Dinesh's photo

this photo by Dinesh

Comments

Dinesh ^club

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 of killing the injured man in his bed. This was early on the morning of Sunday August 24: St. Bartholomew’s day

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Bartholomew%27s_Day_massacre

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.. . . .

The wars were fed by religious ardor, but the suffering of war in turn generated further apocalyptic imaginings. Both Catholics and Protestants thought that events were approaching a point beyond which there would 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 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: 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 near 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 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. ~ Pages 207/209

3 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

21 months ago.

Sign-in to write a comment.

		Page color
		Comments Panel
		Screen Margins
▼▲
		Widescreen

← Among Dinesh's photos

See also...

Book Images Book Images

Keywords

Authorizations, license

this photo by Dinesh

Ξ	Frame Options
3 - +