by Timothy Egan
The wonder is that he ever made it off the island of Corsica, a conquered land, bony and hardscrabble. Napoleon worshipped his mother. A Mediterranean beauty, Letizia Bonaparte was married at thirteen and widowed at thirty-five. She came from a respectable family and joined lesser island nobility in matrimony. But the baby-making wore her down. She gave birth to thirteen children, each barely a year apart. Five would die in infancy. “It’s not poverty I’m afraid of,” she told her son when he was coming of age, “it’s the shame.” Living off a small pension and donations from friends and neighbors, she rarely left home except to attend Mass. Her children were her life.
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IN ONE WAY, my mother and Letizia Bonaparte were two of a kind, a century and a half apart. In her late thirties, pregnant with her eighth child, Joan Patricia Egan started to bleed and was rushed to the hospital. It was very hush-hush and frightening around the house. Nobody would tell us what was going on. We stopped fighting. We cried. We cleaned our dinner plates. Was she going to die? Who would sing to us? Who would take us to the bookmobile to load up on Curious George? Who would make us feel wonderful when we felt friendless and alone? She lost the baby, a miscarriage in the third trimester. When she came home, my mother was pale and didn’t talk much for weeks. She sleepwalked through her days in a nightgown and slippers. It was her fault, she said—her fault for losing the child. She felt she was a failure. She was ashamed.
Months later, the hemorrhaging returned—prolonged vaginal bleeding, leaving spots on a kitchen chair, though she was quick to clean them. We saw the blood and were afraid to ask questions. She smoked cigarettes and drank more than one glass of wine and could no longer find solace in a book at night. She was ordered back to the hospital. Her gynecologist said he would have to remove her uterus, a hysterectomy. Her baby-making days were over. No, my mother insisted. First, she would have to get permission from the priest for such a procedure. Father Schwemin said the decision was in the hands of God, being way up there. He passed her on to the bishop, though not before telling her that “the Lord may not be finished with you yet”—meaning, of course, that she was still duty bound to produce new humans. The highest spiritual authority in our diocese was not happy with her medical request. Give up your womb? It belongs to God, said the bishop. The operation could be seen as sinful. But she’d already brought seven kids into this world—wasn’t that enough? Her life was at stake. This onetime fashion model, this artist, this lover of history and politics and music—she’d put aside her passions to be the mother of a big Catholic family. She’d abandoned her dreams of painting, of writing, of doing something creative outside the home, and never said a word of regret about it. For she did not regret the children, not one of them, on any day. She loved being a mother. She just didn’t love being only a mother. But now, facing the prospect that her ability to bring life into this world might be taken as well, she was made to feel horrible.
“Now, Joan . . . ,” said the bishop. “It’s your decision. I’m not a doctor. I can only tell you how the church feels about this.” She chose the hysterectomy. And life.
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NAPOLEON’S MOTHER LIVED to see her son at the peak of his power—the Emperor of France crowning himself at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, overseen by the pope. Letizia was given the title Madame Mother of His Majesty. He had the clergy right where he wanted them, better off than under secular fanatics, yes, but brought to their knees. Or more to the point, his knees. He took the crown from the pope’s hands and placed it on his head, leaving no doubt about the balance of power. In the flush of his earlier victories, Napoleon had sent terms of submission to the Vatican. This son of a devout Corsican Catholic put the church on notice: the pope’s days as a mover of armies were over. The Holy Roman Empire, once stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean, had been broken apart, the pieces falling into nationalistic factions. What was left of it was “an old whore who has been violated by everyone for a long time,” said Napoleon, words that everyone knew to be true. Yet something would happen between the moment when France’s guns were pointed directly at the Vatican, and Napoleon’s crowning at Notre-Dame.
“Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich,” said Bonaparte. But it was more than pragmatism that informed his thinking. As emperor, Napoleon ensured that his France would still be Christian, but would also tolerate Jews and those of other religions. He would not betray his mother’s faith. Nor would he allow church to monopolize state. For some of his change of heart, you can credit Letizia, who outlived him. Other answers to the question of how Napoleon went from the spear’s tip of a revolution fevered with atheism to a man known as the Restorer of Religion can be found, I hope, in following his boot prints on the southern side of the Alps.
But credit, also, must go to the Benedictine brothers who had control of him for five years at Brienne-le-Château. Napoleon came back to this town of his boyhood a third time, in 1814, and briefly set up headquarters in the château on the hill. France was under siege, the Grande Armée in tatters after the long retreat from Russia a year earlier, the territorial conquests gone. Throughout the wars, Napoleon’s forces often billeted in the towns of the Via Francigena—Saint-Omer, Arras, Laon, Reims, Corbény. When he made a stand near Brienne in January, he was outnumbered, though he typically outwitted his Prussian and Russian enemies. But the end was near. By May, he would be exiled to Elba.
Today, the most prominent statue in town is of a skinny little boy in military academy uniform, hair slicked down, looking sad but not unsympathetic. The story of Napoleon’s first battle, when he built a fort of ice in 1784 and routed the school bullies in a snowball fight, is given as much prominence as the clash of empires outside town. The cadet left school a few months after the snowball fight, a newly minted teenage agnostic. But the school never left him. “It is not Corsica but Brienne that is my native land, because it was there that I formulated my first opinions of mankind,” he wrote. In his will, stitched together during his final exile on the lonely atoll of Saint Helena, Napoleon bequeathed Brienne a million francs.
THIRTEEN
WARS OF RELIGION
Somebody must be home at midafternoon in Wassy. It’s blisteringly hot again today, and only a mad dog or an Irishman would be out in this open-air oven looking for revelation along a medieval pilgrim trail. I’d rather be napping, along with everyone else in this preternaturally somnolent town. I’d prefer to be in a splendid stupor after a long lunch of salade niçoise and chilled rosé. But damn—when you get a chance to knock on history’s door you should take it. I’ve actually knocked on four doors, none of them labeled history, since I got here, and no one is answering the call of the ages. I can’t even rouse a stray chien. You could squat in the middle of the main street, close your eyes, and feign sleep during the civic siesta, and not be bothered. I know, because I tried, in hopes that someone would bother me. Wassy—wake up! Your past is calling.
I found what I was looking for in Wassy, pronounced Vassy, a short detour from Brienne-le-Château. It’s a barn, almost five hundred years old, with a small sign on the wall, Musée Protestant de la Grange de Wassy. Most of the beams are still intact and sun-cracked, the roof holding firm, but all of it is shuttered and crumbling behind a galvanized fence. It says, Go away. I say, Open your doors. Is there someone who can let me in? The barn was a church, a deliberately informal house of worship for Christians who tried to bring their faith back to earth. They were Huguenots, French Protestants, butchered inside this barn. Entire families died in the middle of a service. The casual visitor knows at least that, because there’s a plaque outside commemorating the Massacre of Wassy, March 1, 1562.
Any massacre is awful. A massacre in a church speaks to a potent kind of hatred. This one launched the French Wars of Religion—thirty-six years of violence, three million killed. I want to see where infants screamed when men with axes came for
them. I want to look at the pulpit where a pastor was murdered in midprayer. I want to crouch in the corner where children cowered in their mothers’ arms, as the swords came slashing. I’d like to see the charred roof where a fire took hold. Is that a perverse thing to do on a hot afternoon in rural France? Yes, by almost any measurement. But why do people go to Auschwitz? You see it, you touch it, you become a small part of it, you try to understand it.
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FOUR CENTURIES BEFORE Catholic Christians started killing Protestant Christians, the keepers of the faith took up methodical slaying of believers in another religion—Islam, which had originated in Mecca at the start of the seventh century, and spread rapidly throughout the Mediterranean. After linking the cross with the crossbow, after finding that the marriage of church to state could be profitable and expansive for all involved, organized Christianity waged a series of wars in lands occupied by the imperial followers of the Prophet Muhammad. The emotional call was built around freeing the cradle of Christianity, the old city of Jerusalem. In 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed a European-wide pilgrimage for war, and a holy war at that; it set the tone for the bloody expeditions that followed over the next two hundred years. “Deus vult!” the pope shouted in a fiery speech, God wills it. He guaranteed salvation to those who died. It was no longer a sin to take the life of a fellow human, so long as that human was a declared enemy of the church. Killing an infidel would carry you into everlasting life. “God has invented the Crusade as a new way for the knightly order and the vulgar masses to atone for their sins,” said Urban. In that regard, the offer was democratic. And thus began the most murderous two centuries of a religion founded by a purveyor of peace.
In all, there were eight major “pray-and-slay expeditions,” as the author Tim Moore called them. No sooner had armies flying the flag of Jesus set out in response to Urban’s initial call to war than they took to butchering nonbelievers along the way to the Muslim-held lands. In settled communities of the Rhineland, places like Cologne and Mainz, thousands of Jews were massacred. It was the bloodiest epic of anti-Semitic violence until the Holocaust, nine centuries later. Even other Christians, those deemed heretical in the crumbling Byzantine Empire, were put to the sword. Jerusalem was eventually taken, then lost again. About one in twenty Christians died in the long marches, well before seeing any battle. In all, 1.7 million people were killed. The war-cheering monk Bernard of Clairvaux later issued an apology. He wasn’t sorry about the many innocent lives taken, the orphans created, the villages torched, the property stolen. He was sorry that his side lost the Second Crusade, prompting many people to give up their faith.
Three centuries of relative peace followed the last of the drawn-out formal wars between two of the world’s great faiths. The booty brought home to Rome had enriched the church. With its power and place in Europe secure, it grew more inflexible in its theological views, while meddling in the affairs of state from the smallest villages to the highest royal courts. But just as Catholicism was showing its corruption, venality, and age, a burst of ideas by independent thinkers looked like it might steer Christianity back to Christ.
In the Age of Discovery, as the printing press was bringing new voices to the masses, men like Erasmus became popular philosophers. The son of a priest and his lover, born in 1466, Erasmus promoted Christian humanism, which guided the Renaissance in northern Europe. His mind never took a break. “When I get a little money, I buy books,” he said. “And if any is left over I buy food and clothes.” He learned Greek in order to study the Gospel as it was written, and correct later Latin translations. And from that scholarship he determined that Christianity must be detached from war. Erasmus was a pacifist. In his writings, aimed at average people as well as the ruling elite, he argued that there was no such thing as a holy war. God did not take sides. Erasmus urged Christians to find their own way to the divine, to free themselves of clerical monopoly. Strip Christianity down to its core—love of fellow humans, mercy for the poor, striving for higher things. Erasmus was prolific. He influenced Martin Luther, that rebel Catholic monk, and later broke with him, while still keeping a toehold in the Catholic Church. He never left the faith.
Alas, his views could not prevail. The first Protestant in France to be executed for heresy by fellow Christians was a hermit from Normandy named Jean Vallière. On August 8, 1523, he was tied to a thatch in the Paris pig market and burned to death. The crowd cheered his agony. The monk’s crime? He thought Martin Luther had some good ideas. France certainly practiced what it preached: One King. One God. One Law. But burning hermits could not suppress the dissidents. Forty years after that first execution in Paris, there were upward of two million Protestants in France—almost a tenth of the population. Those in power, encouraged by the Vatican, tried to limit them by decree and harassment. Huguenots could gather in prayer, but only out of sight, in the countryside, or underground.
So it was that the Catholic Duke of Guise was passing through Wassy on the first day of March 1562 when he discovered that Huguenots were praying in a barn inside the town walls. He summoned his soldiers and attacked. It was mass murder—by sword, club, primitive firearm, and arson fire, of children, women, anyone trapped inside. Sixty-three people were killed, and 140 wounded. The massacre prompted Protestants in other parts of the country to arm themselves and return the bloodshed. In all, there would be eight Wars of Religion in the following four decades.
The worst single atrocity was the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris, in August 1572. “Kill them all, kill them all, so that not one will be left to reproach me for it,” said King Charles IX. It started when another Catholic duke murdered a Huguenot leader in his Paris bedroom. His body was thrown from a window, torn apart by a mob, the parts littered through the streets. Over the next two days, more than 50,000 Huguenots were slaughtered in a spasm of sectarian violence. The justification, as offered later, was that Catholics feared Protestant insurgency in France. But the apologists for this high crime went beyond that: the pope issued a medallion in honor of an event that cleansed the church of heretics. Huguenot hunting, as it was called, spread to the provinces. Protestants responded with attacks on priests, desecrations of churches, and massacres of their own. Many fled to Geneva and never returned.
The decades of murder between followers of Christ took an extraordinary toll on France: almost 15 percent of the population was killed in the Wars of Religion, roughly four times the total number of deaths in the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in North America. If that happened in the United States today, on a similar scale, 48 million people would lose their lives. And speaking of the Civil War, let us not forget the motto of the Confederate States of America, the largest slave-holding nation on earth at the time of its brief existence: Deo Vindice—God on Our Side. The Wars of Religion in France would not end until the Edict of Nantes in 1598, guaranteeing substantial rights for Protestants. Still, those freedoms would be taken from them over the next two centuries, with forced conversions under threat of exile or execution.
A similar tragedy unfolded in Germany. In the Thirty Years War, beginning in 1618, Emperor Ferdinand II used violent coercion to force Catholicism back on people who had been inspired by reformed Christianity. This bloodbath would lead to the death of 20 percent of the population—at 7 million people, more than twice the total toll of the French. The Napoleonic Wars, which were fought by massive and well-trained armies over vast swaths of territory, did not cause as many military and civilian losses as a part of the overall population. Nor did World War I. A higher percentage of Europeans died in the intra-Christian wars than in the industrial carnage of the Great War. All the graveyards I saw in the Pas-de-Calais, rows of white crosses stretching to the horizon’s end, could not match the ground turned to bury the dead of Europe’s wars over God.
Only a tiny part of this history is inside the barn in Wassy. When I knock on a fifth door, on the same street as the massacre site, I fi
nally get a response. A sleepy-eyed twenty-something, wearing nothing but saggy basketball shorts, comes to the door. I say Pardonnez moi, and ask in my ragged French if he knows anyone who could let me have a look inside the barn/museum. He yawns and scratches his belly, which is very tan. He yawns again and says, “Un moment,” disappears, and returns with a lit cigarette.
I repeat myself.
He says, in Dude-Slacker French, that he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
I point, and mumble something about the barn.
He shrugs, exhales smoke, and says, “Je ne sais pas.”
I’m thinking, in heat-stressed English, “What the fuck do you mean you don’t know what I’m talking about? You live next to the Wassy Barn. Site of the Wassy Massacre. The Wars of Religion started here, ass-pipe!” But I just repeat myself a third time.
He takes another pull on his cigarette, shrugs a whatever, then tells me to have a nice day in Dude-Slacker English. And he seems sincere.
So. I’m left melting on the street after my meltdown on his porch, my sunglasses smeared with sweat, reading the list of names of the dead on the wall of the Wassy Barn. De Bordes, Antoine. De Bordes, Nicole. A family. Jacquemard, Didier. Jacquemard, Jean. Siblings. A married couple. More children. A father and son. A mother and daughter. Nearby is a print of a gravure from 1568, showing scenes of the massacre. It was my own family’s faith, attached to us for nearly as long as members of the Egan clan have walked the earth, the One True Church now calling me to Rome, behind these atrocities.
