THE SCARS OF RELIGIOUS WAR IN HISTORIES OF FRENCH CITIES

French History
doi:10.1093/fh/craa040

         T H E S C A R S O F R E L I G I O U S WA R

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        IN HISTORIES OF FRENCH CITIES
                      ( 16 0 0 –17 5 0 )

                               B A R B A R A B . D I E F E N D O R F *,

Abstract—This article explores the memory of France’s Wars of Religion in urban histories
published during the century and a half that followed the restoration of peace with the Edict
of Nantes in 1598. It asks why, despite explicit prohibitions against reviving memories of in-
juries suffered during the wars, local historians persisted in demonizing former opponents
in histories that remained overtly confessional in their representation of the troubles. The
article focuses on Catholic authors, who wrote fifty-six of the fifty-eight works examined.
Protestants had little incentive to memorialize the towns in which they had a limited and
declining position. Catholics, by contrast, mobilized memory to reaffirm a local identity
rooted in Catholic practice and belief. Retelling the suffering local populations endured and
recounting the city’s ritual responses to the religious schism, they pushed Protestants to the
margins of a civic culture represented as inherently Catholic even in a bi-confessional state.

In 1598, the Edict of Nantes, echoing pacification edicts issued after every pre-
vious religious war, ordered ‘first, that the memory of everything which has
occurred between one side and the other [during the troubles] shall remain ex-
tinct and dormant as though they had never happened’. The second article com-
manded the king’s subjects to ‘live peaceably together like brothers, friends,
and fellow citizens’, without attacking, injuring or provoking one another by
word or deed.1 Historians have frequently remarked that the clauses requiring
the forgetting—l’oubliance—of past troubles were intended to prohibit liti-
gation over wartime losses and did not—could not—erase all memory of the
conflicts.2 The edicts caused a purging of public records and confiscation of

  * The author is Professor Emerita of History at Boston University and can be contacted at
bdiefend@bu.edu. She would like to thank the organizers of the conferences ‘Remembering the
Wars of Religion’ in Montpellier and ‘Les guerres de Religion furent-elles des guerres de religion?’
in Aix-en-Provence and the 2019 meeting of the Society for the Study of French History in Leeds
for the opportunity to present portions of this work. The audiences at these conferences provided
helpful feedback. She wants also to thank Philip Benedict, Hilary Bernstein, Mark Edwards, Tom
Hamilton and David van der Linden for their perceptive comments on earlier versions of this
article.
  1 ‘The Edict of Nantes with its secret articles and brevets’, trans. J. Parsons, in The Edict of

Nantes: Five Essays and a New Translation, ed. R. L. Goodbar (Bloomington, MN, 1998), 41–68.
  2 D. Margolf, ‘Adjudicating memory: law and religious difference in early seventeenth-century

France’, The Sixteenth Cent J, 27 (1996), 399–418; M. Wolfe, ‘Amnesty and oubliance at the end
of the French Wars of Religion’, Cahiers d’histoire, 16 (1996), 45–68; M. Greengrass, ‘Amnistie
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of French History.
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some private writings, but memory of the conflicts later surfaced and was cul-
tivated in a variety of ways. One of these ways, as yet largely unexplored, was
in local histories.3
   In contrast to national histories, which moved towards an interpretation of

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the wars that sought to calm confessional animosities by rooting the origins
of the conflicts in political and not religious motivations, local histories re-
mained overtly—often antagonistically—confessional in their representation
of the troubles. As Philip Benedict has pointed out, the political interpretation
of the wars pioneered with Jacques-Auguste de Thou’s History of his Own
Time implied that ‘a country could live in peace even if it contained two reli-
gions’.4 Proponents of this view sought to encourage peaceful coexistence and
a shared national identity. This article seeks to explain why local historians did
not adopt a similar point of view. Based on the examination of fifty-eight urban
histories published in France between 1600 and 1750, it asks why they instead
perpetuated inter-confessional tensions by demonizing former opponents and
rooting local identity in the shared defence of a unique religious truth.5
   Only two of the works under examination had Protestant authors, one
of whom wrote from exile in London. The limited and declining position
Protestants had in seventeenth-century French cities gave them little incen-
tive to celebrate the history of these towns. The essential problem thus be-
comes how Catholic historians memorialized the wars at the local level and
why they persisted in writing invective-laden narratives of victimization even
after Protestant worship was prohibited with the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes in 1685. This problem cannot be reduced to questions of lay or cler-
ical authorship. Although Catholic clerics wrote half of the histories under
examination and were responsible for much—though far from all—of the anti-
Protestant invective, they also wrote some of the most balanced and restrained
histories. Nor is it a simple matter of chronology. Anti-Protestant rhetoric does

et oubliance: un discours politique autour des édits de pacification pendant les guerres de re-
ligion’, in Paix des armes, paix des âmes, ed. P. Mironneau and I. Pébay-Clottes (Paris, 2000),
113–23; C. Grosse, ‘Imprescriptibilité ou pardon? Sceller la réconciliation dans l’amnésie: les
clauses d’“oubliance” des paix de religion du XVIe siècle’, in Guerres et paix: mélanges offerts à
Jean-Claude Favez, ed. J.-F. Fayet, C. Fluckiger and M. Porret (Chêne-Bourg, 2000), 61–74; B. B.
Diefendorf, ‘Waging peace: memory, identity, and the Edict of Nantes’, in Religious Differences in
France: Past and Present, ed. K. Perry Long (Kirksville, MO, 2006), 19–49; O. Christin, ‘Mémoire
inscrite, oubli prescrite: la fin des troubles de religion en France’, Pariser Historische Studien,
94 (2009), 73–91.
   3 Collective studies of local histories have previously discussed the religious wars only within

the broader context of the creation of French national identity: M. Yardeni, ‘Histoires des villes,
histoires des provinces et naissance d’une identité française au XVIe siècle’, Journal des savants
(1993), 111–34; C. Dolan, ‘L’identité urbaine et les histoires locales publiées du XVIe au XVIIIe
siècle en France’, Canadian J Hist, 27 (1992), 277–98.
   4 P. Benedict, ‘Shaping the memory of the French Wars of Religion: the first centuries’, in

Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe, ed. E. Kuijpers,
J. Pollmann, J. Müller and J. Van der Steen (Leiden and Boston, 2013), 111–25, at 120; also A. Frisch,
Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh,
2015), especially ch. 3.
   5 See Appendix for a list of the works, which are cited in the notes as ‘Author, City’.

BARBAR A B. DIEFENDORF                                Page 3 of 22

not become more overt or virulent in works published in the 1660s and 1670s,
when militant clerics and lay dévots were openly advocating suppression of
Reformed Church worship, and it does not decline after this goal was achieved.
The answer, this article contends, lies rather in the mobilization of memory to

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reaffirm a unified local identity rooted in Catholic practice and belief after the
schism provoked by the wars.6
   The genre of local history that developed in seventeenth-century
France is best understood within the context of the process historians call
‘confessionalization’, which worked to draw clear boundaries between
Catholics and Protestants by instructing them in the doctrines and practices
particular to their faith. Historians of France generally adopt what has been
called a ‘weak theory of confessionalization’, which they define simply as ‘the
process of rivalry and emulation by which the religions that emerged from the
upheavals of the Reformation defined and enforced their particular versions of
orthodoxy and orthopraxy, demonized their rivals, and built group cohesion’.7
This definition omits the elements of social disciplining and state-building in-
corporated into the original German model and is more appropriate to the
French case. As this article argues, Catholic confessionalization did not pro-
ceed solely through the explication of dogma in catechisms, sermons and po-
lemics. It also worked by ‘othering’ members of the minority faith, excluding
them from the bonds of community and depicting them as dangerous enemies
of civic unity.
   Only a few authors of local histories published after 1600 were old enough to
have experienced the civil wars personally, but nearly all wrote about their city
of origin, which they often described affectionately as their ‘patrie’. Blending
scholarly research with local lore, or memories passed down from earlier gen-
erations, their works transmitted but also perpetuated local attitudes towards
the conflicts. With few exceptions, the authors wrote for an audience already
sympathetic to their confessional bias. Without seeking to persuade those
holding alternative views, they drew sharp lines between insiders and out-
siders and cast those deemed responsible for the religious schism in their city
as ‘others’ by depicting them as heretics who threatened communal salvation
and as demons and beasts who had no place in civil society. Representing the
wars as dangerous assaults on all that was holy, they recounted the destruc-
tion of sacred objects and desecration of holy spaces in emotional terms and
recast memories of suffering and violence as tests of true belief and evidence

   6 On Catholicism and French identity, J. R. Strayer, ‘France: the Holy Land, the chosen people,

and the most Christian king’, in Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe: Essays in
Memory of E. H. Harbison, ed. T. K. Rabb and J. E. Seigel (Princeton, 1969), 3–16; C. Beaune,
Naissance de la nation France (Paris, 1985); A. Tallon, Conscience nationale et sentiment
religieux en France au XVIe siècle: essai sur la vision gallicane du monde (Paris, 2002).
   7 P. Benedict, ‘Confessionalization in France? Critical reflections and new evidence’, in

P. Benedict, The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Huguenots, 1600–85 (Aldershot, 2001), 309–25,
at 313. J. F. Harrington and H. W. Smith, ‘Confessionalization, community and state building in
Germany, 1555–1870’, J Mod Hist, 69 (1997), 77–101, offers a useful overview of the extensive lit-
erature on confessionalization in Germany.

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of divine grace. The wars of the Holy League, which divided Catholics among
themselves, complicated a narrative rooted in confessional oppositions, but
these trials too could be recast in the light of Henri IV’s conversion and re-
membered as unifying experiences and victories for a ‘true’ Catholicism untar-

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nished by unseemly zeal or political ambition.

                                               I
The fifty-eight local histories under examination were identified from the
Bibliothèque nationale’s Catalogue de l’histoire de France and Jacques Le
Long’s Bibliothèque historique de la France, supplemented by searches of
Gallica and Google Books.8 The list includes only histories, published between
1600 and 1750, of cities that belonged to France at the time of the Wars of
Religion. Regional and provincial histories, though numerous, were excluded,
as were manuscript histories and studies devoted to a single church or mo-
ment in the wars. These boundaries are to some extent arbitrary, but it was
important to set research criteria in advance.
   A collective study of this sort has certain inherent limits. It cannot answer
the question of how many people read these books, much less how they read
them, though these are important questions for historians of the book. Nor is
it possible to go back to the sources of each work to ask how the author se-
lectively used the materials at his disposition—as Wolfgang Kaiser has done
for the Ruffis’ histories of Marseille and Hilary Bernstein for Thaumas de la
Thaumassière’s history of Bourges—or how he responded to any criticism his
work provoked, as Bernstein does for the 1562 ‘miracle’ of Le Mans in her con-
tribution to this issue of French History.9 We will not fully understand how
the wars were remembered until such detailed case studies of a great many
localities have been made. A broader survey of the terrain of local history can
nevertheless offer new insights into the complex legacy of the religious wars.
   The histories come from a wide range of geographically dispersed local-
ities. Western France remains under-represented, but this may be an accidental
by-product of the selection criteria. The popularity of regional histories may

   8 Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des livres imprimés, Catalogue de l’histoire

de France, vol. 8 (Paris, 1863); Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des livres
imprimés, Catalogue de l’histoire de France, vol. 9 (Paris, 1865); Jacques Le Long, Bibliothèque
historique de la France (Paris, 1719) and new edn, vol. 3 (Paris, 1771).
   9 W. Kaiser, ‘Le passé refaçonné: mémoire et oubli dans les Histoires de Marseille, de Robert

Ruffi à Louis-Antoine de Ruffi’, Provence historique, 193 (1998), 279–92; H. J. Bernstein, ‘Réseaux
savants et choix documentaires de l’histoire locale française: écrire l’histoire de Bourges dans
la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle’, Histoire urbaine, 28 (2010), 65–84. Bernstein’s forthcoming
book, Historical Communities: Cities, Erudition and National Identity in Early Modern France
(Leiden, 2020), promises to significantly expand our understanding of the genre. Chapter 9,
‘Recent history: remembering the Wars of Religion’, which she has graciously shared with me in
advance of publication, usefully complements this article and offers especially fine analyses of
how both personal issues and religious politics influenced Claude de Rubys’ history of Lyon and
the works by François Le Maire and Symphorien Guyon on Orléans.

BARBAR A B. DIEFENDORF                                   Page 5 of 22

have inhibited the spread of the urban history model in this area.10 All but
one of the histories were published in French, which was by 1600 the lan-
guage of choice for local histories.11 A number of authors mention their desire
to reach a broad audience; several say explicitly that this is why they wrote

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in the vernacular.12 The authors were evenly divided between clerics and lay
men. Among Catholics, the secular clerics were most often parish priests or
cathedral canons; the religious came from a variety of orders. Councillors in
district courts and lawyers in the parlements (sovereign courts) were most
numerous among the lay authors, but there were also doctors, engineers and
landed gentlemen. No single group dominated the writing of local history. The
main thing the authors had in common was that they wrote about a city to
which they had deep personal and family ties.13
   The scope of the works varies widely. Roughly a third focus on local ori-
gins and antiquities on the model of the civic histories penned by Renaissance
humanists. These antiquarian works sometimes consist of little more than de-
scriptions of local monuments and lists of local officials and prelates.14 By con-
trast, the majority of works are narrative histories whose authors undertook
extensive research of published and unpublished documents.
   Some histories were, of course, more thoroughly researched than others.
Authors commonly made use of widely available histories and commentaries by
both Catholic and Protestant authors. Significantly, though, they cite the work
of Jacques-Auguste de Thou and other authors of national histories on matters

   10 J. Baiole, Histoire sacrée d’Aquitaine (Cahors, 1644); G. Bry de la Clergerie, Histoire des pays

et comté du Perche et duché d’Alençon (Paris, 1620); J. Dupuy, L’Estat de l’eglise du Perigord,
2 vols (Périgueux, 1629); G. A. Lobineau, Histoire de Bretagne, 2 vols (Paris, 1707); P. Louvet,
Traité en forme d’abregé de l’histoire d’Aquitaine, Guyenne, et Gascogne (Bordeaux, 1659);
P. de Marca, Histoire de Bearn (Paris, 1640); P. H. Morice, Histoire ecclésiastique et civile de
Bretagne, 2 vols (Paris, 1742–4); P. Olhagaray, Histoire de Foix, Bearn et Navarre (Paris, 1609).
   11 The one exception, Guillaume Marlot’s Metropolis Remensis historia, was initially written

in French, but the author translated it into Latin when his learned Benedictine colleagues told
him he would be ridiculed for using the ‘common language’. G. Marlot, Histoire de la ville, cité
et université de Reims, 2 vols (Rheims, 1843–5), i. iv. J. R. de Solier’s Les Antiquitez de la ville
de Marseille (Lyon, 1632) was initially written in Latin but translated into French by his son, who
published it after his father’s death.
   12 Chifflet, Tournus, letter to the reader; Girardin, Frejus, preface; Menard, Nîmes, i. preface,

xi. At least ten of the histories appeared in two or more editions, and while in most cases the
second edition appeared just two or three years after the first, in some cases more than half a cen-
tury passed between editions, suggesting an enduring (albeit unmeasurable) interest in the work.
   13 Those authors not originally from the city they wrote about were most often clerics long resi-

dent at a local monastery or house of canons and so still writing from a perspective informed by
local knowledge. The lone exception is Pierre Louvet the Younger, a professional historian who
went wherever he was hired to organize archives or write local histories: L. Ducasse, ‘Faire pro-
fession d’historien au XVIIe siècle: étude de la carrière de Pierre Louvet, 1617–1684’ (PhD, École
Nationale des Chartes, 2011).
   14 Works limited to ancient and medieval history or ecclesiastical history consisting of just lists

of bishops and churches with little attention to churches destroyed in the wars include: Borel,
Castres; Chifflet, Tournus; Chorier, Vienne; Colonia, Lyon; Darnal, Agen; Du Port, Arles; Gautier,
Nîmes; Huet, Caen; Ignace-Joseph de Jésus Maria, Abbeville; Louvet, Beauvais; Ménestrier, Lyon;
Regnault, Soissons; Rouillard, Melun; Sanson, Abbeville; Savaron, Clermont; Simon, Beauvais;
Solier, Marseille; and Spon, Lyon.

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of fact while ignoring their broader interpretation of events. They are equally
selective in their use of Protestant sources and place the heaviest emphasis
on the unpublished memoirs and records exploited in their research. Many
books begin with an explanation of sources, which the author subsequently

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cites in the margins or mentions periodically in the text. Obtaining records
from private individuals was essential because there were no public archives
at the time. Even records of cities, courts and other institutions were opened
only to people with the right contacts.15 A book gained credibility when the
author prefaced the work with thanks to the individuals who permitted him to
use their library, got him into church or city archives or in other ways assisted
his research. To take just one example, Germain de La Faille had access to city
records for Toulouse in his official capacity as the city’s syndic, but it was his
extensive contacts among Toulousain notables as an ex-capitoul (alderman)
that gained him access to the unpublished journals, manuscript histories and
registers of the parlement employed in his book.
   Like most local historians, La Faille used Protestant as well as Catholic
sources, though he employed all of his sources more critically than did many
of his peers. He commented, for instance, that the only reproach he had to
make of the manuscript history of Castres a friend had loaned him was that
it was ‘highly partisan’. But, he added, ‘this is a vice for which one can re-
proach both Protestants and Catholics who wrote history during those times’.
He was equally critical of those who kept Toulouse’s city records for the years
of League dominance, which he found ‘furiously impassioned for the party in
power’.16
   By contrast, many of his fellow authors, though asserting their obligations
as historians, frame their works in overtly sectarian terms. Claude Dormay,
for example, writes that ‘the law of history’ obliges him to show his readers
‘the great fury of those who took the name of Reformed, the insolence of their
soldiers and impiety of their leaders’.17 Léon Menard says that he would like to
pass over in silence the ‘sad events’ that occurred in Nîmes, but his role as a his-
torian does not permit this. He especially regrets having to name Protestants
whose families still exist but says it was not possible to record these ‘bloody
catastrophes’ without naming their ‘principal authors’.18 Jean Lebeuf writes in
a similar vein when he reveals the names of those taking part in the violence
in Auxerre to ‘conform to the rules of history’ and faithfully follow his manu-
script sources.19
   Despite the professed ideal of historical accuracy, local historians com-
monly wrote in an emotionally charged language that united them with their
coreligionists in the shared suffering of their common past. They represent the

  15 K. Pomian, ‘Les historiens et les archives dans la France du XVIIe siècle’, Acta Poloniae

Historica, 26 (1972), 109–25.
  16 La Faille, Toulouse, i. preface, and ii. ‘advertissement’.
  17 Dormay, Soissons, 466.
  18 Menard, Nîmes, i. ix.
  19 Lebeuf, Auxerre, 392–3.

BARBAR A B. DIEFENDORF                               Page 7 of 22

wars not as an unfortunate interlude in France’s long past but as a ferocious and
necessary battle to save the kingdom and preserve the true faith. Most Catholic
authors blame the troubles entirely on the heretics who sought to destroy the
Catholic Church. Claude Perry is typical in blaming Luther and Calvin, ‘both

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Monsters of Nature and infamous Apostates from the Catholic Religion’, for
the ‘fatal divisions and bloody wars that their heresies spread’. ‘My pen already
trembles with horror and nearly falls from my fingers’, Perry writes, at the very
thought of the ‘strange ravages and horrible cruelties’ it will have to record.20
   Though Perry favours the terms ‘Huguenots’ and ‘Calvinists’ for his oppon-
ents, the generic ‘heretics’ is the term of choice for many local historians, both
clerical and lay, who use it with pejorative intent whether alone or coupled
with such adjectives as ‘insolent’, ‘perverse’ or ‘furious’.21 Heretics were not
just dissenters from church doctrine; they were dangerous enemies intent on
annihilating the true faith. Several histories reach back to the Arians to repre-
sent the Catholic Church as persistently besieged by heretics, while describing
the ‘blind zeal’ of the Calvinists as worse by far.22 But even authors from towns
without a long history of heresy describe Protestants in terms that mark them
as outcasts from civil society. They are ‘libertines’, ‘lepers’, disseminators of
‘contagious disease’ and members of a ‘synagogue of Satan’, whose ‘pestiferous
doctrine’ arises from ‘the bowels of hell’.23 Animal epithets are common:
Protestants are ‘vermin’, ‘foxes’, ‘famished boars’, ‘more ferocious than tigers’
and ‘ravishing wolves in sheep’s clothing’.24 The level of invective is striking,
but so is its persistence in works written as much as 150 years after the events
the books describe.
   Equally persistent is the argument that the violence perpetrated by French
Protestants was premeditated, deliberate and motivated by both a desire for
booty and the determination to destroy everything the Catholics held sacred,
including the French monarchy. Claude de Rubys’ 1604 history of Lyon says
that, under the influence of their ‘heresiarch’ Calvin, the Huguenots aimed at
‘nothing less than abolishing royalty and monarchy in France’.25 The view that
Protestants wore only ‘the mask of piety’ as they plotted pillage and destruc-
tion dates back to the early years of the wars but proved enduring.26 Toussaint

  20 Perry, Chalon-sur-Saône, 305 and 320.
  21 Guyon, Orléans, 410; Pourcelet, Beaucaire, 20; Du Plessis, Meaux, 352.
  22 Deyron, Nîmes, 122; Menard, Nîmes, i. preface; Le Bret, Montauban, ii. 1–5.
  23 Saint-Aubin, Lyon, 200; Guyon, Orléans, 353, 382, 388, 393, 410.
  24 Malingre, Paris, 247; Louvet, Villefranche, 37; Perry, Chalon-sur-Saône, 326; Pommeraye,

Rouen, 618; Pourcelet, Beaucaire, 24.
  25 Rubys, Lyon, 385. Likewise Le Bret, Montauban, ii. 5.
  26 Dormay, Soissons, 453. Similarly, Bertaut and Cusset, Chalon-sur-Saône, i. 791; Perry,

Chalon-sur-Saône, 324. As Philip Benedict has observed, because people generally believed in
the sixteenth century that there was only one true religion, some faint knowledge of which
was engraved in every person’s conscience, those who opposed them were seen as necessarily
acting out of base motives, using religion as a cloak for ambition, greed or lust: P. Benedict,
‘Were the French Wars of Religion really wars of religion?’, in The European Wars of Religion:
An Interdisciplinary Reassessment of Sources, Interpretations and Myths, ed. W. Palaver,
H. Rudolph and D. Regensburger (Farnham, 2016), 61–86, at 65.

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Du Plessis’ history of Meaux (1731) contends that Protestants already acted at
the time of the Affair of the Placards in 1534 ‘as if they wanted to foreshadow
the bloody war they would soon kindle in the four corners of the kingdom and
the carnage of Catholics that they already meditated in their hearts’.27

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   Not everyone took this sectarian an approach. Germain de La Faille’s
Annales de la ville de Toulouse (1687 and 1701), Michel Félibien and Guy-
Alexis Lobineau’s Histoire de Paris (1725) and Charles d’Aigrefeuille’s Histoire
de Montpellier (1737 and 1739) are more restrained in their language and
balanced in their perspective than was common among local historians. The
most ecumenical treatment, however, came from the Protestant Pierre Borel.
His 1649 history of Castres catalogues the city’s institutions and monuments
while avoiding all but brief references to its tumultuous history as a Protestant
bastion in Catholic Haut-Languedoc. Borel betrays a certain defensiveness
when he writes that, having listed the names of the city’s bishops and abbots,
it is only reasonable to name those who served there as ministers. His desire
to reach across confessional boundaries is also evident in his gentle denial of a
report that Castres’ shops closed on Wednesday mornings to celebrate Calvin’s
feast day. They closed, he explained ‘without animosity’, so people could at-
tend sermons at this time. Protestant readers clearly did not need this explan-
ation. The fact that Borel was writing about a bi-confessional city where the
coexistence mandated by the Edict of Nantes still held sway, even though the
Protestants’ long-dominant position was in decline, may explain his ecumen-
ical approach.28
   By contrast, the other Protestant-authored history, Jean Graverol’s history
of Nîmes (1703), shows that Catholic authors had no monopoly on a partisan
approach. A Huguenot who sought refuge in London after the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes, Graverol wrote to tell the younger generation of refugees
about the suffering that he and his co-religionists had endured. His vituperative
denunciation of the ‘implacable tyranny’ of the ‘idolatrous papists’ who cruelly
persecuted the ‘Church of God’ is a mirror image of the emotionally charged
accounts of the religious conflicts most Catholic authors wrote.29 The differ-
ence is that the violence that Graverol endured was personal, as well as histor-
ical, while most Catholic authors wrote from the perspective of an increasingly
dominant majority about events that had occurred before they were born. This
makes the persistence of intemperate language in Catholic narratives more
challenging to explain. It can only be understood within the broader context
of a drive to restore and reaffirm a shared sense of Catholic community at the
local level.

  27  Du Plessis, Meaux, 329.
  28  Borel, Castres, 17–18. On confessional relations in Castres, P. J. Souriac, ‘Choix confessionnel
et engagement partisan d’une place de sûreté protestante: le cas de Castres durant les guerres de
Rohan (1620–1629)’, in Ville et religion en Europe du XVIe au XXe siècle: la cité réenchantée, ed.
B. Dumons and B. Hours (Grenoble, 2010), 325–43.
   29 Graverol, Nîmes, 15, 18–19, 28–9, 67–70.

BARBAR A B. DIEFENDORF                                Page 9 of 22

                                             II
With few exceptions, French local histories, whether by lay or clerical au-
thors, served the purpose of Catholic confessionalization. Reinforcing belief
that the Catholic Church offered the only sure path to salvation, these works

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also helped restore a unified communal identity rooted in Catholic ritual and
a shared sense of divine protection. Their authors reflected the common view
that religious schism and civil war were signs of God’s wrath, a just punishment
for a sinful people. Penitence and prayer were needed to appease God’s ire, but
so was a zealous attempt to drive out the heresy.30 Focusing their accounts of
the wars at the local level, Catholic historians memorialized the suffering their
towns had endured by describing at length the pillaging of cherished relics
and destruction of sacred spaces, the abuses suffered by clerics and the terror
and hardships inhabitants endured. Narrating the processions and prayers with
which the cities responded to the dangers of heresy, they tell of miracles and
blessings that reassured them of divine grace. They also, however, recount
more violent—but in their view entirely justified—responses to the heretics’
affronts.
   Catholic historians recount the invasion of churches, reversal of saints’ im-
ages, breaking of altars and pillaging of relics in highly coloured language
and frequently in great detail. The Huguenots are said to have committed ‘as-
tounding sacrileges’ with an ‘enraged passion and brutal fury’ and profaned
churches with ‘a frenzied license’ and ‘an unparalleled rage and impetuous-
ness’.31 Individuals perpetrating sacrileges are called ‘monsters’; participants
in crowd violence described as overcome by a contagious fury but also as pil-
laging for both pleasure and profit.32 In addition to providing vivid descrip-
tions of iconoclastic violence, some local histories reproduce inventories
documenting the pillage and destruction of churches.33 These terse lists ap-
pear dispassionate, but, as historians of memory have noted, material objects
had great social and emotional importance in early modern times: ‘We should
therefore take the listing of losses and destruction very seriously.’34 This is
especially true of such sacred objects as saints’ images and relics, which had
spiritual as well as material value and were often important to civic identity.
   Accounts of the human cost of Huguenot takeovers are also framed as rup-
tures of the sacred in their emphasis on the persecution of priests, monks
and nuns. Henri Le Bret, for instance, tells how Huguenots, having seized

  30   Guyon, Orléans, 412–13, 430; Saint-Aubin, Lyon, 165.
  31   Farin, Rouen, 153; Perry, Chalon-sur-Saône, 305; Guyon, Orléans, 410. Similarly Le
Corvaisier, Le Mans, 839–41; Oursel, Rouen, 65–6; Du Plessis, Meaux, 358; Saint-Aubin, Lyon,
200–2. Also S. Broomhall, ‘Disturbing memories: narrating experiences and emotions of
distressing events in the French Wars of Religion’, in Memory before Modernity, ed. Kuijpers
et al., 253–67, on affective language in accounts of sacrilege and iconoclasm.
   32 Saint-Aubin, Lyon, 165; Aigrefeuille, Montpellier, i. 280–1, 297–8; Dormay, Soissons, 467,

471, 473.
   33 Gariel, Montpellier, 69–71; Guyon, Orléans, 394–5; Le Corvaisier, Le Mans, 840–1; Dormay,

Soissons, 470–7; Perry, Chalon-sur-Saône, 328.
   34 J. Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Oxford, 2017), 165.

Page 10 of 22            T H E S C A R S O F R E L I G I O U S WA R

Montauban and banished Catholic ceremonies, imprisoned clerics in the
Cordeliers friary and flogged them so cruelly that some died. They paraded a
priest caught secretly saying Mass backwards on a donkey, while beating him
‘outrageously’, and forced the ‘sacred virgins’ of Saint Clare out of their con-

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vent, ‘exposing them half naked to the mockery and scorn of the populace’.35
   The histories do not overlook the suffering of lay populations. Not surpris-
ingly, histories of cities that experienced Protestant takeovers describe their
residents’ fear and suffering in greatest detail. Their tales of Huguenots ter-
rorizing Catholic inhabitants, forcing them to flee, pillaging their houses and
quartering soldiers there impress upon readers the material and psychological
costs of the wars.36 Histories of cities that did not experience Protestant take-
overs frequently attribute this to the inhabitants’ ingrained hatred of heresy.
Describing the fear that spread when nearby towns fell into Huguenot hands,
they give thanks for their escape from what they consider an all-encompassing
plot to dominate the country.37
   But if local histories enclose Catholic inhabitants within the bonds of shared
suffering, they also recount the rituals that united them as members of Christ’s
body. They describe the processions that brought Catholic populations into
the streets to ritually expiate sacrileges, appeal collectively for divine protec-
tion and offer thanks for victories in the wars.38 Historians of towns that fell
under Huguenot domination tell of the joyous celebrations that took place after
the Protestant occupation was ended and ‘worship of the true God’ restored.
Recounting the ‘unbelievable waves of joy’ with which Catholic religious
services were resumed, they describe ceremonies to ritually purify desecrated
churches, re-erect crosses in public squares and restore recovered relics to
altars.39 Towns that escaped or were freed from Huguenot domination often
instituted a procession to give thanks for the divine providence that protected
them, and several local historians remark that this procession continued to be
celebrated annually even as they wrote.40

  35  Le Bret, Montauban, ii. 47–50.
  36  Dormay, Soissons, 466–77; Du Plessis, Meaux, 355–63, 370–1; Guyon, Orléans, 393–7, 410–
13; La Barre, Corbeil, 245–7; Le Bret, Montauban, ii. 47–55; Menard, Nîmes, i. 309–23, 333–57;
Perry, Chalon-sur-Saône, 324–30; Pourcelet, Beaucaire, 20–2; Saint-Aubin, Lyon, 193–215.
   37 Bouges, Carcassonne, 312–14, 331; Dormay, Soissons, 462; Du Port, Arles, 248; Félibien and

Lobineau, Paris, ii. 1085; Girardin, Fréjus, 246–7; Ignace-Joseph de Jésus Maria, Abbeville, 53;
Ruffi, Marseille, 228.
   38 Bouges, Carcassonne, 303, 314; Dormay, Soissons, 499; Saint-Aubin, Lyon, 234. Also

Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe, 96–101, on the importance of religion to local
memory cultures.
   39 Aigrefeuille, Montpellier, i. 300, 303, ii. 173; Guyon, Orléans, 368–9, 380, 405, 409–10,

413–15, 421, 428–31, 436–7; Oursel, Rouen, 66; Rubys, Lyon, 400; Saint-Aubin, Lyon, 234–5. B. B.
Diefendorf, ‘Religious conflict and civic identity: battles over the sacred landscape of Montpellier’,
P&P, 237 (2017), 53–91, especially 80–3, on the restoration of Catholic processions and other
public rituals in Montpellier.
   40 Bouges, Carcassonne, 314; Fleureau, Étampes, 239; La Faille, Toulouse, ii. 239; Pourcelet,

Beaucaire, 23; Aigrefeuille, Montpellier, i. 381. Also P. Benedict, ‘Divided memories? Historical
calendars, commemorative processions and the recollection of the Wars of Religion during the
ancien régime’, Fr Hist, 22 (2008), 381–405; and Hilary Bernstein’s article in this issue on the pro-
cession of the relics of St Scholastique. Le Corvaisier, Le Mans, 841, leaves the miraculous nature
of these events open to interpretation. He says that the Huguenots fled in panic on the day of the
procession or the following day but does not explicitly attribute this to the saint’s intervention.

BARBAR A B. DIEFENDORF                             Page 11 of 22

   Memory of the wars was also preserved in stories of miracles that reaffirmed
doctrines the Protestants disputed. Thomas Bouges affirmed the sacred power
of relics in telling how the bishop of Carcassonne responded to the city’s
first Protestant sacrileges by subjecting a tiny piece of a relic believed to be

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Christ’s burial shroud to trial by fire. Rising above the flame, the relic refused
to be burned.41 Jean-Scholastique Pitton affirmed the intercession of saints and
power of images with the story of a Huguenot soldier killed when the shot he
fired at an image of Saint Christopher bounced back into his forehead.42 Jean
de Saint-Aubin made the same point in telling how a painting of the Virgin
Mary bled when pierced by a heretic’s blow. The miracle, he says, was authen-
tically verified and resulted in ‘an unbelievable increase in piety, which has
lasted up to the present’. ‘The marks of the blow are still visible’, he adds, ‘and
the memory is precious.’43 Pierre Gariel likewise signals the continuing import-
ance of the protective powers Catholics attributed to their saints in crediting
Montpellier’s protectress, a Black Madonna known as the Magestat antiqua,
with several miracles that occurred after her disappearance and the sacking of
the church in which she stood. He offers each of the miracles as evidence that
the city still enjoyed her protection.44
   Miracles reaffirming Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist also have a
place in local histories. Jean-Scholastique Pitton tells of a consecrated Host
that eluded a Huguenot’s attempt to destroy it by rising above the fire into
which he threw it.45 Claude Dormay tells how a Huguenot who tried to push
his way through a procession of the Blessed Sacrament was stopped when his
horse kneeled down before the passing Host.46 The story’s resemblance to a
well-known miracle of Saint Anthony of Padua is a good reminder that the
tropes these stories employed—bleeding images, Hosts and relics that refused
to burn, and animals that acknowledged the real presence in the Eucharist—
would have been familiar to early modern readers from saints’ lives and ex-
empla.47 Local historians built on their continuing importance in oral tradition
in using them to affirm that the Catholic cause in the wars enjoyed divine pro-
tection and favour.
   Local historians did not, however, rely solely on miracle stories to assert
the validity of the Catholic cause. Many defended the violence with which
the Catholic citizenry responded to Protestant sacrileges and attacks with sur-
prising frankness. They tell how Catholic crowds retook churches that had
been taken from them, how they invaded the homes of suspected Huguenots

  41 Bouges, Carcassonne, 303–5. Also Dormay, Soissons, 474, regarding relics miraculously re-

covered from the city’s moat.
  42 Pitton, Aix-en-Provence, 292.
  43 Saint-Aubin, Lyon, 202–4, 210, which also credits divine providence with the miraculous

recovery of two of Lyon’s most important relics.
  44 Gariel, Montpellier, pt. 4, 19–42, 50–1; Aigrefeuille, Montpellier, ii. 254–9; Diefendorf,

‘Religious conflict and civic identity’, 64–5, 80–1.
  45 Pitton, Aix-en-Provence, 292.
  46 Dormay, Soissons, 499.
  47 J. Delumeau, Rassurer et protéger: le sentiment de sécurité dans l’Occident d’autrefois

(Paris, 1989), especially chs 5–7; N. Balzamo, Les miracles dans la France du XVIe siècle
(Paris, 2014).

Page 12 of 22           T H E S C A R S O F R E L I G I O U S WA R

and how they hunted down and killed individuals implicated in cases of sacri-
lege. These acts of vengeance are often explicitly justified.48 Benoît de Toul, for
example, tells how only the prompt reaction of Toul’s governor preserved the
peace when a crowd of armed Catholics, ‘pushed by a just resentment’, set out

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to kill those implicated in iconoclastic riots.49 Adrien de La Morlière recounts
a similar incident in Amiens, where Catholics burst into the cathedral at the
news that Huguenots had come to pillage it. Blood was spilled, and the bishop
had to reconsecrate the church before saying Mass the following day. To La
Morlière’s regret, ‘more than two hundred good Catholics were taken prisoner
or fled for such a just defence’.50
   Symphorien Guyon is equally explicit in defending the retribution Catholics
exacted when they returned to Orléans after the second war. Telling how they
burned two Protestant churches, attacked worshippers returning from services
outside the walls and created a citizen militia to keep the Huguenots in line,
Guyon goes on to describe a riot in August 1569 so violent that Huguenots who
failed to heed the warning to take shelter in prisons were murdered ‘without
regard to age or sex’. About two hundred people were killed, Guyon estimates,
‘both to prevent their pernicious plans [they were suspected of plotting to
seize the city again] and in punishment for previous disorders’. He interprets
this punishment as divine justice: ‘God, the just Judge, wanting that, as they
had twice troubled and afflicted the city of Orléans, so they should be twice
chastised for their impiety, that is to say, by the punishment just recounted
here and by that which arrived three years later.’51
   He refers here to the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which was exe-
cuted with brutal efficiency in Orléans and left, by Guyon’s estimate, 800
victims.52 The dead should not, Guyon adds, be called martyrs, for they have
been ‘put to death for their heresy and rebellion, and not for defence of the
truth’. He further explains that the king has the ‘just right’ to punish her-
etics, and the ‘people of Orléans’ received this ‘legitimate power’ from him.53
Germain de La Faille is more circumspect in writing about events in Toulouse.
Although he first credits the lieutenant-général of Languedoc with telling city
officials that the king wanted the pacification edict upheld, he presents the
massacre that occurred in defiance of this order as a reaction to the suffering

   48 Bouges, Carcassonne, 311–12; Farin, Rouen, 280; Le Maire, Orléans, 348 (1645); Ruffi,

Marseille, 228–9; Saint-Aubin, Lyon, 165; Rubys, Lyon, 389; Du Plessis, Meaux, 379. Graverol,
Nîmes, 68–70, shows that Protestants too could justify their violence in terms of the cruelty of
their enemies.
   49 Benoît de Toul, Toul, 645.
   50 La Morlière, Amiens, 275.
   51 Guyon, Orléans, 415–20. A. Spicer, ‘(Re)building the sacred landscape: Orléans, 1560–1610’,

Fr Hist, 21 (2007), 247–68, on the restoration of Catholic churches and worship in the wake of
the Protestant seizures.
   52 A. Jouanna, The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: The Mysteries of a Crime of State, trans.

J. Bergin (Manchester and New York, 2007), 143, says that between 500 and 1500 people were
killed in Orléans.
   53 Guyon, Orléans, 424.

BARBAR A B. DIEFENDORF                               Page 13 of 22

Catholics had endured in Montauban, Castres, and other Protestant-held towns
in Haut-Languedoc. Without explicitly justifying the killing in Toulouse, La
Faille normalizes the massacre there as an understandable act of vengeance
prompted by sympathy for the ‘pitiable’ condition of the Catholic refugees who

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had gathered there.54
   What these and other local historians have in common, whether or not they
condone the massacre, is their focus on its religious dimension and local im-
pact. They see the killings as a reaction against Protestant attacks on churches
and altars and not—or only secondarily—as a response to an alleged plot
against the Crown.55 Moreover, authors who credit the king with the right to
order his subjects killed ground their argument in the monarch’s obligation to
pursue heretics rather than his right to put down rebellion. Some offer the sim-
pler argument of ‘an eye for an eye’—or, in François Le Maire’s words, ‘blood
for blood’. Writing that the Catholics of Orléans were ‘animated’ by having seen
Protestants tear down their altars, ruin their churches and break up the graves
of their ancestors, Le Maire says they were determined to destroy those who
had committed these ‘inhuman acts’. ‘God, wishing us to be judged as we judge
others, demands blood for blood’, he concludes, ‘and sometimes allows those
unjustly wronged … to one day reap a much desired and glorious vengeance.’56
Jean de Saint-Aubin also justifies vengeance in judging the Huguenots’ revolt,
their attacks and their heresy to be ‘infinitely more wicked evils’ than the Saint
Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Lyon.57 Not surprisingly, historians of cities
that experienced the most severe massacres defended the killing most vigor-
ously. Historians of towns that escaped the slaughter attribute this to pro-active
measures—most often the enclosure of Huguenots in monasteries or jails—on
the part of provincial governors or town officials, though some nevertheless
describe the massacres elsewhere as necessary and just.58
   Michel Félibien and Guy-Alexis Lobineau’s history of Paris is one of the few
works that does not attempt to justify the killing. The authors describe at
length ‘the tragic scene’ of the massacre but refuse to speculate about the par-
ticipants’ ‘hidden designs’, much less to judge them.59 Claude de Rubys takes
an even more exceptional stance in his history of Lyon. As Gautier Mingous

  54   La Faille, Toulouse, ii. 310.
  55   Malingre, Paris, 262, which mentions only the alleged need to ward off a Protestant coup,
is a rare exception.
    56 Le Maire, Orléans, 345–6 (1645) and 216 (1648). Bernstein, Historical Communities, ch.

9, tells how Le Maire revised his chapter on Saint Bartholomew’s Day for the 1648 edition in
response to criticism he received on account of his use of Protestant sources. This passage, how-
ever, survived the cuts. Also Colletet, Paris, 208.
    57 Saint-Aubin, Lyon, 249. Similarly, La Barre, Corbeil, 249.
    58 Aigrefeuille, Montpellier, i. 304; Bouges, Carcassonne, 342–3; Dormay, Soissons, 493; La

Barre, Corbeil, 249; Menard, Nîmes, i. 371–4; Perry, Chalon-sur-Saône, 348. Le Bret, Montauban,
ii. 111–15, ostensibly presents arguments both for and against the massacre but clearly sides with
those who believed the killing justified.
    59 Félibien and Lobineau, Paris, ii. 1116. Du Plessis, Meaux, 376–8, recounts the massacre there

in detail but without judgement.

Page 14 of 22            T H E S C A R S O F R E L I G I O U S WA R

points out in his contribution to this special issue, Rubys asserts that he cannot
say anything about the massacre in Lyon because he was in Paris at the time.
He nevertheless goes on to admit that he once applauded the killing, ‘more
on account of youthful animosities than by solid judgement’, but he now con-

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siders himself better advised and wishes to conform to the recent edicts ‘com-
manding us to live in peace and repose with one another’ while waiting for
God to inspire those who have gone astray to return to the true church.60
The reversal is striking but must be understood in context. Rubys’ earlier cele-
bration of religious violence was not just the product of youthful excitability.
Already nearly forty at the time of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres, he
shows no sign of having moderated his anti-Protestant ardour in the years that
followed and became an ardent proponent of the Holy League. As Mingous ex-
plains, Rubys was banished from Lyon when it fell to the royalists and allowed
to return by the king’s grace only in 1600, just four years before he published
his history of the city.
   Whether or not his tardy repentance was sincere, Rubys’ expressed willing-
ness to conform to the pacification edicts was expedient—perhaps necessary—
in a work published just six years after the promulgation of the Edit of Nantes.
It is, moreover, significant that he says again in a slightly later passage that it is
necessary to live in peace together ‘until it pleases God to gather back into his
church those who are outside’. The passages seize upon—and paraphrase—a
line in the preamble to the Edict of Nantes that encouraged opponents of the
bi-confessional state created by the Edict of Nantes to understand it as only an
interim solution to France’s religious differences.61

                                               III
Claude de Rubys’ history of Lyon is also exceptional in his refusal to discuss
the era when the Holy League rebelled against royal authority in France. Again
citing the pacification edicts, Rubys refuses to give a detailed account of what
happened in Lyon during the five years of the League ‘so as not to offend
against the amnesty commanded by his Majesty’s edicts’. Clearly, though, he
also avoided the subject because he was embarrassed by his Leaguer past. He
interrupts his narrative with an emotional aside to beg pardon of God, king,
and the Holy Mother Church for having published writings that justified the
League’s rebellion. It would not be seemly for him to write about this era,
he concludes.62 Sébastien Rouillard makes no such personal confession but

  60 Rubys, Lyon, 421–2. The excuse that Rubys was absent from Lyon during the massacres is

disingenuous. As Mingous points out, Claude de Rubys co-authored the letter that gave Lyon’s con-
suls their first news of the massacre in Paris. The letter not only confirmed the killing taking place
there but said that the king let it be understood that he wanted the Protestants treated in the same
way in Lyon as in Paris. Rubys thus played an indirect but possibly significant part in what oc-
curred in Lyon during his absence. Chapter 9 of Bernstein’s forthcoming Historical Communities
offers an excellent analysis of how Claude de Rubys inserts himself into his history of Lyon.
  61 Rubys, Lyon, 422; ‘The Edict of Nantes’, 42.
  62 Rubys, Lyon, 443, 446.

BARBAR A B. DIEFENDORF                              Page 15 of 22

honours the edict’s call for oubliance in declining to discuss the era of the
League on the ground that he fears to open wounds that appear to have begun
to heal. Calling ‘civil and internecine war … the most hideous and pernicious
thing in the world’, he says he will ‘veil this pitiful tragedy with his silence’.63

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Jean de Saint-Aubin also declines to discuss the ‘odious subject’, saying he will
leave it to general histories.64
   Such refusals are, however, rare. Contrary to what several scholars have
suggested, most local historians did not believe that the era should be buried
‘in eternal forgetfulness’ but rather wrote voluminously about their town’s
experience.65 Drawing on sources that often no longer exist, they offer valu-
able insights into this troubled period of civil war. Writing from a local per-
spective, they show how fraught the choosing of sides could be. Residents of
Carcassonne’s walled upper-city fought for two years to force residents of the
ville below to submit to the League. Civil war broke out locally in 1590 when,
according to Thomas Bouges, the cité rained 600 cannon balls down on the
royalist ville, ruining its faubourgs. Angered by the death of neighbours and
destruction of their homes, residents of these suburbs stormed into the fau-
bourg of the cité, where they set fires that killed a number of inhabitants. As
the fighting continued, ‘the confusion was’, in Bouges’ words, ‘so great and the
murders on all sides so numerous, that … all mixed up together, they killed
one another without knowing which faction they were fighting for’.66 Toul
was another city riven by fierce internal divisions. By 1587 the quarrels had,
in the words of Toul’s historian, turned ‘citizen against citizen, brother against
brother and father against son with a merciless fury’.67 In Aix-en-Provence,
Fréjus and Marseille, as in Toul, the decision to support or oppose the League
was complicated by existing factional divisions.68
   For other cities, the conflicts were external ones, caused by their strategic lo-
cation or by the accident of lying in an army’s path. A case in point is Gerberoy
in Picardy. Once a walled city with a proud castle and prosperous bourgeoisie,
Gerberoy is today but a beau village. Occupied successively by leaguers and
royalists, the town had its fortifications destroyed as part of a ransom agree-
ment when its royalist governor was captured fighting to take the Leaguer city
of Beauvais nearby. Gerberoy’s historian, Jean Pillet, says the Beauvaisis then
took out their anger against the defenceless town, which the royalist army
had used as a staging ground for its attacks on Beauvais, by completing the

  63  Rouillard, Melun, 632.
  64  Saint-Aubin, Lyon, 84.
   65 Dolan, ‘L’Identité urbaine’, 290; Benedict, ‘Shaping the memory of the French Wars of

Religion’, 123. The passage Dolan and Benedict cite as evidence most Catholics agreed that the
less said about the League the better is deceptive. Jean Lebeuf’s Histoire de la prise d’Auxerre
par les huguenots (Auxerre, 1723) was never intended to cover more than the wars of 1567 and
1568. Lebeuf did discuss the League in his later Mémoires concernant l’histoire ecclésiastique
et civile d’Auxerre (Paris, 1743).
   66 Bouges, Carcassonne, 391–3.
   67 Benoît de Toul, Toul, 668–72, at 668.
   68 Pitton, Aix-en-Provence, 296, 303–6; Girardin, Fréjus, 246–51; Ruffi, Marseille, 235–6.