Читать книгу Compassion's Edge - Katherine Ibbett - Страница 8

Chapter 1

Pitiful Sights

Reading the Wars of Religion

On dit prov. Guerre et pitié ne s’accordent pas ensemble, pour dire, qu’Ordinairement à la guerre on n’est pas fort touché de pitié, et que mesme il est quelquefois dangereux de l’estre.

[One says proverbially War and pity do not go well together, to mean that ordinarily in war one is not much moved by pity, and that sometimes it is even dangerous to be so moved.]

So a 1694 dictionary tells us.¹ In this opening chapter, though, and more broadly throughout the book that follows, I investigate the ways in which war and pity were necessarily connected in early modern France. I turn first to one particular and powerfully formative intertwining of war and pity: the topos of the “pitoyable spectacle” or “pitiful spectacle” that punctuates writing from the period of the Wars of Religion on both the Catholic and Protestant sides. This topos functioned as an apparatus for the apportioning and directing of pity, underscoring the increasing partisanship of the wars. What did it mean for history on both sides to be told with such repetitive recourse to the pitiful spectacle?

The insistence on spectacle was a strange feature of printed texts about and from the Wars of Religion, especially those by Protestants. These texts often insisted on the verbal quality of their message, the senseless noise of battle translated into words that could be carried like a militant gospel to those ready to hear it. In the capture of one French town, wrote the Protestant historian Simon Goulart, the streets resounded with sighs, with lamentations, yells and miserable groans, all mixed up together as a confused noise and strange tintamarre heard throughout the town. In short, Goulart concluded, “it was a pitoyable spectacle, a pitiful sight.”² In Goulart’s very typical formulation, noise becomes spectacle and spectacle in turn becomes words. The pitiful spectacle depends on the transubstantiation of the printed page. It is a thing witnessed by those present that through the medium of print becomes something readers, too, can look upon. (It is worth noting that Goulart wasn’t there, either; he relied on others for his accounts.) But the reader’s eye does not merely glance back to what is recounted; in painting such a sight, the author imagines a future for the scene of sorrow. The discourse of the pitiful spectacle imagines emotional spectators and readers, crafting a future in which the pain of the past will make itself insistently seen and heard and in the process will become central to the history of the wars on both deeply contested sides. In this chapter, I sift through the pitiful spectacle’s appearance on the Catholic side (Pierre Ronsard, the genre of the histoire tragique, Loys de Perussiis, and Pierre de l’Estoile), before turning to the principal Protestant spectacle-shapers, Jean de Léry and Agrippa d’Aubigné, and then considering a rather different iteration of the topos in the Essais of the moderate Michel de Montaigne.³ But before we hear from the partisans, I will try to give a less impassioned account of events.

It is hard to settle on any single account of the Wars of Religion, whose historiography has from the beginning been fragmentary and partial.⁴ The writing of the wars involved conflicting and competing genres and voices, building to a cacophony of confused noise. The colloquy of Poissy in 1561, at which Catholics agreed to give the “parti protestant” or Huguenots a hearing, sought to establish some shared ground on forms of worship but was unable to do so. In 1562 Catherine de Médici’s regency government introduced the Edict of Saint-Germain, which allowed a very limited freedom of worship for Protestants and encouraged tolerant relations between the two communities. Yet in March of that same year members of the ultra-Catholic Guise family household attacked a Protestant service and a massacre followed, opening what would be almost four decades of violence.

Historians sometimes distinguish between a series of wars—usually eight in total—each brought to a close by an edict or treaty, initially making concessions or granting amnesty to the Protestants and insisting on the forgetting of what had come before.⁵ On each occasion the suppression of Protestant freedoms started up again soon afterward. In between the promised pauses, violence was widespread across most regions of France and across ranks, with hugely damaging effect on the noncombatants dragged in its wake. A particularly bloody turning point was the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of August 1572, in which Protestant leaders and nobles gathered in Paris for a wedding between the king’s Catholic sister and the Protestant Henri de Navarre were slaughtered by the Guise faction; approximately two thousand died in Paris and three thousand in the provinces.⁶ The death and mutilation of the Protestant leader Coligny, a key event of the massacre, figured in Protestant martyrologies and Catholic celebrations for decades thereafter; the tortured body of Coligny frequently figured as a spectacle at the center of accounts of the wars from both sides, becoming what a contemporary described as a “spectacle à tout le peuple” [“spectacle for all the people”].⁷ Huguenot strength was seriously diminished after the massacre, but the rancor and revenge stirred up by the events would prove central to Huguenot organization in the coming decades. In response to the increasing partisan violence on both sides, the years after Saint-Barthélémy also saw the development of a more moderate Catholic grouping who came to be known as the politiques; figures such as Michel de l’Hôpital and Jean Bodin began to look toward a secular state that would not be driven by religious factionalism.⁸

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 bois,

Si moy que la Nature a fait naistre François,

Aux siècles à venir je ne contois la peine

Et l’extreme Malheur dont nostre France est pleine. (1–4)

[My lady, I would be made of lead or of wood,

If I, whom Nature made born a Frenchman,

Did not, to the centuries to come, recount the suffering

And the extreme unhappiness with which our France is beset.]

In the first poem France herself, the whole nation, is the object of pity because of her internal divisions; in the second, factionalism makes a conditional unpitier imaginable. This distinction between the sensitive pitier and the unpitying other will later come to full fruition in the partisan Protestant epic of Ronsard’s great reader Agrippa d’Aubigné.

Yet if pity’s grammar was shared on both sides, Catholic emotive language bemoaning the civil wars often looks rather more like courtly tropes than it does the epic models on which Protestants draw. Where Ronsard’s love poetry, decades earlier, had drawn on Petrarchan tropes of the pitiless woman spurning her lover, now Ronsard set out the binaries of pitiful and pitiless in a martial context.²⁰ Wartime texts like the poem “Complainte sur les miseres de la guerre civile” set into Jacques Yver’s Le Printemps of 1570, in which six nobles gather together to spin tales taking their mind off the war, consistently recycle the figure of the spurned lover, this time voiced by a distressed France: “Jamais de mon piteux œil / Ne se tarit la fontaine” [“Never shall my pitiful eye / See its fountain run dry”].²¹ This is language that provides a familiar literary framework through which to understand France’s crisis; it seeks not to shock but to console.

The Catholic language of pity also draws on a more generalized sensationalism stemming from the genre known as the histoire tragique, in which accounts of the wars blend in with other sorts of horror. In these stories pity marks the stakes of a story in which it is important to take sides. The histoire tragique displays horrors so that readers might be directed to the right—Catholic—path, and the represented and elicited pity displays the proper feelings we must show. The collections of Histoires tragiques (1559–60) by Pierre Boaistuau and François de Belleforest established the topoi of the genre just before the outbreak of the wars; as the wars evolved, so did the genre.²² These stories often ended with a pitiful spectacle, a body over which readers were asked both to mourn and to reflect on their own Christian comportment. One figures a woman about to be executed who calls on her children to fear God “et que souvent ils eussent à se rémemorer ce piteux spectacle” [“and that often they might recall this pitiful spectacle”].²³ The genre was rapidly widespread and instantly recognizable, with each production vying for superlatives. A Complainte pitoyable d’une damoyselle angloise qui a heu la teste tranchée [Pitiful complaint of an English maiden who had her head cut off] published in La Rochelle in 1600 notes, “Entre les calamités plus pitoyables, qui sont arrivés en ce siecle au sexe feminin: Cestuy-ci me semble tres digne d’estre remarqué.” [“Between the most pitiful calamities which have happened to women in this present time, this one seems to me very worthy of comment.”] Like the versions forty years before, this story too ends with the family weeping over a body, and the insistence that “chacun avoit pitié et horreur d’un si piteux spectacle” [“everyone felt pity and horror at such a pitiful spectacle”]. This pairing of pity with horror draws loosely on Aristotle’s pairing in the Poetics, in which the pity we feel for a sufferer is accompanied by a fear that a similar suffering may befall us (this pairing returns in the following chapter). It points to the beginnings of the language of tragic response that will structure seventeenth-century discussions of compassion, even if later French readers would likely have been familiar with the pairing as much from the histoire tragique as from more formal discourses on tragedy.²⁴

In its insistence on the horrors of “this time,” the story of the executed Anglaise is typical of the histoire tragique’s mingled methodology, in which ubiquity and horrific particularity are simultaneously underlined. The wars make themselves felt in such stories as both outlying horror and ever-present backdrop for “ce siècle,” this present time. The Parisian Catholic Christophe de Bordeaux wrote chiefly about the wars, but in a Discours lamentable et pitoyable sur la calamité, cherté et necessité du temps present [Lamentable and pitiful discourse on the calamities, scarcities and necessities of the present time] (1586) he offers a story that is both about the wars and yet displaces their details from their specific emplotments.²⁵ Christophe’s account of the “temps present” moves through a number of famine stories from the Bible to Léry ending with the story of a woman who strangles her children because she has nothing to feed them. The Catholic Christophe even borrows the most horrific point of his story—a cannibal mother—from the Protestant writer Jean de Léry’s account of the siege of Sancerre, to which I will return later. Pushing Ronsard’s more stately allegorical language into the realm of faits divers, Christophe piles up the language of fellow-feeling in a rush of hendiadys: he tells us a story “plaine de commiseration et pitié” [“full of commiseration and pity”].²⁶ The starving widow was refused “pitié et commiseration” (c3) [“pity and commiseration”] by others, and so, as frequent authorial nudges remind us, it will fall to the readers to supply the necessary emotion. A family who stitch themselves into their sheets and wait to die are “chose si pitoyable que je ne sache cueur si dyamantin qui ne fust rompu voyant une telle pitié” (a4) [“something so pitiful that I know no heart hard enough that it was not broken on seeing such a pity”]. Such language asks the readers to lean in to see the scene and test their hearts. The story denounces the hardheartedness of present-day France but also allows its readers—or spectators—a ghoulish thrill along the way.

The pitiful spectacle’s many invitations to its readers suggest the extent to which this genre seeks to shape an ideal readerly community. The topos frames our viewing of particular sights: it builds careful sight lines along which our sentiment can be properly organized. Like many texts of the late sixteenth century, Christophe begins his account by addressing “lecteurs mes amis.”²⁷ The ideal reader is the friend, a person on side with the writer. These texts build both ideal community and ideal reader at the same time and as necessary conditions of each other. With the reflowering of the histoires tragiques in the early seventeenth century, pitiful scenes are increasingly directed to our attention not by the characters but by the narrator. In François de Rosset’s Histoires mémorables et tragiques de ce temps (1619) the narrator pauses to exclaim, “Démons de la douleur, génies effroyables, prêtez-moi vos plaintes lamentables, afin que je puisse dignement décrire cette pitoyable aventure!” [“Demons of pain, terrifying sprites, lend me your lamentable plaints so that I may properly describe this pitiful adventure!”]²⁸ In Pierre Boitel’s Le théâtre tragique of 1622 the narrator begins quite straightforwardly, “C’est ici une histoire digne de compassion.” [“This is a story worthy of compassion.”]²⁹ The histoire tragique chivvies its reader into the proper affective stance, deriving some of its authority from the wartime need to choose sides amidst the difficulties of the “present time.”

The clunky narratorial interventions of this sensationalist genre go on to shape more refined forms of fiction throughout the seventeenth century. In Boaistuau and Belleforest’s 1559 collection of histoires tragiques, which piles up the possible instances of pity, a woman imprisoned writes to her jailer in the hope of moving him to “quelque compassion et pitié” [“some compassion and pity”] as “l’objet d’un si piteux spectacle” [“the object of such a pitiful spectacle”].³⁰ When the jailer reads her letter he is “surpris de grand sursaut car haine et pitié, amour et dédain (ainsi que dedans la nuée le chaud et le froid avec plusieurs vents contraires) commencèrent à se débattre et contrarier en son cœur” [“surprised with a great start, for hatred and pity, love and disdain (as clouds mix together heat and cold with several contrary winds) started to battle and contradict themselves in his heart”].³¹ Here, the flickering of pity and its eventual loss shapes both a sense of character and our readerly response to such figures. Similar scenes in which women ask for pity and men respond with mixed emotions will in more elegantly poised prose punctuate the late seventeenth-century nouvelle historique and early novel seen in Chapter 4.

The demarcation of readerly community was particularly fraught in the 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 Catholic tradition had insisted that the sight of suffering alone was enough to affect and convert the onlooker, Protestant martyrologies like Jean Crespin’s Livre des martyrs gave rise instead to a great outpouring of words. Protestant histories customarily added appendices of names of the sufferers, recording those unspectacular deaths that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. This genre of history forged Protestantism; it allowed a wider audience to bear witness to Protestant suffering, although they were not present at the scene. For Théodore de Bèze, leader of the French Protestant movement, historical writing allows for an expansion in time and space: “L’histoire est le seul moyen par lequel … l’homme peut cognoistre ce qu’il n’a oncques veu ni ouy, voire sans aucun danger, et trop mieux, bien souvent, que si luy-mesme l’avoit ouy ou veu.” [“History is the only way that man can know what he has never seen or heard, with no danger, and better, very often, than if he himself had heard or seen it.”]³⁹ Reading grants a privileged perspective on events, and that perspective forms the Protestant community.

The texts that make the Protestant reader make clear the position from which they speak. Andrea Frisch has shown how the premodern witness is not an isolated individual but always what she calls “dialogic”; the witness’s account draws attention to its status as something “overtly constructed and made.”⁴⁰ This means that the witness must establish himself as part of the same group as his readers; he is trusted not because of what he says but because of who he is.⁴¹ Thus in Jean de Léry’s Histoire memorable de la ville de Sancerre, the address to the reader carves out the author’s right to speak and to be heard based on his identity as a Protestant: “Pource que je suis, et seray jusques à la fin de ma vie, moyennant la grace de Dieu, du nombre de ceux qui font profession de la Religion, pour laquelle la ville de Sancerre a este ainsi rudiment et estrangement traictee que la presente Histoire le contient.” [“Because I am, and if the grace of God allows will be until the end of my life, one of those who profess the religion for which the town of Sancerre has been so rudely and uncouthly treated, as the present story tells.”]⁴² Léry hopes that those who have been there will be able to “recongoistre” [“recognize”] what they saw, but his desire is also to expand the audience beyond the immediate witnesses: “Mais il y a une autre sorte de gens auquels je desire aussi de satisfaire, afin que de cette Histoire ils puissant recueillir le fruit.” [“But there is another kind of person I would like to satisfy, so that they may harvest the fruit of this story.”]⁴³ Written after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre at a time of horror for Protestant France, Léry’s preamble presorts writers and readers so that the right sort of history will build the right sort of religious community.

This careful construction work comes with detailed attention to sight lines and spectatorship, an attention to who sees what, and how. Léry’s history posits insiders and outsiders very clearly; he even supplies diagrams of each military position he describes. Sancerre was the site of a siege famous for its famine, which pushed a couple to cannibalism after the death of their daughter; the scene returns in innumerable texts of the period, including Christophe de Bordeaux’s Discours lamentable, described above, and Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques. Léry insists on the particularity of this French crime:

Car combien que j’aye demeuré dix mois entre les Sauvages Ameriquains en la terre du Bresil, leur ayant veu souvent manger de la chair humaine … si n’en ay-je jamais eu telle terreur que j’eu frayeur de voir ce piteux spectacle, lequel n’avoit encores (comme je croy) jamais esté veu en ville assiegee en nostre France. (147)

[For though I lived for ten months with the American savages in the land of Brazil, having often seen them eat human flesh … I have never been as terrified as I was frightened to see this pitiful spectacle, which had not yet (or so I believe) ever been seen in a besieged town in our France.]

This scene is the baseline Protestant pitiful spectacle to which many others make reference; like the histoires tragiques which sometimes draw on it, it pairs pity and terror in Aristotelian style but brings its horror home to “nostre France.” The spectacle is superlative, and signaled as such, but also paradoxically reiterable; pages later, Léry asks of still another scene, “Qui a jamais ouy ni entendu chose plus pitoyable?” [“Who has ever heard or listened to such a pitiful thing?”]⁴⁴ The aural hendiadys (ouy, entendu) intensifies the urgency with which we are asked to listen. In its piling up of examples and its insistent hendiadys in describing each case, the pitiful spectacle is compassion as copia, a profusion that asks us to look back to painful memories even as we attempt to build France’s future.

Another scene from Léry’s account of the siege of Sancerre makes the pitiful spectacle into a sorting mechanism that sifts the right sort of spectator or reader from the wrong. He tells the story of Protestant townspeople up against Catholic forces, all of whom were barricaded into the castle. The townspeople go to the castle and parade old people, women, and children in front of the opposing forces, “pensans esmouvoir à pitié ceux qui estoyent dans les Chasteau” [“thinking to move those inside the castle to pity”].⁴⁵ Pity is structured around an inside and outside, and here those outside the circle ask to be let in. But the townspeople’s attempts to soften the hearts of their opponents does not work; far from being moved to pity, those inside the castle throw things at them. In the history of the French pitiful spectacle, this invention of the pitiless spectator is the key Protestant innovation.

Agrippa d’Aubigné

Both pitiful sight and pitiless spectator are central to the most ferociously partisan of Protestant texts, Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques. First composed starting in 1577, as he lay injured after fighting at Casteljaloux, d’Aubigné’s text was unpublished until 1616, although fragments seem to have circulated in manuscript well before. The text’s dizzying temporality is thus able to conjure up the bitter period of intense battles between Catholics and Protestants as well as its eventual end; in the preface “Aux lecteurs” d’Aubigné even claims that Henri de Navarre had read and reread the text before he took the throne in 1589.⁴⁶ Its title draws on the genre of the histoire tragique, but d’Aubigné is busy recycling all sorts of references from all sides. He uses Léry’s account of Sancerre in one of his most searing passages on a cannibalistic mother; reaching across the sectarian divide, he also calls up Ronsard, to whose work he was dedicated and whose allegorical maternal France, coupled with Léry’s cannibal mother, reappears in ghoulish format in his text.⁴⁷

Most strikingly, d’Aubigné’s text revels in a series of ekphrases, turning ghastly sights into words; four of the seven books (III, La Chambre dorée; IV, Feux; V, Fers; VI, Vengeances) are structured as a series of visual tableaux, satirizing an unjust justice and recounting martyrdoms and massacres.⁴⁸ The presence of these tableaux might seem jarring given Calvinist rage against artifice and ornament.⁴⁹ Yet in the Tragiques, visuality is redeemed for the Protestant reader. Ekphrasis and enargeia—the process of making visible—were central to the training of classical orators, and they shape what Simon Goldhill calls “a viewing subject.”⁵⁰ These exercises were central to d’Aubigné’s rhetorical training and to the drive of his poetical projects. In insisting on the shaping of the viewing subject, d’Aubigné’s tableaux and their imagined affective response prompt us to a reflection on perspective.⁵¹ In the Tragiques it is pity or its absence that allows us to gauge the presence of suffering; we know the violence of the wars because we are continually provided with spectators’ reactions to it. The sight of the suffering body matters less than the emotional reaction—or mourned absence of such a reaction—to it.

The importance of the imagined spectator might seem to sit uneasily with d’Aubigné’s famous call to his readers to abandon any hope of distancing themselves from the events of the wars: “Vous n’estes spectateurs, vous estes personages” (I:170). [“You are not spectators, you are characters.”]⁵² The text urges Protestant readers to think of themselves positioned within the battles but at the same time asks them to look on at scenes presented through images, or indeed to look upon those who look on, making them into a hybrid and displaced spectator-actor. David Quint has suggested the Stoic who shows constancy faced with death as the ideal figure of the Tragiques, exemplified by the figure of Coligny, who is described in terms which recall Lucan’s Cato.⁵³ To be an actor in civil wars, one must show constancy. But d’Aubigné’s text complicates this inheritance by inquiring into the proper affective stance of those who are spectators and will never be anything else. Though he urges or praises constancy from actors, he also drafts the urgent necessity of an affective response to the wars.⁵⁴

It is not enough, of course, just to be roused to emotion in seeing; the Protestant suspicion of illusion means that the connections between looking and feeling and acting must be carefully delineated. The text presents a clear rift between those who see poorly and those who see right. Sometimes the evil thrive, d’Aubigné tells us, but we must not let ourselves be fooled by thinking that such earthly success is all. In Les Feux the narrator drives away worldly illusions:

Si la prosperité dont le meschant jouit

Vous trompe et vous esmeut, vostre sens s’esblouit

Comme l’œil d’un enfant, qui en la tragédie,

Void un coquin pour roy … (IV:819–22)

[If the prosperity the wicked man enjoys

Tricks you and moves you, your senses are dazzled

Like the eye of a child, who in a tragedy

Takes a wretch for a king …]

This theatrical illusion is the model for bad seeing, in which we are fooled and moved. In contrast, d’Aubigné proffers exemplars who see correctly. A son whose weeping father has been condemned to die tells him:

Mon amour est esmeu, l’ame n’est pas esmeuë,

Le sang non pas le sens se trouble à vostre veuê:

Vostre blanche vieillesse a tiré de mes yeux

De l’eau, mais mon esprit est un fourneau de feux. (IV:937–40)

[My love is moved, but my soul is not moved,

My blood but not my judgment is troubled at your sight:

Your gray-haired age has pulled water

From my eyes, but my mind is a fiery furnace.]

This correct vision makes room for emotion—the response of love—but does not trouble rationality; blood can boil and eyes can weep, but the seer is not fooled and remains untroubled. This austere and distanced appraisal is the model Protestant emotional response. Like that model son, even when they suffered losses Protestants were so certain of their position as God’s elect that they could imagine themselves to have won a heavenly victory if not an earthly one.⁵⁵ Against a background of such radical indifference to earthly outcomes, Protestants rewrite the relation between affect and action. It is more important to feel properly than to have brought about earthly victory. D’Aubigné’s take on pity asks not only what sort of emotion might be the best response to suffering but also what kind of an action emotion might be. Might that affective response alone be enough to guarantee the future of the Protestant Church?

In d’Aubigné’s telling the true distinction of the Wars of Religion is less theological then emotional. From his opening address to readers, d’Aubigné stakes his claim to wrangle with the emotions of his audience. People are bored of books that teach, he writes, and they clamor for something else, for the writer to “esmouvoir” [“move”] (Au Lecteur:13) them, even if seeking to move others might suggest “la passion partizane” [“partisan passion”] (AL:167), a label d’Aubigné takes on with gusto.⁵⁶ As it is for other writers of the wars, the pitiful spectacle is d’Aubigné’s prime way to move readers. The first book Miseres is described as a “tableau piteux du royaume en general” [“pitiful painting of the whole kingdom”] (AL:134), and it opens the way for long sequences of tableaux which encapsulate the bloody action of the religious wars: allegories, portraits, dreams, and so on. Throughout these scenes, d’Aubigné forms the reader’s properly directed emotion by labeling events with their affective force: readers are urged to look upon “Le massacre piteux de noz petits enfans” [“the pitiful massacre of our little children”] (I:408), or more generally on “l’estat piteux de nos calamitez” [“the pitiful state of our calamities”] (I:1207). This adjectival usage is compulsively partisan, and in its forceful repetitions it underlines the partisan structure of pity itself. In one telling couplet—“Quand esperdu je voy les honteuses pitiez / Et d’un corps divisé les funebres moitiez” [“When lost I see the shameful pity / Of a divided body the deadly moiety”] (I:131–32)—the rhyme words, pity and moiety, underline the affective distinctions and divisions at work. To pity is to observe a distinction between sufferer and observer; and to write about pity, as d’Aubigné does so insistently, is also to observe a distinction between those who pity and those who do not.

One key passage in Les Feux, detailing the execution of the English Protestant Anne Askew, sets out the clear structure of this affective otherness. When presented with the scene of her torture, this extraordinary exemplar takes pity on those who inflict pain on her: “On presente à ses yeux l’espouventable gehenne, / Et elle avoit pitié en souffrant de la peine / De ces faux justiciers.” [“They present to her eyes the dreadful rack / And she took pity on them, feeling grief / For the false justice of her jailers”] (IV:161–63). In contrast, her jailers’ anger blinds them to such generous emotion: “la passion desrobbe / La pitié de leurs yeux” [“passion steals / pity from their eyes” (IV:174–75). D’Aubigné presents us with a scene that ought to bring about pity but that instead underscores only the emotional gulf between Catholic and Protestant, in which one passion, an anger so great as not to need a specific name, drives out the more precise response of pity. In these pages, we know Askew is a martyr because of her eyes on heaven; we know the judge is a tyrant because of his pitiless response. As if to underwrite the correct way to look, we learn that God himself responds to the sight of the English martyrs with pity, seeing “deux precieux tableaux, / Deux spectacles piteux” [“two precious tableaux, two pitiful spectacles”] (IV:151–52). In looking without pity, the Catholic cuts himself off from God.

This identifying unpity structures the ethical world of the Tragiques. We recognize the enemy other by their lack of emotion faced with scenes that ought to bring about pity, scenes in which the ordinary affect of human intimacy is denied: “ces proches inhumains / Dessus ces tendres corps impiteux s’endurcirent” [“these inhuman neighbors / grew hardhearted and pitiless over these tender bodies”] (IV:1016–17); in battle the Catholics sound the noisy alarm “de peur que les voix tremblantes, lamentables, / Ne tirent la pitié des cœurs impitoyables” [“lest the trembling, lamentable voices / Pull pity from pitiless hearts”] (IV:569–70). It is not just historically identifiable characters who are marked out by their pitilessness; in La Chambre dorée, d’Aubigné sketches a series of pitiless allegorical figures: Cruelty, with a portrait of pity thrown at her feet (III:379); pitiless Stupidity (352); Ignorance, lacking pity (365); Ire, veiled “De peur que la pitié ne volle dans le cœur / Par les portes des yeux” [“Lest pity fly into her heart / Through the doors of her eyes”] (303–4). All of these figures refuse sight and in so doing refuse pity.⁵⁷ D’Aubigné places modern Protestant suffering as part of a long history of the elect; even the massacre of the Innocents “ne sonnoient la pitié dans les cœurs impiteux” [“could not sound pity from the depths of pitiless hearts”] (VI:468). Pitilessness places the enemy beyond the transhistorical bounds of humanity: “ce cœur sans Oreille, et ce sein endurcy / Que l’humaine pitié, que la tendre mercy / N’avoient sceu transpercer” [“this unlistening heart, this hardened breast unpierced / by human pity and tender mercy”] (VI:475–77). D’Aubigné wields the label of humanity not as a universalizing gesture but as another rhetorical weapon allowing him to distinguish between sides: on one side humans, on the other horror. He holds out the hope that pity will bring the other side round, that it may serve as a weapon of proselytization—“La je vis estonnez les cœurs impitoyables” [“There I saw pitiless hearts amazed”] (I:433), he writes of one moment of proper response—but such moments are always isolated. The pitiful spectacle allows us to distinguish between sides; it is a contrivance for the proper direction of attention, the apportioning and distribution of affect, and for the immediate identification of those who ally themselves against the true faith whether throughout history or in the present day.⁵⁸

One particular pitiless figure in the Tragiques, whose presence reverberates throughout the text, is of particular historical significance for the French early modern configuration of pity: the pitiless mother. D’Aubigné returns to this figure again and again. In the opening pages of Miseres, he sets up France as mother. Later in Miseres, that maternal figure reappears in viciously deranged guise as the cannibal mother who eats her own child during a siege, and in order to act so dreadfully she must deny all pity even as she invites it:

La mere deffaisant pitoyable et farouche,

Les liens de pitié avec ceux de sa couche,

Les entrailles d’amour, les filets de son flanc,

Les intestins bruslans, par les tressauts du sang,

Le sens, l’humanité, le cœur esmeu qui tremble,

Tout cela se destord, et se desmesle ensemble. (I:505–10)

[The mother, pitiful and wild, undoing

The bonds of pity and those of family,

The bowels of love, the filiation of her flanks,

Her burning guts, through the leaping of her blood,

The sense, the humanity, the moved heart which trembles,

All that is tangled and untangled together.]

Yet here the pitiless mother, undoing the bonds of pity and the bowels of love (recalling the biblical bowels of compassion) is herself worthy of pity, “pitoyable et farouche.” Even as her wildness places her beyond the bounds of humanity, she is still somehow within the reach of our emotion. D’Aubigné plays here on the twin valence of pitoyable, to be full of pity or to be worthy of pity, and lets us feel the painful balance between the two possibilities. This mother is not like the pitiless figures above; she undoes her pity from necessity. It is not the mother but an allegorized and agency-bearing hunger that is without pity:

Cette main s’emploioit pour la vie autrefois,

Maintenant à la mort elle emploie ses doigts,

La mort, qui d’un costé se presente effroyable,

La faim de l’autre bout bourrelle impitoyable:

La mere ayant long-temps combatu dans son cœur,

Le feu de la pitié, de la faim la fureur … (I:515–20)

[This hand was once used for life,

Now for death it uses its fingers,

On one side dreadful death,

But hunger on the other side torments without pity:

The mother having long fought in her heart

Against pity’s fire and hunger’s rage …]

The mother is herself divided, between love and the drive to survive, between the sweetly nostalgic sigh for the sustaining “autrefois” and her dreadful future. Unlike the allegorical pitiless women elsewhere in the text—Stupidity with her dead complexion (III:350–51)—this mother is still fleshly, still human even as she trembles on the border of humanity. This is a touched and touching figure, despite her horrific action. And where d’Aubigné’s usual assignation of pity or unpity marks the absolute divide between Protestant and Catholic, here the mother’s troubled unpity is a sign of her own internal divisions: she is both sufferer and causer of suffering, a Protestant who has lost her natural pity through no fault of her own. As d’Aubigné puts it, “C’est en ces sieges lents, ces sieges sans pitié, / Que des seins plus aymants, s’envole l’amitié” [“It is in these slow sieges, these pitiless sieges / That love flees from the most loving breasts”] (I:499–500). It is the times that are without pity, not the poor pitiful mothers. The sorting mechanism of pity fails for a moment as it encounters the troubled figure of the mother.

This version of the pitiless mother is, I contend, a historically significant figure. It recalls, of course, the figure of Catherine de Médicis, the queen mother reviled as pitiless by the Protestants. But more significantly it bitterly revises the allegorical figure of France as mother. D’Aubigné’s dreadful imagining of this most inhuman and yet pitiable figure seems to mark a limit case that cannot be repeated. In sketching the mother who cannot show pity, d’Aubigné draws on seemingly unshakable gender norms to imagine the horrors of what history had wrought. In Léry’s account of the siege of Sancerre, from which d’Aubigné draws this scene, it is a couple who eat their child. Here, d’Aubigné focuses on the woman alone in order to shock his readership more effectively. As Sarah McNamer has shown, late medieval and early Renaissance reckonings of pity and compassion drafted such emotions as the ultimate feminine virtue, stemming from a tradition of Marian worship.⁵⁹ Such figures are frequent in France in the sixteenth century, too, but seventeenth-century compassion is largely a masculine preserve. Of course, theological battles between Catholic and Protestant had made the Marian figure more controversial. But I suggest that the compassionate as mother disappears chiefly because of wartime accounts such as that of Léry, and d’Aubigné’s extraordinary pitiful rendering of them. After the cannibal mother, the representation of female compassion becomes impossible. To what new figure does d’Aubigné point in her place?

Another maternal scene suggests the new affective exemplar after the displacement of the compassionate mother. A mother divided against her maternity returns in different form with d’Aubigné’s ekphrasis of the judgment of Salomon, where two mothers dispute their claim on one child:

On void l’enfant en l’air par deux soldats suspendre,

L’affamé coutelas, qui brille pour le fendre:

Des deux meres le front, l’un pasle et sans pitié,

L’autre la larme à l’œil tout en feu d’amitié. (III:725–28)

[We see the child suspended in the air by two soldiers,

The hungry sword, which shines ready to cut him in two:

The faces of the two mothers, one pale and pitiless,

The other, tears in her eyes and burning with love.]

The emotional rift between these two mothers recalls the divisions of France: on the one side pity and on the other the absence of affect. Both mothers are looking at the same thing, but they respond to what they see differently, figuring once again the absolute distinction between pity and unpity stitched throughout this text. Yet ultimately their emotional response is of less import than the careful response of Salomon the judge. Salomon judges not the mothers’ actions but their affective response; in turn, d’Aubigné asks his readers to reflect on which kind of looking and which kind of emotional response entails that we will, at the Last Judgment, be judged to be right. In this settlement, as elsewhere in the period, the ideal compassionate is not the maternal nurturer but rather the cool-headed male judge who apportions affective resources; each side figures themselves as a Salomon, a judge able to respond to the emotion of others to good effect.

In these necessarily partisan accounts, the pitiful spectacle is always related to a structure of judgment.⁶⁰ It posits a binary of spectatorship—the good and the bad, the inside and the outside—and it polices the borders of that binary. But other moderate or politique writers imagined a different affective relation to the spectacle of the wars. In the next section I turn away from the pitiful spectacle that cries out for judgment to the account of the pitiful spectacle given by a retired judge: Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne’s version of this language establishes a less partisan way of seeing and reading.

Pity and Reading: Montaigne

In “De la physionomie” (III, 12), an essay centrally concerned with the wars, the essayist Michel de Montaigne writes,

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.⁶¹

[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 be able to watch it and learn from it.

Thus do we eagerly seek to recognize, even in shadow and in the fiction of the theatres, 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 (pitoyables) events arouses a pain that gives us pleasure.]⁶²

Montaigne’s discussion of spectacle distinguishes between reading accounts of change and seeing them with his own eyes; to this extent he stays within the rhetoric of the eyewitness so important to much writing of the religious wars. But his positioning as reader or witness is very different from that posited by partisan writers. Both reading and seeing allow him to exercise his curiosity, a notion that sets him apart from the partisan spectator. As Neil Kenny describes, early modern curiosity is not only the desire for knowledge; the term also marks a diligence or care (the terms are related) for the object of curiosity. In the sixteenth century it was frowned upon by Catholic and Calvinist orthodoxy alike.⁶³ Montaigne’s curiosity to look upon the spectacle of the wars makes him an observer who is not disinterested, but neither is he blindly driven by affect. His reappraisal of the arousal of pity makes room for an entirely different sort of reading.

Montaigne continues with a statement of some embarrassment at how little these public misfortunes have cost him as a moderate sheltered from the effects of partisan opinion, concluding: “Aussi qu’en matiere d’interests publiques, à mesure que mon affection est plus universellement espandue, elle en est plus foible.” [“Also, in the matter of public calamities, the more universally my sympathy is dispersed, the weaker it is.”]⁶⁴ Montaigne’s pitiful spectacle allows for a less ferociously partisan response and affords its onlooker something almost pleasurable. Where the wartime rhetoric sought to direct and focus affective response, here Montaigne speaks of diffused affections. In this model, one can feel—pitifully, pleasurably—in response to what one sees, but this feeling does not compel communitarian identification nor partisan action. The Essais draft a new model of political spectatorship, moving away from the exemplary toward an imagining of things invisible to the public eye. In “De la gloire” (II, 16) Montaigne inquires into the status of deeds unwitnessed but not unwasted: “Combien de belles action particulières s’ensevelissent dans la foule d’une bataille?” [“How many fine individual actions are buried in the press of a battle!”]⁶⁵ Where Protestant writers build a pitiful spectacle and imagine that the right sort of audience will come, Montaigne is uncertain that any spectacle can give rise to a predictable outcome. How many pitiful sights disappear without anyone being moved at all?

This hesitation about the legitimacy of the pitiful spectacle structures the extraordinary opening essay of Montaigne’s Essais, “Par divers moyens on arrive à pareille fin,” probably written in 1578 and first published as the opening to the first edition of 1580.⁶⁶ Montaigne begins the essay and his book by first explaining a military strategy and then complicating the notion that a strategy can be explained at all:

La plus commune façon d’amollir les cœurs de ceux qu’on a offensez, lors qu’ayant la vengeance en main, ils nous tiennent à leur mercy, c’est de les esmouvoir par submission à commiseration et à pitié. Toutesfois la braverie, et la constance, moyens tous contraires, ont quelquefois servi à ce mesme effect.⁶⁷

[The commonest way of softening the hearts of those we have offended, when, vengeance in hand, they hold us at their mercy, is by submission to move them to commiseration and pity. However, audacity and steadfastness, entirely contrary means, have sometimes served to produce the same effect.]⁶⁸

Montaigne’s exploration of how to soften a victor’s heart is, David Quint suggests, a refraction of his thinking about and through the Wars of Religion.⁶⁹ But unlike the other accounts of pity we have seen stemming from those wars, Montaigne’s essay does not let us rest with an easy distinction between subject and object of pity, pitier and pitied. And unlike most writers discussed throughout this book, he does not deliberate on how or when to grant compassion but rather on how to get it. Montaigne draws on the familiar language of writing the wars but also in this first essay of his book sets a deliberately new tone as thinker, writer, and perhaps most of all reader. “Par divers moyens” sets up reading as a form of response to the wars.

Montaigne’s essay is in part, of course, a reading of and meditation on Seneca, whose essay “De clementia” [“On Mercy”] written for Emperor Nero famously distinguishes between mercy and pity in order to dismiss the latter.⁷⁰ In granting clemency, writes Seneca, we gain security and thus exercise a reasoned mercy; but in pity we lose that rationality and lose our security, too. Seneca’s distinctions between different categories of emotion, attitude, and effect also structure Montaigne’s essay, but where Seneca uses those distinctions to push some categories of emoters aside—notably those who respond to suffering but not its cause—Montaigne lets no distinction remains secure for long. He begins with the example of Edward, prince of Wales, hailed for his greatness, who responded not to supplications but only to the bold resistance of three gentlemen whose “notable vertu” [“remarkable valor”] eventually causes him to “faire misericorde à tous les autres habitans de la ville” [“show mercy to all the inhabitants of the city”].⁷¹ Here greatness responds to the greatness it recognizes in others; compassion, in this instance, responds by following similarity.

The following example gives us the prince Scanderberg, who on the point of killing a soldier is struck by the “resolution” of his foe and desists. Here great nobility reaches across difference and responds to the great virtue of a common man; Montaigne notes that Scanderberg’s refusal to act might be read differently by those “qui n’auront leu” [“who have not read”] (8, 3) the strength and valor of the prince, who might imagine his inaction to be a sign of weakness. In this phrasing, what we see is bolstered by reading; the text hesitates between imagining that we might read the person or have read about the person (Donald Frame translates the line in full as “who have not read about”). Montaigne puts the two practices—reading texts and reading people—in necessary relation with one another.

Earlier in this chapter we saw how compassion proceeds through and constructs rigorous social structures. In “Par divers moyens,” Montaigne moves carefully through a range of such structures, trying out each variation in turn. Already in his first examples of mercy in response to audacity, we see the structural underpinning of supplication and response. In responding to another, we respond across or behind a mesh of similarities and differences: rank, gender, courage. In his third example Montaigne worries at the gendered distinctions between male virtue and womanly softness that are so important to the Stoic tradition: the “cœur magnanime” (8) of the noble women who “great-heartedly” (3) carry their duke and their households on their shoulders so impressed Emperor Conrad that his hatred for the duke is lost and he begins to treat them “humainement” [“humanely”] (8, 4).⁷² Here the emperor responds across a gender distinction but within the circle of nobles. His human treatment is of humans who are, in some way, like him. In this example, you get a better result from your valor if you are the right sort of person to start with. Although Montaigne began by announcing that he would study “the commonest way,” up to this point it looks as though the common way depends almost exclusively on being born noble.

From these historical examples Montaigne falls back upon himself, in what Quint has described as “from an ethical standpoint, the single most important contribution to the self-portrait that will be a major project of his book.”⁷³ We swing from one perspective to another. Leaving behind the position of the vanquished, Montaigne notes that either supplication or Stoicism would undo him were he the victor, “car j’ay une merveilleuse lascheté vers la misericorde et la mansuetude. Tant y a qu’à mon advis je serois pour me rendre plus naturellement à la compassion qu’à l’estimation” (8). [“I am wonderfully lax in the direction of mercy and gentleness. As a matter of fact, I believe I should be likely to surrender more naturally to compassion than to esteem”] (4). This attitude is indeed something we see played out throughout the Essais, in his response to animal suffering in “De la cruauté” (II, 11), or in “De l’expérience” (III, 13) where he speaks of a “naturelle compassion, qui peut infiniement en moy” (1100) [“natural compassion, which has infinite power over me”] (1028) for those he sees suffering in war. This preferential option for pity is, he acknowledges, something that sets him apart from the Stoics, who “veulent qu’on secoure les affligez, mais non pas qu’on flechisse et compatisse avec eux” (8) [want us to succor the afflicted, but not to unbend and sympathize with them”] (4), and as he goes on to note it is “des femmes, des enfans, et du vulgaire” (8) [“women, children, and the common herd”] (4) who are most prone to it. He continues by turning to “ames moins genereuses,” “less lofty souls”, the “peuple” who might be imagined in Stoic terms to be prone to pity. Yet in the example of the Theban people, they too yield to valor rather than supplication: they respond sympathetically to difference rather than sameness, as does Montaigne.

What can we make of this aside on the self which surges up in the midst of the essay’s strange dialectical proceedings? Montaigne’s procedure in this essay is based on Renaissance rhetorical training.⁷⁴ Peter Mack suggests he takes his cue from the Renaissance rhetorician Agricola, who asks in De inventione dialectica “For if we are more likely to pity gladiators the less they beg for life, how much more will a very brave man who despises danger move us?”⁷⁵ But Montaigne’s method also and more importantly suggests a particular disposition of the self. Quint argues that it is not only through commiseration that Montaigne eagerly takes up the “mollesse” or softness criticized by the Stoics, but also through his continual practice of seeing more than one side, practicing “mollesse” as what Quint calls an ethical pliancy.⁷⁶ Montaigne’s acknowledgment of his own pity, and perhaps of his womanliness or vulgarity, is the pivot point of the essay: we pirouette from imagining the position of the pitied to that of the pitier and back again. Where the pitiful spectacles seen earlier in this chapter allowed for only one proper perspective, Montaigne allows himself to try out all positions in response, asking himself: Am I like this historical example, or unlike?

The sifting of similarity and difference that structures the essay’s examples is also crucial as a structuring pattern within each individual example. Montaigne tries out the same but different story again and again in order to establish some sort of common rule for finding commiseration, the emotion which brings people together in common emotion. Distinctions of rank and gender are crucial to the careful choreography of sameness and difference in this essay. Sometimes the great are moved by great virtue (sameness), sometimes the people are (difference); sometimes the greatest, Alexander, is not moved by the valor of Betis for in his greatness he cannot see how uncommon it is: “Seroit-ce que la hardiesse luy fut si commune que, pour ne l’admirer point, il la respectast moins?” (9–10). [“Could it be that hardihood was so common to Alexander that, not marveling at it, he respected it the less?”] (5).⁷⁷ In moving through these examples, Montaigne essays the distinctions between pity and valor, victor and vanquished, noble and common, men and women. From this play of sameness and difference, we see the trickiness of finding a common ground from which one can acknowledge difference. Montaigne tries out different ways to make bonds signify something, looking at the connections between diverse historical examples or between diverse human positions and experiences. Where Seneca (and the Stoic tradition in general) dismissed compassion as a character problem, Montaigne reads it as a structural one. His essay explores not the intention of emotion but rather the edges of its complicated organizational patterns.⁷⁸

Montaigne eventually rereads and revises one essay into another as he adds a palimpsest of objections to his original premise. In parsing these examples, Montaigne gropes his way toward finding a pattern of similarities, examples that can be followed or understood, only to break that pattern in later revisions of the essay by proffering up differences: in the B text (the revision of 1588), the great Alexander who shows cruelty to the obstinate Betis; in the C text (the revision of 1595), Dionysius the Elder who drowns the valorous Phyto because although he, as a great man, is unmoved by Phyto’s valor he fears that the rank and file might admire it. (Dionysius, like Montaigne, fears what will come from spectacle, even if his reaction to that—to kill Phyto away from view—is not necessarily what Montaigne, whose vulgar “mollesse” makes him more akin to the soldiers, would admire.) In a final addition to the essay, Dionysius is moved to act against Phyto because he is a reader, this time reading not the foe but rather the emotions of his soldiers (i.e., reading their reading of the enemy):

Dionysius, lisant dans les yeux de la commune [la foule] de son armée qu’au lieu de s’animer des bravades de cet ennemy vaincu, au mespris de leur chef et de son triomphe, elle alloit s’amolissant par l’estonnement d’une si rare vertu. (9)

[Dionysius, reading in the eyes of the rank and file of his army that, disregarding their leader and his triumph, they were softened by astonishment at such rare valor.]⁷⁹

Reading, then, is necessarily a form of interpretation and judgment of events: a method that can lead to widely diverse ends, since we can never be sure what will stem from such readings.⁸⁰ In the example of Dionysius, it is a way of responding to “la commune” and acting against them; but it is also, contradictorily, a way of establishing some sort of commonality. If Montaigne’s essay reads and rehearses the structures of compassion, it also reaches across them to imagine the sort of common ground between different sorts of text and between writer and reader that can be shared in the process of essaying and reading.⁸¹ Montaigne’s opening shot of the Essais functions as something like a rhetorical captatio benevolentiae to garner the goodwill of his audience. By setting out his own vulnerability, he also asks the reader to take mercy on his book.

Montaigne returns to this link between reading and compassion in an essay that has often been read in a pair with “Par divers moyens”: “Divers evenemens de mesme conseil” (I, 24).⁸² He begins with the story of François duc de Guise, the notoriously unmerciful leader of the Catholic extremist faction, and describes his clemency to someone who has plotted against his life, noting without further comment on Guise’s reputation that this did not save him from another and this time successful attempt on his life. This story becomes part of a larger meditation on fortune, a question brewing in “Par divers moyens” but brought to explicit articulation here. Montaigne notes that fortune has a large part in both writing—which escapes from the author’s intention—and in military enterprises. But in both, he counters that the capacity to read—to sift and to judge—is something more within our own control. Thus, “Un suffisant lecteur descouvre souvant és ecrits d’autruy des perfections autres que celles que l’autheur y a mises et apperceües, et y preste des sens et des visages plus riches” (127). [“An able reader often discovers in other men’s writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects”] (112). The “visage” or face (Frame has it as “aspect”) that we discover in reading is significant, for when Guise speaks to the plotter he knows he is guilty from reading his face: “votre visage le montre” (124) [“your face shows it”] (109). Skillful reading does not save Guise, but it helps him understand what he faces.

In “De la diversion” (III, 4) Montaigne returns again to this question of clemency, recounting how he counseled a young prince (probably Henri de Navarre) away from revenge by diverting him with the idea of “clemence et bonté” (835) [“clemency and kindness”] (769) not solely by praising these virtues but by suggesting what he might gain in them: “Je le destournay à l’ambition” (835). [“I diverted him to ambition”].⁸³ Montaigne nips at the relation between emotion and belief. Just as Henri might not believe in clemency but believes it might stand him in good stead (like Guise), so readers can be moved by fictional regrets even when they do not believe them: “Ainsi nous troublent l’âme les plaintes de fables; et les regrets de Didon et d’Ariadné passionnent ceux mesmes qi ne les croyent point en Virgile et en Catulle” (837). [“Thus the laments in fiction trouble our souls, and in Virgil and Catullus the regrets of Dido and Ariadne impassion even those who do not believe in them”] (771). (We will see the power of these same fictional regrets return in Chapter 2.) Montaigne is untroubled by the fictiveness of these regrets and the nonbelief of the ensuing emotion; he suggests that hired mourners are sometimes carried away by true grief, and recounts Quintilian’s observation that he was sometimes overcome by emotions he sought only to arouse in others (838, 772). He offers the example of local mountain women who both praise and dismiss their husbands in mourning them, “comme pour entrer d’elles mesmes en quelque compensation et se diverter de la pitié au desdain” (838) [“as if to bring themselves to some sort of balance and to turn themselves aside from pity to disdain”] (772). Montaigne praises this “bien meilleure grace” (838) [“much better grace”] (772) which breaks the usual habit of speaking only well of the dead. The women’s emotion-diversion—from pity to disdain and back again—is a mark not of the fickleness of women (as one can imagine it might be elsewhere in this period) but stands in the text as an example of flexibility, and Montaigne gives a name to their activity: they are doing “le prestre martin” (838) [“play the part of Prester Martin”] (772), that is, following a proverbial priest who gave both call and responses as he said the Mass.

The mourning women could be almost comic, but Montaigne is serious about their grace. In their diversions they do better than a pairing of philosophers he had set against each other in another essay also centrally concerned with judgment, “De Democritus et Heraclitus” (I, 50). Contemplating the human condition, Democritus is always laughing; Heraclitus always hangs his head with “pitié et compassion” (303) [“pity and compassion”] (268). In this instance Montaigne plumps for Democritus’s disdain rather than the “estimation” compassion traces for its object. But in the essay on diversion, the mourning women move more flexibly, making an agile flip-flop between each affect or attitude.

The graceful switch of the mountain women returns us to Montaigne’s attempt in “Par divers moyens” to try out the positions of both vanquisher and vanquished. Though judgment is a question central to Montaigne’s Essais, it is a judgment that partakes of both curiosity and compassion; it is capable of inhabiting a range of positions. Where in partisan accounts the pitiful spectacle draws a community together and defines that community from a tightly drawn perspective, Montaigne’s revision of the topos tries out differing kinds of response, imagining and inhabiting different perspectives. Most importantly, Montaigne makes room for a particular model of bystander, emoter, and reader, who can observe with shared sympathy and whose lack of partisan action is a form of “bien meilleure grace.”

In what follows I ask how the seventeenth century, seemingly past the worst of the wars, will frame and respond to the legacy of the sixteenth century’s pitiful spectacle in different ways. Montaigne’s readerly vulnerability with regards to compassion—and especially the regrets of Dido—will recur at sometimes surprising points in this material; but, more often, seventeenth-century writers will draw their circle of compassion narrowly and carve out instead a sovereign scorn for those who ask for mercy. France’s political communities continued to look out for pity long after the end of the wars, but more often took their cue from the partisans than the politiques.