Massacres During the Wars of Religion

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Massacres during the Wars

of ReligionEl Kenz, David

Saturday 3 November 2007

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Massacres during the Wars of Religion

The Western notion of massacre first appeared in France during the Wars of Religion. At the time, the St.Bartholomews Day massacre represented the ultimate model of an outburst of extreme violence againstdefenseless civilians. Just after the royal Princess Marguerite de Valoiswedding to the Head of theHuguenot (Protestant) faction, Henri de Bourbon-Navarre, nearly 3,000 Protestants were slain in Paris infive days, from the night of of August 23-24 to August 29, 1572. The most recent historiographical studiesconsider the royal family responsible for the killing, as regards the decision to eliminate the belligerentorwarring Huguenots( Huguenots de guerre), the leadership of the Protestant faction (Sutherland, 1973;Soman, 1974; Garrisson, 1987; Kingdon, 1988; Diefendorf, 1991; Crouzet, 1994; Bourgeon, 1995). Thedecision to mount the royal coup was motivated by fear of a Protestant plot following an attempt toassassinate their leader, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, as well as by the desire to save the political concord(agreement) achieved with difficulty in 1570, or to prevent a Catholic uprising driven by Spain. Besides, asunusual signals appeared in the city, Parisian Catholics, who considered themselves invested with a holymission, followed this lead and indulged in mob violence, leading to a much deadlier massacre. Eventually,Charles IX took responsibility for the massacre as a whole, but immediately demanded that the masskillings be stopped, since they represented intolerable disorder, which ran counter to the goals pursued by

the monarchy over the previous decade. Nevertheless, massacres occurred locally in the kingdom untilautumn, ending up in the murder of 7,000 additional victims (Benedict, 1981).

Compared to contemporary massacres, the historical distance that separates us from the St. BartholomewsDay massacre makes it easier to apprehend it retrospectively as an event, that is, as an absolute andirreparable break in historical continuity. However, historical methods of research entail putting facts intoperspective, and the St. Bartholomews Day massacre must be evaluated in the light of existing practices ofreligious violence at the time. Thus, the contextualization approach is necessary in order to precludeanachronistic interpretations of massacres; yet we must also consider its limitations, so as to avoidtrivializing this massacre and in effect, disregarding its unique character as an event.

The St. Bartholomews Day massacre: a foundational event

The St. Bartholomews Day massacre constitutes a historical event. A historical act becomes an event to theextent that it represents an extraordinary disjunction in space and time; it is defined by this break and thedifference it creates, as well as by peoples awareness of it, and its impact. To its protagonists, the St.Bartholomews Day massacre turned out to be a miracle, or a tragedy that appeared to put an end toreligious strife as it had developed since the First War of religion in 1562. The slaughter was followed by apress campaign from Rome to London which, incidentally, led to the appearance of a new terminology for

massacres.

The St. Bartholomews Day massacre did not fundamentally transform the policy of the kingdom, whichstill amounted to a series of compromises between the Crown and the various political-religious parties.Nevertheless, it triggered an alteration of peoples understanding and awareness. Following the massacre,Protestants became aware of the fragility of their community, which had been declining numerically sincethe 1560s. Huguenot pamphlets emphasized the historical and legal aspects of the monarchy in order tocondemn Charles IXs betrayal of his Protestant subjects. This led to a secularization of discourse, whichultimately set the stage for political coexistence with hereticalmonarchs. On the Catholic side, in spite ofthe miracleof St. Bartholomews Day, believers had to put up with the presence of their opponents, whohad taken refuge in their strongholds of the West and South. The increase in expiatory processions revealed

a change in spirituality, which focused on penance from then on; the kingdom was still corrupted by thedevil, but the Catholic people themselves were to blame (Crouzet, 1990, vol. II, 186-361). In the end, theSt. Bartholomews Day massacre expressed the end of the dream of a united Christendom, in the sense that

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a religious representation of the world was no longer admissible, since humanity had produced suchhorrors. This was the beginning of a civilization of blame, or of sin (civilisation de la faute) (Apostolids,2004: 109-132).

However, the event of the St. Bartholomews Day massacre cannot be reduced to a historical event in thesame way as the abrupt shift of a wheat production curve, the death of a sovereign or a scientific

breakthrough. A massacre is a negativefoundational event, that is, an event that both breaks with whatwent before, and acts as a new beginning, as people react to it. In this case, commemoration throughmourning has the same foundational effect as positive foundational events [the Mayflower, or the fall of theBastille, for example],wrote Paul RicSur, in the sense that they legitimate behavior and institutionalarrangements apt to prevent their reappearance.(RicSur, 1991: 52) One characteristic of foundationalevents is that they differ considerably from primary, infra-significant events (which occur in the physicalworld), but also from events as historians see them (which are part of a causal chain). In fact, massacresconstitute such terrifying acts that they elicit ideological, scholarly and memorial narratives to try to makesense of them and, sometimes, a refusal to put forward any discourse, a sort of silent text. Furthermore, theslaughter mostly remained inexplicable, because its protagonists suppressed it. Thus, the decision that set

off the St. Bartholomews Day massacre left no trace in any archives, and was immediately covered up byofficial and informal versions. Yet this does not mean that the foundational event was invented. It wasdistinct, but it was also a part of the infra-significantevent and the historical event that it was based on.

Both on the Protestant and on the Catholic sides, the fact that it was impossible to count the victimsdemonstrates how incommensurable the St. Bartholomews Day massacre was. Some Huguenot polemicistsput forward the figure of 300,000 killed for all of France while a Catholic versifier warned that listing thedead would mean interfering with Gods design to exterminate the heretics (Crouzet, 1994: 34-35). Catholicapologists justified the massacre as a righteous kings act of self-defense against a plot from his treacheroussubjects, while Protestant chroniclers responded with the hypothesis of papistbarbarity and a crimepremeditated by Catherine de Medici, the Machiavellian queen. Huguenot memory also considered theParisian killing as a slaughter of Gods people, decimated by Charles IX, the new Pharaoh. Thus, theycontributed to spirituality focused on sin and incurring divine wrath, but the martyrdom of believers is alsoreminiscent of the testimony of the Passion, and the suffering of the Jews in the Old Testament. Thus, it

justifies the Protestantssuperiority over the Catholics, in reference to the Christian sacrifice (El Kenz,1997: 232-233).

Soon, the St Bartholomews Day massacre was asserted as a largely consensual place of memory, in whichthe bloodthirsty cruelty of the Valois was stigmatized, in opposition to the tolerance of Henry IV, the kingwho proclaimed the Edict of Nantes. Thus, it legitimized the advent of the Bourbon dynasty, succeeding thelast, degenerate members of the house of Valois, and it justified inter-religious coexistence (Joutard et al.,

1976). In turn, 19th century historiography reinforced this happy mediumrepresentation, through whichbourgeois and supporters of the clergy made the royal family a scapegoat for a tragedy that had actuallybeen contrived by their own distant ancestors, the militia captains and radical preachers that had opposedthe royal policy of civil tolerance (Bourgeon, 1992:127). Therefore, community memories and that of theProtestant Church, as well as traditional historiography, fabricated a foundational event which belongs tothe narrative constructions of French identity, concerned with protecting itself from religious passions.

Revisiting the context

Historians are confronted to discursive constraints which obliterate analysis of massacres. In all historicalperiods, the testimony from massacre survivors has been put forward in an absolute way, making it bothsingular and universal. In The War of the Jews, before the historian Josephus described the siege of



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Jerusalem by the Romans, he wrote that he was about to recount an act with no equivalent, either in thetales of the Greeks or those of the Barbarians, as terrible to tell as it is incredible to hear.(1977 Frenchtranslation by Pierre Savinel, Editions de Minuit, as quoted by Brossat 1999:161-168) However,researchers must transcend the absoluteness of testimony, in order to construct a historical object. Manyhistorians aspire to distance themselves sufficiently from the subject at hand so as to determine the factsscientifically. Thus, George L. Mosse, a pioneer of the history of totalitarianism who had to flee Nazi

Germany because he was of Jewish descent, said that, to do history, one must always stand aside andscrutinize a mechanism dispassionately, not adopt a victims standpoint, as difficult as it may be regardingmovements that have been hostile to oneself, like national-socialism.(from Du Baroque au nazisme: unehistoire religieuse de la politique,a 1994 interview of the author, as quoted in the preface to Mosse,1999:III)

Unlike memory, history is a relative discipline. Therefore, historians integrate the event of a massacre intoa context, in order to convey the mental images and perceptions according to which the deadlytransgression is committed. Though the scope of the St. Bartholomews Day massacre was unprecedented,in fact, it was not the first massacre of the French Wars of Religion. Murderous violence first reached a

peak at the beginning of the first civil war; according to the Protestant writer Agrippa dAubign,Huguenots were massacred in thirty towns at that time. Franois de La Noue claimed that during theinterval of inter-religious coexistence, from 1563 to 1567, 3,000 of his fellow Protestants were massacred.However, the Huguenots also perpetrated acts of mass murder, such as in La Michelade, Nmes, where 80papistswere killed on September 30, 1567. Yet as the Protestant Louis Micqueau stated in 1563, Catholicsrather tended to sacrifice flesh-and-blood persons, whereas Protestants tended to settle for destroying stoneimages.

Between 1559 and 1571, according to a series of 58 massacres recorded in Jean Crespins 1614 Histoire desMartyrs (History of the Martyrs) and in LHistoire ecclsiastique (Ecclesiastical History, published in1580), the region of Provence experienced the highest number of killings (62.7%), with the Loire valley asa distant second (8.5%), followed by Languedoc (5.2%), Champagne (4.6%), and Guyenne and Poitou(4.6%). This geography of massacres corresponds to the areas that experienced the most intense fighting.One-third of the slaughter took place when a city was captured. In Tours for example, the Huguenots tookthe city on April 2, 1562 and looted its churches. During its re-conquest by the royal forces, on July 11, thecitys Catholic inhabitants took revenge by tying 200 Huguenots back to back, and drowning them in theLoire River. The concentration of massacres in the South was linked to the exceptional urban density of theregion, to the size of its Protestant community and to the violence of the military conflict in the region.Conversely, Brittany experienced no killings at all: Protestants were a minority there and its Catholicgovernor, the duke of Etampes, kept a moderate stance and prevented fratricidal fighting from breaking out.

Hence, the military factor appears to be essential in explaining massacres. Repression of the religious rebelswas bloody; it resulted from the State arsenal built up against insurgents, treated as criminals guilty of anearthly lse-majest offence, whether they had risen up on religious, social or political grounds. As early asthe 15th century, the unruly cities of the Netherlands were subjected to ducal rigor, as in 1468, when 5,000citizens of Lige were killed by the army of Charles le Tmraire (duke of Burgundy, from the house ofValois) for having dared to defy him and to become allies of Louis XI. In 1535, in Germany, the capture ofthe city of Mnster was followed by the systematic execution of the last 200 Anabaptists, who haddefended the city against the Bishop-sovereign. In Spain, during the revolt of the Moriscos (formerMuslims who had theoretically converted to Catholicism), 4,000 of them were massacred at Galera, onFebruary 10, 1570.

The repression of religious rebels followed the general customs of war, which tolerated the slaughter ofcivilian populations if they offered any resistance. In the 16th century, the German Landsknechtscharterforbade only the execution of pregnant women, during the capture of a city. However, the component of



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religious dispute interfered with State policing operations. On the one hand, the authorities feared makingmartyrs of the rebels; in 1566, Marguerite of Parma, the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, ordered herofficers to have the Valenciennes insurgents hanged, not burned at the stake, which was reserved forheretics. On the other hand, religious disputes could stimulate hatred of others, which produced militarymassacres. In 1649, at the head of the New Model Army, Cromwell pacifiedIreland without any qualmsover massacring the garrison of Drogheda (3,500 were killed), near Dublin, then the civilian population of

Wexford. Admittedly, in this case, the conflict between Puritans and Catholics seems to have been coupledwith ethnic antagonism (Carlton, 1992; Claydon and McBride, 1998).

Thus, the St. Bartholomews Day massacre constituted a transgression because it occurred in peacetime.Furthermore, it took place in the royal capital, at the governments initiative. In fact, at the time, the judicialrepression of heretics rarely led to mass executions. Under the Ancien Rgime, the judicial system rarelyaimed to exterminate heterodoxy as a whole, but rather to carry out occasional, dissuasive punishment. InSpain, the auto da fe of Valladolid, in which thirty Christians were burned at the stake for their evangelicalfaith, on May 21, 1559, was an exception. In France, the judges of the Aix parliament, who wereresponsible for the massacre of 3,000 Waldensians (an early Protestant sect, also known as Waldenses or

Vaudois) at Mrindol and Cabrires, in Provence (April 18-19, 1545), were tried in 1549, and the Kingsgeneral prosecutor, Guillaume Gurin, was executed for this abomination.

Actually, the novelty of massacres during the Wars of Religion resided in the fact that they were beyondthe control of central governmental authorities. Two-thirds of the massacres committed by Catholics werecarried out independently by city-dwellers. In 1573, in order to impose Henry of Anjous claim to thePolish throne upon the Sejm (the Polish parliament), which comprised a large Protestant minority, Jean deMonluc, Bishop of Valence, stigmatized the excessive behavior of the common people in France, whichdistorted the St. Bartholomews Day execution. This version of the facts established a link between theoutbreak of violence and the fact that the people had intruded in the religious dispute. This topos can alsobe perceived in Huguenot accounts of the massacres. In 1562, Jacques du Creux, known as Brusquet, thehead jailer of Auxerre, took advantage of the war to take control of some local ruffians, so as to rob and killProtestants with impunity. Nevertheless, it seems that in fact, the main ringleaders of the massacres werenotables. In 1562, in Toulouse, the Parliament judges participated in the preventivemassacre of theheretics; in 1572, in Paris and Lyon, the urban militia and the chevins (magistrates, or city councilors)initiated the massacre carried out by the population.

During the massacres, the perpetrators meted out an informal version of justice.They carried out thetraditional forms of torture reserved for heretics (Davis, 1979:263-265). In April 1562 at Marsillargues(Provence), the people refused the release of a Protestant who was to be freed in virtue of the Edict ofJanvier (January 17, 1562), which allowed the Huguenots religious freedom. They seized and burned him,

along with others. The people took it upon themselves to reinstate burning people at the stake, apunishment the monarch no longer wished to have applied. Similarly, in Marseille, the killer Jean Sabatierdragged the bodies of Antoine Vass and his nephew outside the city to burn them at Portegale, thecustomary place for public executions. Thus, he legitimated his actions by integrating them in thetraditional torture-execution sequence for Protestants.

At times, the killers also dispensed their own version of justice, but always in reference to official justice.In Tours, a cobbler named Chastillon submitted to being broken on the wheel whereas he could have beenhanged, if he had been willing to renounce his faith. However, the way popular justice was carried out didnot always follow the official ritual closely; it tended to depend on the murderersmood. In Paris, in 1562,

killers burned Roch le Frre in the swine market. They performed a sort of combination of the officialexecution mode burning at the stake with a setting intended to animalize the heretic. At the same time,others snatched a servant, took him to the Place Maubert, and drowned him in the Seine River. The settingthey selected was one of the traditional places for the public execution of heretics, yet they did not



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materialize its symbolic value by completing the traditional ritual.

Sacred rituals can also be detected behind the killings perpetrated by Catholics. Persistence in disfiguringcorpses (mentioned in half the sources) displayed a sacred language, representing Gods power on Earththrough attacks on the hereticsbodies, seen as the embodiment of sin. Thus in Orange, in 1562, femalecorpses were exposed naked with ox horns, stones or small wooden stakes inserted in unmentionable

places of their bodies.The corpses were clothed in filth to indicate their otherness, their distinctivenessfrom Divine creation. They were dragged like dead beasts,symbols of the Beast of the Apocalypse. Theaccumulation of acts of cruelty like tearing the eyes out and severing the nose, lips and ears was supposedto prefigure the torments of hell. Finally, dismembering the bodies and sometimes exposing andauctioning pieces of them drowning and burning people at the stake, represented the mouth, thebottomless pit and the fire of hell (Crouzet, 1990: vol. I, 236-317).

Protestants that carried out mass murder followed another logic, which should be compared to iconoclasticdidacticism. First, they were responding to the Catholic massacres. Their favorite victims were priests,nicknamed the shorn,who embodied the Papistonslaught. On August 15, 1562, 94 clerics were killed in

this way at Lauzerte, in southwestern France. Secondly, the Protestant fighters were desecrating the firstestate (the clergy). In the Theater of the Cruelty of the Heretics of our Time (Thtre des cruauts deshrtiques de notre temps) written by the Catholic Richard Verstegan in 1587, an illustration depictsProtestants inspecting the slashed-open stomach of a priest, so as to derisively observe where the sacredbody of Christ was meant to go through (Lestringant, 1995: 104-105). Finally, the Huguenots wanted tomake a clean sweep of the country in order to establish the trueChurch. After the first civil war,anticlerical terrorism seemed to be a success in the area of Agen, where people used to say, no priest orcleric dares to live, for fear of being killed and massacred( aucun cur, ni prtre nose habiter, craignanttre tu et massacr) (Crouzet, 1990: vol. I, 495-712).

The St. Bartholomews Day massacre constituted a condensed version of the inter-religious violence thathad been raging since the 1560s. However, it differed from the first massacres to the degree that the royalauthorities started the slaughter and took responsibility for it, even though the collective violence hadquickly evolved beyond their control. Nevertheless, the civilians organized into religious associations,integrated in a militarized urban network and led by local notables, were the most vindictive.

The hazards of trivialization and anachronism

Contextualizing a massacre does not mean treating it as if it were banal; underestimating extreme violence

would make the concept ethically and methodologically irrelevant, because this would mean writing off itstransgressive nature. Causal explanations, which are still dominant in historical scholarship, can sometimestend to globalize the perpetrators and play down their responsibility, by reducing them to social, cultural orpolitical players driven by phenomena that are beyond them, and which lead them to commit extreme acts.This approach transforms the phenomenon of a massacre into a homogenous event, whereas the historiansgoal should be to identify heterogeneity, as Primo Levi observed in an essay on the gray zone,anexpression that conveys the range of different types of behavior in Nazi camps (Levi, 1989: 36-68). In thesame way, in his study of German battalions on the Eastern front during the Second World War,Christopher Browning demonstrates the variability of ways in which German commandos first act outviolence, faced with the extermination of the Jews (Browning, 1994:228-245). To avoid excessivelygeneral explanations of massacres, studies on the subject should focus on acting out (passage lacte in

French). This can only be analyzed based on the principle of an individuals autonomy with regard tohis/her singular intention to engage in a massacre (Zawadski, 2002: 571-579). According to thecombination of psychological, socio-professional, political, religious and cultural motives at a given



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moment, an individual may be led to respond to the impulse to massacre, or not (Smelin, 2005: 361-364).

This type of method, which follows particular trajectories, requires extraordinary historical documentation.Regarding the Wars of Religion, there is not much witness testimony from the perpetrators of massacres. In1562, Franois de Beaumont, Baron des Adrets (1513-1587), the lieutenant of the prince of Cond (theleader of the Protestant faction), became notorious for his role in massacres in Provence (at Valence,

Pierrelatte, Saint-Marcellin, etc.). Thereafter, this military man admitted to having committed fourthousand murders in cold blood,for strategic purposes. In this way, his men were obliged to vanquish theirenemies, so as to prevent them from being able to take their revenge. In addition, the massacre of theCatholics at Valence was committed in retaliation for that perpetrated against Protestants in Orange.Finally, the Catholic governor of Grenoble fled, terrified by Des Adretsreputation (Constant, 2002:16-25). In the same way, Blaise de Montluc (1500-1577), the Kings lieutenant, forced the inhabitants ofGuyenne into obedience by pitilessly executing the recalcitrant Huguenots. To this end, he had twoexecutioners accompany his soldiers. Flouting the rules of chivalry, he executed a former comrade-in-armsfrom the Italian wars on the grounds that if he escaped, he would resist us in every village( sil enrchappait, il nous ferait tte dans chaque village). These two characters did not show any feelings of

guilt. They were doing their job as soldiers, and at the time, it entailed the right of life and death over bothmilitary and civilian opponents.

However, as the distinction between armed and unarmed individuals was no longer absent, therepresentation of massacres became the subject of propaganda to discredit ones enemies. Appalled by theexcesses of the civil war, some well-known figures renounced violence in spite of their politicalcommitments. In his Essais, first published in 1580, the French writer Montaigne discussed the first threewars of religion (1562-63; 1567-68; 1568-70) quite specifically; he had personally participated in them, onthe side of the royal army, in southwestern France. The St. Bartholomews Day massacre led him to retireto his lands in the Prigord region, and remain silent on all public affairs until the 1580s. Thus, it seems thathe was traumatized by the massacre. To him, cruelty was a criterion that differentiated the Wars of Religionfrom previous conflicts, which he idealized. Montaigne considered that three factors accounted for the shiftfrom regular war to the carnage of civil war: popular intervention, religious demagogy and thenever-ending aspect of the conflict.

He chose to depict cruelty through the image of hunting, which fitted with the tradition of condemninghunting for its association with blood and death, but it was still quite surprising, to the extent that thispractice was part of the aristocratic way of life. Montaigne reviled hunting by describing it as an urbanmassacre scene. In addition, the man-animal relationship allowed him to define virtue, which he presentedas the opposite of cruelty. He contrasted the spectacle of an animals death with mans love for his dog, asort of natural benevolence based on his personal feelings. Thus, the writer lauded sensitive, tender and

emotive personalities that cannot bear violence, including against animals. Far from adopting a sort ofpantheism inspired from Antiquity, Montaigne associated the propensity to cruelty toward animals, withthat exercised toward men. After all, following the St. Bartholomews Day massacre, the invented image ofCharles IX shooting Huguenots from the Louvre palace window did combine the established reputation ofthe king as a hunter, with a stigmatization of hunting, a cruel and perverted custom, did it not? (El Kenz,2005: 186-195).

Further examples of this type can be suggested but overall, they were exceptional in terms of socialrepresentation. On the other hand, in the 1560s, ordinary men made pacts of friendship to avoid massacresin their city, in spite of mutual religious hostility. The danger that soldiers represented stimulated urban

solidarity, which caused a revival of local political activity, encouraged by the commissioners of thereligious peace treaties (Christin, 1997: 73-102). Furthermore, it seems that religious violence was lesslikely in towns with a population of under 10,000, to the extent that it was more difficult to gather a crowdlarge enough to wind up in a process of de-individuation and dehumanization, which was the source of



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massacres. In that case, solidarity between neighbors was stronger than inter-confessional hostility(Konnert, 2002: 97-113).

The second shortcoming of historical interpretations of massacres is anachronistic criminalization, inreference to genocide legislation. Thus, in the introduction to Inhuman History& (LHistoire inhumaine& ),the conquest of the New World is identified as genocide! (Richard, 1992: 7) Indeed, the conquest of

America brought about a demographic catastrophe for indigenous peoples. At the end of the 15th century,25 million Native Americans lived in Mexico; in 1568, only 2.65 million remained. Similarly, Peru had 9million inhabitants in 1532, at the time of the Inca emperor Atahualpa, whereas there were only 1.3 millionleft in 1570 (Borah and Cook Sherburne, 1971-1979; Bernand and Gruzinski, 1991: 536-543). Theobviously undeniable violence of the hostilities was not the main cause of such a population collapse.Microbe shock(exposure to diseases against which indigenous peoples had no immunity), localsocio-economic disorganization and the imposition of an abusive form of the mita by the Spanish (whichbecame a forced-labor system in which the autochthonous people were exploited, particularly in mining)were the sources of this demographic tragedy. Besides, the conquistadors did not have a project to eradicatethe population. Driven by the desire to convert the indigenous peoples and by greed, they quickly

established relationships with the local populations, which led to the emergence of a new multiethnicsociety, in spite of the victorsundeniable contempt for the vanquished which did not, however, includegenocidal ideas (Zuniga, 1999: 425-452).

The massacres in Vende (France) and the slave trade are also sensitive subjects, involving political andmemory issues that have led to competition between victims striving to obtain the genocide label, aphenomenon diametrically opposed to historical research. To a lesser extent, the academic debate on the St.Bartholomews Day massacre resulted in a number of slip-ups, in which the term revisionism came up, inthe negationist sense.

In his essay Des Cannibales,Montaigne analyzed the notion of barbarity. He compared cannibalismamong the Tupinamba people of Brazil, to the Stoicspractice of eating decaying meat, and to the acts ofviolence committed during the Wars of Religion. In reference to Jean de Lrys History of Brazil (Histoiredu Brsil, 1578), the humanist Montaigne concluded that barbarity is always denounced as some otherpeoples custom. Moreover, all things considered, Native Americans were less cruel that the Europeans andthe Ancients, he added, because their cannibal practices were highly ritualized, limited to defensive warfareand did not satisfy a taste for human flesh. Henceforth, massacres during the Wars of Religion are aninescapable reference in the understanding of human history; consequently, they justify historicalcomparisons that, in fact, demystify the superiority of both ancient and modern civilizations. In this work,Montaigne set out a hierarchy of different evils, opposing the Native Americanscannibalism, associatedwith revenge, and the cruel Portuguese custom of burying a prisoner up the waist, before shooting him full

of arrows, and then hanging his body. Accordingly, he asserted that truthful discourse is based on puttingmassacres into perspective, in order to transcend the voix commune(common voiceor voice of thepeople, of our passions), through the voye de la raison,the voice of reason.

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