How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  12. Q. How to live? A. Guard your humanity

  TERROR

  LIKE EARLIER PEACE agreements, 1570’s Treaty of Saint-Germain displeased everyone. Protestants, always wanting more, thought its terms did not go far enough, as it granted them limited freedom of worship. Catholics thought it went too far; they were anxious that Protestants would take any concessions at all as encouragement. They feared that Protestants would press for an all-out revolution against the legitimate Catholic monarch, and start another war. They were right about there being another war, but wrong about who would be responsible.

  Tensions kept rising, and reached a peak during celebrations held in Paris in August 1572 to mark a dynastic wedding between the Catholic Marguerite de Valois and the Protestant Henri de Navarre. The leaders of three main factions came to the ceremony in a grim mood: the moderate Catholic king Charles IX, the radical Protestant leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, and the extremist Catholic duc de Guise. Each faction was haunted by fear of the others. Inflammatory preachers raised the emotional temperature further among ordinary Parisians, urging them to rise up to prevent the wedding and wipe out the heretic leaders while they had the chance.

  The marriage went ahead, on August 18, and four days of official festivities followed. No doubt many breathed a sigh of relief when they ended. But late on the final night, August 22, 1572, someone fired an arquebus at the Protestant leader Coligny as he walked back to his house from the Louvre palace, not killing him outright but breaking his arm.

  News of the incident spread around town. The next morning, streams of Huguenots came to see Coligny, vowing revenge. Many of them believed (as most historians still do) that the king himself was behind the assassination attempt, together with his mother Catherine de’ Medici—the idea being to nip any potential Protestant rebellion in the bud by removing its leader. If true, this was a miscalculation on Charles’s part. The attack on Coligny made Protestants angry. More dangerously still, it made Catholics fearful. Expecting Protestants to rise up in response to what had happened, they gathered around the city and prepared to defend themselves. The king was probably unnerved too, and may have reasoned that a dead rebel leader was less dangerous than a wounded one. Apparently on his orders, a royal guard broke into Coligny’s house and finished the botched job by killing the injured man in his bed. This was early on the morning of Sunday, August 24: St. Bartholomew’s Day.

  The killers cut off Coligny’s head and dispatched it to the royal palace; it would eventually be embalmed and sent to Rome for the Pope to admire. Meanwhile the rest of the body was thrown out of the window to the street, where a Catholic crowd set fire to it and dragged it around the district. The body fell to pieces as it smoldered, but segments were paraded about and further mutilated for days.

  The commotion at Coligny’s house caused further panic among Parisian Catholics as well as Protestants. Catholic gangs rushed onto the streets; they seized and killed any recognizable Protestants, and burst into houses where Protestants were known to live—and where many were sleeping peacefully, having no idea what was going on in the city. The mobs dragged them outside, slit their throats or tore them to pieces, then set fire to their bodies or threw them in the river. The mayhem attracted larger and larger crowds, and fueled further atrocities. To pick just one reported incident, a man named Mathurin Lussault was killed when he made the mistake of answering his door; his son came down to investigate the noise and was stabbed too. Lussault’s wife, Françoise, tried to escape by leaping from her upstairs window into a neighbor’s courtyard. She broke both her legs. The neighbor helped her, but the attackers burst in and dragged her into the street by her hair. They cut off her hands to get her gold bracelets, then impaled her on a spit; later they dumped her body in the river. The hands, chewed by dogs, were still to be seen outside the building several days later. Similar scenes took place all over the city, and so many bodies were thrown into the Seine that it was said to run red with blood.

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  Whatever Charles had intended by the original assassination—if indeed he was responsible—he can hardly have intended this. He now ordered his soldiers to suppress the violence, but it was too late. The killing went on for nearly a week through the districts of Paris, then spread around the rest of the country. In Paris alone, the massacres, which were known for ever more by the name of St. Bartholomew, left up to five thousand dead. By the end some ten thousand had been killed in France. Cities were sucked into the violence like fishing-boats into a tornado: Orléans, Lyon, Rouen, Toulouse, Bordeaux, and countless smaller towns.

  It was a furor of the kind Montaigne detested even on a traditional battlefield, but here the victims were civilians. On the whole, so were the killers; only in a few places were soldiers or officials involved. Bordeaux was one of these few. Nothing happened there until October 3, but when it did, it was apparently organized and approved by the fanatical Catholic mayor of the time, Charles de Montferrand, who produced a formal list of targets to be attacked. In most places, the bloodshed was done more chaotically and by people who would have been reasonable folk the rest of the time. In Orléans, the mob stopped at taverns between killings to celebrate, “accompanied by singing, lutes and guitars,” according to one historian. Some groups were composed mainly of women or children. Catholics interpreted the presence of the latter as a sign that God Himself was in favor of the massacres, for He had caused even innocents to take part. In general, many thought that, since the killings were on no ordinary human scale, they must have been divinely sanctioned. They were not the result of human decisions; they were messages from God to humanity, portents of cosmic mayhem just as much as a blighted harvest or a comet in the sky. A medal made in Rome to commemorate the massacres showed the Huguenots struck down, not by fellow mortals, but by an armed angel shining with holy wrath. In general, the new Pope, Gregory XIII, seems to have been pleased with events in France. Apart from the medal, he commissioned Giorgio Vasari to paint celebratory frescos in the Sala Regia of the Vatican. The French king likewise took part in processions of thanksgiving, and had two medals struck, one portraying himself as Hercules doing battle with the Hydra, the other depicting him on his throne surrounded by naked corpses and holding a palm frond to represent victory.

  Once the Huguenots had collected themselves and gathered armies to fight back, all-out war broke out again. It would continue through the 1570s, with only occasional pauses. The St. Bartholomew’s events formed a dividing line. After this, the wars were more anarchic, and more driven by fanaticism. Besides ordinary battles, much misery was now caused by uncontrolled gangs of soldiers on the rampage, even during supposed peace interludes, when they had no masters and no pay. Peasants sometimes fled and lived wild in the forests rather than wait in town to be attacked and sometimes tortured for the fun of it. This was the state of nature with a vengeance. In 1579, one provincial lawyer, Jean La Rouvière, wrote to the king to beg help for the rustic poor in his area—“miserable, martyrized, and abandoned men” who lived off the land as best they could, having lost all they had. Among the horrors he had seen or heard of were tales of people

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  buried alive in heaps of manure, thrown into wells and ditches and left to die, howling like dogs; they had been nailed in boxes without air, walled up in towers without food, and garroted upon trees in the depths of the mountains and forests; they had been stretched in front of fires, their feet fricasseed in grease; their women had been raped and those who were pregnant had been aborted; their children had been kidnapped and ransomed, or even roasted alive before the parents.

  The wars were fed by religious ardor, but the sufferings of war in turn generated further apocalyptic imaginings. Both Catholics and Protestants thought that events were approaching a point beyond which there could be no more normal history, for all that remained was the final confrontation between God and the Devil. This is why Catholics celebrated the St. Bartholomew’s massacres so
joyfully: they saw them as a genuine victory over evil, and as a way of driving countless misled individuals back to the true Church before it was too late for them to save their souls.

  It all mattered a great deal, because time was short. In the Last Days, Christ would return, the world would be obliterated, and everyone would have to justify his or her actions to God. There could be no compromise in such a situation, no seeing the other person’s point of view, and certainly no mutual understanding between rival faiths. Montaigne, with his praise of ordinary life and of mediocrity, was selling something that could have no market in a doomed world.

  Signs of the imminence of this Apocalypse were plentiful. A series of famines, ruined harvests, and freezing winters in the 1570s and 1580s indicated that God Himself was withdrawing His warmth from the earth. Smallpox, typhus, and whooping cough swept through the country, as well as the worst disease of all: the plague. All four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seemed to have been unleashed: pestilence, war, famine, and death. A werewolf roamed the country, conjoined twins were born in Paris, and a new star—a nova—exploded in the sky. Even those not given to religious extremism had a feeling that everything was speeding towards some indefinable end. Montaigne’s editor, Marie de Gournay, later remembered the France of her youth as a place so abandoned to chaos “that one was led to expect a final ruin, rather than a restoration, of the state.” Some thought the end was very nigh indeed: the linguist and theologian Guillaume Postel wrote in a letter of 1573 that “within eight days the people will perish.”

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  The Devil, too, knew that his time of influence on earth was drawing to a close, so he sent armies of demons to win the last few vulnerable souls. They were armies indeed. Jean Wier, in his De praestigis daemonum (1564), had calculated that at least 7,409,127 demons were working for Lucifer, under the middle-management of seventy-nine demon-princes. Alongside them were witches: a dramatic rise in witchcraft cases after the 1560s provided more proof that the Apocalypse was coming. As fast as they were detected, the courts burned them, but the Devil replaced them even faster.

  Contemporary demonologist Jean Bodin argued that, in crisis conditions such as these, standards of evidence must be lowered. Witchcraft was so serious, and so hard to detect using normal methods of proof, that society could not afford to adhere too much to “legal tidiness and normal procedures.” Public rumor could be considered “almost infallible”: if everyone in a village said that a particular woman was a witch, that was sufficient to justify putting her to the torture. Medieval techniques were revived specifically for such cases, including “swimming” suspects to see if they floated, and searing them with red-hot irons. The numbers of convicted witches kept rising as standards of evidence went down, and the increase amounted to further proof that the crisis was real and that further adjustment of the law was necessary. As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous, and that those behind it have exceptional powers of resistance. It was all accepted with hardly a murmur, except by a few writers such as Montaigne, who pointed out that torture was useless for getting at the truth since people will say anything to stop the pain—and that, besides, it was “putting a very high price on one’s conjectures” to have someone roasted alive on their account.

  A major development warned of by the theologians was the imminent arrival of the Antichrist. Signs would abound in coming years: in 1583 an old woman in an African country gave birth to an infant with cat’s teeth who announced, in an adult voice, that it was the Messiah. Simultaneously, in Babylon, a mountain burst open to reveal a buried column on which was written in Hebrew: “The hour of my nativity is come.” The leading French expert on such Antichrist tales was Montaigne’s successor in the Bordeaux parlement, Florimond de Raemond, also an enthusiastic witch-burner. Raemond’s work L’Antichrist analyzed portents in the sky, the withering of vegetation and harvests, population movements, and cases of atrocity and cannibalism in the wars, showing how all proved that the Devil was on his way.

  To join in mass violence, in such circumstances, was to let God know that you stood with Him. Both Protestant and Catholic extremists made a cult of holy zeal, which amounted to a total gift of yourself to God and a rejection of the things of this world. Anyone who still paid attention to everyday affairs at such a time might be suspected of moral weakness, at best, and allegiance to the Devil at worst.

  In reality, many people did carry on with their lives and keep out of trouble as best they could, remaining faithful to the ordinariness which Montaigne thought was the essence of wisdom. Even if they believed in it, the coming confrontation between Satan and God interested them no more than the scandals and diplomacy of the royal court. Many Protestants quietly renounced their faith after 1572, or at least concealed it, an implicit admission that they considered the life of this world more important than their belief in the next. But a minority went to the opposite extreme. Radicalized beyond measure, they called for total war against Catholicism and the death of the king—the “tyrant” responsible for the deaths of Coligny and all the other victims. It was in this context that La Boétie’s On Voluntary Servitude was suddenly taken up and published by Huguenot radicals, who reinvented it as propaganda for a cause La Boétie himself would never have favored.

  As it turned out, regicide was unnecessary. Charles IX died of natural causes a year and a half later, on May 30, 1574. The throne passed to another of Catherine de’ Medici’s sons, Henri III, who proved even more unpopular. He was not even liked by many Catholics. Support grew throughout the 1570s for the Catholic extremists known as Ligueurs or Leaguists, who would cause the monarchy at least as much trouble as the Huguenots in coming years, under the leadership of the powerful and ambitious duc de Guise. From now on, the wars in France would be a three-way affair, with the monarchy often caught in the weakest position. Henri tried occasionally to take over leadership of the Leagues himself, to neutralize their threat, but they rejected him, and often portrayed him as a Satanic agent in disguise.

  He may have been too moderate for the Leagues, but Henri III was extremist in other ways, showing no understanding of Montaigne’s sense of moderation. Montaigne, who met him several times, did not like him much. On the one hand, Henri filled his court with fops, and turned it into a realm of corruption, luxury, and absurd points of etiquette. He went out dancing every night and, in youth, wore robes and doublets of mulberry satin, with coral bracelets and cloaks slashed to ribbons. He started a fashion for shirts with four sleeves, two for use and two trailing behind like wings. Some of his other affectations were considered even stranger: he used forks at table instead of knives and fingers, he wore nightclothes to bed, and he washed his hair from time to time. On the other hand, Henri also put on exaggerated displays of mysticism and penitence. The more perplexed he became by the problems facing the kingdom, the more frequently he took part in processions of flagellants, trudging with them barefoot over cobbled streets, chanting psalms and scourging himself.

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  To Montaigne, the notion that the solution to the political crisis could lie in prayer and extreme spiritual exercises made no sense. He recoiled from these processions, and put no credence in comets, freak hailstorms, monstrous births, or any of the other signs of doom. He observed that those who made predictions from such phenomena usually kept them vague, so that later they could claim success whatever happened. Most reports of witchcraft seemed to Montaigne to be the effects of human imagination, not of Satanic activity. In general, he preferred to stick to his motto: “I suspend judgment.”

  His Skepticism drew some mild criticism; two contemporaries in Bordeaux, Martin-Antoine del Rio and Pierre de Lancre, warned him that it was theologically dangerous to explain apocalyptic events in terms of the human imagination, because it distracted attention from the real threat. On the whole, he managed to avoid serio
us suspicions, but Montaigne did risk his reputation by speaking out against torture and witch trials. He was already associated in many people’s minds with a category of thinkers known to their enemies as politiques, who were distinguished by their belief that the kingdom’s problems had nothing to do with the Antichrist or the End Times, but were merely political. They deduced that the solution should be political too—hence the nickname. In theory, they supported the king, believing that the one hope for France was unity under a legitimate monarch, though most of them secretly hoped that a more inspiring, more unifying king than Henri III might one day come along. While remaining loyal, they worked to find points of common ground between the other parties, in the hope of halting the wars and laying a foundation for France’s future.

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  Unfortunately, the one piece of common ground that really brought extreme Catholics close to extreme Protestants was hatred of politiques. The word itself was an accusation of godlessness. These were people who paid attention only to political solutions, not to the state of their souls. They were men of masks: deceivers, like Satan himself. “He wears the skin of a lamb,” wrote one contemporary of a typical politique, “but nevertheless is a raging wolf.” Unlike real Protestants, they tried to pass as something they were not, and, since they were so clever and intellectual, they did not have the excuse of being innocent victims of the Devil’s deception. Montaigne’s association with the politiques gave him a good reason to emphasize his openness and honesty, as well as his Catholic orthodoxy (though, of course, claiming to be honest is exactly what a wolf in sheep’s clothing would do).