By the late 1570s the Catholic League, led by the Guise and now supported by Spain, opposed all concessions to Protestants and set themselves against the moderate king Henri III. In the subsequent impassioned battles between the League and the king, Henri was assassinated, as were the Guise; in 1589 the Protestant Henri de Navarre became king, to reign as Henri IV. The new king faced lengthy battles to win back his kingdom and his capital from the League supporters. Paris succumbed only after Henri’s conversion to Catholicism; some provinces took longer, but by 1598 the Peace of Vervins marked an official ending of the wars.9
Henri’s much-lauded Edict of Nantes of 1598 ushered in a series of concessions to the Protestant minority. Nantes was not the most generous of the wartime edicts, but it was the one that held at least for a while, for reasons of expedient timing perhaps as much as firm belief. It allowed for limited freedom of worship and the establishment for a series of years only of a number of Protestant enclaves known as safe cities. From that point on, Catholics and the Protestant minority were bound to share their differences, to live alongside each other and observe their distinctions instead of trying to overwhelm them. Yet in its spatialized model of forbearance, the working toleration established by Nantes also reified religious difference; what the French shared was the observation of a lived rift. Toleration was an uneasy settlement between commonality and absolute difference. Together, everyone lived its differences, although some more brutally than others.
The pitiful spectacle, too, bound Catholics and Protestants apart. It was a key weapon in the affective policing of a divided France, but it was also a shared language that suggested the cultural common ground between the two sides. Of course, Catholics and Protestants parsed the pitiful spectacle differently according to their differing views of the conflict. Yet for both sides pity demarcated their political stand, allowing writers to shape their position in relation to the conflict and to the community they imagined as their audience. In delineating the pitier (both represented in the text and looked for as the reader), the pitied, and the pitiless, this language figured the larger factionalism of the wars and in so doing established fellow-feeling as something central to the political life of the troubled nation.
Reading Spectacle
The political plaintiveness of the pitiful spectacle makes it an obvious ancestor of the scenes relayed to the modern viewer by documentary photography or reportage, popularly considered to be great motivators of humanitarian action. A critical discourse on documentary photography has raised questions about the stakes and legitimacy of photographs of suffering and the way in which they create or forestall community making. After 9/11 Susan Sontag (following Virginia Woolf) asked to whom photographs of suffering are addressed: Who is the “we” targeted by such images?10 Yet the sixteenth-century discourse reminds us that images do not only draw on an assumed community; they also anxiously make and remake their community in a necessarily continual process.
Sontag’s essay also raises concerns about what she terms the instability of compassion that arises on looking at suffering: “It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”11 The sociologist Luc Boltanski’s work on the televised spectacle of suffering takes a more flexible perspective on affective spectatorship, suggesting that the distinction between spectating and acting may not be as straightforward as that envisioned by Sontag. For Boltanski, the spectator “can point towards” action when she is prepared to report what she has seen; the sight of suffering, he suggests, demands that one speak about it.12 Far from the atomized compassionate response critiqued by Hannah Arendt, Boltanski’s model looks very much like early modern, and particularly Protestant, imaginings of the relation between seeing and doing, in which one singular report can rapidly be disseminated with great effect. In the insistently repetitive writings of the sixteenth century, emotion does not wither; it is ceaselessly renewable.
One might even imagine, Boltanski suggests, that emotion is in itself a form of report or commentary, a kind of action.13 Likewise, sixteenth-century texts ask whether to be moved is also a form of action. The texts I read in this chapter worry over the relation between pity and action in different ways, and in so doing they set up a particular problem about readership. Is the reader called to action, or is a call to feeling enough of a response? What is it we do when we read, and can we imagine reading’s compassion as an action in itself?
The question of reading is important: the pitiful spectacle calls us to look and read all at once. Sontag and Boltanski draw on visual models: photos or television. But in the Wars of Religion, spectacle is dependent on the word.14 The spectacles conjured by Protestant and Catholic writers are tightly wrought texts that engage with visual material but also with a long tradition of rhetorical arts and the literary sources that displayed them. Writers drew on ancient models for envisaging the very notion of civil war. The Catholic Joachim Blanchon writes of “cette guerre Civille ou aultrement commune misère: Laquelle je compare et me semble fraternizer, ou encores estre plus cruelle, que celle dont a traicté Appian” [“this civil war or common misery, which I compare to and seems to resemble or be even more cruel than that which Appian described”].15 Protestants were more likely to draw on Lucan’s Pharsalia, the epic of choice for those on a losing side.16 But both sides shared a deep familiarity with rhetoric as a training in the deployment of emotions, seeking to bring about a particular effect. Renaissance rhetorical texts and editions of classical rhetoric directed an increasing amount of attention to the emotions, setting out a series of protocols for arousing pity. Sometimes, the Roman rhetor Quintilian writes, an accuser might weep tears of pity for the guilty party he condemns, in order to provoke the judge’s response, but this is a risky practice he warns us against.17 At other moments the orator must adopt a persona in order to bring about pity in his listener, for Quintilian notes that first-person narrations are most apt to bring about emotion. But trying to evoke pity is a delicate task: the moment of compassion cannot last too long nor be too overplayed, and its timing is important.18 Quintilian suggests that the proper punctuation of emotion will often depend on the careful use of visuals: the showing of a wound, the appearance of the client, and so on. The care in the proper distribution of these managed moments of pity is certainly key to the texts of the Wars of Religion, in which words recall bodily actions or gestures that denote emotion. But whereas Quintilian discusses how to deploy pity in the conclusion or epilogue of a trial, sixteenth-century writers distribute such moments throughout their texts, frequently repeating and recycling scenes from other writers even as they proclaim each scene they describe to be superlative in the suffering it shows. In the arousal of pity, repetition is crucial.
Catholics: From Ronsard to the League
In Catholic writing, the arousal of pity tells us a great deal about Catholic understandings of their position relative to the fortunes of the nation. Although Catholic forces were frequently besieged, especially in the south, their political position was preeminent and they imagined themselves not as a party but rather as representatives of the whole; the Catholic voice imagines itself to be objective where the Protestant knows it can never be. In the first years of the wars, Catholic usage of the topos illuminates these Catholic assumptions about the national imaginary. In Ronsard’s first of the Discours des Miseres de ce temps of 1562, written for the queen regent Catherine de Médicis in the first year of the conflict, France’s ship of state has become a “piteux naufrage” (44) [“pitiful shipwreck”], and Ronsard bemoans that the situation of France is so dire that even her unfriendly neighbors “a nostre nation en ont mesmes pitié” (90) [“even have pity for our nation”].19 To open the following poem, the Continuation, Ronsard invokes the affective horror of the wars by figuring the horror of he who could ignore them:
Ma Dame, je serois ou de plomb ou du