200867937

School of History
Faculty of Arts

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Student ID: 200867937

Module Code: HIST3498

Module Name: Early Modern Media: Printing and the People in Europe c.1500-c.1800
Tutor’s Name: Dr Sara Barker

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School of History
Faculty of Arts

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Examine the ways in which printed works contributed to ONE of the following conflicts:

The French Wars of Religion

The greatest power that engravings, books, and pamphlets exuded lay in the polemic

utilisation of the Wars of Religion (Wars) to exacerbate further religious conflict. Although

considering all forms of print, the majority during the Wars were produced ephemerally with the

persuasive purpose of exaggeration. Print became more radicalised as the Wars continued as

subtle hints in histories of crusades evolved into aggressive anti-heretical polemic propaganda.

To consider the influence of printed media at a time of increased access to publications, it is

imperative to emphasise that the immense pressure of the Wars was contributed to by individual

authors acting collectively to increase awareness of events and this will be addressed in this essay.

Firstly, religious differences were exacerbated by opinionated pamphlets and poetry, secondly,

negative legacies were generated through curated informational prints, and finally, archaic

notions of biblical references and the Albigensian Crusade were resuscitated to produce a more

extreme conflict which was communicated to an involved audience. Prints by intellectual

creators directly engaged with propaganda as authors curated what their international intended

audience would know about the Wars. Intellectuals such as Thomas Beauxamis were prompted

to engage directly with Protestant propaganda and his response mirrored similar debates

surrounding what to present in the informational Wars, Massacres and Troubles (Wars) and De

Trustibus Galliae (Galliae).1 Pierre de L’Estoile engaged in producing a lasting image of print as a

tool for exposing the climax of destructive propaganda during the Wars in 1589 while proving

that edicts desiring oubliance (forgetfulness) were less effective in creating a legacy than

contemporary opinions. Scribner importantly described how there was a successful utilisation of

printing despite no revolution in literacy rates further indicating how popular imagery in

propaganda captured the attention of early modern France as it sought to spread views

1See Thomas Beauxamis, Resolution sur certains pourtraicz et libelles intitulez du nom Marmitte (Paris: Jérôme de Marnef,
1562).

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internationally.2 Print, which should have been a revolutionary and uniting factor at a time of

increased book production, was utilised to divide the two sides further apart by increasing

tension.

Firstly, the earliest Catholic portrayals of Protestants in print during the Wars sought to

distort the human element of their religious enemy. Protestants being depicted as monkeys

occurs prominently in the Catholic poem Galliae and iconoclasm accompanied their capture of

Lyon.3 Dehumanising Protestants was a common technique in Catholic propaganda as their

heresy rendered them a cancer to be destroyed. This setting as the start of the poem provides the

audience with an exaggerated view of the events depicted in an effort to raise tension and

abhorrence towards Protestants. The popularity of the print published in Lyon is representative

of its reputation as a printing city because, apart from Paris, it had ten times more recorded

prints in the sixteenth century than any other French city.4 The ape representation also reflects a

Catholic effort to separate themselves from animalistic Protestant iconoclasm but also this

senseless destruction indicated their perception that the religion itself was mindless. Wylie

Sypher’s view on polemic imagery, particularly towards Protestants, “deformed” their Reformed

principles and showed how they were morally inferior as well as religiously flawed.5 Though

focusing the analysis on sexual abnormality, this could be taken further by indicating how the

brutal intended reaction to these prints would have been to present the exaggerated but

vindictive religious separation witnessed in the Wars. The French conflict has a unique place in a

century of European religious wars by providing the most extreme and aggressive war of print

2 Robert Scribner, For the sake of simple folk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 7.
3 Philip Benedict, Tortorel, J., & Perrissin, J., Graphic history: the Wars, massacres and troubles of Tortorel and Perrissin
(Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2007), p. 153.
4 Recorded prints in France,

<https://ustc.ac.uk/index.php/search/cicero?tm_fulltext=&tm_field_allauthr=&tm_translator=&tm_editor=&ts_
field_short_title=&tm_field_imprint=&tm_field_place=&sm_field_year=&f_sm_field_year=&t_sm_field_year=&s
m_field_country=%22France%22&sm_field_lang=&sm_field_format=&sm_field_digital=&sm_field_class=&tm_
field_cit_name=&tm_field_cit_no=&order=&sm_field_ty=true> [accessed 14 December 2018].
5 G. Wylie Sypher, ‘“Faisant ce qu'il leur vient a plaisir”: The Image of Protestantism in French Catholic Polemic on

the Eve of the Religious Wars’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 11. II, (1980), 59-84 (p. 60).

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against individuals while also viciously attempting to persuade the country that their faith was

true.6

Similarly, the most ruthless method of print infiltrating the Wars was through extreme

depictions of accentuated religious differences in pamphlets which separated Protestant and

Catholic communities further. By the 1590s, the Catholic League had successfully marked its

place as a political and religious force that sought to counter Protestantism in a way that Henri

III could not. Protestant rejection of this attack is evident from their engraved depiction of a

monstrous Catholic League titled ‘The Effects of the League’, this view in 1594 heightened the

differences between Catholics and Protestants while also being intimidating and shocking

contemporary audiences with the metaphoric symbolism of a beast destroying France.

6 Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 182.
7 ‘The Effects of the League’ <https://0-www-bridgemaneducation-
com.wam.leeds.ac.uk/en/asset/2961698/summary?context=%7B%22route%22%3A%22assets_search%22%2C%2
2routeParameters%22%3A%7B%22_format%22%3A%22html%22%2C%22_locale%22%3A%22en%22%2C%22f
ilter_text%22%3A%22catholic+league+propaganda%22%7D%7D> [accessed on 11/11/2018].

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The monster controls the French crown and globe to show its powerful ambitions to take over

France domestically and restore Catholic hegemony internationally after the Reformation, but its

beastly nature overpowers the subtler techniques to fully reveal Catholic evil. Additionally, the

print seeks to present the destruction of the French city in the background to present the

League’s extreme action in killing innocents as can also be observed by the plainly dressed

Protestant martyrs being trampled and killed by the beast. As its publication date coincides with

Henry IV’s abjuration from Protestantism, this print does not seek to reflect the present

influence of the League, but its rooted success across France led to the extremely negative

situation for Protestants by the mid-1590s. Engravings within pamphlet propaganda, such as this

particularly, presented multiple themes in one picture to inform the viewer of the conclusion that

differences were irrevocable.

Poetry was another format used by French authors to publicly commentate on the

heightened pressure emphasised by stark religious differences between the Catholic and

Protestant faiths. In 1562, Ronsard hurriedly published Discours at the outbreak of war and the

print deliberately exposed religious differences to increase pressure on a failing royal authority.

Setting up his denouement, Ronsard describes how “Ainſi la France court en armes divisée, / Depuis

que la raiſon n'eſt plus autorisée” [So France runs headlong, divided and armed, / for reason is no

longer subject to authority].8 This displayed a clear fear of royal authority failing to cope with

increased tension as he was writing at a time of intense raised fervour at the beginning of

unprecedented civil war within France. However, the imprint includes “with royal privilege” and

this indicated not only how Ronsard’s strong position as court poet to the monarchs was

supported, but also how his Catholic view was inherent to the majority of France’s collective

traditional identity.9 Barker’s analysis astutely traces his religious separatist ideals back further

than the Wars to his separation of the leadership, the pope for Catholicism and Calvin for

8 Pierre Ronsard, Discours des misères de ce temps (Paris: Gabriel Buon, 1563), sig. Bi [p. 10].
9 Ibid., sig. A [p. 1].

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Protestants, while both calling themselves saviours of their “most Christian” France.10 Yet, closer

analysis of Discours provides a stronger indication of how poetry increased tension due to the

further separation of the dangerously divergent religious faiths. As a medium of print, poetry was

able to reflect common opinion in France by exploiting not only religious differences that made

Protestants an enemy, but also the inner fears of the audience concerning divergence from

traditional French Catholicism, heightened by the conflict surrounding them.11 Many of

Ronsard’s expected audience of French Catholics had witnessed the events described personally.

The speed of publication reflects the elevated role of print in the sixteenth century to act as

contemporary commentaries which, in this case, separated France’s ideologies further with

heightened tension.

The fearful poetry of Ronsard juxtaposed the aggressive polemic pamphlets by providing

a melancholy and figurative way of reflecting contemporary fears of the two extremely distinct

sides during the Wars. Furthering this notion, increased publications of coq-a-l’áne poems

emerged where the implicit violence is contrasted by a comic form of presenting fundamental

religious differences between the two warring sides. The short poems often sought to

deliberately joke and exaggerate unique aspects of the religions such as Protestants not observing

Lent where ‘Compose contre les Huguenots de La Rochelle’ describes “Found in the body of the fish/ A

Huguenot buttock,/ What a tasty morsel.”12 Coq-a-l’áne examples like this, with ridiculous and

ironic concepts of the fish eating Protestants who do not observe Lent, often came after

particularly violent episodes in the Wars where the two religious sides were split most severely.13

Almost solely published in the vernacular, these examples of the varying tones of poetry

highlight its flexibility to react humorously and increase public interaction with the increased

10 Sara Barker, ‘“D’une plume de fer sur un papier d'acier”: Faith, nationalism and war in the poetry of the first
French War of Religion, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 220 (2013), 151-171 (p. 158).
11 Scribner, p. 8.
12 Grégorie Holtz, ‘Illogic and polemic: The coq-a-l’áne during the Wars of Religion’, trans. by Annette Tomarken,

Renaissance Studies, 30. I (2016), 73-87 (p. 79).

13 Ibid., p. 75.

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religious tension during the Wars while still maintaining two distinctive sides. Sproxton reflects

upon the practical response to pamphlets by viewing the religious scapegoating as an attempt to

alienate and increase hostility towards the opposing faction.14 Her often restrictive discussion of

bipartite religious factions does not utilise the concept that powerfully persuasive printed media

such as poetry directly increased religious tension; the popularity of Discours and coq-a-l’áne

indicated a market for the extreme.

Secondly, prints produced during the Wars were made with the primary intention of

influencing people’s perception of an event as they extended its legacy in the public sphere by

recreating and commenting on the conflict. Informational prints such as Wars provided the

public with a heightened sense of their own involvement in the recreated pictorial conflict as it

claimed to offer memories from eyewitness accounts. A collection of woodcuts and engravings,

this print influenced the war by deconstructing battle scenes for the audience to understand the

narrative frame behind the conflict and heighten their engagement with the violence of the Wars.

Providing the public with balanced depictions of the key events during the Wars were partially an

effort to notify impartially, but religiously motivated sentiments were unavoidable at a time of

such heightened conflict. The imprint reveals the publishing location of Geneva and, as the

centre of Protestant printing, this exposes a credible curatorial partiality evident in the selection

of events chosen. Benedict’s persuasive interpretation outlines how the artists memorialized

Protestant victories by not recording their iconoclastic occurrences that were included in Galliae

mentioned earlier which acted as a Catholic illustrative equivalent to Wars.15 This assessment is

significant by highlighting how the informative authors still constructed the narrative which they

wanted to proliferate about the Wars. What was omitted clearly reveals print’s role in curating an

14 Judy Sproxton, Violence and Religion: Attitudes Towards Militancy in the French Civil Wars and the English Revolution
(London: Routledge, 1995), p. 19.
15 Benedict, p. 153.

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extreme version of public memory of events and historical calendars such as Pseaumes de David

(1590) also contributed to sustained legacies of certain historical narratives. Though the calendars

spanned a timeline including the death of Constantine, its curatorial impact on the Wars

exacerbated religious tension because it ignored Protestant events such as the conspiracy of

Amboise and iconoclasm just as in Wars.16 Alternatively, these omissions were also influenced by

the limited and portable octavo size which made them popular, but in the dramatically amplified

context of the Wars, even commonplace everyday prints reveal how devoutly motivated

curatorial tendencies filtered into society.

A different view, is that informational prints also worked to try to forget past differences

as a method of decreasing tension. Edicts were a crucial example of this as the Peace of Saint-

Germain (1570) exemplified with phrases referring to the previous conflict as “things that never

happened” and forbidding “the memory, thereof, to take hold”.17 Clearly, oubliance was a

negotiated outcome and the context of this edict signalled an attempted return to these times and

obliterate the memory of the brutal Wars. As the quickest method to disperse the edict was with

print, this increased its role as a purveyor of peace through small pamphlets and the king’s

publisher. The primary message in this conciliatory edict was unsuccessful as war restarted after

only two years. Though expected given the negotiated context of the edict creation whereby

neither side achieve their fundamental aims, Frisch extends this view to reveal how oubliance

became an attempted practice in France throughout the Wars rather than just idea.18 Print acted

as a permanent record of the failure of the edicts to confront and pacify fundamental religious

differences such as the heretical Protestant unorthodoxy that caused two sides to emerge at the

beginning of the war.

16 Philip Benedict, ‘Divided Memories: Historical calendars, commemorative processions and the recollection of the
Wars of Religion during the ancien régime’, French History, 22. IV (2008), 381-405 (p. 400).
17 The Edict of Saint-Germain, 1570’, in David Potter, The French Wars of Religion: selected documents (Basingstoke,

Macmillan, 1997), 118-121 (p. 118).

18 Andrea Frisch, Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2015), p. 174.

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Similarly, print allowed case studies of individuals such as L’Estoile to significantly

contribute to the collective memory of extreme prints produced during the Wars. Based upon his

memoires and collation of League materials during their ascendency in Paris in the 1580s,

‘Drolleries of the League’ actively worked to counter oubliance and create a record of Catholic

literature for future generations. League publications dramatically increased from seventy-eight

to 362 during 1587-1589 and these numbers indicate the accelerated fervour in the build up to

Henri III’s assassination as rising publications mirrored increasing tension during the Wars.19

Doing this through memorialising ephemeral League material in a curated collection, he

persuasively generated a legacy of extreme propaganda affecting popular opinion, physically

validated by the League’s own prints. L’Estoile’s role as a collector requires further analysis as a

royalist contemporary view during a time of Catholic hegemony and Hamilton perceptively raises

awareness of how the collector’s printed perception of the raised tension is just as important as

the recorded events themselves.20 Yet, the role of print here as proof provides a more pertinent

reflection of L’Estoile as it ensured oubliance could not occur and the League’s true extreme

reputation was maintained by print, rather than other contemporary opinions, just before they

diminished in the 1590s. He quintessentially defines the role of print at this period of the Wars as

being a record of the increasingly extreme religious views as well as providing tangible

recollections of what individuals could take away from the conflict.

Additionally, the printers and authors themselves utilised print to contribute to the Wars

by forcing their partisan religious agendas into increasingly radical publications following major

incidents to dictate the legacies of individuals. The Saint Bartholomew Day’s massacre of

Protestants plagued the legacy of the penultimate Valois king, Charles IX, who was treated

inconsistently in print after his reputation was dramatically affected by rising tensions. Charles’

reputation partly revolved around his mother’s regency, but also the unprecedented royal order

19 Tom Hamilton, Pierre de L’Estoile and his world in the Wars of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p.
141.
20 Hamilton, p. 5.

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to massacre Protestant populations as both Catholic and Protestant prints attest to his role in

instigating the slaughter. Haton, a Catholic priest who commonly exaggerated Protestant actions,

provided the same justification as the royal government in that the order was in self-defence

against a Protestant plot.21 At the pinnacle of extreme religious violence during the war, print

sought to maintain Charles’ image; most commentaries following the massacre surprisingly

portray Charles IX as moderate and benevolent.22 Though unmentioned by Smither, the Catholic

control of Paris’ printing networks unquestionably contributed to this sustained image.

Countering this, Charles’ personal role in the massacres more clearly influenced the Wars

by inspiring an extreme shift in Protestant political philosophy towards the advocation of

resistance. This was spread across Europe and the Protestant Hotman was an influential figure in

this effort as he sought to tarnish the King and his retinue’s legacy by denouncing them as the

“chief ringleaders in the butchery of Paris”.23 As a trained scholar publishing this work in

London, his efforts to persuasively condemn the Duke of Guise as well as Charles for the

massacres was an effort, through print, to destroy their reputation among the literate in Europe

as well as inspire active French resistance. Pettegree astutely goes further by placing the

intellectual Hotman among the confrontational world of street pamphlet production and this

interaction indicates how printing culture supplied the Wars with academic firepower to destroy

reputations.24 It clearly had the ability to shape public perception of events and a monarch’s

international legacy.

The foundations for Catholic League polemics were laid by Chesneau who, contrary to

mostly anonymous Protestant printers, actively encouraged crusading publications as a weapon

21 Claude Haton, ‘The Catholic Response to a Huguenot Plot, 1572’, in Barbara Diefendorf, The Saint Bartholomew's
Day massacre: a brief history with documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009), 96-98 (pp. 96-7).
22 James Smither, ‘The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre and Images of Kingship in France: 1572-1574’, The Sixteenth

Century Journal, 22. I (1991), 27-46 (p. 28).

23 François Hotman, ‘A True and Plain Report of the Furious Outrages of France, 1573’, in Barbara Diefendorf, The

Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre: a brief history with documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009), 82-87 (p. 85).
24 Pettegree, p. 180.

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during the Wars as he pre-empted League propaganda by using words as weapons in the 1560s.

Similar to later League polemicists targeting Henri III, Chesneau took a militant position in his

reports of events in the war and also in his propaganda whereby he implored others to also use

books as metaphorical weapons against heresy.25 He actively targeted royal authority but his role

as a printer with his own evangelical brand encapsulated the raised importance of print during

the Wars. Accessible imagery such as his identifiable printer’s device including a serpent of

heresy would become recognisable to audiences in early modern France and increase his

audience’s involvement with the extremist views of challenging Protestants during the Wars.26

The importance of publishing in octavo and smaller sizes was crucial to his popularity as it was

more affordable and could become weaponised in the spiritual Wars.27 His evangelically militant

position revealed how print was weaponised in the form of pamphlet literature to most

successfully contribute to the events of the Wars as they were directly responsible for

dramatically raising conflict which destroyed reputations.

The third technique utilised in print culture to control the Wars was the resuscitation of

biblical imagery. This heightened tension by incorporating contemporary issues within archaic

religious depictions. Filtering into almost all religiously motivated works, the printed Bible were

often especially large which is significant because what was contained within was seen as having

increased religious importance and symbolic value at a time when vernacular interpretations of

the Bible were actively encouraged by Protestants. A key example of this, the coloured woodcut

below,

25 Luc Racaut, ‘Nicolas Chesneau, Catholic Printer in Paris during the French Wars of Religion’, The Historical Journal,
52. I (2009), 23-41 (p. 33).
26 Scribner, p. 9.
27 Racaut, p. 40.

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28

reveals how biblical parallels to the Old Testament were commonly made as an artistic

expression of the increasing pressure of religious conflict as the Wars began.29 The marmite

represents Catholic indulgences and although being held up by Catholic caricatures such as

corrupt priests, it is being tipped over by a heavenly sword representing power of the true God.

This represents how a biblical print culture increased pressure during the Wars as the engraver

places God on the side of Protestants and calls for an end to Catholicism. Indeed, the legend

below outlines how Truth overturns the pot “to shatter” Catholic defence of their corrupt faith

using the sword of the gospel.30 The print venerated the Protestant cause, but also used the

biblical references as signs of their virtue. With the Bible being so fundamental to both sides in

28 ‘Le renversement de la grande marmite’ <http://www.unicaen.fr/mrsh/hce/index.php?id=165#tocto2n6> [accessed

on 1 November 2019].
29 Philip Benedict, ‘Of Marmites and Martyrs: Images and Polemics in the Wars of Religion’, in The French Renaissance

in Prints from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (exhibition catalogue of the Grunwald Centre for the Graphic Arts,
Los Angeles, 1995), 108-37, (p. 108).
30 Ibid., p. 111.

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the Wars, it is unsurprising that its imagery powerfully transcended into contemporary prints,

particularly on the Protestant side where the true vernacular word was an evangelical weapon.

The notion of conflict being presented in biblical proportions gains traction when

considering the context behind the portrayals of fire and violence. Evident in the Marmite

engraving as the fuel for Catholic prodigality, fire sparked by judgement featured prominently in

print during the Wars of Religion and contributed to the conflict by exacerbating the desire

surrounding purification of corrupt religious practices. Caricaturing Protestant martyrdom as a

saintly act, the fire in this print relates to the attempt to destroy perceived heresy. Print culture

fed into this by exaggerating the biblical references calling for the burning of corruption and

Zemon Davies’ ground-breaking study on crowd violence profoundly ties this to ritualised

cleansing of heresy that inspired the hostility.31 Massacres that characterised the Wars were in

part a reflection of the violence called for in the Bible, but it was the ordinary citizens spurred to

destroy who were most aware of the importance to “burn their groves with fire” for corruption

within French Christianity.32 As Paris recorded the most European productions of the Bible in

the sixteenth century, and the urban literate had dramatically multiplied, individual readership of

the Bible as a persuasive text inspired an extreme fervour to kill for faith during the Wars.33

However, biblical metaphors evident in marmite were exaggerated further by authors such as

Beauxamis who challenged Protestantism through biblical references involving fiery pots.

Likening Protestant heresy to Israelites who were detached from God and craved the corrupting

“fleshpots of Egypt”, this provocative publication’s timing in 1562, after the Edict of January

had granted concessions to Protestants, reveals how the inflammatory pressure of upcoming

31 Natalie Zemon Davies, ‘The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France’, Past & Present, 59,
(1973), 51-91 (p. 82).
32 King James Bible (Deuteronomy 12:3).
33 Recorded European Bibles,

<https://ustc.ac.uk/index.php/search/cicero?tm_fulltext=&tm_field_allauthr=&tm_translator=&tm_editor=&ts_
field_short_title=&tm_field_imprint=&tm_field_place=&sm_field_year=&f_sm_field_year=&t_sm_field_year=&s
m_field_country=&sm_field_lang=&sm_field_format=&sm_field_digital=&sm_field_class=%22Bibles+%28inclu
ding+parts%29%22&tm_field_cit_name=&tm_field_cit_no=&order=&sm_field_ty=true> [accessed 14 December
2018].

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conflict was illustrated in print.34 While preaching authors for over a millennium had utilised

these sacred words and metaphors for evangelical purposes, the crucial pertinence during these

Wars was that the viewers generally had a greater personal understanding of the biblically-

grounded engravings. Furthermore, the link to popular violence is evident through the

republication of the sermon after the Bartholomew’s Day massacre to show the validation of his

earlier view. More extreme prints gained traction and heightened tension during the Wars

because of an increased engagement with the Bible.35

Building on this, the biblical and archaic precedent in prints accompanied the revival of

the Albigensian Crusade in polemic literature masked as general histories to provide a greater

sense of the extreme situation facing Catholic France during the Wars. Primarily based around

the inflammatory rhetoric of Jean Gay, these authors branded the heretical Protestants to the

crown as an equivalent evil to the Cathars of Languedoc who were extinguished in the thirteenth

century. Gay provoked religious anxiety through his analogy of Cathars acting as “evangelists like

the modern heretics”.36 Comparing the two heresies through the medium of print provided

ammunition for an eager Catholic mass market on the brink of war. The Cathar unorthodox

minority targeted by the Albigensian Crusade were slaughtered and effectively quelled but the

key difference here is that the Catholic prints are an effort to spark aggression from the king.

Not only did religion underpin everyday life for early modern society, but the context of France

as a Catholic land with a king following the coronation oath to rout out heresy, increased the

fervour evident in print for religious conflict. Indeed, proposed violence surrounds the context

of Gay’s advocation of a vicious campaign against Protestants who held the same heretical

genealogy that linked them with the Cathars37. Gay’s position as a prosecutor of the Toulouse

Parlement gives weight to the sense of heightened fear as his publication incited and promoted

34 Benedict, ‘Of Marmites and Martyrs’, p. 111.

35 Ibid., p. 114.
36 Jean Gay, Histoire des scismes et heresies des Albigeois (Paris: Pierre Gaultier, 1561). p. 1.
37 Philip Conner, Huguenot heartland: Montauban and southern French Calvinism during the Wars of Religion (Aldershot:

Ashgate, 2002), p. 128

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discord with his comparative use of the Crusade. The Toulousains Parlement called for a “Crusade

for the extirpation of heretic[al]” Protestants, even sanctioned by the Papacy in a Papal Bull in

1568.38 This provided an indication that earlier prints such as Gay’s carried huge weight in

resuscitating the notion of crusade against French heresy and intensifying the conflict of the

Wars. The international audiences of these prints concerning the Wars of Religion were key

contributors to increased conflict.

Royal authority also became entangled with the place of crusade in early modern France

as prints concerning the conflict became tools in escalating religious violence. Secretary to the

Parlement of Paris, du Tillet presented printed subtle encouragement for Charles IX to emulate

Saint Louis (IX) by conquering heresy at a young age.39 Though young Charles was

impressionable, du Tillet supported this comparison by persuasively associating the strong

Regent Queens of Catherine de Medici and the Blanche of Castile. They were alluded to as part

of the masked intentions of an inconspicuous crusading history which truly sought to spark

greater conflict against heresy. Du Tillet would later write during the Wars that the same religious

violence witnessed in the Crusade against heresy would succeed now as it did then.40 This plea to

the royal crown concludes the work and would have been persuasive after nearly three decades

of conflict. Saint Louis’ crushing of heretics officially ended the Crusade by effectively destroying

Cathar leadership and this lofty pious comparison was balanced with a comparison of Henri I de

Montmorency-Damville with the target of the Albigensian Crusade, Raymond of Toulouse VI, as

both harboured safety for heresy under their protection, resisting Catholic forces.41 This twofold

comparison not only shows the levels of permeation that the Albigensian Crusade had before the

Wars, but also highlights the desire of Catholic authors to heighten the extremity of the situation

38 ‘Publication de la croisade faite a Toulouse contre ceux de la nouvelle religion (12 September 1568)’, in Claude de
Vic, Vaisette, Joseph, Histoire générale de Languedoc (Toulouse: Eduoard Privat, 1889), 12, 885-886 (p. 885).
39 Jean du Tillet, Pour l’entiere maiorite du Roy treschrestien, contre le legitime conseil malicieusement inuenté par les rebelles (Paris:

Guillaume Morel, 1563) [3]r-v.

40 Jean du Tillet, Sommaire de l’Histoire de la guerre faicte contre les hérétiques Albigeois (Paris: Robert Nivelle, 1590), p. 88.
41 Luc Racaut, Hatred in print: Catholic propaganda and Protestant identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot:

Ashgate, 2002), p. 112.

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by drawing on previous Catholic victories in an internal French religious conflict to justify

eradicating the contemporary Protestant heresy. Just like du Tillet’s references, Gay’s

inflammatory publication pre-empted the Albigensian similarities with the Wars as

Montmorency-Damville would later be dismissed by Charles IX in 1574 after what he wrote

regarding being “more of the Religion than Papist” and would protect Protestants with his own

land.42 The similarity of this action to Raymond who was not a Cathar but was determined to

embrace perceived heresy in the Languedoc region is significant and his printed words sparked

conflict with the king but also gave justification to his crusading association. Gay and du Tillet

used the threat of future war that would be a Catholic crusade to raise tension and help instigate

conflict against a plaguing heresy.

In conclusion, internal warfare during the Wars provided an important and lasting legacy

of how print could manipulate conflict. Primarily, prints were aimed at exacerbating religious

differences, but they would also dictate the collective memory of events and individuals as well

as revivifying the contemporary utility of crusading and biblical imagery. Though analysis has

successfully navigated multifaceted world of print and engravings to highlight their place in the

Wars, further research could be made into uniting socio-political motives behind dictating the

legacy of individual prints. A united motive emerges in informational literature that the

heightened tension in the Wars filtered into print depictions leading to a biased recollection of

events. The concept that prints such as historical calendars curated their choices so extremely

reveals their impact on the Wars as the large French audience requiring calendars would be

influenced by this purposeful spreading of a Protestant vision for collective memory. Du Tillet’s

diagnosis of cleansing was corroborated with violent polemics memorialised in L’Estoile’s

collection as collective perception of the Wars was dictated by print. The failing position of royal

authority in Ronsard’s poetry accompanies a growing sense of public interest in how print could

42 ‘Damville and Languedoc’, in David Potter, The French Wars of Religion: selected documents (Basingstoke, Macmillan,
1997), p. 160.

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present opinions and information. The complex world of print culture, from humorous poetry

to aggressive and dehumanising propaganda, had the ability to both inspire future events such as

the pictorial metaphor of tension spilling into war, but also to curate and preserve the memory of

Charles IX. Likewise, it could draw on biblical imagery and religious violence of the past to

heighten the tension surrounding the conflict while also inspiring future actions as is the case

with Hotman’s contribution to Protestant resistance theory. The key to the role of print was the

individuals behind its creation. Print culture utilised publications to foster personal agendas

which heighten tension and ultimately shape contemporary and lasting views of the Wars.

Word Count: 4,295.

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