L’idéal éthique de fidélité dans les témoignages protestants du massacre parisien de la Saint-Barthélemy

Abstract

Some survivors of the Parisian St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre delivered a testimony of the event in their Memoirs: Jean Mergey; Charlotte Arbaleste, wife of Philippe Duplessis-Mornay; the Duke of La Force, Jacques Nompar de Caumont; Jacques Pape de Saint-Auban; the Duke of Sully, Maximilien de Béthune. Beyond the diversity of situations they reported, their narratives all highlight the same ethical ideal of fidelity, which guides their behaviours as actors, as much as it founds their credibility as witnesses. After demonstrating how the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre represents a crisis of faith, this paper first sheds light on the compensatory virtue of Memoirs, whose redaction is motivated by a concern for memory and an imperative for justice. It goes on to show how the testimonies these Memoirs rely upon, be they direct or indirect, take the form of narratives seeking to guarantee their authenticity. All of them place a survivor of the massacre at the center of attention and offer this person the possibility of a propitious presentation of himself or herself. Distinguishing themselves as diligent servants, careful dissimulators, or prodigious teenagers, the survivors all recount and defend a course of action that enabled them to survive without denying themselves in the long term, while acknowledging their debts to others and what they owe to God’s Will.

Keywords

• Protestantism
• St. Bartholomew’s Day
• massacre
• testimony
• memory narrative
• presentation of self