce pendant que là où les troubles . . . sont advenues es Republiques, le simple peuple n’avoit pas grande occasion de chanter: & que

­110     Forgetting Differences par consequent, que lon ne doit faire chanter non plus en les representant, qu’en la verité mesme. (n.p.) it seems to me that in a time of civil war in the Republic, the people did not have much occasion to sing; consequently, one should no more have them sing in [theatrical] representations than they in truth did.

In the 1570s, Jean de La Taille also saw truth as a poetic constraint: rejecting “histoires fabuleuses” for “celles que la Verité mesme a dictées,” he notes that he was forced to allow the shade of Samuel to appear in his tragedy Saül le furieux, even though he himself was hesitant about the existence of ghosts.19 In 1598, Pierre de Laudun d’Aigaliers was unambiguous on this question: “l’argument [de la tragédie] ne doit être feint, mais vray”; “l’argument de la Tragédie est vray.”20 Such prescriptions brought tragedy into an ever-closer proximity to historiography. The social function claimed for humanist tragedy overlapped significantly with that of humanist historiography. Drawing on Horace in the preface to his translation of Hecuba, Guillaume Bochetel asserts that poetry has the capacity to give instruction on matters of virtue and vice, and thus to give insight into the future via the examples of the past (4).21 Tragedy does this better than other genres because it is addressed to princes and kings, who derive great profit from such “monuments de si grande utilité” (4).22 We can immediately recognize the rhetoric of the “school of virtue” here, and it is primarily on these grounds that tragedy competed with historiography in sixteenth-century France. For Bochetel, tragedy is a school of kings and princes, invented in order to show the high born the uncertainty and instability of temporal life so that they will cast their lot with virtue (4). The philosophy of history that served as the primary backdrop for this kind of tragic didactics was the view of secular events in terms of vicissitude, both within an individual life and on the larger scale of polities and civilizations. One of the backbones of Bodin’s 1566 Methodus, as well as one of the foundations of Du Bellay’s program for a Deffense et illustration de la langue francoyse, the view of history as a cycle of vicissitudes gets its most elaborate French expression in Louis Le Roy’s 1575 De la vicissitude ou variété des choses en l’univers, which declares that all “choses humaines” are characterized by “commencement, duree, perfection, corruption & alteration.” In his 1571 Considération sur l’histoire française, Le Roy details both the disasters and the accomplishments of his “siècle merveilleux,” proposing that there are always opposing forces at work on high, so that history is neither progression nor decline, but rather characterized by “varieté & instabilité” (11r). As we have already seen, this view of history, which underpins Stoic moral

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philosophy, is an important current in French histories published in the sixteenth century. Indeed, in the preface to his translation of Plutarch’s Lives, Jacques Amyot characterizes history as the depiction of kings, princes, and notables “quand ils sont parvenus aux plus hauts, ou bien qu’ils ont esté dejettez aux plus bas degrez de la fortune.” Sixteenthcentury works about the civil wars use the concept of the tragic in order to come to terms with the uncertainties of such vicissitudes.

Tragedy as Verdict It will probably come as no surprise that a large number of writers in the period ultimately appeal to the existence of some higher power, above the human fray, that lends an ultimate coherence to the turbulent variety of history. These writers frequently exploit the basic structure of Greek tragedy, tending to focus their representations of the wars on a single, more or less exceptional protagonist whose ultimate fate is revealed through a series of peripeties.23 From this perspective, the vicissitudes of history could be subsumed into a rhetoric of royal, cosmic, or divine justice, as in Jean Le Masle’s 1573 Brief discours sur les troubles qui depuis douze ans ont continuellement agité et tourmenté le Royaume de France. Le Masle’s poem opens up with a statement of the cyclical view of history, wherein fortunes are continually reversed. For this Catholic polemicist, God is the master of these cycles, striking down those full of “vain orgueil” at the very height of their power. Le Masle cites as testimony to the accuracy of this vision of history the recent downfall of Coligny, just at the moment when fortune seemed so opportune for him and his band of rebels. Le Masle’s terse summary of the assassination of the Protestant leader and the subsequent St. Bartholomew’s Day ­massacres reads like a theatrical dénouement: voyla comment la divine puissance De ces mutins en fin a pris vengeance Tout à un coup, quand moins ils s’en doutoyent Et qu’au plus haut de l’heur estre cuidoyent. thus did the divine power wreak vengeance on the mutinous All in a moment, when they least expected it And when they thought themselves most fortunate.

Le Masle’s insistence on the heights of power to which the Huguenots had risen in the months preceding the massacres – “quand ils pensoient avoir /Plus d’heure au monde, & le plus de pouvoir” – as a justification

­112     Forgetting Differences for their execution exploits the perspective of both Greek and Christian tragedy, in which a spectacular fall is not only preceded, but frequently explained by a meteoric rise, and whose cathartic dénouement unveils a definitive kind of knowledge (gnosis) about the tragic situation. The act of moulding Coligny’s fortunes into this particular kind of tragic form served to defend the actions of the monarchy, whose apologists claimed that the killings were the only possible response to the threat of powerful, seditious subjects. Le Masle says nothing about Protestantism, much less heresy: God appears only to authorize the tragic reversal of fortune that underpins a political discourse of the just punishment of rebellion. And in reality, Charles IX went so far as to have a formal judgment pronounced against Coligny post-mortem, and then have him hanged in effigy at the end of 1572, thus politically framing the event in precisely the terms of crime and punishment proposed by Le Masle’s tragic template. Hardly a passive spectator, Le Masle emphasizes his proximity to events: he does not have to look “bien loin,” he notes, for an example of the reversal of fortune, and later in his poem he will give an account of the “terreur” he felt as he was very nearly murdered during the second war (“leur main estoit preste . . . de saccager ma teste”). Le Masle thus applies the rhetoric of tragedy to contemporary experience rather than to a distancing account of the past. Rather than a means to neutralize current events, tragedy functions here as a way to lend a persuasive, compelling form to a polemical political position. The appropriation of the discourse of what would come to be known as revenge tragedy is even more explicit in Jean le Frere de Laval’s grossly polemical history of the wars, which ran through several editions in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.24 Laval sets the stage for Coligny’s assassination thus: L’un des principaux Tragiques Grecs ayant fait commencer quelquefois une sienne Tragedie sur l’echafaut par un mechant personnage qui parloit fort scandaleusement, le peuple detestant le jeu, se prit a tumultuer & murmurer contre le poete. Luy donc pour appaiser la multitude sort en avant, & les prie attendre la Catastrophe, pour voir la fin malheureuse de celuy qui tenoit tel langage. Pareillement si aucun s’est offensé de regarder es livres precedens l’Amiral & ses complices jouer si longuement en toute liberté la sanglante Tragedie des seditions Francoises, je le supplie patienter encore ce livre, auquel il trouvera occasion d’estaindre la plupart de sa colere en la punition des conjurateurs et rebelles. . .quand il lira tantost comme. . .la justice vengeance les a faits. When one of the principal Greek tragedians opened a tragedy with an evil character saying very scandalous things, the public, repulsed by this, began

Tragedy as History     113 a hue and cry against the poet. In order to appease the crowd, the poet came out and begged them to wait for the Catastrophe, in order to see the unhappy end of the character who spoke in such a way. Likewise, if any [reader] has been offended by seeing, in the preceding chapters, how the Admiral [Coligny] and his accomplices played freely and at length the bloody Tragedy of French sedition, I beg him to bear with me through one more chapter, where he will find reason to extinguish most of his ire in the punishment of those plotters and rebels . . . when he reads how . . . justice wrought vengeance upon them.25

Introduced in this way, Coligny’s assassination not only becomes the inevitable catastrophe to which the preceding events lead; it also provides a kind of catharsis for the angry reader. Laval’s tragic version of history deliberately provokes ire in order, it seems, to extinguish that ire – at least partly – in the satisfaction of a spectacle of “just vengeance.” Here again, the tragic structure itself does rhetorical work in the service of a political polemic, by inducing in the reader a state of angry expectation that can be mitigated only by a display of the execution of justice as the tragic frame has defined it. If there is indeed a rhetoric of tragic spectatorship in Le Masle and Laval, it is of a very different nature than the one we have encountered in seventeenth-century historiography. In their telling, the “tragedy” of Coligny solicits an engaged public with a clear and present sociopolitical stake in a dénouement that functions as a quasi-juridical verdict. The kind of distance that would later be claimed by historians like Matthieu is entirely absent; instead, we have the report of someone who is exposed to the same dangers as the protagonists of history. The reader, in his turn, is not led to experience horror in the face of this spectacle, but rather is taught, via the rhetoric of tragedy, how to think, to feel, and, most importantly, to act in relation to a specific event in his own sociopolitical orbit, deriving a sense of political satisfaction from the punishment depicted on stage.26 The specificities of Greek tragic form in its sixteenth-century guise also serve to intensify the polemical dimension of tragic poems such as François de Chantelouve’s 1575 Tragédie du feu Gaspard de Coligny.27 Here, the Protestant admiral appears as an utterly base character in league with the likes of Pluto, the Furies, Satan, and Calvin to overthrow his king; even his Calvinism is merely a hypocritical cover for his desire to be above all laws (as he himself helpfully explains in his opening monologue). This tragic exaggeration of Coligny’s ambitions, which we already saw in Le Masle and Lanval, again frames Coligny’s downfall in terms of tragic justice. His murder, and the massacres that followed it, are judged by the chorus (“le Peuple”) to be a “généreux exploit,” and

­114     Forgetting Differences everything in the play leads the spectator to agree, right down to the elegantly bloodless dénouement. As reported by a messenger, Coligny and “autres” are simply “envoy[és] sous les Stygiens flos,” sent down into the Stygian waters in an anaesthetized climax that avoids arousing any emotions that might induce sympathy for the slain Protestant leader. Consigned to the realm of a cosmic justice whose course can never be reversed, the victims of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres are simply and unproblematically washed away. The tragic form is here not merely a vehicle for polemic, but a significant enhancement of it, due chiefly to the specific ways in which the play is structured. Chantelouve’s tragedy stages history in terms of what Aristotle, in his discussion of tragedy in the Poetics, called a “complete” action, with beginning, middle, and end. And “an end,” notes Aristotle, “has nothing following it.” Chantelouve exploits this tragic notion of finality in order to foreclose any other interpretation of this episode in history: justice has been done, there is no possibility for appeal, and – in a gross distortion of the historical reality – there are not even any dead bodies left to contemplate. Chantelouve’s version of tragic form serves to both constitute and delimit an historical event by pronouncing an irrevocably final verdict on Coligny, and to rally political opinion accordingly. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the play’s aesthetics are neither violent nor bloody, despite its subject matter. Chantelouve’s relentlessly negative depiction of Coligny blocks any sort of affective engagement with him; as a supposedly bad man who deservedly falls from fortune, Coligny arouses neither pity nor fear. This orientation to the tragic, which exploited a specific rhetoric of tragedy precisely in order to intervene in contemporary politics, can be found in several other plays from the period that purport to represent current events directly. These plays tend to stage selected “events” of the wars in terms of the justice or injustice of a single act, thus exhibiting that unity of plot that would become so dear to French neoclassical theory.28 Pierre Matthieu’s 1589 Guisiade, which dramatized what he called “le massacre du Duc de Guise,” depicts the Duke of Guise as a pious Catholic loyal to the crown, holding out the hope of reconciliation with a jealous Henri III. But as Matthieu puts it in his synopsis of the play, as happily as things begin, so unhappily would they end: an unnamed, diabolical figure enters the scene in Act IV and precipitates the play’s peripety by persuading Henri III to have Guise assassinated (an event that had taken place less than a year before the play was published). The death of this “généreux martyr” is related by a messenger in the play’s final act, which closes with the lamentations of the Duke’s mother and her prediction that Henri will become crazed with remorse at the deed he has done.

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On the page, each act of Matthieu’s tragedy is prefaced by a substantial resumé of its argument, such that the play itself explicitly functions as the transposition, in the mode of drama, of Matthieu’s tendentious summary of current events. (The third and fourth acts are in fact punctuated by a series of such “arguments,” which make up a significant proportion of the play.) Insisting upon the historical truthfulness of his play, Matthieu offers his Guisiade to Charles de Lorraine, brother of the slain duke, whose prudence, according to the playwright, allows him to distinguish between true and feigned zeal. Thus, at the same time that polemical historians such as Le Masle and Laval exploited a rhetoric of tragedy in order to establish the truth of a certain version of contemporary history, Matthieu will go so far as to put his version of history into the form of a tragic poem, with the obvious intention of exploiting not merely the rhetoric, but also the dramatic form of tragedy in order to enhance the persuasiveness of a polemical historical account designed to provoke a political response. Everything in the Guisiade is calculated to draw the audience as close as possible to the action. The play opens with a direct address to the king that urges him to defend the religion of his forefathers, an address that doubles as an exhortation to the public reading or viewing the play: “Ouvrez les yeux pour voir l’heretique fureur, /Qui nous fait ressentir ceste civile horreur.” In his synopsis of the tragedy, Matthieu describes it as “si nouvelle, qu’à peine a-t-elle ressuyé les yeux de ceux qui se ressentent des malheurs d’une si estrange vengeance.” Using an affective vocabulary that he ties to a rhetoric of revenge, Matthieu aims to describe the intimate relationship between his theatrical subject and the play’s dedicatee and to rally Ligueur opposition to Henri III.29 The intended effect of the play, like that of the polemical histories, is to induce an emotional reaction that leads to decisive political action. The synopsis ends with a vivid image of Guise’s blood seeping out of the king’s chambers to stain the whole of France: just as César, stabbed in the senate, left it tainted with his blood, “le généreux Duc de Guise massacré au cabinet du Roy, ne le laisse seulement empourpré des siens: mais en rend la France toute sanglante.”30 Guise’s blood is thus made to drip from the very verses of the poem, mingling with that of the French who were still engaged in armed conflict at the time of the tragedy’s publication. Matthieu’s play is part of a significant corpus of “tragic” accounts of episodes of the Wars of Religion that conceived of the rhetoric of tragedy as a potential instrument of political polemic, rather than as a discourse designed to mitigate tensions and reconcile spectators.31 In his 1607 Triomphe de la Ligue, Richard-Jean de Nérée acknowledges

­116     Forgetting Differences that his tragedy might well “regratter [les] playes,” “rafraîchir [les] douleurs,” “troubler [le] calme,” and “r’allumez [les] feux amortis” of a France in which “l’amnistie Roiale a mis au ban et au tombeau toutes animositez, toutes partialitez.” Although Nérée acknowledges that France is in fact at peace when he writes, he deliberately contravenes the politics of oubliance by exhuming the anti-royalist extremism of the era of Henri III, an extremism that was far from completely extinguished in 1609, as the subsequent assassination of Henri IV made dramatically evident. This is tragic poetry that aims to extract blood, not simply tears, by exploiting a sense of tragic finality in order to lend a quasi-juridical authority to a polemical representation of events.

Tragedy and Reconciliation Before 1598 Of course, not all characterizations of the civil wars in tragic terms in this period were intended to serve polemic, vengeful, and violent ends. Yet even conciliatory uses of the rhetoric of tragedy during the wars posited an equivalence between tragic emotions and a political stance. In other words, works that exploited the vocabulary of tragedy as a means by which to intervene in the ongoing conflict of France’s civil wars, whether these works were polemical or conciliatory, necessarily construed the rhetoric of tragedy in terms of the more abstract concept of the tragic. What is of interest here is not only the content of that concept – that is, what kinds of situations are considered tragic in sixteenth-­century France? – but also, and even more importantly, perceptions of its proper place. The omnipresence of the Wars of Religion as a reference for thinking about tragedy in the period inevitably militated against a narrowly theatrical conception of the term, since tragedy was perceived to have exceeded the confines of any poetic genre or theatrical space. The poet–soldier Jean de la Taille’s Remonstrance pour le roy, a tous ses subjects qui ont pris les armes, apparently written during combat in 1562, is a signal example of a civil war discourse of the tragic that will influence conceptions of tragedy in the period. Highlighting the “ruine, desespoir . . . & discort” of the French Wars of Religion, La Taille’s poem uses the rhetoric of pathos to frame a political intervention that serves as a tragic counterpart to Pierre de Ronsard’s better-known Discours des misères de ce temps of the same year. In the Remonstrance, La Taille develops a rhetoric of affective response to the wars that he will go on to elaborate a decade later in the more narrow terms of tragic poetry. The remonstrance was one of the formal means by which the parlia-

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ment could weigh in on the policies of the king. An old practice with obscure origins, it lacked precise juridical parameters.32 While the core of the genre consisted in what Antoine Furetière called a “humble supplication qu’on fait au Roy, pour le prier de faire réflexion sur les inconvénients d’un de ses édits ou de ses ordres,” the continually shifting relations between the parliament and the monarchy meant that the remonstrance had to be flexible enough to respond to varying political circumstances. Even granting such political flexibility, La Taille’s poem is unusual in its inversion of the traditional roles and functions assigned by the genre of the remonstrance: rather than gather the objections to royal legislation of the parliament and the third estate, La Taille’s remonstrance stages the complaints of the king himself, drawing the portrait of a monarch who by virtue of his very impotence solicits the reader’s pity. Far from ventriloquizing the king’s voice to appropriate royal authority, La Taille’s remonstrance underlines the young monarch’s inexperience and vulnerability. In order to lend the juridico-political genre of the remonstrance the “feel” of tragedy, La Taille’s poem exploits the overlapping lexica of the two discourses, thereby establishing a kind of symbiosis between tragedy and remonstrance. In the very first line of the poem, the young king announces that he is delivering his plaintes, a term whose technical juridical sense quickly expands to encompass a strongly affective dimension: Maintenant, mes Subjects, si jamais Courtoisie, Amour, Crainte, & Pitié, leur demeure ont choisie Au fond de vostre Cueur, si oncq’avez porté A votre jeune Roy Honneur, & Loyauté, Je vous pri’d’escouter vostre Roy qui vous prie, Qui se plaint, qui se deult, qui lamente & qui crie.

The plainte of the supplicant, initially framed by the genre of the remonstrance as an instance of juridical speech, expands its purview to include expressions of grief, lamentations, and cries, all of which, as we shall see, are privileged types of utterance in sixteenth-century tragedy.33 The appropriate response to these emotional outcries is also affective: the fact of experiencing fear and pity, as well as love, in the face of the king’s lament is the sign of loyalty to him. The good subject, the courteous subject, the loyal subject will pity the monarch as he is portrayed in La Taille’s remonstrance. The use of direct, first-person discourse enhances the pathetic tenor of the king’s speech, a dimension of the poem very evident when Charles evokes the death of his father: “hélas, comme à present /m’est son fatal

­118     Forgetting Differences trespas, nuisible & desplaisant!” Instead of initiating the transmission of a glorious royal heritage, the death of Henri II leaves a young orphan king overwhelmed by the challenges of intensifying civil war (“orfelin . . . sans pouvoir [Pour mes trop jeunes Ans] à ces troubles pourvoir”). Tragic emotions are omnipresent: the word “pitié” or some variant thereof (piteux; pitoyable) appears no less than eleven times over the poem’s 400 lines (La Taille’s remonstrance is significantly shorter than Ronsard’s Discours); and in addition to the royal cries, lamentations and “plaintes,” we have “regrets,” “peines,” “pleurs,” and one “soupir,” all of which are punctuated by numerous “hélas!” The ubiquity and intensity of the emotions represented and transmitted in the remonstrance also constructs a moving spectacle that François I, Henri II, and Louis XI are invited to witness within the poem. To the latter, Charles exclaims, “Que dirois-tu, voyant ce désordre mutin . . . Que dirois-tu voyant chez tes Subjects logé/Pour une Opinion un debat enragé . . . Voyant un tel erreur que tu serois marry!” For La Taille, as for the polemical writers we have just considered, emotion is not a substitute for political engagement, but rather a prelude to it. Further amplifying the appeal to the emotions, La Taille directs the king’s plaintes at the heart: “soften your hearts,” he begs; further on, the pitiable voice of the people is to calm the furor raging in French hearts (“si de vostre Roy les aequitables Pleurs /Ne peuvent amollir la dureté de voz cueurs,” may “la pitoiable voix [du peuple] puisse aumoins de voz cueurs la fureur assoupir”). It becomes clear that the affective response that La Taille seeks to elicit is meant to be a prelude and a spur to a specific course of action, that of laying down arms and abandoning the battles currently being fought. By staging the lamentations of a pitiable young king, La Taille aims to reconcile a warring people by means of a shared affective bond to the monarch. While love is certainly one of the emotions the poet seeks to incite, this bond is constituted primarily of quintessentially tragic emotions. These emotions are predicated on a concept of the tragic distinct from the one we saw in Le Masle, Lanval, and the polemical dramaturges. Rather than frame the troubles as a war of the just against the unjust, La Taille dwells on the bloody horror of civil war as a conflict of same against same: Hé quelle erreur encore, ou plutost quelle horreur, De voir gent contre gent s’allumer un fureur, Le sang contre le sang, Enfans contre le Pere, Femme contre l’Epoux, Frere contre le Frere, Amy contre l’Amy, Cousins contre Cousins, Seigneurs contre Seigneurs, Voisins contre Voisins?

Tragedy as History     119 Rome ne vante plus la sanglante querelle Qu’eut jadis le Beau-pere & le Gendre . . .

Here, La Taille draws the conflict between Caesar and Pompey into a framework of generalized interfamilial violence. Rather than describe the conflict in terms of opposing factions, La Taille characterizes it is a battle of moral equals designated by the same terms, many of which imply filiation (“gent contre gent,” “Frere contre le Frere, Amy contre l’Amy, Cousins contre Cousins, Seigneurs contre Seigneurs, Voisins contre Voisins”). Thus, La Taille appears to seek to induce “crainte et pitié” in part by assuming the very identification or resemblance between audience and tragic subject upon which the emotional effects of his remonstrative poem will depend. In order to feel pity and fear faced with La Taille’s Remonstrance, the French must feel that they are in the process of destroying themselves, and not killing an enemy or exacting just and lawful punishment, since, as the poet will remark in his subsequent treatise on tragedy, the latter situations do not move anyone to tears (“car tout cela n’esmouveroit pas aisément, & à peine m’arracheroit il une larme de l’oeil”).34 La Taille’s remonstrance does not simply describe a community of Frenchmen; the poem in fact seeks to reinstate such a community by inducing a shared emotional response to the spectacle of the pitiable young king. The subject of the Remonstrance could not be any closer to its audience, historically speaking: “nos guerres civiles.” This would seem to establish an equivalence between tragic characters and tragic spectators, and for that very reason, perhaps, would provoke the strongest emotional reaction. Ultimately, in the most extreme form of homeopathy imaginable, La Taille has Charles use the language of tragic affect about France’s civil wars in order to purge France of the tragedy of civil war.

Tragedy Without End La Taille urged his fellow Frenchman to take pity on their young king, and by extension, on themselves, in order to bring about an end to the Wars of Religion. By contrast, the most prolific author of tragedies in sixteenth-century France, Robert Garnier, will stage civil war as a never-ending, irreconciliable series of conflicts that defy political or philosophical resolution. Taking up and modifying La Taille’s overtly emotional rhetoric, Garnier will construe affect as action rather than as a motivating force for action. In a poem composed to accompany

­120     Forgetting Differences the 1581 ­translation of the Hymnes de Synese by Jacques de Courtin de Cissé, he sums up the nature of his tragic theater as a series of lamentations for France’s own troubles, viewed through the lens of GrecoRoman history: Tandis qu’en durs regrets, et en plaintes ameres, Tu me vois lamenter d’une tragique voix Les desastres romains, et les mal-heurs grégeois, Pleurant nos propres maux sous feintes etrangères . . .35

Here are the “regrets,” “plaintes,” lamentations, and cries that we encountered in La Taille’s depiction of the young Charles IX when the wars first broke out, but this time, they are directly attributed to the poet. Florence Dobby-Poirson has suggested that in the political context in which Garnier wrote, tragedy becomes the privileged arena for the expression of emotion.36 Yet as we have seen, the representation or expression of tragic emotion was intended to have effects ranging from incitement to vengeful violence to peaceful reconciliation. How did Garnier expect his audience to respond to such outpourings? It is safe to say that Garnier’s audience was made up primarily of readers, not spectators. As Henri Chardon noted, few poets have had as many editions as Garnier: for the period 1585 to 1626, no less than fiftythree reissues of the collected tragedies have been identified.37 Despite this obvious popularity, there are no attested performances in the seventeenth century. This invites us to situate the reception of Garnier’s plays in terms of habits of reading, rather than within theories of theatrical spectacle. Analyses of sixteenth-century French tragedy written from the perspective of its coming neoclassical heyday inevitably point to its unperformability, to its wordiness, and to its lack of action; debate continues to this day as to whether most of these plays were ever acted, or performed onstage more than once. It is in any case undeniable that, as Donald Stone observed decades ago, “It is a simple but all-important fact that the coming of French Classical drama is accompanied by discussions about performance which at no time surrounded Humanist tragedy.”38 Rather than approach this lack of interest in performance as a defect that would eventually be rectified, we might consider what it meant for the emerging discourse of tragedy in the sixteenth century. The encounter with the play in book form not only allows for the prefatory framing transmitted by dedications and by liminary poetry; it also permits the kind of imaginative identification with the characters that was encouraged by historians like Amyot. Garnier, like Jean Bodin, studied law at Toulouse, and subsequently became advocat en la cour du Parlement at Paris before returning to the

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Maine where he was born, and where he was conseiller au présidial du Mans from 1569–74, then lieutenant-criminel from 1574 until 1586, when Henri III appointed him conseiller au Grand Conseil.39 Despite this charge, he seems to have remained in Le Mans until he died in 1590. Jacques de Thou and Guillaume Colletet depict him as horrified by the destruction and violence of the continuing wars and as a member of the Ligue malgré lui rather than a fanatic supporter of the radical Catholic faction that dominated Le Mans until a few months before Garnier’s death (Chardon 159–67). Garnier died just after the wars of the Ligue had begun, before the conversion and ascension to the throne of Henri IV, and well before the registration of the Edict of Nantes. As Marie-Madeleine Mouflard insists, Garnier earned his living as a jurist, never receiving any royal support for his poetry.40 Garnier thus composed all of his tragedies while holding an active post in the law courts, which obliged him both to assemble and judge criminal cases and to take part in political assemblies. Jean Balsamo has recently argued that by 1589, the tragic poem had become the only remaining forum for deliberative rhetoric, the parliaments having been thrown into dysfunction by the wars.41 If we were to take Garnier’s plays to represent the state of parlementary debate on France’s troubles in the 1570s and 1580s, we would be forced to conclude that the courts were awash in tears, and that no decisions were ever reached. Garnier’s tragedies are a representation or enactment of political dysfunction rather than an alternative to it. While the abundance of Senecan sententiae no doubt gave readers food for philosophical thought, Garnier’s celebrated “optique tournante” (Mouflard) casts them as a dizzying array of contradictory teachings more apt to produce nausea than moral and political nourishment.42 A signal feature of these plays, not all of which of course had specific poetic precedents, is their inconclusiveness: they lack a single catastrophe to which everything leads. Raymond Lebègue wrote memorably of “les entassements de catastrophes qui s’intitulent La Troade et Antigone,” remarking that they propose “un moyen d’émouvoir le public, qui consiste à réunir en cinq actes les malheurs de toute une famille.”43 The absence of any kind of moral climax in Garnier’s civil war tragedies makes it extremely difficult to draw moral lessons from them, much less models for public action (be they positive or negative). For Garnier, whose three Roman plays, Cornélie, Porcie, and Marc Antoine, orbit closely around, but never represent, Caesar’s assassination, canonized historical “events” like the death of Caesar serve as a point of departure rather than a climax. In the title of his first tragedy, we can immediately recognize the notion of tragedy as a generalized and

­122     Forgetting Differences diffuse “bloody season” rather than as the story of a specific individual: Porcie, tragédie françoise, représentant la cruelle et sanglante saison des guerres civiles de Rome, propre et convenable pour y voir dépeincte la calamité de ce temps. The fate of individual characters in Garnier’s play is subordinated to the fate of Rome, but it is never clear who really has Rome’s interests in mind. The first chorus of Porcie ends with a plea to the Goddess of Peace to bring about reconciliation in Rome, but there is no political agent proposed as the vehicle of this gesture. It is perhaps worth pointing out how insistently Garnier’s Porcie seeks to characterize civil war as, precisely, tragic. The opening monologue, delivered by the Fury Mégère, assimilates Roman civil war (in which we “voir foudroyer ceste race de Mars /Et pour s’entretuer brandir les mesmes dars /S’armer de mesme fer, & de mesme courage /Des squadrons en squadrons s’animer au carnaige”) to the discord that reigns over the house of Oedipus (in addition to Oedipus himself, Mégère invokes the tragedies of Thyestes and Atreus). And yet, the action of Porcie opens after Caesar’s assassination. The deaths of Brutus and Cassius, while part of the temporal scope of the play, first come up in a single subordinate clause in a long and inconclusive debate about the best way to treat Caesar’s adversaries. This structure relegates hommes illustres to the background in order to focus on characters that, while hardly representatives of le menu peuple, are not the grand protagonists of history. Though perhaps not quite the equivalent of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Garnier’s tragic heroines are peripheral figures in terms of the events of the Roman civil wars. As women, neither Portia nor Cornelia merits her own life in Plutarch; they are actors in history malgré elles, dragged into conflict by their attachments to powerful men. Unlike Stoppard, however, Garnier will not simply exchange foreground for background; that is, he will not replace the points of view of Caesar and Brutus with those of Portia and Cornelia, but rather relentlessly juxtapose them, without either dissolving their agonizing conflicts into a larger whole, or resolving them into any sort of stable hierarchy. The spatio-temporal structure of both Porcie and Cornélie intensifies the spectator’s (or reader’s) inability to come to rest on a definitive verdict on the characters and events portrayed in the play. Because the major antagonists never actually speak to one another, changes in speaker frequently entail changes in place and thus in overall perspective. The views of the triumvirate get ample airing in Porcie, for example, but these men turn out to be perplexingly contradictory figures. Marc Antony sounds like he’s walked in right out of Corneille when he magnanimously refuses to agree to any sort of vengeance beyond the killing of Caesar’s assassins themselves: “Lépide, je ne puis, mon magnanime

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Coeur /Hait naturellement une telle rigueur” (vv. 1233–4). Générosité! He refuses to go after Pompey, since he had no part in Caesar’s death: “Pompey ne fut pas de nos conspirateurs” (v. 1273). Justice! But a few lines later we are forced to adjust our views of Antony’s motives: Je prens plaisir de voir le fils du grand Pompey Qui se feist obéir de la terre et des eaux Esploré, vagabond, armé de trois vaisseaux, Pauvre et désespéré dans la mer se retraire Et là faisant estat d’un infame Corsaire . . . (vv. 1288–92)

Cruelty! The spectator is at various moments invited now to admire, now to look askance at Antony, and indeed, on all of the characters. Their points of view are always positioned relative to one another, and are moreover frequently self-contradictory.44 As in the historical panoramas of Le Roy, we are thus constantly invited to consider that an act – or a person – that looks generous and just, say, from one place, might look cowardly and perfidious from another. In the context of such a vertigious play of perspectives, a definitive moral or juridical verdict on the “argument de la tragedie” remains forever out of reach. Constrained by the shifting perspectives of the characters in the play, the reader–­ spectator is unable to acquire any insight that harmonizes or exceeds their multiple, contradictory points of view. Garnier’s summary presentation of Porcie (in the prefatory argument) proposes no moral lesson, nor does it offer a framework likely to produce one. After recounting the various peripeties of the story, Garnier simply concludes, “voilà le cours de l’histoire, où j’ay fondé le project de cette presente Tragédie.” At the end of this summary, Garnier points out a bit that he did not find in his sources but that is instead original to him: the suicide of Portia’s nurse, which Garnier stitched onto the tail of the play (as he put it) “pour enveloper d’avantage en choses funebres & lamentables, & en ensanglanter la catastrophe.” This is hardly a catastrophe-asdénouement akin to what we saw in the plays that conceived of tragedy in terms of a final act of justice; rather, the play’s fourth and final suicide consolidates and generalizes the political hopelessness of the characters, in particular since the nurse’s suicide has nothing heroic about it. If the auto-destruction of Brutus, Cassius, and certainly Portia can be understood in terms of a Stoicism that takes Cato as its model, Garnier’s own contribution takes the gesture out of the realm of moral philosophy and into the domain of everyday despair. This despair extends to the choir and, by implication, to the reader–spectator as well when the nurse, as she kills herself, exclaims:

­124     Forgetting Differences Plorez, filles, plorez pour vos propres miseres Qui retiendrez ici vos ames prisonnieres, Plorez vostre malheur, plorez, helas! plorez Les infinis tourmens que vous endurerez.

The future tense suggests that while the play may conclude, the tragedy has not ended; the cries and laments will continue to sound. In Garnier’s Roman plays, we approach a notion of tragedy as a kind of testimony to the radical impossibility of justice in an environment of civil war. The lack of closure and the presence of irreconcilable perspectives in Garnier should not be seen merely as a rhetorical exercise; we should take them seriously as real deliberations about ethical behavior (such as were undertaken by Montaigne at the same time). Their inconclusiveness is an indication of deep uncertainty surrounding the questions under debate, uncertainty that notoriously also dogged historical accounts of Rome’s civil wars. Garnier’s way of telling Portia’s story in fact has many affinities to Appian’s account of this period in Rome’s history, an account Garnier names as one of his sources for the play. Appian’s sympathy lies mostly with Brutus and Cassius, but he grants Antony a moment or two of humanity. There is a fair amount of direct discourse (with much more of it devoted to Brutus and Cassius than to Caesar and Anthony), but usually in the form of monologues; there is virtually no dialogue between opposing parties. These are precisely the same features we encounter in Garnier’s play, and they work to similar effect. When Appian speaks of Brutus’s motives for assassinating Caesar, he gives myriad possibilities: Whether Brutus was ungrateful, or ignorant of his mother’s fault, or disbelieved it, or was ashamed of it; whether he was such an ardent lover of liberty that he preferred his country to everything, or whether, because he was a descendant of that Brutus of the olden time who expelled the kings, he was aroused and shamed to this deed principally by the people . . . at any rate these and many like incentives fired the young man to a deed like that of his ancestor.45

What happened is clear; the political and moral valence of the event, however, is uncertain. Such an open-ended, inconclusive view of the major events in history is taken up in Garnier’s tragedy. The abundance of well-studied polemic notwithstanding, inconclusiveness also characterizes much historiography of the 1570s, 1580s and 1590s. Let us return, for example, to Louis Le Roy. Though in his philosophical writings Le Roy ostensibly contains vicissitude within a Christian/neoplatonic unity that subsumes all discord, his historio-

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graphical writing is given over entirely to the account of discord and difference in all its forms. Le Roy strives for an ideal vantage point from which he could know “tous les affaires du temps present pour les transmettre a la posterite par vraye histoire” – this is nothing other than the “histoire accomplie” or “perfect history” theorized at around the same time by La Popelinière – but he ultimately acknowledges, as does La Popelinière, that this kind of knowledge is simply beyond any man’s ken. All he can do, then, is proceed “by observing and researching things as they come” – “par diligente observation & recherche des affaires ainsi qu’ils vont”46 – which sounds quite a bit like Garnier’s method of simply following “le cours de l’histoire.” The result is a sprawling, multifarious work-in-perpetual-progress that offers no clear lessons beyond that of the inexorability of vicissitude itself. Whereas in Polybius, the moral status of an act and that of its motive more or less unproblematically coincide, in historiography about the French civil wars, the controversial question was rarely what happened, but rather was why and how it happened, as the history of the historiography of Gomberville’s “famous” St. Bartholomew’s Day makes amply clear.47 There was of course no shortage of publications that claimed to know and to show the motivations of prominent actors in the conflicts; in addition to the material we have been considering, the polemical literature abounds with exposés of the nefarious machinations of Catherine de Medicis, Condé, the Duc de Guise, the Admiral Coligny, and Henri III.48 By contrast, histories written under the sign of perpetual vicissitude strive for truthfulness and comprehensiveness rather than the illustration of any moral or political maxim or polemical position. One of their distinctive formal features, a corollary both of their desire for truthfulness, on the one hand, and of their rejection of the beau récit, on the other, was the assembly and display of documents from as wide a variety of sources as possible. These included both multiple sources pertaining to a single set of events, and sources pertaining to a wide range of contexts (Europe, ancient Greece and Rome, of course, but also India, Persia, and the New World in the works of Le Roy). If in the historiographical works of Le Masle and Laval, and in plays like the Guisiade, history and tragedy are both characterized in terms of a conflict of exceptional individuals,49 as we have seen, what has been termed the “new historiography” (Bodin, La Popelinière, et al.) will by contrast aim to amass as much information from as many points of view as possible.50 The best example of this impulse in official French civil war historiography during the wars is probably Jean de Serres’s 1598 Histoire des choses memorables. This over 800-page volume is collected from various sources (as well as Serres’s own experiences). Some of these

­126     Forgetting Differences source texts are reproduced in the body of Serres’s recueil itself, which is more or less a chronological account of the wars between 1547 and 1597. In contrast to Pierre Matthieu’s pithy sentence s­ ummarizing the events of St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, Serres’s account of that year occupies a full forty pages (the year 1571, by contrast, only gets three). It is in fact very difficult to tell where exactly his account of the assassination of Coligny and the ensuing violence begins or ends. Serres’s is not a neat, unified drama of justice done, in the style of Laval, nor is it a tendentious account of injustice, in the manner of Simon Goulart. Rather than reserving the term “tragédie” for a few events of the greatest magnitude, Serres uses it with great frequency in his Histoire. If the conflicts as a whole constitute “la tragedie la plus sanglante qui se soit jamais veuë en France” (150), this tragedy is itself made up of a series of smaller-scale tragedies. Serres’s account of the troubles begins with a fatal duel, referred to as a “tragédie sanglante” (1); tax revolts under Henri II are a “tragédie” that ended in “comédies” at court, with a series of marriages (7); the “final act” of the tournament at which Henri II is mortally wounded changes “toutes ces comédies joyeuses et riantes en une sanglante et luxueuse tragédie” (63). Other tragedies ensue before August 1572, when the queen mother “joua plusieurs personnages dans cette tragédie” (421); the first attempt on Coligny’s life is “l’entrée de la tragédie” (428); royal dealings with the Protestant stronghold at La Rochelle are a tragedy that Catherine de Médicis and her councillors “faisoyent jouer” (494); a marginal note qualifies the end of the Duke of Nemours as a tragedy (768); and so on. Serres’s history is nearly epic in scope, covering fifty years of conflict and ranging over the entirety of France, all in minute and vivid detail. It is the sum total of these local disasters, collected from a range of sources, that, for him, make up the “tragedy” of the Wars of Religion. As his complicated account of the events of August 1572 demonstrates, Serres, like Appian, does his level best to understand the motives of all of the actors in this episode. Despite writing from a clearly discernible Protestant point of view, he frequently mentions and disparages acts of iconoclasm on the part of his coreligionaries as he relates the episodes of violence that have punctuated the previous decades. Serres’s harrowing, close-up account of the assassination of Coligny reports that the admiral was stabbed first in the chest and then in the head, and eventually all over his body; the Duc de Guise could barely recognize him because of “le sang couvrant [sa] face” (431). But Coligny is just one tragic victim among many, since as Serres reports, “seigneurs, gentilshommes, leurs pages et serviteurs . . . gens de justice

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de toute qualitez, gens de lettres, de longue robbe, escholiers, medecins, marchans, artisans, femmes, filles, jeunes garsons, sans espargner les enfans au berceau et au ventre de leur meres” (432) were also cruelly massacred. “En lieu de justice,” sums up Serres, “l’on ne parla que de meutres & saccagemens” (211). This is clearly a different notion of the “tragedy” of St. Bartholomew’s Day than that of Le Masle, Laval, or Chantelouve. Serres never lets his readers forget the human cost of the wars, regardless of who stuck the knife in, and he underlines the fact that the large number of guilty parties ultimately made it impossible for officers of justice to carry out their charge (“la multitude des coupables . . . empescherent [les] justiciers de faire ce qu’ils pretendoyent,” 276). There is indeed a depressing symmetry in the reciprocal violence he reports: “les meurtriers furent meutris, & leur butin escheut à d’autres butineurs” (170). The kind of violence Serres describes – rather vividly, I might add – is not performed in the service of justice; it is for the most part indiscriminate, as in Monluc’s attack on Agen, in which “La cruauté fut extreme, sans espargner sexe ni aage, jusques à tuer les petits enfans dans les bras de leurs meres, & leurs meres puis apres” (212); or again Monluc in Nérac, where “toutes cruautez & violences furent exercees . . . sans avoir esgard à qualité, sexe ni aage” (212).51 This account offers no satisfying spectacle of justice, but neither does it offer the promise of vengeance against the Monlucs of this world. It is this utter lawlessness and lack of moral closure that, for Serres, constitutes France’s tragedy, which he conveys in terms that appeal not just to the visual but also to the auditory imagination. In his account of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres, Serres describes how one could hear the “tempeste horrible de huées des meutriers” and the sound of “portes et fenestres enfoncés à coups de hache,” as well as the “pitoyable cris de ceux qu’on bourreloit”; dead bodies were dragged through the mud “avec hurlemens et sifflements estranges” (432). Palaces and public places were “teints de sang”; body parts tossed into the Seine left it “toute rouge de sang, qui aussi ruisselait par la ville, nommément en la cour du Louvre, maison du Roy” (434). There is a theatrical sensibility at work here, one that emphasizes blood, violence, and suffering. In this all-encompassing tragedy, any single death hardly ranks as a dénouement, much less as a coup de justice. Thus, Serres’s Histoire as a whole has no conclusion. Even though he published it after the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes, the final words of his text, following his direct transcription of a harangue for peace given by Henri IV, are these: “I have arrived at 1596, my intended stopping point for now. What happened in subsequent years will be seen in other writings, God

­128     Forgetting Differences ­ ermitting.” We are made to understand that there is, unfortunately, p more to the horrific story.

Garnier and the Affective Proximity of Tragedy Although with Serres we have moved away from the kind of tragic history that seeks primarily to provoke an engaged political response, we are obviously still quite far from a historiographical articulation of the tragic with the politics of oubliance. Serres immerses his readers in an ongoing, open-ended experience of tragedy in the form of a series of ultimately irreconciliable conflicts. Offering up little in the way of lessons of virtue, these histories cast the events of the wars as all-too-painfully memorable. The reader is more or less left wringing his hands, with the “horrible huées” and the “pitoyable cris” of the suffering French ringing in his ears. Founded on the view of history as ultimately inscrutable, Garnier’s civil war tragedies similarly induce collective lamentation precisely because they propose no possible resolution to the suffering they depict, be it political, philosophical, or divine. The invitation to the chorus and, by extension, to the reader–spectator from Portia’s dying nurse to “plorez vos propres miseres” stages precisely the mode of reception that Garnier himself proposed when he characterized his tragedies as “bewailing our own troubles in a foreign guise” (“pleurant nos propres maux sous feintes étrangères”), which suggests that what was at issue in his tragic poetry was the audience’s emotional relationship to its own history. Like Ronsard, La Taille, and the polemical tragedians, Garnier appeared to believe that contemporary history could furnish the material of theatrical tragedy, and that it was the business of tragedy to comment directly on current events. In a poem to Henri III, he encourages the French king in his foreign wars by announcing the tragedies he will write on the subject of those Henri will have vanquished (“Et que je puisse d’eux faire une tragédie, Semblable à celles-cy, qu’humble je vous dédie”).52 Here, of course, Garnier projects historical tragedy onto France’s adversaries; more frequently, however, he lamented the degree to which the tragic mode was suited to France’s own historical situation. Garnier consistently and explicitly linked his tragic compositions to contemporary history and in particular to the French civil wars.53 He dedicates his Marc Antoine to Guy du Faur de Pibrac, the notorious apologist for the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres, asking: à qui mieux qu’à vous se doivent addresser les representations Tragiques des guerres civiles de Rome? Qui avez en telle horreur nos dissensions domes-

Tragedy as History     129 tiques, et les malheureux troubles de ce Royaume, aujourd’hui despouillé de son ancienne splendeur . . . to whom better than to you should tragic representations of Rome’s civil wars be addressed? You who are so horrified by our domestic conflicts, and by the troubling misfortunes of this kingdom, which is now stripped of its ancient splendor . . .54

The account of Rome’s troubles is thereby addressed specifically to one who was most troubled – indeed horrified – by France’s civil conflicts; in other words, to one who is assumed to share the emotions of the characters depicted. In a passing remark on Garnier, Georges Forestier has suggested that for sixteenth-century dramaturges, “the more unbearable the violence of the events recounted, the stronger the moral efficaciousness of tragedy seemed” (“l’efficacité morale de la tragédie semble d’autant plus forte que la violence des événements racontés ou mis en scène est plus insoutenable”).55 But as we have seen, it is difficult to distill any kind of “enseignement,” moral or otherwise, from Garnier’s plays. Attempts to derive political claims from his dramatic oeuvre have remained deeply speculative, since they are inevitably made on the basis of dialogue that the playwright attributes to figures whose characters are manifestly unstable, via the medium of a type of drama whose signal feature is the optique tournante.56 And indeed, Garnier himself never puts forward his plays as instances of didactic poetry. His reflections on tragedy in the dedication of La Troade, to the Archbishop of Bourges, suggest other aims: Je sçay qu’il n’est genre de poëmes moins agréable que cestuy-cy, qui ne represente que les malheurs des princes, avec saccagemens des peuples. Mais aussi les passions de tels sujets nous sont jà si ordinaires, que les exemples anciens nous devront doresnavant servir de consolation en nos particuliers et domestiques encombres: voyant nos ancestres Troyens avoir, par l’ire du grand Dieu, ou par l’inévitable malignité d’une secrette influence des astres, souffert jadis toutes extrêmes calamitez, et que toutesfois du reste de si misérables et dernières ruines s’est peu bastir, après le décez de l’orgueilleux empire romain, ceste très-florissante Monarchie. I know that there is no genre of poem less pleasurable than this one, that shows nothing other than the misfortunes of princes, and the destruction of peoples. But the passions of such subjects are by now so ordinary among us, that ancient examples should henceforth serve to console us in our domestic and particular difficulties: seeing our Trojan ancestors – whether by the wrath or God or by the unavoidable curse of some secret astral influence – having suffered such extreme calamities, but nonetheless from such miserable ruins having been able to build (after the demise of the audacious Roman Empire) this flourishing monarchy.

­130     Forgetting Differences It is remarkable indeed to see a Renaissance poet express his regret at the appropriateness of his poetry, which he furthermore acknowledges is written in the most disagreeable genre, in the absence of any ­compensatory appeal to the didactic potential of the whole miserable enterprise. Raymond Lebègue remarked of La Troade, “on ne voit pas nettement l’enseignement moral ou religieux qu’[on] avait coutume de tirer des événements dramatiques.”57 As Garnier’s dedication suggests, rather than any clear political or moral lesson, the best that the warring French can hope for from the ancient plays is the consolation of the hope of better things to come, God and the stars willing. This attempt to represent contemporary experience in foreign clothing might be seen to have a certain distancing effect, since the foreign setting discourages a form of reception that takes tragedy as simply another mode of directly conveying contemporary experience. Nonetheless, Garnier’s explicit revelation of the feint makes it difficult for readers to forget the degree to which their own contemporary experience is indeed implicated. His insistence on the strong emotions he expects such representations to provoke makes proximity a matter of affect, rather than a condition of moral instruction. The “consolation” promised by his tragedies is predicated on a strong identification between the contemporary French, on the one hand, and the ancient Trojans, on the other: the latter are the “ancestors” of the former, and the misery depicted onstage does not represent some universal human condition, but a set of particular historical circumstances overtly linked to “nos particuliers et domestiques encombres.” If antique-style theatrical tragedy is flourishing in France, Garnier implies, it is not due to the rediscovery of some universal literary value, but rather to the sad fact that history is repeating itself due to forces beyond human control. It is thus assumed that the audience for the play is a particular one – in this case, the French in civil war; it is further expected that this audience, by virtue of its particular situation, will share the emotions of the characters depicted.58 In his liminary sonnet to Garnier’s collected theatrical works (1580), Robert Estienne attempts to revive a Polybian appropriation of the representation of the Roman past as a source of all-purpose instruction. Characterizing Garnier’s antique tragedies as vehicles of teachings about how to avoid the fate of the Greek and Roman empires, Estienne urges: France, appren par ces vers, que ton Garnier t’adresse, Appren ce que tu dois pour ton bien éviter; Que les malheurs d’autruy te puissent profiter, Et sois sage aux despens de Rome et de la Grèce. Rome, qui de son temps du monde estoit maistresse, Rome, à qui rien que soy ne pouvoit résister,

Tragedy as History     131 S’est laissé à la fin par ses forces donter: Et l’empire des Grecs par soymesme a pris cesse. La civile fureur et le meurtre intestin De Rome et de la Grèce avança le destin, Et de leurs citoyens les feit la triste proye. France, fuy donc la guerre, et suy tousjours la paix, A fin que ton Garnier, te louant désormais, Change son deuil tragique en un doux chant de joie.59

Yet by 1580, it was far too late to have recourse to Polybius’s “malheurs d’autruy” in order to win painless instruction from the suffering of others in the matter of civil war. Garnier’s poetics of reception would appear to invert the dynamic of Polybian history, which sought to draw the reader as close as possible to the past misfortunes of others without exposing him to the same risks. Garnier proposes to do just the opposite, projecting the miseries of contemporary experience onto the past – “Pleurant nos propres maux sous feintes etrangères.” Whereas Polybius (or Amyot) aimed to animate the past for the benefit of the inexperienced reader, Garnier seeks to cloak the reader’s (tragic) experience in the guise of the past. Estienne gets it right in his final line: Garnier’s plays are songs of grief. With Garnier, the tragic appeal to the emotions becomes more emphatically affective, and correspondingly less likely to prepare an active political intervention. Given the pervasiveness of lament and tears in Garnier’s tragic plays, and the absence of any clear resolution of suffering on either the earthly or the cosmic plane, these dramas convey a sense of both political hopelessness and existential helplessness in the face of historical vicissitude. If nothing stops anyone from hoping for better days ahead, the plays do not give any inkling as to how the situation might improve. Indeed, as Cornélie remarks, “Moindre n’est mon tourment, ni moindre ma douleur /Pour voir à tout le monde un semblable malheur” (II, 16). Evoking the Lucretian metaphor of the shipwreck, Claude Binet’s laudatory sonnet on Garnier’s drama simply assumes that what is at stake in Garnier’s tragedies is nothing other than the miseries of his own times: Celuy qui nud au port secoue le naufrage A d’autres eschouez raconte son malheur Cil, qui a veu gresler l’espoir de son labeur, Au sein d’un laboureur pleure son labourage Mais, Garnier, avec toi chascun plaint son dommage Sur ton docte echaffaud, la royale grandeur, Le noble, le vulgaire, en un semblable pleur Noyent le long ennuy des malheurs de nostre aage60

­132     Forgetting Differences Here, shared misery gives rise to “un semblable pleur” in kings, nobles, and ordinary Frenchmen; tragedy is no longer seen as the exclusive domain of the grands.61 Rather than characterize the tragic poet as the master manipulator of emotions (as will be done in later tragic theory), Binet casts him as the privileged voice of an agonized community. Even the praise of Garnier by fellow poet Rémy Belleau is framed as a plainte: “Je plains fort que le sang et le meurdre execrable /Les tragiques tançons et la palle frayeur /Exercent sans pitié leur cruelle rigueur /Du François eschaffaut le subjet lamentable.” As La Taille put it in his Remonstrance, civil war is a matter of “Frere contre le Frere, Amy contre l’Amy, Cousins contre Cousins, Seigneurs contre Seigneurs, Voisins contre Voisins.” Binet’s poem shows how this conception of the tragedy of the French Wars of Religion, as a pervasive, never-ending conflict of moral equals, crystallized in the communal lament of Robert Garnier’s tragedies. Author, characters, and audience join together in the collective plainte of the shipwrecked, still far from the shores of oubliance.

Notes  1. For her part, Catherine seemed to take the link between contemporary history and tragedy very seriously. In his Discours sur la reyne Catherine de Médicis, Brantôme reports that while Catherine enjoyed theatrical representations: depuis Sofonisba, composée par Monsieur de Sainct-Gelays . . . elle eust opinion qu’elle avoit porté le malheur aux affaires du Royaume, ainsin qu’il succeda; elle n’en fist plus jouer [de tragedies], mais ouy bien des commedies et tragi-commedies.



Brantôme, “Pierre de Bourdeille,” Recueil des dames, poésies et tombeaux, Etienne Vaucheret (ed.), (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), p. 36. The Recueil was probably finished around 1600, and first published posthumously at Leiden in 1665.   2. See the Advertisement fait au Roy . . . touchant la derniere declaration de la guerre, 1587 (La Rochelle: Jehan Portost, 1587).   3. La Popelinière, Henri-Lancelot Voisin de, La Vraye et entière histoire des troubles (Cologne: Arnould Birckman, 1571), n.p.   4. In an analysis of the genre of the histoire tragique, Yves-Marie Bercé maintains that near the end of the sixteenth century, in an unprecedented extension of the ancient metaphor of the world as a stage, “l’histoire devient un théâtre . . . et l’historien doit donc avoir le talent du dramaturge.” “L’Histoire comme théâtre,” Écritures de l’histoire (XIVe–XVIe siècle) (Geneva: Droz, 2005), pp. 351–60, (351).   5. See Bouhaïk-Gironès, Marie, Jelle Koopmans and Katell Lavéant (eds), Le Théâtre polémique français: 1450–1550 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008).

Tragedy as History     133  6. Koopmans, Jelle, “The university out on the streets: Drama, debate and public space in France (1490–1520),” in Jan Bloemendal, Peter Eversmann and Elsa Strietman (eds), Drama, Performance and Debate: Theatre and Public Opinion in the Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 57–80, (58). Koopmans documents several case studies in which universities in particular were involved in political debates conducted by means of dramatic performances.   7. The many studies of Raymond Lebègue on French theater in this period remain an indispensable point of departure. On the increasingly vexed political function of farce in particular in sixteenth-century France, see Beam, Sara, Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in Early Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), esp. ch. 4, “Farce during the Wars of Religion.” For a philosophically-oriented consideration of the notion of “presence” as it was manifested (or represented) in and by the theater in early modern France and Spain, see Egginton, William, How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).  8. Cf. Mazouer, Charles, “La tragédie religieuse de la Renaissance et le mystère médiéval: l’attirance d’un contre-modèle,” Seizième Siècle, 6 (2010), pp. 95–105.  9. For useful synopses of the history of tragic theater in this period, see Mazouer, Charles, Le Théâtre français de la Renaissance (Paris: Champion, 2002); Forsyth, Elliott, La Tragédie française de Jodelle à Corneille. Le thème de la vengeance (Paris: Nizet, 1962); Lancaster, Henry C., A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1929); Lanson, Gustave, Esquisse d’une histoire de la tragédie Française avant Jodelle [1920] (Paris: Champion, 1954); Lazard, Madeleine, Le Théâtre en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980); Lebègue, Raymond, La Tragédie Française de la Renaissance [1944] (Paris: SEDES, 1954) and Stone, Donald, French Humanist Tragedy: A Reassessment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974). I will have occasion to cite more specialized works below. 10. In Pinvert, Lucien, Jacques Grévin (Paris: Fontemoing, 1898), p. 385. Cited in Charbonnier, François, La Poésie Française et les guerres de religion [1920] (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), pp. 292–3. 11. In Grévin, Jacques, Le Théâtre de Jacques Grevin (Paris: Vincent Sartenas, 1561), n.p. 12. Timothy Reiss has emphasized the prominence of tragedy at moments of profound sociohistorical disruption: in each of its major appearances, tragedy has accompanied the rupture of a familiar order, in the which the essential relationships between physical, social, and religious life are now losing their reference to any experience of totality.



Reiss, Timothy J., Tragedy and Truth. Studies in the Development of a Renaissance and Neoclassical Discourse (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 34. 13. Usher, Phillip John, “Tragedy on the aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew’s

­134     Forgetting Differences Day massacre: France’s first Phèdre and the hope for peace,” Romance Notes, 52:3 (2012), pp. 255–62, (256). Usher’s fascinating reading of Robert Garnier’s 1573 tragedy Hippolyte, which positions the play as “the spectacle of death, as an alternative to war” (262), leaves the nature of spectatorship unexamined. 14. Jodelle’s 1558 remark is cited in Leblanc, Paulette, Les Écrits théoriques et critiques Français des années 1540–1561 sur la tragédie (Paris: Nizet, 1942), p. 187. 15. In Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), Enders examines the ontological uncertainty surrounding theatrical representations of violence on the eve of the Reformation in France. 16. Plutarch’s Lives, Englished by Sir Thomas North in Ten Volumes (London: Dent, 1910), vol. 1, p. 19. Cf. Vie des hommes illustres, trans Jacques Amyot (Paris: Jean-François Bastien, 1784), tome premier, p. xxxii. 17. For the scope of the Ciceronian inheritance, see Marc Fumaroli, L’Âge de l’éloquence; Francis Goyet, Le Sublime du lieu commun. That Renaissance drama has a primarily moral imperative is the central argument of Stone’s French Humanist Tragedy. Charles Mazouer has recently retierated this: “Pour notre Renaissance, la tragédie est une école, pourvoyeuse d’exemples moraux pour tous ou miroir des princes.” “Ce que tragédie et tragique veulent dire dans les écrits théoriques du XVIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 109:1 (2009), pp. 71–84, (80). Where Stone insisted on the importance of rhetoric in tragedy, however, Mazouer underlines philosophical grappling with transcendent powers. A precious collection of primary documents is Paulette Leblanc’s Les Écrits théoriques. 18. Bernard Weinberg estimated that Grévin’s theoretical discussions of theater “do not lead to any total theory of poetics or of the dramatic art; they do not lead to any reinterpretation of the traditional [medieval] concepts; they do not lead to any reorientation of thinking about comedy and tragedy.” Weinberg, Bernard, “The sources of Grévin’s ideas on comedy and tragedy,” Modern Philology, 45:1 (August 1947), pp. 46–53, (53). 19. La Taille, Jean de, “L’art de la tragédie,” Saül le furieux (Paris: Fédéric Morel, 1572). 20. Laudun d’Aigaliers, Pierre, L’Art poétique francoys (Paris: Anthoine du Breuil, 1598), pp. 279, 286. 21. Euripides, Hecuba, trans Guillaume Bochetel and Lazare de Baïf (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1550), n.p., preface. 22. Thus, we can orient more specifically to tragedy Raymond Lebègue’s observation that: les trente années pendant lesquelles la France a subi l’épreuve de la guerre religieuse sont l’époque où la littérature et la vie politique et sociale ont entretenu, dans ce pays, les rapports les plus étroits et les plus manifestes.



“La littérature Française et les guerres de religion,” French Review, 23:3 (1950), pp. 205–13, (205). In spite of his deep and sensitive research into the period, Lebègue ultimately characterized the main literary influence of the wars in terms of a general “abaissement de la culture” (207, 208).

Tragedy as History     135 23. By characterizing this type of tragedy as “Greek,” I seek here simply to pinpoint those common elements of Greek tragic plot that were appropriated by sixteenth-century French writers, who tended to take Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides as exponents of a single, unified tradition. I do not thereby mean to deny the existence of differences among the tragic worlds of these three playwrights; nor do I presume to make claims about how those plays would have been received in antiquity. A stimulating consideration of these questions with respect to Sophocles can be found in Simon Goldhill’s Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and, more generally, in the excellent Companion to Greek Tragedy edited by Justina Gregory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). See also Goldhill’s recent essay, “The ends of tragedy: Schelling, Hegel, and Oedipus,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 129.4 (2014), pp. 634–648, for a genealogy of modern conceptions of tragedy, indebted to German idealism, that “focus on the individual as the privileged site of tragedy ...; [on] a modern psychology of internal division and harmonization ...; [and that exhibit] a willingness to see the process of reconciliation as led by religion, framed by religion” (644). All of these, I would argue, are equally characteristics of the polemical tragedians of the French sixteenth century. 24. Elliot Forsyth approaches the question of revenge tragedy from a broadly anthropological perspective in La Tragédie Française de Jodelle à Corneille (1553–1640), Le thème de la vengeance (1962). Expanded edition Paris: Champion, 1994. 25. Le Frere de Laval, Jean, La Vraye et Entiere Histoire des troubles et guerres civiles, avenuës de nostre temps (Paris: Marc Locqueneulx, 1575), p. 519r (misnumbered as 591r). I have not been able to establish a complete bibliography of Laval’s history, which seems to have been printed constantly throughout the 1570s and into the 1580s. There is more than one issue with the date 1575 (another gives Guillume de la Noüe as printer; both Locqueneulx and La Noüe are mentoned in the privilège); at a minimum, other issues include 1572, 1573, 1574, 1576, and 1578, as well as expanded editions in 1582 and 1583. Another book of the same name, published in Paris during 1584 in Laval’s name, is a reworking of La Popelinière. 26. This kind of proximity between reader and text is also characteristic of collections of histoires tragiques, which were imported into France from Italy in the sixteenth century. Initially translated from the Italian, these ostensibly historical anecdotes of everyday transgressions never addressed the events of the Wars of Religion. For a discussion of their mise-en-scène of crime and punishment, see Pech, Thierry, Conter le crime: droit et littérature sous la Contre-Réforme. Les histoires tragiques (1559–1644) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000). Since collections of histoires tragiques gather many little stories with no clear historical relation to one another, the form, like that of the vie or the oraison funèbre, allows glaring moral contradictions to subsist unresolved. A good example of this can be found in Boitel’s Théâtre tragique from the 1620s. Boitel, Pierre, Le théâtre tragique, sur lequel la fortune représente les divers malheurs advenus aux hommes illustres et personnes plus signalées de l’univers, depuis la création du monde

­136     Forgetting Differences jusques à présent (Paris: Toussaint du Bray, 1621–2). This volume simply strings together, one after another, paratactically, the story of how a series of more or less “grands” (everyone from Cain to Henris III and IV) met an early and violent end. (And the end is all we get here; the entries are rarely more than a page or two.) Both Henri de Lorraine duc de Guise and Henri III get glowing reviews in their individual entries, as does Louis de Condé, despite the fact that they were mortal enemies of one another during the civil wars (see pp. 271–84). 27. An excellent introduction is provided by Keith Cameron in his edition of the play (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1971). Richard Hillman’s wonderful English translation, a scholarly edition in its own right, includes an expert analysis of the character of Coligny (The Tragedy of the Late Gaspard de Coligny (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2005)). See Postert, Kirsten, Tragédie historique ou histoire en tragédie? (Tübingen: Narr, 2010), pp. 131–63, for a discussion of Chantelouve’s debt to Pibrac, and of his exploitation of historical detail as a means of persuasion in his propagandistic framing of Coligny’s death. “En nouant habilement faits historiques . . . et éléments inventés . . . le dramaturge rend sa tragédie, c’est-à-dire sa version des événements, crédible” (156). I would insist that rather than using history to authorize his tragedy, Chantelouve uses tragic form to enhance the credibility of his version of history. 28. See the stimulating editorial introduction to Le Bruit des armes: mises en forme et désinformations en Europe pendant les Guerres de Religion (Jérémie Foa and Paul-Alexis Mellet (eds), (Paris: Champion, 2012)) for a consideration of how “events” were constructed in polemical material during the Wars of Religion. 29. Louis Lobbes, a recent editor of the Guisiade, seems to have been taken in by Matthieu’s rhetoric when he explains that the play’s Senecan division into acts “n’a pas dû poser beaucoup de difficultés: il suffisait de suivre le fil des événements” – as if the flux of history, especially that of a period as contentious as the one Matthieu’s play treats, simply presented itself in the form of Senecan tragedy. The intrigue of the play, in any case, could hardly be less Senecan. Matthieu, Pierre, Théâtre Complet, Louis Lobbes (ed.), (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007), p. 68. 30. Shortly thereafter, there appeared Simon Belyard’s treatment of the same subject, the Guysien ou perfidie tyrannique commise par Henri de Valois, published at Troyes by Jean Moreau in 1592, which shared both the politics and the aesthetics of Matthieu’s play. For a study of the polemical style of these two plays, see Ternaux, Jean-Pierre, “La diabolisation dans La Guisiade (1589) de Pierre Matthieu et Le Guysien (1592) de Simon Bélyard,” Études Épistémè, 14 (2008), pp. 1–18. On the connection between plays including those of Chantelouve and Matthieu to English revenge tragedy, see Hillman, Richard, French Origins of English Tragedy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 31. In the introduction to her exhaustive study of French-language “théâtre d’actualité” in the age of the Wars of Religion, Charlotte Bouteille-Meister judges that the romantic view of theater as an art charged with sublimating the ugliness of reality is ill-suited to the drama of the period, when many

Tragedy as History     137 plays represented current events “sans détour.” She points to tragedy as the privileged arena for theatrical representations of the wars of religion, representations that sought to provoke a pragmatic reaction “dans le temps humain” (39). “Représenter le présent. Formes et fonctions de “l’actualité” dans le théâtre d’expression Française à l’époque des conflits religieux 1554–1629” (unpublished doctoral thesis [Arts et spectacles], Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, 2011). I would like here to thank Dr. Bouteille-Meister for sharing with me her research, which encompasses far more than just tragedy. 32. For an in-depth study of the genre of the parliamentary remonstrance in this period, see Daubresse, Sylvie, Le Parlement de Paris ou la voix de la raison (1559–1589) (Geneva: Droz, 2005). According to Daubresse, “L’absence de règle précise du droit de remontrance est la caractéristique essentielle des relations entre le Parlement et la monarchie” (265). Ultimately, “La remontrance est surtout le guide moral de la volonté royale” (468), a very general role that obviously opens the way to less narrowly juridical adaptations of the form such as that of La Taille. 33. For recent reflections on the term’s multiple resonances in Renaissance France, see Alazard, Florence (ed.) La Plainte à la Renaissance (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008). 34. La Taille, “Art de la tragédie,” p. 19. 35. Garnier, Robert, Oeuvres complètes, Lucien Pinvert (ed.), (Paris: Garnier, 1923), vol. 2, p. 214. 36. Dobby-Poirson, Florence, Le Pathétique dans le théâtre de Robert Garnier (Paris: Champion, 2006). Dobby-Poirson sees some resemblances between certain verses and more overtly political pamphlets of the period (384–5, 402). Her work is a sensitive and erudite study of the poetics of affective expression that ultimately proposes a purely aesthetic reading of Garnier’s tragedy. 37. Chardon, Henri, Robert Garnier: sa vie, ses poésies inédites (Paris: Champion, 1905), p. 222. Cf. Forestier, Georges, Edric Caldicott and Claude Bourqui (eds), Le Parnasse du théâtre: les recueils d’oeuvres complètes de théâtre au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Presses Sorbonne, 2007), p. 244. 38. Stone, French Humanist Tragedy: A Reassessment, p. 156. 39. Not many details of Garnier’s biography are known. I follow here Chardon, Henri, Robert Garnier. Sa vie, ses poésies inédites (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970 [original edn. Paris 1905]) and Mouflard, Marie-Madeleine, Robert Garnier 1545–1590. Tome I. La vie (La Ferté-Bernard: Bellanger, 1961). As Chardon indicates, “en 1562 et 1568 [Toulouse] avait été le théâtre des luttes religieuses les plus sanglantes” (18). Les jeux floraux were cancelled in 1563 on account of the civil unrest. Garnier won the violette in the following year’s poetic competition with a chant royal that presented an allegory of the troubles with the hopeful refrain, “la mer n’est pas toujours boillonante en oraige” (19–23); in 1566, he was accorded the églantine for another chant that celebrated “l’Hercule qui dompta les monstres de son âge,” King Charles IX (32–6). The jeux were again cancelled in 1567 and 1568, but by this time, Garnier had left for Paris. 40. Mouflard provides a good explanation of what this entailed in her chapters XI and XII:

­138     Forgetting Differences Les fonctions purement judiciaires [d’un lieutenant-criminel] restent très importantes; Garnier contrôle toute la justice repressive du Maine (Sarthe et Mayenne) avec des pouvoirs bien plus étendus que de nos jours . . . La fonction principale de Garnier est de juger et il instruit lui-même les process . . . l’essentiel de la tâche de Garnier, c’est la justice criminelle.

Mouflard, Robert Garnier, p. 242. 41. “l’espace clos du poème tragique reste le seul lieu, le dernier forum où peut se déployer une grande éloquence délibérative, progressivement dépossédé de son rôle public.” Balsamo, Jean, “Rhétorique et politique deans les Gordians et les Maximins (1589) d’Antoine Favre,” Seizième Siècle, 6 (2010), pp. 39–49, (49). While this reading explains Favre’s choice of discursive medium, it fails to address his elaborate efforts to disavow potential political readings of the play. 42. The precise relationship between Senecan tragedy and Stoic philosophy remains a controversial one to this day. (For a recent entry in the debate, see Staley, Gregory, Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).) Erasmus’s assumption of a distinction between Seneca the tragedian and Seneca the philosopher was maintained by many scholars in sixteenth-century Europe. As Roland Mayer explains, it was only in 1593 that the Jesuit Martín Del Rio, seeking to combat the spread of Stoic doctrine, attributed most of the plays to the philosopher Seneca the Younger rather than to the rhetorician, Seneca the Elder (to whom many of the plays had been credited) thereby consolidating the notion that the plays were a philosophical mouthpiece for a Stoic author. “Personata Stoa: Neostoicism and Senecan Tragedy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 57 (1994), pp. 151–74. 43. Without elaborating on the point, Lebègue surmises that these “horreurs accumulées plaisaient aux contemporains de la Saint Barthélemy” (La Tragédie religieuse en France (Paris: Vrin, 1929), p. 438). 44. Of Cornélie, Arthur Augustus Tilley remarked, “the action is confused, disconnected, and leads to nothing, not even to the death of Cornelia.” The Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), vol. II, p. 91. 45. Appian, Civil Wars, trans Horace White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912 and 1913), bk 2, vol. III, pp. 433–5. This passage is on 271r of the 1560 edition of Claude de Seyssel’s French translation (Paris: Vincent Sertenas). 46. Le Roy, Louis, Considération sur l’histoire française [1567] (Paris: Morel, 1568), p. 12r. 47. A good overview is Robert Kingdon’s Myths About the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacres 1572–1576 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). The writings of French historian Jean-Louis Bourgeon are remarkable recent contributions to the polemic. 48. This is a literature so pervasive as to defy citation. An enlightening way into the material is Benedict, Philip, “From polemics to wars: The curious case of the House of Guise and the outbreak of the French Wars of Religion,” Historein, 6 (2006), pp. 97–105. 49. Le Masle goes on to evoke the countless battles that will later be described

Tragedy as History     139 in excruciating detail by Jean de Serres, “trop . . . longues à reciter” for his purposes, stopping only at the particularly “memorable” Battle of Montcontour, where in 1569 Henri de Guise’s forces defeated those of the Huguenots led by Coligny. 50. Bodin generally admires Polybius, but is less enthusiastic about the fact that “he seemed to assume the role of philosopher, no less than that of historian” (Bodin, Jean, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History [1566], trans Beatrice Reynolds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), p. 59). By contrast, he loves Tacitus and Suetonius because they are so rich in detail, not confining themselves to military victories and political spectacles, but going behind the scenes of history (68 ff.). Such details inevitably complicated rather than enhanced a didactic interpretation: if Bodin saw Tacitus as approving a strong central authority, readers like Etienne de La Boetie and François Hotman saw Tacitus as merely accepting tyranny as the unavoidable consequence of the decay of republican virtue. On the multiple readings of Tacitus in the period, see Salmon, John Hearsey McMillan, “Cicero and Tacitus in Sixteenth-Century France,” The American Historical Review, 85:2 (1980), pp. 307–31. 51. Cf. Acte II of Garnier’s Les Juives (Paris: Mamert Patisson, 1583): Tout est mis au couteaux; on n’espargne personne; A sexe ou qualité le soldat ne pardonne; Les femmes, les enfants et les hommes âgez Tombent sans nul esgard pesle-mesle esgorgez . . .

52. Garnier, Robert, Oeuvres complètes, Lucien Pinvert (ed.), (Paris: 1923), vol. 1, p. 8. 53. For a discussion of the role of contemporary politics in Garnier’s tragedies, see Gillian Jondorf’s Robert Garnier and the Themes of Political Tragedy in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 54. Lebègue, Raymond (ed.), Marc Antoine. Hippolyte (Paris: Société des Belles Lettres, 1974), p. 9. See also the recent edition of Marc Antoine by JeanClaude Ternaux, which appeared as vol. IV of Garnier’s Théâtre complet (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010). 55. Forestier, Georges, La Tragédie française. Passions tragiques et règles classiques (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), p. 8. 56. Gillian Jondorf recognizes this in her perceptive study, Robert Garnier and the Themes of Political Tragedy. Yet she nonetheless cannot resist drawing interpretive conclusions from the inconclusive debates Garnier’s plays stage (see esp. ch. 4). 57. Garnier, Robert, La Troade. Antigone, Raymond Lebègue (ed.), (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1952), p. 248. 58. J. Street suggests that: where the ancient dramatists had appealed to the spectator’s religious emotion, aroused by the pattern of the disaster as a whole, the neo-classcial authors attended increasingly to the emotional states and psychology of the human figures involved in the action, and sought to allow the spectator to experience for himself what it feels like to be in the position of the hero.

­140     Forgetting Differences French Sacred Drama from Bèze to Corneille (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) p. 2. Garnier’s position is different from both of these: the spectator is already in the position of the “hero,” who gives voice to their common lament. 59. In Garnier, Oeuvres complètes, p. 13. 60. In the liminary material to Garnier, Robert, Porcie (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1568). 61. As Marie-Madeleine Fragonard observes, “L’histoire des guerres ne peut être résorbée dans une conception de l’histoire où les forces collectives seraient absorbées dans le caractère passionnel des grands de ce monde” (195). For Fragonard, the collective nature of tragedy in the period is consolidated by the use of a choir, and by that of representative/­allegorical personages. She emphasizes the multiplicity of the latter in a play like Pierre Matthieu’s Double tragédie des Guises (which includes the peuple; a marchand; les Estats; and the parlement) as an indicator of the complexity of viewpoints in a society at war. “La Représentation des forces collectives,” Guerre di religione sulle scene del Cinque-Seicento: XXIX Convegno internazionale, Roma, 6–9 ottobre 2005, Maria Chiabò and Federico Doglio (eds), (Roma: Torre d’Orfeo, 2006), pp. 193–215. In “Tragedy and collective experience,” John Gould questions the assumption that a tragic chorus usually conveys the voice of the collectivity. He argues that it expresses “not the values of the polis, but far more often the experience of the excluded, the oppressed, and the vulnerable.” “Tragedy and collective experience,” in Michael Stephen Silk (ed.), Tragedy and the Tragic: Greek Theatre and Beyond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 224. Garnier’s optique tournante generates multiple perspectives in his tragedies without depending crucially on his use of the choir; nor is the collectivity in Garnier distinct from “the oppressed and the vulnerable.”



Chapter 5

From Emotion to Affect

Toute la France estoit Françoise, tous les François ne faisoyent plus qu’un corps vuidé de ses mauvais humeurs et rempli des esprits de concorde et d’obéissance . . .1

In light of works like the Guisiade or the Mort de Coligny, as well as Robert Garnier’s relentlessly grim depictions of tragic distress, we might be moved to ask Pierre Bayle’s question, this time of tragedy: how could tragic theater, with its moving representations of explosive political intrigues and interfamilial violence, possibly have functioned as an instrument of reconciliation in the wake of the Wars of Religion? In his comprehensive History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century, Henry C. Lancaster remarks that “Civil war doubtless retarded the growth of the French stage.”2 Yet he concludes his discussion of the period of the wars with the observation that there was in fact “considerable dramatic activity, both in the composition and in the performance of plays” during this time (32). Lancaster resolves this apparent contradiction by proclaiming that among these plays, he could find “no work of permanent importance,” but only “personal and political plays” (32). The latter he simply puts in a category apart from that of tragedy, even when their authors explicitly classified them as such. As a consequence, Lancaster argues too hastily that “the influence of such productions will be exerted on writings like the mazarinades rather than on the drama of later years” (156), for influence should not be thought of merely in terms of resemblance or imitation. Just as the civil wars of antiquity were to serve as negative examples for the ­sixteenth-century French, sixteenth-century tragedy proposed a proximity between spectator and stage that neoclassical dramatists, writing under the régime of oubliance, would seek to avoid. The context of the civil wars, so evident in the earlier plays, therefore also played a role in the transition from humanist to neoclassical tragedy.

­142     Forgetting Differences

Distant Pleasures After the 1629 Peace of Alais, the French civil wars, and French history more generally, disappear from both the theory and practice of tragedy. One might be tempted to argue that the absence of French subjects on the tragic stage after this moment was due to the fact that the Wars of Religion had indeed finally ended. Yet the later seventeenth century saw its share of civil strife, particularly during the Fronde. Nonetheless, despite the civil turmoil of their times, and the omnipresence of civil war in the classical plays that served as their models, neoclassical dramatists ceased to characterize tragedy in historical terms. Certainly, the Wars of Religion, and civil war more generally, did not simply terminate with the Edict of Nantes and the reign of le grand Henri.3 After the death of Henri IV, two more current events provided the subject for tragic drama: the assassination of Marie de Medicis’s ally Concini in 1617, which gave rise to two plays published the same year (La Victoire du Phébus François contre le python de ce temps and La Magicienne estrangère); and the siege of La Rochelle, which inspired two theatrical works celebrating the victory of Louis XIII over his recalcitrant Protestant subjects (the 1622 Tragédie des rebelles and the 1629 Rocheloise). But contemporary subjects were apparently no longer thinkable thereafter (save with the caution of an exotic locale). As Louis Ferrier discovered after publishing his supposedly newfangled tragedy on Anne de Bretagne (1679), dramatizations of French history were simply rejected as inappropriate: La nouveauté de son sujet lui a attiré bien des censeurs, et j’ai été surpris de voir qu’elle n’ait pas plu à de certains gens, par l’endroit même où je croyais qu’elle devait plaire le plus. Ils ont dit que notre histoire était mal propre à nous fournir des sujets de tragédie, qu’il fallait mener le spectateur dans un pays éloigné, remplir son oreille par des noms plus pompeux, lui imposer et l’éblouir en quelque façon. The novelty of its subject attracted quite a few censors, and I was surprised to see that it did not please certain people precisely due to that aspect of it that I had thought would be most pleasing. These people said that our own history was inappropriate as a source of subjects for theatrical tragedy, that it was necessary to whisk the spectator off to a foreign land, fill his ears with more lofty names, carry him away and overwhelm him somehow.4

Racine would offer a similar view when he announced that “le respect qu’on a pour les héros [tragiques] augmente à mesure qu’ils s’éloignent de nous.”5 Indeed, one can trace an itinerary through the theoretical discourse on tragedy of the late sixteeenth and early seventeenth centuries along which the paths of theatrical tragedy, on the one hand,

From Emotion to Affect     143

and the tragedies of French history, on the other, increasingly diverged. Moreover, this divergence itself eventually became one of the pillars of neoclassical aesthetics. Thomas Pavel characterizes seventeenthcentury French literature in general as an “art de l’éloignement,” noting that: Ces oeuvres n’ont pas, comme celles produites plus tard par le réalisme, l’ambition de corroborer l’expérience vécue du lecteur . . . Bien au contraire, les mondes de la fiction classique se proposent d’attirer le spectateur hors de son champ d’expérience empirique immédiate. These works, unlike later realist productions, do not aim to corroborate the lived experience of the reader . . . Quite the contrary; the fictional worlds of [French neo-]classicism undertake to draw the spectator beyond the confines of his immediate experience.6

In his largely theoretical Pratique du theatre, published in 1657, l’Abbé D’Aubignac emphasized more specifically the divorce between tragedy and contemporary history: Mais quand durant la guerre on continuë ces Jeux dans un Estat, c’est donner tesmoignage bien signalez, qu’il y a des tresors inépuisables et des Hommes de reste . . . Et que les avantages de leurs Ennemis leur sont si peu considerables, que la joie publicque n’en est pas seulement alterée. (6) But when during wartime such pursuits are carried on within a state, it gives undeniable evidence of material and human wealth . . . and [shows] that any advantage the enemy might have is so negligeable, that the public mood is not dampened in the least.

Here, the act of performance is a gesture that flagrantly denies the impact of history on the theater-going public, whose joie remains undiminished even in wartime. As Giovanni Dotoli remarks, by the 1620s and 1630s, the dramaturgical “règle de toutes les règles est de plaire.”7 There is of course a large body of scholarship dedicated to demonstrating what appears to be just the opposite of what D’Aubignac prescribes here. In his classic study of the Morales du grand siècle, Paul Bénichou argued that one can find in the theater of Corneille in particular “l’écho des discussions politiques de [ce] temps.”8 There certainly are connections to be made between seventeenth-century tragedy and seventeenth-century politics; the important point here, though, is that seventeenth-century playwrights – quite unlike their sixteenth-century counterparts – were loath to make such connections explicit. It is thus not surprising that Bénichou finds only indirect “échos,” “retentissements,” and “résonances” (85) of seventeenth-century history

­144     Forgetting Differences in Corneille, but “sans prétendre retrouver l’écho d’un événement précis” (91). Indirection had become integral to the very conception of tragedy. What remains to be explained, however, is just how the aesthetics of distance emerged in the wake of the very different models of reception proposed by sixteenth-century humanism. D’Aubignac’s postulate of undiminished joy is a far cry from the laments that Robert Garnier expected to induce in his audience. Whereas Garnier united his public in a communal plainte, the playwrights of seventeenth-century France will increasingly seek to ascribe very different emotions to their spectators. The rhetoric of shared “tragic” emotions that was cultivated in early seventeenth-century royal historiography of the French Wars of Religion had its counterpart in the theory and practice of theatrical tragedy in the era of oubliance. The common aims and claims of history and tragedy in sixteenth-century France had given rise to common difficulties in the face of the civil wars: like history, tragedy had been framed as a pedagogical discourse superior to the precepts of philosophy on account of its vivid particularity and consequent capacity to excite emotion in the service of (ideally) virtuous action. The effect of tragic poetry was therefore not construed in terms of a private emotion, but rather as a prelude to some other form of public, civic motion. This classically Ciceronian conception of movere meant that, like humanist historiography, sixteenth-century humanist tragedy was granted the capacity to incite action in the public arena. The potential danger of this framework, of course, lay in the nature of the actions an audience would be moved to undertake. When he wrote the Guisiade, Pierre Matthieu framed as a civic virtue violent hostility to a king characterized as diabolical and tyrannical. A few months later, Henri III was assassinated. This is not to say, of course, that Matthieu’s play caused the king’s assassination; rather, it is to draw attention to the social reality that informed the notion that history and poetry were to “move” readers in sixteenth-century France. In his synthetic account of the tragedy of this period, Christian Biet suggests that for poets like Robert Garnier or Jean de la Taille, “le vrai but de la tragédie est d’émouvoir dans une intention édifiante.”9 Given the intensely violent and frequently unedifying ends for which the appeal to emotion had been enlisted throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, however, such a program could not have unproblematically imposed itself. Here, more specifically, is how Jean de La Taille describes the aim of tragedy in 1572, the year of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres: “la vraye et seule intention d’une tragedie est d’esmouvoir . . . car il faut que

From Emotion to Affect     145

le subject en soit si pitoyable et poignant de soy, qu’estant mesmes en bref et nument dit, [il] engendre en nous quelque passion.”10 In his 1549 Deffense et illustration de la langue francoyse, Joachim Du Bellay had written that his ideal poet would be one who could make him “indigner, apaiser, éjouir, douloir, aimer, haïr, admirer, étonner: bref, qui tiendra la bride de mes affections, me tournant çà et là, à son plaisir.”11 Similarly, in his posthumous 1587 preface to his unfinished Franciade, Pierre de Ronsard instructs the budding epic poet thus: Tu seras industrieux à esmouvoir les passions et affections de l’ame, car c’est la meilleure partie de ton mestier, par des carmes qui t’esmouveront le premier, soit à rire ou à pleurer, afin que les lecteurs en facent après toy. You will work to move the passions and affections of the soul, since it is the best part of your profession, by means of verses that first move you to laughter or to tears, such that readers will do the same after you.

Thus, in her study of the rhetoric of the passions in Renaissance France, Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani proposes that writers of the period made of movere the touchstone of excellent poetry.12 And yet, as unremarkable as the Pléiade’s endorsement of an oratorical finesse crossed with a neoplatonic furor poeticus might sound to students of Renaissance poetry, it was clearly a potentially volatile prescription in the midst of France’s civil maladies. Du Bellay’s desiderata bring the vernacular poet very close to the Ciceronian orator, whose eloquence, and thus the emotions to which that eloquence gives rise, is a means to the end of civic (and frequently military) action. As is well known, there was at this time an abundance of polemical literature whose aim was, precisely, to incite passionate emotions, often to violent and disastrous effect.13 Indeed, Ronsard’s own verses reveal how impassioned words tended to entail violent deeds in the context of the Wars of Religion. In one of the more notorious revisions to his own work, the prince of poets, who in a 1560 elegy on the Amboise conspiracy had urged a response to the group of rebels “par livres,” subsequently replaced books with arms: “Il fault en disputant par livres le confondre /Par livres l’assaillir, par livres luy respondre” becomes, in 1562–63, “Par armes l’assaillir, par armes luy respondre” (Elégie à Guillaume des Autels). Poetic furor, it seems, was not so readily distinguishable from polemical fury as the wars unfolded. As we have seen, Arnaud Sorbin used Pléiade-style poetry to urge his Catholic brothers to combattre; similarly, citing the example of Bertrand du Guesclin, a French hero of the Hundred Years’ War, Ronsard will exhort Catholic nobles, “Combatez pour la France et pour sa liberté . . . Souvenez-vous que vous estes enfans /De ces

­146     Forgetting Differences peres jadis aux guerres triomphans . . . Imitez vos ayeux afin que la noblesse /vous anime le coeur de pareille proesse.”14 Ronsard’s evocation of the medieval epic tradition inevitably associates poetic inspiration with war, and with a martial conception of what it means to “esmouvoir les passions et affections de l’ame.” Indeed, one version of the fifteenth-century chronicle of Guesclin’s exploits includes these lines, spoken by Bertrand himself: “Faictes sonner la trompe pour noz gens esmouvoir /Pour la ville assaillir que le feu puist ardoir!”15 The aim here is not to produce tears and sighs, but to motivate a military enterprise. In light of the broad influence of this chivalric poetico-historical tradition, still very much alive even for a self-conscious innovator like Ronsard, the insistence that tragedy should “esmouvoir” and “engendrer quelque passion” seems both vague and remarkably cavalier at a time when, as the historian Mark Greengrass has shown, Henri III was getting set to devote considerable energy to understanding theories of the passions precisely in order to temper those of his subjects. Surely, La Taille did not have in mind a play like the Guisiade (written seventeen years later); but just as surely, Matthieu’s play manifestly seeks to engender passion and to move readers. What’s more, Matthieu’s play respects the unity of plot (the only unity explicitly mentioned by Aristotle); even more tightly constructed in this regard is Simon Belyard’s bloody Guysien, which focuses relentlessly on the murdered bodies of the Guises.16 La Taille’s attention to precisely this aspect of tragic dramaturgy has led some of the foremost experts on his work to claim that it presages French neoclassical theater.17 How are we to make sense of a theory of tragedy that seems to accommodate both the exquisitely controlled poetry of Racine and what J. R. Street characterized as “Catholic propaganda theatre”?18 La Taille’s observations about tragic poetry were first published in 1572, the year of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, as a preface to his play Saül; this edition of the play was also accompanied by La Taille’s previously published Remonstrance. La Taille’s short theoretical treatise entitled De l’art de la tragédie is one of the first sustained reflections on the art of tragedy in French. What made La Taille’s treatise “classical” for its modern editor was its brief mention of the three unities. What will open the way to a new conception of the role of emotion in tragedy, however – a role that will be developed and consolidated in the neoclassical period – is La Taille’s discussion of France’s civil wars.

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The Pitfalls of Self-Pity In L’Art de la tragédie, Jean de La Taille describes the subject of theatrical tragedy in terms of the piteux that figured so prominently in his Remonstrance, as well as of the emotional reactions to which such piteous disasters give rise. The true subject of tragedy is “les piteuses ruines des grands Seigneurs . . . des inconstances de Fortune . . . ­bannissements, guerres, pestes, famines, captivitez, execrables cruautez des Tyrans, et bref . . . larmes et miseres extremes” (3, 4). Addressing Henriette de Clèves, La Taille characterizes the civil wars as the tragic subject par excellence – but only to banish the topic as completely inappropriate for theatrical tragedy: Madame, combien que les piteuses desastres advenus nagueres en la France par nos Guerres civilles, fussent si grands, et que la mort du Roy HENRY, du Roy son fils, et du Roy de Navarre, vostre Oncle, avec celle de tant d’autres Princes, Seigneurs, Chevaliers et Gentils-hommes, fust si pitoiable qu’il ne faudroit ja d’autre chose pour faire des Tragedies: ce neantmoins pour n’en estre du tout le propre subject, et pour ne remuer nos vieilles et nouvelles douleurs, volontiers je m’en deporte, aimant trop mieux descrire le malheur d’autruy que le nostre, qui m’a fait non seulement voir les deux rencheutes de nos folles guerres, mais y combattre, et rudement y estre blesse. Madame, inasmuch as the pitiful disasters that befell France during our civil wars were so great, and as the death of King Henry, and of his son, and of the King of Navarre, your uncle, as well as those of so many other princes, lords, knights and gentlemen was so pitiful that no other material will ever be necessary to write tragedies; nevertheless since this is not at all an appropriate subject, and since I do not want to stir up our sorrows both old and new, I willingly avoid these matters, preferring to describe the misfortunes of others rather than our own, during which I not only saw two relapses of our insane wars, but also fought in them and was seriously wounded.20

It is at first very puzzling to read that the main aim of tragedy is to esmouvoir, and then to learn that the Wars of Religion, specifically cited as the privileged example of a quintessentially tragic series of events, is in fact not at all the appropriate subject for tragic poetry. Given that “la vraye et seule intention d’une tragedie est d’esmouvoir,” it is not immediately apparent why the civil wars should be banished from the tragic stage. What subject could be more “pitoyable” for the French public than their own tragic civil strife, that “piteuse desastre” that brought the “si pitoiable” deaths of so many “Princes, Seigneurs, Chevaliers et Gentils-hommes”? La Taille’s about-face appears considerably more intelligible when we bear in mind the still-potent martial associations of the verb “esmouvoir.” Like its frequently maligned cousin, “passion,” the term

­148     Forgetting Differences ­“esmouvoir” was intimately bound up with the notion of violent religious and more generally civil conflict in sixteenth-century France. François Juste’s 1533 edition of Clément Marot’s Adolescence clémentine contains the evangelical Marot’s response to Sorbonne theologians’ attempts to “esmouvoir le peuple à sédition contre le roy” in the wake of François I’s banishment of Noël Béda, an enemy of the Reform; the poet accuses them of seeking to “esmouvoir débatz contentieux” from the pulpit. In a defense of “true Christians,” the Calvinist Nicolas des Gallars condemns Catholic polemicists who seek to “esmouvoir tout en rage, & enflammer les coeurs a l’effusion du sang des innocens.”21 A 1589 pamphlet examines the “justes causes qui peuvent esmouvoir le peuple à s’eslever & s’opposer à la Tyrannie & injustice du Roy.”22 “Esmouvoir guerre” was itself a conventional formula, as frequently used in the age of the Wars of Religion as it was when Joinville warned, “Garde toy de esmouvoir guerre, sanz grant conseil, contre home crestien.” Indeed, the Mémoires de Condé, which contain several examples of this usage, sometimes simply use the shorthand form “esmouvoir le peuple,” leaving the violent complement implicit; similarly, Palma Cayet will describe the military precautions taken at Tours in 1589 to guard against “tout ce qui s’y pourroit esmouvoir.”23 These are examples of the most frequent use of the verb in French at this time, best translated as “to move to act in the public arena.” As such, they are iterations of the Ciceronian movere that Ronsard and Du Bellay had urged vernacular poets to exploit. However, whereas Cicero’s orator, as well as the Pléiade’s ideal poet, could use this technique to incite a variety of emotions and behaviors, as the examples I have cited attest, esmouvoir tended overwhelmingly to lead to violence, sedition, and civil unrest in the polemical literature of sixteenth-century France. The actions thus motivated therefore have little in common with the chivalric heroics of Bertrand du Guesclin. Rather, in sixteenthcentury France, esmouvoir too often led directly to civil disturbance, or emeute. Jean Nicot’s dictionary gives evidence not only of the continued usage, but indeed of the predominance of this sense of esmouvoir throughout the sixteenth century and on into the seventeenth. Nicot’s 1606 Thresor de la langue francoyse (effectively repeating Jacques Dupuy’s 1573 Dictionnaire François-Latin) gives thirteen possible Latin translations for esmouvoir.24 Of the twenty-nine examples of French usage given, eight position the verb as the cause of an action or an event rather than what we would now call an emotion. The first example is in fact “esmouvoir un combat,” and nearly a third of the subentries

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link esmouvoir to conflict, combat, or sedition. By contrast, only four make esmouvoir the cause of an emotion. The specific emotions mentioned are notable for their strongly contrasting valence: on the one hand, anger, ire, and hatred, and on the other, pity, compassion, and mercy. The problem for Jean de La Taille was thus that the potential effects of “esmouvoir” and “engendrer quelque passion” could not be restricted to the realm of an affective appreciation of poetry for positive moral ends. During the Wars of Religion, the traditional martial resonances of “esmouvoir” had been renewed and even amplified, and on countless occasions, passion was shown to have led to civil violence. In order to take up the Pléiade’s project of “moving” readers, La Taille had to ensure that he steered them clear of memories of the civil wars, lest he renew “nos vieilles et nouvelles douleurs.” When La Taille characterizes the dangers of renewing this memory in affective terms, he is clearly referring to the political and social context of the wars; but he is also describing the potential impact of tragic theater in terms of his audience’s emotional response.25 La Taille suggests that he was afraid of provoking a too-impassioned response from his audience, of causing them real pain and, perhaps, of inciting real violence. La Taille’s rejection of the prospect of “moving” his audience in the traditional, quasi-physical, public, and political sense of the term will lead him to propose a different interpretation of the Lucretian spectator than Polybius and his Humanist disciples had done. The Art of Tragedy suggests not simply that representation is less risky than direct experience, as Amyot and others had argued, but, further, that one’s own misfortunes remain threatening even in the form of a poetic representation. If the historian Palma Cayet could still write in 1608 that “la souvenance des perils que l’on a passez donne plaisir quand on en est hors et en seureté,” for La Taille it is imperative that tragic poets write about “les malheurs d’autruy.”26 La Taille’s categorical rejection of the civil wars as a subject for tragic theater thus compounds the distance created by the act of representation itself by introducing historical and cultural distance. Only with the cushion of this distance can tragic theater indulge in its capacity to “change, transforme, manie, et tourne l’esprit des escoutans deçà de là” (3v) and still induce pleasure rather than douleur. This postulate accords a great deal of power to tragic theater as a particularly potent form of representation. Many of the most important critical works on the French theater of the first decades of the seventeenth century point out the increasing sophistication of the techniques employed to produce the theatrical illusion.27 In his essential study of

­150     Forgetting Differences French théâtre sanglant of this period, Christian Biet observes that in the decades immediately following the Edict of Nantes, theatrical representations of blood and violence had to walk a fine line between provoking a bloody and violent response, on the one hand, and of promoting an amoral “plaisir de l’horreur pour elle-même,” on the other.28 Biet suggests that one way in which tragic poets of the first decades of the seventeenth century respected the politics of oubliance without sacrificing tragic intensity was by transposing scenes of cruelty into remote times and places (in, for example, Alexandre Hardy’s Scédase, which features two rapes and a murder; or the Tragédie mahométiste, in which blood is drunk and a heart is eaten). For Biet, such transpositions were especially necessary in an era of increasing theatrical realism, as the improved economic, political, and material conditions of the theater made it possible to minimize the distinction between “la fiction sanglante et le sang versé.”29 In his analysis of the neoclassical French rules for representing tragic passions, Georges Forestier starts from the premise that: l’art de la tragédie réside probablement dans la quête du meilleur équilibre possible entre l’illusion permise par la représentation d’actions possibles et la conscience de cette illusion . . . , and observes that les Français du XVIIe siècle se sont convaincus de la nécessité de renforcer le plus possible le pôle illusioniste . . . dans le but de permettre au spectateur d’oublier autant que possible son statut de spectateur.30 The art of tragedy probably resides in the quest for the best possible equilibrium between the illusion that the representation of possible actions permits and the consciousness of that illusion .... the seventeenth-century French were convinced of the necessity of reinforcing as much as possible the illusion itself . . . with the aim of allowing the spectator to forget to the greatest extent possible his status as spectator.

As Timothy Reiss argues, “the spectator sitting before the illusion may, if the staging is not intrusive, easily forget his own physical presence and accept the emotions of the stage character: classical dramaturgy depends on this possibility.”31 While Reiss focuses explicitly on the illusion itself, equally remarkable is the “self-forgetting” upon which such an illusion is predicated, since it evokes a personal and cultural amnesia with clear affinities to the politics of oubliance. For Reiss, Biet, and Forestier, the spectator cannot himself be a part of the theatrical illusion. This constitutes a significant shift away from Garnier’s tragic poetics (to say nothing of the model of spectatorship put forward by overtly polemical theater), which situated the emotions of the characters, those of the audience, and even those of the playwright on the same plane. The

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transposition of tragic poetry from the page to the illusionistic stage, by contrast, ultimately circumscribes the spectator’s sphere of action, effectively reducing it to the expression of emotions that bear exclusively on the spectacle before him. The official historiographical rhetoric of reconciliation entailed the forgetting of differences on several levels: in order to forget their animosities, the French were to encounter the civil war past as a more or less undifferentiated block of tragic history, in spite of (or thanks to?) the gory details widely available in monarchically sanctioned accounts such as Baudouin’s translation of Davila or Mézeray’s history of France. This way of characterizing the past as an entity unto itself, crucially distinct and separate from the present, also entailed and enabled the rhetorical erasure of differences with respect to the reception of the history of the wars, since it was cast as provoking the same “emotional” reaction in all (French) readers. Conversely, such a model of reception brought with it an insistence on a difference between history and experience, on the one hand, as well as on a strong distinction between emotion and action, on the other. Matthieu and Baudouin especially sought in their histories to elicit an affective reaction that makes a detour around the moral lessons taught by history, construed as models for action. Depictions of the tragic events of the Wars of Religion instead became occasions for admiration or repugnance, feelings which were to be widely shared. The value of the past was thereby measured according to affective rather than moral–philosophical criteria. This is precisely the mode of reception that will be encouraged by vivid representations of distant, tragic subjects in the French theater of the early seventeenth century. If La Taille generalizes his sense that the subject of the civil wars is too painful for his audience into a familiar theoretical maxim (namely, that it is better to “descrire le malheur d’autruy que le nostre”), he nonetheless places a new and different emphasis on the old Polybian notion of vicarious historical experience by foregrounding an emotional response that is apparently divorced from any necessary connection to action. We must talk about other people’s misfortunes and therefore maintain our distance from tragic subjects not in order to shield ourselves from physical danger, but in order to protect ourselves (and our neighbors) from potentially destructive emotions. Under the aegis of oubliance, theatrical tragedy, like royal historiography, retreated from the kind of direct political engagement that the dramatization of recent history would entail. In his French dictionary of 1680, Pierre Richelet narrowed considerably the semantic range of the word now spelled as émouvoir. The only

­152     Forgetting Differences synonyms he offers are toucher and exciter, alongside a medical usage “en parlant de purgations, & qui signifie lâcher le ventre.” The entry for s’émouvoir introduces one additional synonym, “se troubler” (since the other senses given – “se sentir ému, être touché” – merely repeat those already listed). Richelet’s entry has the distinction of including two references to tragedy in the mere eight examples of usage it offers. The first is a citation of Jean Racine’s Iphigénie (“La raison ne peut l’émouvoir”) and the second a phrase that suggests that tragedy was by then considered the paradigmatic agent of the verb: “Il a été ému à la Tragédie.” Littré’s entry for émouvoir synthesizes the evolution I have been tracing here, in that all of the more than twenty-five historical examples of usage he gives from the eleventh up through the sixteenth century manifest the physical sense, with a sole exception (Montaigne). Conversely, Littré draws all of the examples for the figurative sense of “Produire sur l’âme un mouvement comparé au mouvement physique” from seventeenthcentury French theater. By following esmouvoir from Nicot to Littré, we get a clear sense of an evolution away from the vigorously transitive sense of esmouvoir as an externalized gesture leading to a physical, public action, on the one hand, and towards an inner movement that corresponds to a nascent psychologisation, on the other.32 Esmouvoir was no longer to be taken in the larger oratorical sense in which Amyot, Du Bellay, and Ronsard had employed it, but rather in a more narrowly affective sense. In contrast to the seditions, quarrels, wars, and riots of the sixteenth century, seventeenth-century emotion was more tightly linked to horror, pity, terror, and compassion, as Jean de La Taille had wished.

Pitying Others The nature and mechanism of the effect of tragedy on its audience has of course always been one of the most controversial topics in tragic theory. As such, it has received a considerable variety of explanations according to the interests and investments of those doing the explaining. Aristotle’s own comments on the subject are notoriously obscure: in chapter 13 of the Poetics, he simply notes that as spectators of tragedy we feel pity “for a man who does not deserve his misfortune” and fear “for the man like ourselves” (47). This obscurity allowed seventeenth-century playwrights to elaborate an interpretation of tragic poetics very different from that of their sixteenth-century counterparts. Though many critics of tragedy from the sixteenth century familiar with Aristotle’s Poetics appear to have assumed that tragedy effected a

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“purgation” that required some sort of identification between the tragic character[s] and the members of the audience, the nature and degree of this identification were usually left unexplored, unexplained, or obscure in their writings. In the Ars poetica, Horace had remarked that one of the most notable of achievements of the Latin poets was that they “boldly forsook the footsteps of Greece and celebrated, in comedy and tragedy alike, our national deeds.”33 Citing the identification between character and spectator upon which tragic catharsis is predicated, several of the Italian theorists of the cinquecento (for example, Trissino, Grazzini, and Giraldi) seemed to call for a tragic theater that engaged with contemporary, national subjects.34 By contrast, in keeping with La Taille’s dictum that it is better to depict the misfortune of others rather than one’s own, the emphasis of French tragic theory and practice, as the seventeenth century progressed, moved towards a notion of aesthetic enjoyment predicated on an increasing distance between spectator and tragic hero. Summing up the experiences of a career that began in 1629, Pierre Corneille opens his 1660 Discours de l’utilité et des parties du poème dramatique with the claim that “selon Aristote, le seul but de la Poésie Dramatique [est] de plaire aux Spectateurs” – and it soon becomes clear that, whatever Aristotle may have meant, the sort of pleasure Corneille has in mind has very little to do with the strong emotional reactions evoked by Garnier.35 In his Discours de la tragédie, Corneille explicitly contests Italian readings of Aristotle that propose that catharsis is predicated on a specific identification between spectator and hero, suggesting that they understand “trop littéralement ce mot de nos semblables” in Aristotle’s presentation.36 For Corneille, tragedy provokes pity and fear just because tragic heroes “sont hommes comme les auditeurs”37 – an utterly general sort of human bond that obliterates any historical specificity on the part of the hero as well as any real personal engagement on the part of the spectator. But Corneille goes even further, expressing doubt as to whether catharsis ever really occurs during a theatrical performance: “je doute si elle s’y fait jamais.”38 He goes on to give several examples of tragedies that, according to him, excite pity but not fear, because there is no possibility of identifying with the hero (he mentions Oedipus and his own Polyeucte). Much of his subsequent discussion is then concerned with techniques for making spectators feel pity – the very reaction that, according to Corneille himself, “embrasse l’intérêt de la personne que nous voyons souffrir,” as opposed to the “crainte qui la suit” which “regarde la nôtre [personne]” (95–6). The increasing lack of a particular identification between spectator and tragic hero is apparent in the épître to Richelieu that precedes

­154     Forgetting Differences Georges de Scudéry’s version of La Mort de César (1637). Unlike Garnier, Scudéry does not posit any sort of historically contingent resemblance or link between his audience and his characters. Instead, he maps his dedicatee and his main character onto an apparently contextless grid of virtue and valor: “si le Grand CAESAR fust venu dans le temps où vous estes . . . la Couronne qu’il obtint apres dix ans de combats, auroit paru sur vostre teste.” Richelieu has nothing at all to learn from Caesar; indeed, it appears that he could teach the Roman dictator a thing or two. Far from suggesting that Richelieu better watch his back lest a present-day Brutus accost him, Scudéry advises him that: ce mesme CAESAR, qui pouvoit estre vostre captif, a besoing de vostre protection . . . car je ne doute point qu’il ne se trouve des BRUTUS, qui le persecuteront encor dans mon ouvrage: mais il les vaincra tous sans peine, pourvu que vous le regardiez favorablement. this same CAESAR, who could be your captive, needs your protection . . . because I have no doubt that there are BRUTUSES out there, who will persecute him anew in my play; but he will easily defeat them all, provided that you look favorably upon him.39

Thus, Scudéry’s ideal spectator gazes down upon both the historical Cesar and the play Caesar full of paternalistic pity, utterly free from fear – the very position Corneille will theorize in his discourse on tragedy.40 Richelieu’s comfortable distance is one of the fundamental elements of a tragic theater that sought to create a spectacle very different from that proposed by sixteenth-century French tragedy. Whereas playwrights from Chantelouve to Garnier to La Taille did not hesitate to represent or at least allude to the bloody particularities of French history, Racine himself, in keeping with the now-dominant aesthetics of éloignement, aimed to assemble what he described in his preface to Alexandre as “tout ce que le siècle présent et les siècles passés nous peuvent fournir de plus grand” – in other words, everything that transcended history, and that consequently remained at a certain distance from any and all historically situated spectators. Like Corneille and Scudéry, Racine frequently invoked a distancing pity in his discussions of spectators’ emotions. In the first preface to his 1668 Andromaque, he explains why he has chosen not to “reform[er] tous les héros de l’antiquité pour en faire des héros parfaits” as some of his critics would have preferred:41 Aristote, bien éloigné de nous demander des héros parfaits, veut que les personnages tragiques . . . ne soient ni tout à fait bon ni tout à fait méchants . . .

From Emotion to Affect     155 parce que la punition d’un homme de bien exciterait plus d’indignation que de pitié du spectateur . . . [et] on n’a point pitié d’un scélérat. Aristotle, far from requiring perfect heroes, wants tragic characters . . . to be neither wholly good nor wholly bad . . . because the punishment of a good man would incite more indignation than pity on the part of the spectator . . . and no one pities a villain.42

Ironically, this very mediocritas neutralizes the potency of the tragic example even as it ideally makes it possible for any spectator to identify with the tragic hero. Thus Racine’s Britannicus possesses the “qualités ordinaires d’un jeune homme” and is for this reason “très capable d’exciter la compassion.”43 Not to forget the tragic heroine: as Racine famously observed, even Phèdre is “ni tout à fait coupable, ni tout à fait innocent.”44 Such Aristotelian moderation notwithstanding, Racine goes on to claim that Phèdre is intended to provoke “terreur,” “horreur,” and even hatred on the part of the audience, giving rise to a distancing moral condemnation clearly distinct from the intimate fear Jean de La Taille sought to instill in Marguerite de France. Fear, as we have seen, had been central to the discourse of sixteenthcentury tragedy, as the mechanism by which theatrical representations could teach the lessons of history.45 In the preface to his 1625 pastoral La Silvanire, Honoré d’Urfé explicitly rejects what he called the “sévérité” of such theater, proclaiming that “maintenant les Rois et les Princes ne se plairaient guères à n’être servis à leur table que du bouillon noir de Sparte.”46 Of course, neoclassical dramatists did make claims for the moral instruction to be had from their work, but such instruction was characterized in terms of a universal lesson for all beholders. When in 1642 Pierre Du Ryer published his version of Saül, he had no ominous warnings for Louis XIV; rather, he announces that “je ne dedie cet ouvrage à personne, parce que je le dedie a tout le monde . . . parce que les uns & les autres peuvent trouver dans son sujet une instruction sans aigreur, & un divertissement sans scandale” (n.p.). When the spectator is not personally implicated in the tragedy onstage, the pedagogical pill loses its bitterness. As D’Urfé observes: si les remèdes que nous y proposons contre le vice ne sont de ces fortes médecines qui travaillent beaucoup le patient, elles ressemblent pour le moins à ces pillules usuelles, pour lesquelles il ne faut point tenir la chambre, ni interrompre nos exercices ordinaires. and if the remedies we propose against vice are not those strong medicines that exhaust the patient, they at least resemble those ordinary pills, which do not oblige us to stay in our room or interrupt our daily activities.47

­156     Forgetting Differences Any identification between spectator and character remains both general and implicit, thus sparing audiences the douleur that direct implication would produce. In sharp contrast to what we saw in the latter part of the sixteenth century, the tragedies of Corneille and his contemporaries shun the rhetoric of exemplarity that targets specific historical individuals and situations, and that made sixteenth-century tragedy decidedly “moins agréable” than its seventeenth-century counterpart.48 There is, in sum, no claim that the tragedies played out in the theater have a special connection to French history; consequently, the historicity of the French public that watches them remains unacknowledged. In keeping with this tendency to de-emphasize the resemblances between tragic characters and their spectators, Racine’s dedicatory letters and prefaces, unlike Garnier’s, La Taille’s, or Matthieu’s, underline that which distinguished the members of his audience from his tragic heroes. Alexandre le grand’s dedication to the king points out the ways in which Louis XIV is not like Alexander: “VOTRE MAJESTE est arrivée au comble de la gloire par un chemin plus nouveau et plus difficile que celui par où Alexandre y est monté.”49 Moreover, Racine’s Louis is immune to the contingencies of fortune that defined Guillaume Bouchetel’s princely spectators: “quelle part la fortune peut-elle prétendre aux actions d’un roi qui ne doit qu’à ses seuls conseils l’état florissant de son royaume[?].”50 In stark contrast to Racine’s extravagant portrait of Louis, Jean de La Taille’s dedication of his brother Jacques’s Alexandre to Henri de Navarre in 1573 had lamented both the degree to which tragic hero and contemporary king resemble one another, and the inescapable power of historical contingency over human fate: Sire, ayant longuement combattu en moy-mesme, à qui j’adresserois la Tragedie de ce roy Alexandre, j’ay pensé que je ne la pourroys mieux vouer qu’à un Roy qui n’a pas le cueur moins magnanime qu’Alexandre: principalement à supporter les jeux Tragiques, que Fortune . . . joue piteusement sur le Theatre François . . . je supplieray Dieu, sire, de vous donner plus de vie et d’heur que n’eust cestuy-cy, et de vous preserver de l’inconvenient qui le fit mourir. Your Majesty, having fought within myself at length about to whom I should address the tragedy of King Alexander, I thought that I could dedicate it to no one better than a king whose heart is no less magnanimous than Alexander’s; especially in its ability to withstand the tragic games that Fortune . . . is playing piteously in the theater of France . . . I beg God, sire, to give you more good fortune and a longer life than he had, and to protect you from the accident that killed him.51

Like Scudéry’s Richelieu, Racine’s Louis has no need of such protection; neither the king nor the cardinal had anything to fear, impervious as

From Emotion to Affect     157

they apparently were to the vagaries of history that haunted La Taille’s Henri. In his 1674 Reflexions sur la poétique, René Rapin summed up the kind of depersonalized pleasure that had become the raison d’être of neoclassical tragedy: La Tragedie ne devient agreable au spectateur que parce qu’il devient luymesme sensible à tout ce qu’on luy represente, qu’il entre dans tous les differens sentimens des acteurs, qu’il s’interesse dans leurs avantures, qu’il craint, et qu’il espere, qu’il s’afflige, et qu’il rejouït avec eux . . . En effet, dés que l’ame est ebranlée, par des mouvemens si naturels et si humains, toutes les impressions qu’elle ressent, luy deviennent agreables: Son trouble luy plaist, et ce qu’elle ressent d’emotion, est pour elle une espece de charme, qui la jette dans une douce et profonde resverie, et qui la fait entrer insensiblement dans tous les intérets qui jouent sur le theatre. C’est alors que le coeur s’abandonne à tous les objets qu’on luy propose, que toutes les images le frappent, qu’il epouse les sentimens de tous ceux qui parlent, et qu’il devient susceptible à toutes les passions qu’on luy monstre: parce qu’il est ému. Tragedy only becomes pleasurable for the spectator because he himself becomes sensitive to everything that is presented to him, he enters into all the different sentiments of the actors, he becomes involved in their adventures, he fears, he hopes, he is distressed, he rejoices with them .... In effect, as soon as the soul is stirred by such natural, human movements, all of the impressions it feels become pleasurable: it finds its confusion pleasing, and the emotion it feels is sensed as a kind of spell that throws it into a deep, sweet reverie, and makes it imperceptibly appropriate all of the interests represented onstage. In this state the heart abandons itself to any object presented to it, all images strike it, it adopts the sentiments of all who speak, and it becomes sensitive to all passions that are shown to it: because it is moved.52

For Rapin, tragic emotion is no longer a matter of tragedy giving voice to the sentiments of a particular group of spectators, as it was in Robert Garnier’s drama. The sentiments of French tragic characters and French spectators are simply naturalized here. Rapin thereby turns emotion into the very thing that unifies the French public rather than tearing it apart.53 Exquisitely sensitive though they may be, the members of Rapin’s theoretical audience are in historical terms utterly generic spectators who can “entrer dans tous les intérets,” whose heart “s’abandonne à tous les objets qu’on luy propose,” who “epouse les sentimens de tous ceux qui parlent” – who are, in short, pleased by all things that “move” them in ways that are simply “naturel” and “humain.” There is no mention here of the contingencies of fortune, or of any special link between an audience explicitly identified as French and any particular historical tragic subject. Such a link has become theoretically superfluous in a culture that claims, as Racine formulated it in the preface to Iphigénie,

­158     Forgetting Differences that “le bon sens et la raison [sont] les mêmes dans tous les siècles” (511). Moreover, Rapin’s generic spectator, who initially seems to take an active role in his engagement with the theatrical spectacle, seems to become increasingly passive as this engagement deepens. Eventually, the soul becomes the object rather than the subject of the emotions Rapin details, and the whole experience culminates in the remarkably passive “il est ému.” Not only divorced from action, the spectator’s emotion is now also entirely contained by the manipulations of tragic poetry.

Containing Emotion Jean de La Taille’s almost instinctive turn to the “misères d’autruy” picked up a thread from Polybian historiography that had served to weave a protective veil between the potentially tragic experience of history, on the one hand, and its safe and sound beneficiaries, on the other. But unlike Polybius, for whom history was, ultimately, intended to prepare one for experience, La Taille seemed to hesitate between the didactic – La Famine’s specific lessons for Marguerite de France – and the purely and much more generally affective – the series of emotions a spectator would undergo in the face of the spectacle of the vicissitude of “les choses humaines” (3v). Whereas the first aim positions the end of the tragic poem outside of the moment of reading (or of spectatorship), in the world of politics and prudence, the second appears to set the boundaries of reception within the confines of the audience’s direct interaction with the play. In an analysis of seventeenth-century tragic spectatorship, Christian Biet cites the libertine Saint-Réal’s attempts to explain the pleasure that can be had by reading about bloody battles or seeing violence onstage in his 1671 De l’usage de l’histoire. As Biet points out, Saint-Réal explicitly rejects the Lucretian model according to which the pleasure that the spectator derives from seeing a shipwreck is due chiefly to the fact that he is exempt from danger: this would be a very brief pleasure, according to Saint-Réal, since it does not take very long for people on shore to realize that they are in no danger of drowning.54 What is striking here, in light of earlier uses of the Lucretian image such as those by Amyot, Montaigne, or Binet (in his sonnet to Robert Garnier), is that Saint-Réal does not consider the emotion provoked in the spectator who watches a shipwreck from the safety of the shore as a prelude to the possibility of moral instruction, but simply as a momentary effect which, due to its extreme brevity, could not be pleasurable. Completely draining

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the image of its prior metaphorical, philosophical, and sociopolitical resonances, he takes it to refer simply to people watching a shipwreck, and to their recognition that they are not on the ship. For Amyot, our position on the shore is the terrain of the eschole de prudence. For Montaigne, the Lucretian shore is a vantage point from which one can attempt to exercise unbiased judgment. For Binet, Garnier’s position among the shipwrecked allows him to act as a spokesperson for the sorrows of his beleaguered compatriots. Saint-Réal, by contrast, appears to take Lucretius’s metaphor as a paradigm of a narrowly construed theatrical spectatorship; moreover, he appears to assume that the impact of such spectacles, while intense, lasts only as long as one is in the theater, watching. Rather than casting his gaze toward politico-prudential, moral-philosophical, or social–psychological horizons, Saint-Réal sees only the shipwreck, and attempts to explain the effect of the tragic spectacle solely in terms of the spectacle itself. This approach makes of the theater a place in which emotions are circumscribed and contained, rather than a site where they motivate a public posture.

The Theater of Containment Jean Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, a contemporary of Jean de la Taille, will take a more philosophical approach to the status of the Wars of Religion for a poetics of tragedy. Vauquelin’s 1563 poem to Catherine de Medicis, La Monarchie de ce royaume contre la division, offers a signal example of the sixteenth-century French neoplatonic vision of sociopolitical harmony guaranteed by a divinely sanctioned monarch that historian Denis Crouzet has studied in depth. In the wake of the first war, the poem posits concord, in the form of an authoritative, divine “one,” embodied by the French monarch, as a natural state: “rejoignons-nous d’un naturel accord,” he implores his fellow Frenchmen. This premise leads the poet to offer a series of examples of hierarchies from the natural world as evidence of the soundness of this vision: just as the king who unites his realm imitates God, so he also imitates the eagle, chief of the birds; the dolphin, prince of the waters; the lion, king of the beasts, and so on.55 In Vauquelin’s depiction of universal harmony, the French monarchy is the still point at which “vouloir” and “pouvoir” are conjoined; “liberté” is ascribed to the man who “obéit à l’Edict de son Roy . . . pour le repos,” as the legislation of the Crown is synonymous with justice. Though Vauquelin mentions more than one well-known tragic story in the course of his hymn to the divinely sanctioned monarchy, his

­160     Forgetting Differences interpretations claim them, remarkably, as examples of concord and harmony. Improbably sandwiched between the lion and the queen bee in Vauquelin’s politically stable bestiary is a reference to Philomel: Et Philomene en soupirant aux bois Contre Teree, a la premiere voix. Et dans un chesne ou dedans leurs ruchetes, On voit qu’un Roy honorent les Avetes.

For Vauquelin, the tragedy of Philomel (it is impossible to know which version he may have had in mind – Seneca? Ovid? Chrétien?) somehow becomes an emblem of natural order along with the lion and the bee. The raped and mutilated protagonist, who with her sister wreaks a terrible revenge on her attacker (they kill Tereus’s son Itys and serve him to his father for dinner), joins the proud ranks of eagles and dolphins, and, in a subsequent image, of brave and heroic military commanders. The violence and suffering of her story disappear behind what we must take to be Vauquelin’s sense of a felicitous – if not exactly happy – ending: Philomel was able to exact revenge on her attacker; her tragedy thus embodies concord by representing justice. The gory details of how justice is served (so to speak) are simply submerged within a transcendent, all-encompassing vision of hierarchically ordered harmony. Further on in the poem, Vauquelin manages to wrench a positive model for the French monarchy from the history of the Roman civil wars. In the rebellious French factions of his day, Vauquelin sees: Cesar vainqueur, et le vaincu Pompee Cestuy deffait, Cesar estant resté Dans la grand’Rome en repos arresté Le chef du monde, hors l’honneur de la guerre, Il fut meurtry en paix dedans sa terre: Et toutefois le Repos et la Paix, Comme Cesar ne furent pas deffaits. Mais Marc Antoine et les ligues secretes, Furent enfin tant seulement deffaites, Et sous Octave un regne florissant Entresuyvit le Tumulte puissant.

Vauquelin compresses Roman history from the end of the Republic to the reign of Augustus into eleven verses that begin with Julius Cesar’s defeat of Pompey (indirectly treated in Garnier’s 1568 tragedy Cornélie); hurry through Cesar’s assassination (already a subject of French tragedy in Grévin’s 1561 Mort de César) and Marc Antony’s defeat (Garnier’s lament-filled tragedy on this subject was performed in 1575); and come to rest on the “regne florissant” of Octavian, whose name Vauquelin

From Emotion to Affect     161

then transfers to Charles IX, “nostre Octave.” All of the tragic moments of the Roman civil wars that would be exploited in French theatrical tragedies of the period are cancelled out in Vauquelin’s poem and subsumed by the era of “repos” and “paix” represented by Octavian. In the world of this poem, the lesson of history is that everything eventually reverts to a “natural” state of tranquility. Vauquelin’s desire not to dwell on the tragic moments in history, or on discord or conflict in any form, is readily apparent in his Art poétique. This long poem was first published in 1605, but its composition dates back to 1574, during the reign of Henri III, for whom it was written. Vauquelin’s treatise thus spans the most intensely violent period of the Wars of Religion up through the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes and on into the height of the reign of le grand Henri. The poet in fact opens his address to the reader with an apology for his work’s untimeliness, calling his verses “hors de saison” (cxvi). He blames the civil wars for this quality in his work, invoking “tous les troubles de ce Royaume avenus de [son] âge” as the reason that he did not finish and publish the work “du vivant de [ses] contemporains” (cxv, cxvi). Vauquelin’s poetic views are usually situated somewhere in between those of the sixteenth-century Pléiade, whose works he discusses and defends (and whose vision of furor poeticus he adopted and adapted), and those of seventeenth-century France’s famous législateur de Parnesse, Boileau (insofar as he espouses several poetic rules that will become part of neoclassical doctrine).56 This in-between quality extends to his ambivalence about the suitability of the civil wars as a subject for theatrical tragedy, an ambivalence that places him in the very midst of the transformations in the rhetoric of tragedy that I have been tracing. The initial conceit of the Art poétique’s first book makes a straightforward analogy between politics and poetics: after his invocation of the Muses, Vauquelin posits a resemblance between God’s law, the king’s laws, and the laws of poetry, all of which squares with the neoplatonic vision in the poem to Catherine de Medicis. Tragedy and concord are already aligned to some degree here, insofar as all genres of poetic writing are to conform to rules that are themselves presented as analogous to “les Edicts de nos Roys, vos justes ordonnances.”57 In general, then, poetry, like nature, resists discord: Vauquelin tells the Muses that he and his friends “par vos douces liqueurs /De la guerre civile adouci les rigueurs.”58 But if it sounds here as if all poetic activity functions as a sweet counterweight to the bitter rigors of war, Vauquelin will go on to apply this general principle to only one specific case, that of tragic poetry. In the first part of his discussion of tragedy, Vauquelin flirts with the

­162     Forgetting Differences idea that theatrical tragedy could take contemporaneous discord as its subject: et si nostre echafaut Tu veux remplir des tiens, chercher loin ne te faut Un monde d’argumens: Car tous ces derniers ages Tragiques ont produit mile cruelles rages. Mais prendre il ne faut les nouveaux argumens: Les vieux servent toujours de seurs enseignemens. Puis la Muse ne veut soubs le vray se contraindre Elle peut du viel temps, tout ce qu’elle veut, feindre.59

Vauquelin offers two reasons why the dramatist should not take his own tragic age as a tragic subject: first, he asserts that old subjects unfailingly teach clear lessons; then, in somewhat of a non sequitur, he makes a pitch for poetic license, which would apparently be inhibited by the introduction of contemporary history which has now suddenly become the privileged home of “le vray.”60 But before we label Vauquelin a partisan of neoclassical “vraisemblance” avant la lettre,61 we must consider the next forty-eight lines of the poem, which close the second book of the Art poétique. These verses suggest another motivation for Vauquelin’s refusal to accept the possibility of tragedies about the wars. Addressing France herself, Vauquelin, like the royal historians who oriented their works to a vague “posterity,” prefers to defer a theatrical rendering of the Wars of Religion to a hazily situated but peaceful time in the future, thus reinstating the historically true as a legitimate subject for tragedy, but only on the condition that it does not shock future spectators: Tes massacres cruels aux beaux ans qui suivront, Aux Poetes Tragics de sujet serviront: Mais ores appaise toy: permets que tes contrees Ne soient à l’avenir de tes fureurs outrees [.. . .] Et si par cette paix, un peu d’ejouissance, Ne nous donne pouvoir sur l’aveugle ignorance, Tous vos arts se perdront: Muses, donc approuvez Que parmi tant de maux joyeux vous nous trouvez

The composition of tragedies about the civil wars is dependent on peace: it will be possible to talk about the “massacres cruels” only in the “beaux ans qui suivront,” in the era of concord. Rather than constraining poetic freedom by tethering it to the “true,” what the wars in fact do is threaten all contemporaneous poetic activity: it is, finally, possible to compose tragedies only in a time of concord, which makes it, de facto, impossible to take ongoing discord as a tragic subject.

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In his earlier poem to France’s queen mother, Vauquelin barely mentions discord, instead foregrounding the vision of a French body politic joined to and by a single “âme” represented by the monarch. This vision will translate into a conception of tragedy that makes the representation of unity (and, indeed, the unity of representation) a central feature. Since La Taille had chosen to address the king in the form of a tragic remonstrance, we can conclude that he saw the rhetoric of tragedy as a meaningful form of political intervention. Vauquelin, by contrast, writes an abstract, philosophical poem that subsumes the tragic into a larger, peaceful whole. His theory of tragedy similarly recommends the supression of painful historical events, or indeed, it seems, of conflict of any kind. We can see here the beginnings of the kind of neoclassical tragedy intended to buttress the authority of the monarch and divert attention away from political troubles. What starts out as a program to promote national unity and reconciliation thus evolves into a poetics that perpetually situates tragedy in other times and places in order to insulate it from political conflict.

Forgetting Differences The abstraction of history and historical difference permeates the theoretical discourse on neoclassical theater. At the same time that it serves the end of audience pleasure, this abstraction also constitutes one of the pillars of the myth of French universalism. Corneille describes a tragic theater for an audience that is to become increasingly disinterested because they are less personally implicated in the drama onstage, except insofar as they are “hommes comme les autres.” Consequently, as the French seventeenth century unfolds, its tragic heroes become less and less defined as historically specific others, and increasingly simply hold the place of a generic tragic other for an audience that, mutatis mutandis, also loses its historical specificity. Thus, Guyon Guérin de Bouscal’s Mort de Cleomenes roy de Sparte, published anonymously in 1640, is dedicated simply to “toy, favorable lecteur.” In a 1676 preface that implicitly positions the French theater-going public as a neutral point of reference, Racine argues for the suitability of the contemporary Turks as objects of tragic representation in Bajazet by assimilating them to the ancient Greeks or Romans by virtue of their common distance from a French culture that is simply taken for granted: L’éloignement des pays répare en quelque sorte la trop grande proximité des temps, car le peuple ne met guère de différence entre ce qui est, si j’ose ainsi

­164     Forgetting Differences parler, à mille ans de lui, et ce qui en est à mille lieues. C’est ce qui fait . . . que les personnages turcs, quelques modernes qu’il soient, ont de la dignité sur notre théâtre. On les regarde de bonne heure comme anciens. Ce sont des moeurs et des coutumes toutes différentes. The physical distance of the country makes up to some degree for the toogreat temporal proximity, since most people do not distinguish between that which is a thousand years away and that which is a thousand leagues away. This is why . . . Turkish characters, modern as they are, are considered worthy in our theaters. They are like the ancients. Their mores and customs are completely different.

What counts for Racine is not the Turks’ identity per se, but rather their status as “différents,” a status they share with the ancient Greeks and Romans and presumably with anyone else who is not French.62 But rather than acknowledge the situatedness of this point of view by invoking something akin to Garnier’s “particulier et domestique,” Racine simply depersonalizes it.63 For Racine’s purposes, there is simply no need to distinguish among others; the abstract notion of “différence” suffices, and the point of reference according to which the determination of difference must necessarily be made remains occulted. It is easy enough to deconstruct the neoclassical myth of French culture as “bon sens” and “raison’: the naturalization of the French point of view obviously depends upon its occultation, on its keeping a distance from which it can observe while remaining unobserved. Situating the “art de l’éloignement” with respect to reactions to the Wars of Religion, however, helps to explain how such a myth arose in the first place, since it allows us to recover something of the soil in which the French neoclassical ideology of universalism took root. In the turnof-the-century legislation to obliterate memories of a divisive past and thereby to keep unpleasant history at a distance, we can find the seeds of the myth of a culture whose values are both natural and permanent. An all-embracing rhetoric of amnesia in the wake of the conflicts helped both to erode the Renaissance Humanist culture of memory and to lay the foundation for a neoclassical discourse of timeless universality. Tragedy played and would continue to play a privileged role in the flowering of this myth, since one of the functions of an aesthetic of distance in neoclassical theater was to buttress the fiction of a timeless French culture. The plausibility of that fiction was threatened by the precarious historicity of Frenchness that a memory of the civil wars would entail. The historiographical impulses initiated by the politics of oubliance also lent themselves to subsequent efforts to minimize political dissent and to homogenize a complicated past. As we have seen, the distinctive features of this conciliatory rhetoric made it possible to convert a former

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Huguenot warrior into Henri “le grand,” and to position him in particular, and the Bourbon monarchy in general, as the bulwark between a violent, horrifying past and a secure present (and future). By 1685, the politics of oubliance were asserted by the Crown to have effectively established not merely an emotional consensus on the period of the Wars of Religion, but also a political and religious consensus on the principles over which those wars were fought. Styling the revocation of the Edict of Nantes as an extension of the policy of oubliance put forth by Henri IV, Louis XIV construed the forgetting of differences not as a posture towards the past, but rather as an attitude toward the present. The preamble to the Edict of Fontainebleau (1685) ends: Nous voyons présentement [. . .] que nos soins ont eu la fin que nous nous sommes proposée, puisque la meilleure et la plus grande partie de nos sujets de la Religion Prétendue Réformée ont embrassé la Catholique. Et d’autant qu’au moyen de ce, l’exécution de l’édit de Nantes, et de tout ce qui a été ordonné en faveur de ladite R.P.R., demeure inutile, nous avons jugé que nous ne pouvions rien faire de mieux pour effacer entièrement la mémoire des troubles [. . .] que de révoquer entièrement ledit édit de Nantes. We now see [. . .] that our efforts have had the intended effect, since the better and greater portion of our subjects of the so-called Reformed Religion have embraced the Catholic faith. And insofar as by this means, the execution of the Edict of Nantes and of all that has been decreed in favor of the aforementioned so-called Reformed Religion, is rendered superfluous, we judge that we can do nothing better in order to efface entirely the memory of the troubles [. . .] than to entirely revoke the aforementioned Edict of Nantes (my emphasis).

By seeking to erase the memory of the era of oubliance itself, Louis XIV interpreted the gesture of forgetting differences not in terms of reconciliation, but rather as a license to deny the very existence of confessional difference in France.

Notes   1. Matthieu, Pierre, Histoire de France & des choses memorables aduenues aux prouinces estrangeres durant sept annees de paix: Du regne de roy Henri IIII (Cologny: Pierre Poiret, 1613), p. 3r.  2. Lancaster, Henry C., A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1929), p. 13.  3. Despite the peace imposed by the Edict of Nantes in 1598, [Huguenot] militancy remained an ongoing reflection of the commitment, ambitions and beliefs of the wider community in the seventeenth century. After all, from

­166     Forgetting Differences 1620, the Huguenots still had the wherewithal to fight three wars, which preoccupied the crown for nearly a full decade.



James, Alan, “Huguenot militancy and the Wars of Religion,” in Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer (eds), Society and Culture in the Huguenot World 1559–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See also Holt, Mack, The French Wars of Religion 1562–1629 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).   4. Ferrier, Louis, Anne de Bretagne (Paris: Jean Ribou, 1679). Cited in the Frères Parfaict, Histoire du théâtre françois (Paris: le Mercier et Saillant, 1735–49), vol. 12, pp. 124–5.   5. Racine, Jean, Théâtre complet, Jacques Morel and Alain Viala (eds), (Paris: Dunod, 1995), p. 382.  6. Pavel, Thomas, L’Art de l’éloignement. Essai sur l’imagination classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 54. Similarly, Revel Elliot’s study of Racine focuses on “ce goût du lointain et du merveilleux . . . dont on a relevé de nombreuses indices dans la littérature du XVIIe siècle” (Mythe et légende dans le théâtre de Racine (Paris: Lettre Modernes, 1969), p. 5). In her study of French theoretical writings on tragedy from 1540–61, Paulette Leblanc notes the absence of such an aesthetic in the sixteenth century: l’éloignement, a-t-on dit quelquefois, peut seul conférer à ce qui ne serait, de près, qu’un fait divers criminel, une généralité et une élévation tragiques. Il y a sans doute beaucoup de vrai dans cette observation, mais, de 1540 à 1561, aucun théoricien, aucun auteur ne la retient. (117–18)

  7. Dotoli, Giovanni, Temps de préfaces: Le débat théâtral en France de Hardy à la Querelle du “Cid” (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996), p. 103.  8. Bénichou, Paul, Morales du grand siècle (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1948), pp. 95, 97. More recently, see Clarke, David, Pierre Corneille. Poetics and Political Drama under Louis XIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. part III. I thank David Quint for suggesting that I confront this line of argumentation.   9. Biet, Christian, La tragédie (Paris: Colin, 2010), p. 38. 10. La Taille, Jean de, “L’Art de la tragédie,” Saül le furieux (Paris: Fédéric Morel, 1572), p. 4. 11. Du Bellay, Joachim, Deffense et illustration de la langue francoyse (Paris: Arnould Angelier, 1549), bk 2, ch. ix, n.p. 12. “le critère, la pierre de touche de l’excellente poésie.” Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle, La rhétorique des passions (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), p. 25. 13. A recent study that emphasizes the link between written polemic and physical violence is Racaut, Luc, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 14. Ronsard, Pierre de, Remonstrance au peuple de France (s.l., 1563). This pamphlet was frequently reprinted throughout the sixteenth century in the suite of Discours des misères de ce temps, as well as in Ronsard’s Oeuvres complètes. Later in this poem, Ronsard even details the weapons and armor that should be used in defense of “France”:

From Emotion to Affect     167 Mais ayés forte picque, & dure & forte espee, Bon jacque bien cloué, bonne armeure trempee, La bonne targue au bras au corps bons corcellets, Bonne poudre, bon plomb, bon feu, bons pistollets, Bon morion en teste, & sur tout une face Qui du premier regard vostre ennemy déface.

15. Cuvelier, Chronique de Bertrand du Guesclin, Guillaume de Saint-André (ed.), (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1839), vol. I, p. 145. 16. For a careful comparison of the dramaturgy of these two polemical plays, see Bouteille-Meister, Charlotte, “Les cadavres fantasmés des Guise,” in Kjerstin Aukrust and Charlotte Bouteille-Meister (eds), Corps sanglants, souffrants et macabres: XVIe-XVIIe siècles (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2010), pp. 285–302. 17. “laisse prévoir le théâtre du siècle classique”; de La Taille, Jean, Saül le furiex. Famine, ou les Gabéonites, in Elliott Forsyth (ed.), (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1968), p. XXXXV. This edition hereafter cited as Forsyth. See also Raymond Lebègue, who calls La Taille’s treatise “le meilleur [read: most Classical] ouvrage de ce genre qu’un Français ait écrit avant le Classicisme” (La tragédie française de la renaissance (Brussels: Office de Publicite, 1944), p. 39). 18. Street, J. R., French Sacred Theater from Bèze to Corneille (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 57. 19. Forsyth, Saül le furieux. Famine, ou les Gabéonites, p. 33. 20. La Taille, Jean de, La Famine, ou les Gabéonites (Paris: Fédéric Morel, 1573), pp. 2, 3. 21. Des Gallars, Nicolas, Seconde apologie ou defense des vrais Chrestiens, contre les calomnies impudentes des ennemis de l’Eglise catholique. Où il est respondu aux diffames redoublez par un nommé Demochares docteur de la Sorbonne (Geneva: Jean Crespin, 1559). 22. Dialogue du Royaume; auquel est discouru des vices & vertus des Roys, & de leur Establissement . . . et des justes causes qui peuvent esmouvoir le peuple à s’eslever & s’opposer à la Tyrannie & injustice du Roy (Paris: Didier Millot, 1589). 23. De Condé, Louis, Mémoires de Condé ou recueil pour servir à l’histoire de France, . . . (London: Rollin fils, 1743). See, for example, vol. 3, pp. 115, 125. This edition was immediately banned in France for having had “la témérité de tirer de l’oubli et de faire imprimer plusieurs pièces indignes de voir le jour.” Arrêt du conseil d’état qui ordonne la suppression d’un livre intitulé: Mémoires de Condé, etc. supplément (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1743). 24.

Esmouvoir, Acuere, Agitare, Coagitare, Conciere, Concire, Excitare, Exacuere, Impetum dare, Incitare, Instigare, Peragitare, Admouere alicui stimulos, Ardorem iniicre. Esmouvoir un combat, Pugnam conspirare. Esmouvoir aucun à quelque chose, Aliquem commouere. Fort esmouvoir, Accendere, Concitare, Permouere. S’esmouvoir fort, Non minime commoueri. Irriter et esmouvoir aucun à courroux, Mouere alicui stomachum, Incendere aliquem. Inciter et esmouvoir à se combatre, Coire bellum, praelium, pugnam, Eiicere hostem, Excire hostem ad dimicandum, Hostem prouocare ad certamen.

­168     Forgetting Differences Esmouvoir une chose tellement qu’on vienne à s’entrebatre, Ad manus rem reuocare. Esmouvoir une grande haine et rancune contre aucun, Concitare magnum odium in aliquem. Qui esmeuvent sedition, Faces seditionis. Esmouvoir un homme à quelque chose, Adducere hominem in rem aliquem, Hortari. Esmouvoir les auditeurs, Relinquere aculeos in animis audientium. Esmouvoir à misericorde, Ad misericordiam inducere. Esmouvoir à pitié, Commouere miserationem. Esmouvoir à pleur, Fletum excitare, Excire lachrymas alicui. Ne s’esmouvoir point, AEquo animo ferre, Leuiter aliquid ferre. Esmouvoir et faire bruit des pieds, ou autrement contre aucun, Obstrepere. Qui esmeut et incite, Stimulator, Concitator. Qui fait le mauvais et esmeut noise parmi le peuple, Tumultuosus. Qui esmeut l’accusation, Fax accusationis. Qui esmeut à pitié et compassion, Miserabilis. Qui ne s’esmeut de rien, AEquus animus. Sans qu’aucun les esmeust à ce faire, Nullo impellente. Grandes choses s’esmeuvent, Mouentur res magnae. Esmeu, Citus, Concitus, Motus, Commotus, Incitatus, Percitus, Turbulentus. Estre esmeu, Affici animis, Excitari, Exaestuare ira. Estre esmeu à esperer liberté, Exardere ad spem libertatis. J’estoye esmeu, Impellebar, Inducebar. Il a esté esmeu de tes lettres, Affectus est tuis literis. Esmeuz du bruit et commun dire, Rumoribus atque auditionibus permotis.



Jean Baudouin’s 1607 dictionary essentially reproduces Nicot. Nouveau dictionnaire François-Latin . . . Oeuure cueillie és escrits des plus Doctes, et entre autres de M. Nicod, et soigneusement reueuë par Iean Baudouin (Lyon: Claude Morillon, 1607), p. 377. 25. Reinhard Krüger characterizes La Taille’s treatise as a call for a tragic theater whose “Ziel [soll] die Wahrung des inneren Friedens [sein]” (“Katharsis und Politik in Jean de La Taille’s ‘Art de la tragédie’,” Lendemains, 8 (1983), p. 105). 26. “Au Roy.” Palma Cayet, Pierre-Victor, Chronologie novenaire (Paris: Jean et Etienne Richer, 1605). Palma Cayet attributes the thought to Cicero. 27. In addition to Reiss, see Egginton, William, How the World Became a Stage. Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), as well as the works of Forestier and Biet. 28. Biet, Christian, Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants (fin XVIe – début XVIIe siècles), (Paris: Laffont, 2006), p. xxxvii. 29. Biet, Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants, p. xxxi. 30. Forestier, Georges, La Tragédie Française. Passions tragiques et règles classiques, 2nd edn (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), p. 10. 31. Reiss, Timothy, Toward Dramatic Illusion. Theatrical Technique and Meaning from Hardy to “Horace” (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 191. 32. For more evidence of this shift, see the linguist Annelies Bloem’s analysis of the usage of the term in a modest corpus of medieval and Renaissance documents: “Esmouvoir à bien vivre. La construction prépositionnelle en à en tant que témoin de la psychologisation du verbe émouvoir,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 127 (2011). 33. Horace, The Complete Works of Horace, ed. Caspar Kraemer, trans. Edward Henry Blakeney (New York: Modern Library, 1936), p. 406.

From Emotion to Affect     169 34. See Weinberg, Bernard, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance [1961] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), vol. 1, esp. pp. 66–8. 35. In Louvat, Bénédicte and Marc Escola (eds), Trois discours sur le poème dramatique (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1999), p. 63. 36. Ibid., p. 96. 37. Ibid., pp. 96–7. 38. Ibid., p. 97. 39. De Scudéry, Georges, La Mort de Caesar (Paris: Augustin Courbé, 1637), n.p. 40. The distance between hero and spectator is, moreover, closely linked to the increasing emphasis on the individual in seventeenth-century tragedy. JeanPierre Vernant describes Athenian tragedy in terms of the tension between the two elements that occupy the tragic stage. One is the chorus, the collective and anonymous presence embodied by an official college of citizens. Its role is to express through its fears, hopes, questions, and judgments the feelings of the spectators who make up the civic community. The other, played by a professional actor, is the individualized character whose actions form the core of the drama and who appears as a hero from an age gone by, always more or less estranged from the ordinary condition of the citizen.

Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans Janet Lloyd (Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1990), pp. 32–4. In ­seventeenth-century French tragedy, the figure of proximity – the chorus, which was still prominent in sixteenth-century theater – has dropped out, and only the distanced hero remains. 41. Racine, Théâtre complet, p. 130. 42. Ibid., p. 131. 43. Ibid., p. 255. 44. Ibid., p. 577. 45. Bradley Rubidge notes that “after the dominance of fear in Renaissance accounts of catharsis, seventeenth-century critics propose an appeal to admiration” (“Catharsis through Admiration: Corneille, Le Moyne, and the Social Uses of Emotion,” Modern Philology, 95 (1998), p. 323). 46. Dotoli reprints the entire preface (169–76). Dotoli, Giovanni, Le Temps des préfaces. Le débat théâtral en France de Hardy à la Querelle du Cid (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996). 47. Dotoli, Temps des préfaces, p. 176. 48. For a fuller discussion of this phenomenon with respect to Corneille, see Lyons, John, The Tragedy of Origins. Pierre Corneille and Historical Perspective (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 2, “Cinna and the historical logic of empire,” pp. 71–108. 49. Racine, Théâtre complet, p. 69. 50. Ibid., p. 70. 51. Cited in Fragonard, Marie-Madeleine, “Saül: péché du Roi et vengeance de Dieu,” in Marie-Madeleine Fragonard (ed.), Par ta colère nous sommes consumés. Jean de La Taille auteur tragique (Orléans: Paradigme, 2000), pp. 36–7.

­170     Forgetting Differences 52. Rapin, René, Reflexions sur la poétique (Paris: François Muguet, 1674), sect. 18, pp. 171–5. 53. Cf. Katherine Ibbett, who observes that “for Rapin, we feel because we are French, and not Greek; he rewrites Frenchness as the site of shared emotion” (207). Ibbett argues that Corneille will use a “language of compassion and friendship [that] marks a real change in the notion of how we relate to a tragic figure, who is no longer an exemplar or a warning, but our friend” (205). Ibbett, Katherine, “Pity, Compassion, Commiseration: Theories of Theatrical Relatedness,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 30:2 (Dec 2008), pp. 196–208. 54. “puisqu’il ne faut pas longtemps à des gens qui sont à terre, pour reconnaître qu’ils ne sont pas en péril de se noyer.” Saint-Réal, Abbé de, De l’usage de l’histoire, René Demoris and Christian Meurillon (eds), [1671] (Paris: GERL 17/18, 2000), p. 19. Cited in Biet, “Actions et tragédie au XVIIe siècle, order et des orders,” Biblio 17, (131) 2001, pp. 285–309, (301). 55. This is a commonplace; cf., for example, Du Verdier, Antoine, Discours sur la réduction de la ville de Lyon à l’obéissance du roy (Lyon: Thomas Soubron, 1594), p. 4. 56. Georges Pelissier asserts that “Boileau n’ajoute rien à Vauquelin . . . Vauquelin et Boileau donnent les mêmes règles; tous deux se contentent de traduire Horace” (Pelissier, Georges (ed.), L’Art poétique de Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1885), p. cxii). 57. Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, L’Art poétique, v. 51, p. 3. 58. Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, L’Art poétique, bk 2, v. 1077–8122. 59. Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, L’Art poétique, v. 1107–16, 124–5. 60. La Taille’s struggle with supernatural elements in the Old Testament show that, unlike what Vauquelin would have us believe, there was no necessary connection between contemporary history and the notion of a truth that confines the poet. 61. This is a term of no little ambiguity in neoclassical dramatic theory itself, as John D. Lyons’s patient discussion in Kingdom of Disorder amply demonstrates (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999), see esp. ch. 3. 62. Michèle Longino argues that “the immediate everyday referent with regard to the ‘Other’ for the [seventeenth century] French was the muslim Turk” (Orientalism in French Classical Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 7). She also notes in passing that: the immediate exotic – the “Other within” – communities of Jews, Huguenots, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, etc., within the hexagon, was apparently too threatening to the building of French collective identity and therefore not admissible on the French stage. The French had not yet achieved sufficient critical distance and established sufficient national identity to examine their own complex population. (60–1)

63. Larry Norman cites the same passage from Bajazet to suggest that for Racine, “tragedy needs a certain historical otherness as well as timeless universality.” “Racine’s ‘Other Eye’: History, Nature, and Decorum from Ancient to Modern,” Biblio 17, [129] 2001, pp. 139–50, (142). Norman

From Emotion to Affect     171 has developed a larger argument about the seventeenth-century French relation to ancient history in The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Conclusion

By approaching the rhetoric of oubliance primarily as a strategy for reconciliation, I have sought to move the focus of my analysis away from the concept of forgetting and towards that of forgetting differences. Oubliance, in the texts studied here, does not entail censorship of the past so much as its reframing. The paratexts and programmatic statements I have highlighted afford insight into the ways in which elite writers forged the rhetorical tools with which they and their readers could reconcile themselves to their troubling recent past, and thus to one another. Two central theses emerge from the material studied here. The first concerns the practice of history writing. Post-war historians attempting to serve the goal of reconciliation amplified the rhetoric of historical distance associated with critical historiography. Royally-sanctioned histories of the wars like those of Pierre Matthieu and Pierre-Victor Palma Cayet both repurposed and strengthened this aspect of Jean Bodin’s method. For the royal historians, this was a tactic for managing an archive that was at once a gold mine and a minefield: firsthand documentary sources on the Wars of Religion were plentiful, but they were also incredibly volatile. The imperative of oubliance thus converged with new methodologies in historiography to consolidate the postulate of a sharp distinction between the present and the past. The second thesis concerns the somewhat surprising role played by the rhetoric of emotion in the creation of this historical distance. Classical, medieval, and Renaissance Humanist writings across a number of genres enlist the term movere or esmouvoir with the explicit aim of inciting juridical, martial, or political action. Rhetorical techniques for “moving” listeners or readers to action in the world are designed to create an illusion of immediacy, thereby transforming historical events into vicarious experiences. Henri-Lancelot Voisin de La Popelinière, hewing more closely to the methodological precepts of Bodin than to the imperative of

Conclusion     173

oubliance, simply conflated experience and history, treating the events of the wars as if they were on the same historiographical plane as the ancient past. Conciliatory historians of the wars, by contrast, sensitive to the fact that they were addressing a public whose relationship to the past was already all too immediate, sought to drive a wedge between history and experience. In order to mitigate the possibility of an active response to the account of a violent recent past, historians writing in the age of oubliance such as Pierre Matthieu, Jean Baudouin, and François Eudes de Mézeray foregrounded the affective dimension of esmouvoir. As Baudouin’s preface to Enrico Davila’s extravagantly detailed history of the Wars of Religion makes especially clear, the solicitation of an affective response to the material was coupled with a rhetoric of alienation rather than one of identification: the horror, pity, and tears of French readers were to be taken as proof of their distance from the events that they were being invited to contemplate. The foregoing developments are linked by their common grounding in a discourse of the tragic, which was one of the preëminent modes of writing about the Wars of Religion. From the very beginning of the conflicts, the concept of the tragic supplied a framework for recounting the history of the troubles and its impact on the French polity. Since the sense that tragedy had a special power – even a duty – to esmouvoir its public was widely shared, it was perhaps inevitable that the “tragedy” of France’s civil wars would entail a reconsideration of the term’s purview. Jean de la Taille’s attempt to grapple with precisely how theatrical tragedy should move its audience in his Art de la tragédie clearly reveals how the Wars of Religion provoked deep, and often deeply confused, reflections on the status of emotion as an effect of tragic poetry. The poet-soldier La Taille, imbued with a martial sense of what it meant to move an audience, declared the Wars of Religion off limits to tragic poets. By contrast, the emotional modes of reception that the magistrate Robert Garnier imagined for his tragic theater (characterized explicitly by its author as an attempt to come to terms with France’s civil wars) afforded a transition between La Taille’s Humanist conception of theatrical reception, on the one hand, and neoclassical forms of spectatorship, on the other. While polemical tragedies about the wars sought to appropriate the immediacy associated with medieval theatrical performance as well as with Humanist modes of reading, and thereby to solicit a politically engaged public response, Garnier foregrounded the affective impact that the proximity of the tragic subject would have on his readers. By characterizing his civil-war tragedies as a form of collective plainte, Garnier enlisted affect as a rhetorical means to unify and thereby reconcile his reading public.

­174     Forgetting Differences As the last chapter of this study points out, La Taille’s aesthetics of distance and Garnier’s heightened emotional response would become hallmarks of French tragic theater in the seventeenth century. By providing an extended genealogy for these well-known features of neoclassical drama, I hope to have opened fresh perspectives for scholars of that period. By striving to remain alert to the contingencies driving the rhetorical shifts to which I have attempted to draw attention, I hope to have made a contribution to scholarly thinking about the methodologies we use to approach the study of the past. It would be a mistake, I believe, to characterize the shifts I have traced here as ideological. If I have positioned the royal policy of oubliance as the primary motor of change here, I have tried to underline the degree to which interpretations of and responses to that policy among historians and poets were neither uniform nor predictable. In other words, I have tried to approach oubliance as a practice rather than simply as an idea. The claim that this book addresses practices rather than ideas might be difficult for some historians to take seriously. The claim is of course predicated on the premise that rhetoric, whether in the form of historiography, of tragic poetry, or of something else, has an impact not merely on thought, but, perforce, on practice. I seek, therefore, to have historiography and tragedy counted among the many practices that colluded to maintain the “assez grande fraternité” Pierre Bayle was so puzzled to find in seventeenth-century France. To this end, I have tried to show how historiography and tragedy served in part as instruments of reconciliation in the wake of the French Wars of Religion. That said, I do not want to leave readers with the impression that the texts studied here can be reduced to political tools. In foregrounding the links between the policy of oubliance and the practices of writing history and tragedy, I have tried to show how other constraints played a role in shaping the ways in which the forgetting of differences was interpreted and furthered within these two discourses. Although Louis XIV’s reiteration of the policy of oubliance in the Edict of Fontainebleau is an undeniably ideological appropriation of the forgetting of wartime differences as the equivalent of religious and political homogeneity, the techniques of oubliance developed by the historians and poets I have been discussing were not inevitably servants of that ideology. A sense of the separation between past and present, on the one hand, and a poetics of affective response, on the other, could be put to various uses. If a detailed analysis of those uses in seventeenth-century France lies beyond the scope of this study, I hope that future considerations of these dimensions of the representation of troubled collective histories, whether in France or elsewhere, will benefit from the perspectives proposed in this book.

Index

Amyot, Jacques, 45, 69–70, 111 Appian, 124–5 Aubignac, Abbé de, 143–4 Aubigné, Agrippa, 4, 73, 96n13

Davila, Enrico, 88–93, 102n68 Davis, Natalie Z., 28 De Waele, Michel, 88 Dobby-Poirson, Florence, 120

Balsamo, Jean, 121 Bandole, Antoine, Paralleles de Cesar et de Henry IIII, 47–50 Baudouin, Jean, Histoire des guerres civiles de France, 88–91 Bayle, Pierre, 63–4 Beloy, Pierre, 5, 65 Benedict, Philip, 5, 65–6, 95n11 Biet, Christian, 144, 150, 158 Binet, Claude, 131–2 Blumenberg, Hans, 84–5 Bodin, Jean Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, 66–9, 74, 79, 81, 86 Six livres de la république, 27, 34–5 Bouteille-Meister, Charlotte, 136n31

Edicts of pacification Amboise, 1, 35–7 Beaulieu, 38 Boulougne, 38 Fontainebleau, 165 January, 35 Nantes, 1–2, 5–15, 41, 51, 65, 96n15, 165 St-Germain, 1, 37–8 esmouvoir, 70, 92, 144–52 Estienne, Henri, 33–4

Caesar, Julius, 43–52 Calvin, Jean, 30–3 Cameron, Keith, 62n56 Chandieu, Antoine, 34 Chantelouve, François de, Tragédie de Gaspard de Coligny, 113–14 Chardon, Henri, 120 Charles IX, 35–8, 45–6, 93, 112, 116–20, 161 Chrestien, Nicolas, Royalles Ombres, 51 Christin, Olivier, 10, 18n6 Corneille, Pierre, 143, 153, 154, 156, 163 Couzinet, Marie-Dominique, 97n21 Crouzet, Denis, 26–7

Forestier, Georges, 129, 150 Fragonard, Marie-Madeleine, 140n61 François II, 28–9, 32–3, 55n9 Garnier, Robert, 119–32, 144, 150, 159 Gomberville, Marin de, 66–7, 80 Greengrass, Mark, 2, 60n36, 65, 95n9, 146 Grévin, Jacques, 106, 109–10 Henri III, 38, 44, 46, 51–2, 62n56 Henri IV, 13, 16, 27, 38, 41–54, 66–7, 76, 87–8, 93 Huchard, Cécile, 79 Ibbett, Katherine, 170n53 Jondorf, Gillian, 139n56 Kelley, Donald, 65 Koopmans, Jelle, 105

­176     Forgetting Differences La Popelinière, Henri Lancelot Voisin de, 71–82, 104 La Taille, Jean de, 144 L’Art de la tragédie, 86, 110, 146–52 Remonstrance pour le roy, 116–19 Lafrance, Félix, 100n51, 101n53 Latracey, Denis, 52–3 Le Frère de Laval, Jean, La Vraye et Entiere Histoire des troubles, 112–13 Le Masle, Jean, Brief discours sur les troubles, 111–15, 125 Le Roy, Louis, 110, 123–5 Lebègue, Raymond, 121, 130, 134n22 Loisel, Antoine, 39–40, 104 Loraux, Nicole, 4 Lucian, 75–6 Margolf, Diane, 2, 57n21 Martin, Martial, 44 Matthieu, Pierre Guisiade, 114–16 Histoire des derniers troubles, 42, 47, 53, 79–88 Sommaire discours, 87–8 Merlin-Kajman, Hélène, 96n15 Mézeray, François Eudes de, 91–4 Montaigne, Michel de, 10–11, 84–5 Mouflard, Marie-Madeleine, 121 Nervèze, Antoine de, 53 Nesmond, André de, L’Amnestie, ou l’assoupissement des injures passées, 5–15 neutrality, historiographical, 71–4, 80 Nicot, Jean, Thresor de la langue françoise, 148–9

Offenstadt, Nicolas, 59n28, 59n31, 59n32 Palma Cayet, Pierre-Victor, 76–8, 148–9 pardon, royal, 26–40 Pavel, Thomas, 143 Pibrac, Guy du Four de, 64–5, 128 Polybius, 70–2, 76, 83, 86, 102n63, 125, 131 posterity, 74–8 Postert, Kirsten, 136n27 Quint, David, 46 Racine, Jean, 142, 152, 154–7, 163–4 Rapin, René, 157–8 Reiss, Timothy, 133n12, 150 Ronsard, Pierre de, 3–4, 19n3, 42, 46, 106–7, 145–6 Saint-Réal, César Vichard de, De l’usage de l’histoire, 158–9 Schiffman, Zachary, 94n5 Serres, Jean de, Histoire des choses mémorables, 125–8 Sorbin, Arnaud, 108–9, 145 Stone, Donald, 120 Sully, Duc de, Paralleles de César, et de Henry le Grand, 50–1 Thou, Jacques de, 66, 99n42 Uomini, Steve, 103n71 Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, Jean, 159–63