Compassion's Edge. Katherine Ibbett
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to a great outpouring of words. Protestant histories customarily added appendices of names of the sufferers, recording those unspectacular deaths that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. This genre of history forged Protestantism; it allowed a wider audience to bear witness to Protestant suffering, although they were not present at the scene. For Théodore de Bèze, leader of the French Protestant movement, historical writing allows for an expansion in time and space: “L’histoire est le seul moyen par lequel … l’homme peut cognoistre ce qu’il n’a oncques veu ni ouy, voire sans aucun danger, et trop mieux, bien souvent, que si luy-mesme l’avoit ouy ou veu.” [“History is the only way that man can know what he has never seen or heard, with no danger, and better, very often, than if he himself had heard or seen it.”]39 Reading grants a privileged perspective on events, and that perspective forms the Protestant community.
The texts that make the Protestant reader make clear the position from which they speak. Andrea Frisch has shown how the premodern witness is not an isolated individual but always what she calls “dialogic”; the witness’s account draws attention to its status as something “overtly constructed and made.”40 This means that the witness must establish himself as part of the same group as his readers; he is trusted not because of what he says but because of who he is.41 Thus in Jean de Léry’s Histoire memorable de la ville de Sancerre, the address to the reader carves out the author’s right to speak and to be heard based on his identity as a Protestant: “Pource que je suis, et seray jusques à la fin de ma vie, moyennant la grace de Dieu, du nombre de ceux qui font profession de la Religion, pour laquelle la ville de Sancerre a este ainsi rudiment et estrangement traictee que la presente Histoire le contient.” [“Because I am, and if the grace of God allows will be until the end of my life, one of those who profess the religion for which the town of Sancerre has been so rudely and uncouthly treated, as the present story tells.”]42 Léry hopes that those who have been there will be able to “recongoistre” [“recognize”] what they saw, but his desire is also to expand the audience beyond the immediate witnesses: “Mais il y a une autre sorte de gens auquels je desire aussi de satisfaire, afin que de cette Histoire ils puissant recueillir le fruit.” [“But there is another kind of person I would like to satisfy, so that they may harvest the fruit of this story.”]43 Written after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre at a time of horror for Protestant France, Léry’s preamble presorts writers and readers so that the right sort of history will build the right sort of religious community.
This careful construction work comes with detailed attention to sight lines and spectatorship, an attention to who sees what, and how. Léry’s history posits insiders and outsiders very clearly; he even supplies diagrams of each military position he describes. Sancerre was the site of a siege famous for its famine, which pushed a couple to cannibalism after the death of their daughter; the scene returns in innumerable texts of the period, including Christophe de Bordeaux’s Discours lamentable, described above, and Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques. Léry insists on the particularity of this French crime:
Car combien que j’aye demeuré dix mois entre les Sauvages Ameriquains en la terre du Bresil, leur ayant veu souvent manger de la chair humaine … si n’en ay-je jamais eu telle terreur que j’eu frayeur de voir ce piteux spectacle, lequel n’avoit encores (comme je croy) jamais esté veu en ville assiegee en nostre France. (147)
[For though I lived for ten months with the American savages in the land of Brazil, having often seen them eat human flesh … I have never been as terrified as I was frightened to see this pitiful spectacle, which had not yet (or so I believe) ever been seen in a besieged town in our France.]
This scene is the baseline Protestant pitiful spectacle to which many others make reference; like the histoires tragiques which sometimes draw on it, it pairs pity and terror in Aristotelian style but brings its horror home to “nostre France.” The spectacle is superlative, and signaled as such, but also paradoxically reiterable; pages later, Léry asks of still another scene, “Qui a jamais ouy ni entendu chose plus pitoyable?” [“Who has ever heard or listened to such a pitiful thing?”]44 The aural hendiadys (ouy, entendu) intensifies the urgency with which we are asked to listen. In its piling up of examples and its insistent hendiadys in describing each case, the pitiful spectacle is compassion as copia, a profusion that asks us to look back to painful memories even as we attempt to build France’s future.
Another scene from Léry’s account of the siege of Sancerre makes the pitiful spectacle into a sorting mechanism that sifts the right sort of spectator or reader from the wrong. He tells the story of Protestant townspeople up against Catholic forces, all of whom were barricaded into the castle. The townspeople go to the castle and parade old people, women, and children in front of the opposing forces, “pensans esmouvoir à pitié ceux qui estoyent dans les Chasteau” [“thinking to move those inside the castle to pity”].45 Pity is structured around an inside and outside, and here those outside the circle ask to be let in. But the townspeople’s attempts to soften the hearts of their opponents does not work; far from being moved to pity, those inside the castle throw things at them. In the history of the French pitiful spectacle, this invention of the pitiless spectator is the key Protestant innovation.
Agrippa d’Aubigné
Both pitiful sight and pitiless spectator are central to the most ferociously partisan of Protestant texts, Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques. First composed starting in 1577, as he lay injured after fighting at Casteljaloux, d’Aubigné’s text was unpublished until 1616, although fragments seem to have circulated in manuscript well before. The text’s dizzying temporality is thus able to conjure up the bitter period of intense battles between Catholics and Protestants as well as its eventual end; in the preface “Aux lecteurs” d’Aubigné even claims that Henri de Navarre had read and reread the text before he took the throne in 1589.46 Its title draws on the genre of the histoire tragique, but d’Aubigné is busy recycling all sorts of references from all sides. He uses Léry’s account of Sancerre in one of his most searing passages on a cannibalistic mother; reaching across the sectarian divide, he also calls up Ronsard, to whose work he was dedicated and whose allegorical maternal France, coupled with Léry’s cannibal mother, reappears in ghoulish format in his text.47
Most strikingly, d’Aubigné’s text revels in a series of ekphrases, turning ghastly sights into words; four of the seven books (III, La Chambre dorée; IV, Feux; V, Fers; VI, Vengeances) are structured as a series of visual tableaux, satirizing an unjust justice and recounting martyrdoms and massacres.48 The presence of these tableaux might seem jarring given Calvinist rage against artifice and ornament.49 Yet in the Tragiques, visuality is redeemed for the Protestant reader. Ekphrasis and enargeia—the process of making visible—were central to the training of classical orators, and they shape what Simon Goldhill calls “a viewing subject.”50 These exercises were central to d’Aubigné’s rhetorical training and to the drive of his poetical projects. In insisting on the shaping of the viewing subject, d’Aubigné’s tableaux and their imagined affective response prompt us to a reflection on perspective.51 In the Tragiques it is pity or its absence that allows us to gauge the presence of suffering; we know the violence of the wars because we are continually provided with spectators’ reactions to it. The sight of the suffering body matters less than the emotional reaction—or mourned absence of such a reaction—to it.
The importance of the imagined spectator might seem to sit uneasily with d’Aubigné’s famous call to his readers to abandon any hope of distancing themselves from the events of the wars: “Vous n’estes spectateurs, vous estes personages” (I:170). [“You are not spectators, you are characters.”]52 The text urges Protestant readers to think of themselves positioned within the battles but at the same time asks them to look on at scenes presented through images, or indeed to look upon those who look on, making them into a hybrid and displaced spectator-actor. David Quint has suggested the Stoic who shows constancy faced with death as the ideal figure of the Tragiques, exemplified by the figure of Coligny, who is described in terms which recall Lucan’s Cato.53 To be an actor in civil wars, one must show constancy.