Etudes Epistémè (Nov 2024)
Mémoire et actualité d’un massacre : la Saint-Barthélemy sous les plumes huguenotes du XVIIIe siècle
Abstract
This article explores the conditions under which, in the middle of the 18th century, Saint-Bartholomew’s Day Massacre reappeared in Protestant writings. In Le Patriote françois et impartial (1751), pastor Antoine Court replies to the bishop of Agen who spoke out against tolerance towards Huguenots. This Patriote inspired three other texts : L’Accord parfait de la nature, de la raison, de la révélation et de la politique (1753), the Mémoire théologique et politique au sujet des mariages clandestins des protestants de France (1755) and the Lettre d’un patriote sur la tolérance civile des protestants de France (1756). This set of texts triggered the abbé Novi de Caveirac’s reaction in Mémoire politico-critique (1756) and Apologie de Louis XIV et de son conseil sur la Révocation de l’édit de Nantes… avec une dissertation sur la journée de la S. Barthelemy (1758). Caveirac was in turn attacked by the pastor de La Broue in L’Esprit de Jésus-Christ sur la tolérance (1760), and Court de Gébelin echoes this in the Bibliothèque des Sciences et des arts. These authors question the reasons why a Catholic author undertook to justify the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and Saint-Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. They discuss Caveirac’s historical argument, but also the astonishing discrepancy between his discourse and the values of the ‘enlightened century’ under king Louis XV. In addition to this main corpus, allusions to Saint-Bartholomew’s Day Massacre may be found in in L’Asiatique tolérant by La Beaumelle (1748), as well as in the writings of La Beaumelle, first in 1762 in La Calomnie confondue written on the occasion of the Calas affair, then in his ‘Requête des Protestants français au roi’ of 1763, and in Court de Gébelin’s Toulousaines (1763).
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