Mémoires de la Saint-Barthélemy

Abstract

At the start of the twenty-first century, 450 years after the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day, the remembrance of this tragic ‘bloody night’ has re-emerged with force in the collective memory and in the public sphere. This revival is not just the result of the massacre’s anniversary: it is part of a particular political context in which debates on secularism and multifaithism, sparked anew by the Paris 2015 attacks, as well as on the persistent risk of political violence have flared up. While the historiography of St Bartholomew's Day, an event that immediately ‘closed in on itself’ (D. Crouzet), continues to be constantly renewed and discussed by historians themselves, this issue of Études Épistémè attempts to examine how and to what ends this protean memory of an event with paradigmatic value has gradually been (re)modeled in France and around the world, from 1572 to the present day. Our aim in this issue was to open up a history of the different memorial situations and postures that developed over the centuries in relationship to the event, to look at the uses that have been made of it, and the agendas it has been made to serve. How was Saint Bartholomew's Day portrayed and commemorated in the aftermath of the massacre, by whom, and with what purposes in mind? How did its memory travel from place to place and how was it repurposed to fit new contexts? What specific poetics or aesthetics voiced it or grew out of it? How and why do we draw analogies, do we ‘Bartholomize’ or, on the contrary, ‘de-Bartholomize’ other events in the course of history? The articles are divided among four sections, each of which attempts to address these major questions.

Keywords

• fiction
• history
• massacre
• wars of religion
• St Bartholomew’s Day
• toleration