Compassion's Edge. Katherine Ibbett

early years of the war. The pitiful discourse seen in wartime accounts like that of Loys de Perussiis published in 1563 makes clear that distinctions between Catholic and Protestant were fairly recent and somewhat porous. Loys writes, he says, wearily, “aiant veu et ouy dire que le filz soit allé contre le père, les frères et cousins l’un contre l’autre, amis contre les siens plus intrinsèques. Brief ce n’ha esté que une propre guerre civile, sanglante et sans mercy” [“having seen and heard say that sons went against their fathers, brothers and cousins against one another, friends against their most familiar friends. In short it had been a real civil war, bloody and merciless”].³² In describing the “pitoyables tragédies” (430) [“pitiful tragedies”] inflicted on southern Catholics by the Protestant regional majority, Loys gives up, faced with “tant d’autres cruautés que les escrivant la force me default, pour la pitié que mon ame en sent” (404) [“so many other cruelties that I have not the strength to write them, for all the pity that my soul feels for them”].

      These the distinctions between Protestant cruelty and Catholic suffering are, for Loys, not always absolute. In one dreadful battle, some of the Protestants turn out to be kinder than might have been feared. On seeing a Catholic dangling from a rock, “Ce voyant lesdictz adversaires (parmy lesquelz se treuvent quelques pitoyables) le firent secourir, et la vie luy fut sauve” (453). [“Seeing this the said adversaries (amongst whom were some men of pity) rescued him, and his life was saved.”] In this period, the usage of “pitoyable” wavers between “object of pity” and “feeler of pity,” with most usage still relating to object rather than subject. Fittingly, here the usage switches to the subject, and the surprise that the Protestant other might show pity suggests how easy it would be for subject and object to change sides in these early years of the civil wars.

      Yet the Protestant pitier’s emotional exception is made only for one individual; the rest of the Catholics are killed and floated downstream to Avignon, with horns on their head and a mocking note in their hand, to be received by the Catholic prelate Fabrice de Serbellon: “Voyant Monseigneur Fabrice ce piteux spectacle, meu de pitié et de compassion, ordonna qu’ilz fussent tous inhumes et ensevellis et honnorablement en terre sacrée … usant de son accoustumée grandeur et clémence” (454). [“When Monseigneur Fabrice saw this pitiful spectacle, moved by pity and compassion, he ordered that they were all disenhumed and buried honorably in sacred ground … with his usual grandeur and clemency.”] The priest’s response to something he sees (“voyant”) recalls that of the exceptional Protestant who spared a Catholic in seeing his suffering (“ce voyant”), but Loys makes clear that the Protestant action is parenthetical where the Catholic is usual. Loys’s praise of Serbellon’s accustomed compassion is key to the rebuilding of a Catholic community in the Protestant-dominated district, where the prelate had recently arrived; he dedicates his book to him, building his history around a compassionate response that is both exemplary and entirely to be expected.

      In Loys’s account, compassion between Protestants and Catholics is possible only in an exceptional and singular instance which does not alter the terrible flow of events. We are reminded that the rift is recent, and left in a state of shock that such neighborly or even familial closeness has been so rapidly polarized by the early events of the wars. Pity marks the flickering of something that reaches across those boundaries, but it never manages to make room for a lasting understanding or peace. Loys’s observation of that passing pitiful instant speaks of a relatively moderate Catholic positioning that can still imagine a compassionate gesture from the other side, something akin to what would later be the position of the “politiques.”

      This Catholic language of pity would also become ripe for exploitation by more extremist voices. In his Registre-journal written during the reign of Henri III, the moderate politique Pierre de l’Estoile recounts an incident that took place in the summer of 1587. The extremist League, the Guisard faction, had placed a painting in a cemetery showing the anti-Catholic cruelties of England’s Elizabeth I, in order to whip up the crowd against the Huguenots. L’Estoile writes that when the “sot peuple” [“stupid people”] of Paris saw it, they fell for the Guise logic and cried out for war: “Il s’esmouvoit, criant qu’il faloit exterminer tous ces meschans Politiques et Huguenos.” [“They were moved, shouting that all the wicked Politiques and Huguenots should be exterminated”]. In early modern usage, “esmouvoir” and “esmoution” refer primarily to unrest; the affective meaning of emotion comes secondarily to the sense of civil disorder, and L’Estoile suggests that here the crowd is moved to passionate unrest. In order to prevent this misuse of spectacle by the Ligue, the king’s more moderate forces then had to act without themselves causing a spectacle; the king orders that the painting be removed “mais le plus secrettement et modestement qu’ils pourroient, crainte d’esmotion” [“but the most secretly and modestly as possible, for fear of emotion/unrest”].³³ L’Estoile clearly means that the king seeks to order unrest; but his text also suggest that such an “esmotion” can arise from the exploitation of what we today call emotion in the form of the pitiful spectacle. The Ligue respond to the king’s gesture by turning the missing painting into an emotional ekphrasis, placing sonnets all over town:

      Laissez cette peinture, ô Renars politiques,

      Laissez cette peinture, en laquelle on void peints

      Les spectacles piteux et les corps de sang teints,

      Sang, dy je, bien heureux des devots catholiques.

      [Leave this painting, you politique foxes,

      Leave this painting, in which we see painted

      Pitiful spectacles and bodies drenched in blood,

      The blessed blood, I say, of our devout Catholics.]

      Here in the Ligue account, the pitiful spectacle functions as a set term in which the target audience knows indisputably who is the object of our pity and who is responsible for such a situation.³⁴ Pierre de l’Estoile’s response insists that the pitiful spectacle is dangerous propaganda; it must be skirted around by moderates and controlled lest the ignorant masses be abused. The two meanings of emotion, feeling and unrest, are all too easily brought into dangerous relation with one another.

      Catholic usage and wariness of this language tells us much about the shaping of attention and affect in prose and political life of the period. But it was Protestant writers who rendered the topos in the most compelling style, often drawing across the party line on Catholic inspiration. In Protestant writing, the pitiful spectacle becomes a reflection not merely of contemporary France but a meditation on how affective sight lines can build and maintain a political community.

      Protestant Pity

      In the first decade of the wars, a moderate Protestant invocation of pity was almost indistinguishable from the language employed by Ronsard, forming a category described by the literary historian Jacques Pineaux as “chants d’appel” [“appeal songs”].³⁵ Reformist writers of this period sing for peace. Estienne Valancier’s Complainte de la France of 1568 calls on the French people to stop the war and silence “les chants piteux / Que tu orras ici chanter la France” [“the pitiful songs / That you hear France sing”].³⁶ Likewise the moderate Protestant historian La Popelinière’s Vraye et entiere histoire de ces derniers troubles of 1571, dedicated to the nobility of France, features an end poem praising the compassion of the young king and calling for peace.³⁷ In both these invocations, it is France herself that is the object of pity, and writers speak to and sometimes for an imagined whole of France. After Saint Barthélemy, however, a more embattled form of pity makes itself heard; its language, central to Protestant polemic and to the making of a more martial literature, slices into that imagined whole.

      It is not coincidental that the discourse of the pitiful spectacle is so prevalent in Protestant writing, and it is not so merely because Protestant forces suffered the greater blows during the wars. Protestant thinkers were already highly ambivalent about the status of the image. Stuart Clark describes the Protestant reformation as a “shock to early modern Europe’s visual confidence” that made vision itself the “subject of fierce and unprecedented confessional dispute.”³⁸

      Where