The French Wars of Religion: Life, Death, Afterlife
Religion and politics have made a volatile combination in eras before our own. In 16th-century France, they were literally matters of life and death. This period is known as the Wars of Religion, when a group of Protestants called Huguenots vied with Roman Catholics for control of the French throne and influence over the minds of believers throughout the kingdom.
During this tumultuous time, pamphlets provided an outlet for news and opinion. Politicians, clergymen, and other elites used printed texts to carry out rhetorical and propaganda battles over the key events and controversies of the moment. Some pamphlets offered densely argued theological disputes, with numerous biblical citations in the margins. Others reproduced important edicts, proclamations, and legal decisions. Still others — the social media of their day — offered vitriolic attacks and rejoinders filled with lies and exaggerations. Pamphlets came in all styles, from poetic tributes to satirical orations to polemical dialogues or letters. Sold surreptitiously by book peddlers and often read aloud to sympathetic ears, pamphlets were cheaply printed and usually small (and thus more easily hidden from royal censors).
Special Collections holds thousands of French political pamphlets, spanning from the death of King Francis I in 1547 to a series of civil wars in the mid-17th century known as the Fronde. The University of Wisconsin has a particularly close connection to these materials. In fact, the most authoritative bibliographies of French political pamphlets held by American libraries were compiled in the 1960s and 70s by scholars at UW–Madison.
The pamphlets in this exhibit focus chiefly on the pivotal years 1588–1589, a moment of ferocious political violence that saw King Henry III order the assassinations of his most powerful rivals — only to be felled himself by an assassin’s knife. His successor, Henry IV, would eventually bring some measure of peace between Protestants and Catholics through the Edict of Nantes. After documenting these questions of life and death, the case explores the afterlife of the pamphlets themselves by tracing the fate of one pamphlet from its original publication through to its digitization by Internet Archive more than four centuries later.
Doguet, Guillaume. Discovrs de la desconfitvre des pvblicains par les capitaines de l’armee…
Sieges and battles were common topics for pamphlets during the Wars of Religion, often including lists of prominent nobles captured or killed.
La vie et innocence des devx freres…
The Duke of Guise and Cardinal Guise — two brothers from a powerful political family — were assassinated one day apart on 23-24 December 1588. On the title page of a pamphlet mourning their murders, they reunite in prayer at the foot of a crucifix.
Les sorceleries de Henry de Valois et les oblations qu’il faisoit au diable dans le bois de Vincennes…
Meanwhile, in another pamphlet from the same period, demons dance around the throne of the monarch who ordered the killings. (The king himself is not depicted. According to the text, he was away in the forest worshipping Satan.)
In contrast to clearly recognizable religious images like these, many theological disputes during the French Wars of Religion involved finer points of Christian doctrine, such as the precise proportions of Christ’s human and divine natures or exactly what was communicated to believers through the bread and wine of the Eucharist.
Antiquorum Galliae episcopatuum geographica descriptio.
Pamphlets spread news and inflamed opinion across the French kingdom as politicians and propagandists sought to influence urban elites in provincial cities and towns. In addition to Paris (labelled on the map by its Latin name, Parisii), other centers of printing activity during this time period included Lyon (Lugdunum), Orleans (Aurelia), and Rouen (Rothomagum).
Discovrs de la vie et de la mort.
This simple title — Discourse on life and death — reflects a reality that faced not just kings and cardinals but everyday people as well. Historians estimate that between 2 and 4 million French subjects died from violence, disease, and famine during the Wars of Religion.
Du contemnement de la mort.
Bound by a later collector into a compilation of funeral orations, this pamphlet bears the poignant title On the contentment of death: Discourse adapted to the misery of this time.
Histoire au vray du meurtre et assassinat proditoirement cōmis au cabinet d’un roy perfide & barbare…
The murders of the Guise brothers before Christmas 1588 sparked an outpouring of tributes as well as outrage at the monarch who ordered their killings. According to its caption, this woodcut illustration depicts:
“…the cruel death committed against the innocence of Cardinal Guise, a sacred person dedicated to God.”
Given their strong critique of the king, it is hardly surprising that the author and artist concealed their identities. Although royal censorship could be eluded, the potential punishments were severe if caught, so most pamphleteers during the Wars of Religion remained anonymous.
Bourgoing, Edmond. Discovrs veritable de lestrange & subbite mort de Henry de Valois…
Henry III dances with Death after meeting his fate at the hands of an assassin on 1 August 1589. A fanatical young Dominican friar talked his way into the royal chamber, claiming that he possessed secret messages and documents. Whispering in the king’s ear, the true message was delivered in the form of a knife to his stomach. The friar was killed on the spot by the king’s guards. The monarch died the next morning.
Relation de la deffaicte des Anglois dans l’Isle de Ré.
The Wars of Religion drew attention throughout Europe. Countries aligned with the Catholic and Protestant sides followed events in France closely and sometimes became directly involved in the conflict.
Much of the time, England sided with the Protestant Huguenots. In 1627, the Duke of Buckingham — whose previous foreign policy misadventures included ordering an invasion of Spain that ended in drunken defeat when his sailors broke open vats of local wine — lay siege to the Isle of Ré, near La Rochelle on France’s west coast.
The campaign was a disaster. Food ran out. Rain flooded trenches. Disease spread. When Buckingham finally gave up, his soldiers discovered that the defensive wall built to protect their retreat had been erected on the wrong side of the bridge, leaving them exposed to a withering counterattack by French forces.
Anna d’Este. Les regrets de Madame de Nemovrs svr la mort de Messeigneurs de Guyse ses enfans.
Anna d’Este was a power broker for nearly half a century. Her Italian roots and close ties to Queen Catherine de’ Medici often put her in a mediating position during the Wars of Religion. Her influence came at a cost, however. The Duke of Guise and the Cardinal de Guise — the brothers whose assassinations we witnessed above — were her sons. Their father (Anna’s first husband) had been killed in political violence as well. In this pamphlet, Madame de Nemours (as she was known in her second marriage) laments the loss of her two children.
While pamphlets are considered an ephemeral form of printed material — cheaply produced, of the moment, not necessarily meant to last — considerable care and attention has been lavished on the ones that did survive. Tracing the afterlife of these pamphlets allows us to speculate on why certain texts or topics might have been more likely to survive their moment intact or been prized more highly by contemporaries as well as later collectors.
In this and the final two sections of this exhibit, we follow Les regrets de Madame de Nemours from its original publication in 1589 to its appearance nearly two centuries later in a bibliography of historical documents through to its digital afterlife in our own century.
Le Long, Jacques. Bibliothèque historique de la France.
Bibliothèque historique de la France was originally compiled in 1719 by Jacques Le Long, a priest who spent much of his life in seclusion assembling an index of all editions of the Bible. A later version of the Bibliothèque historique (displayed here) covered 48,223 manuscripts and printed titles that its editors considered important in the religious and political history of France.
The project’s fifth and final volume was completed in 1788 — a decade before the French Revolution unleashed a new print explosion that overwhelmed anything that had come before.
Les regrets de Madame de Nemours appears on page 308 as number 18865.
In collaboration with Internet Archive, the Newberry Library in Chicago has digitized thousands of pamphlets from the Wars of Religion, the French Revolution, and later time periods. These scans help scholars detect subtle differences between different editions of the same text — especially in the case of a popular or influential pamphlet like this one, which went through many reprintings. Note, for instance, that the Newberry’s copy of Regrets de Madame de Nemours lacks a date on the bottom of the title page.
Online copies are not a perfect substitute. Some aspects of the materials can be seen or felt only by examining the physical originals, such as cropping or gilding along the edges that might give clues as to how an item was treated by its later owners. Nevertheless, digitization expands the possibilities for new generations — facing new eras of political and religious violence — to study these exceptional primary sources from an earlier time.