"Do you have to be angry to slaughter? Reflections on the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (France, 1572)."

 

This talk will explore the mechanisms by which the principal killers of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre achieved their ends. The question of the killers’ ideological motivations has often been raised, in particular to highlight the religious anxieties at the core of their behavior. However, other emotions should also be addressed, such as anger, desire for revenge and frustration. After investigating the role of these emotions in the process of violence, this talk will examine whether anger is sufficient to kill, and what the prerequisites are for a guilt-free massacre.

 

A former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, Jérémie Foa is an Associate Professor at Aix-Marseille University, a member of the TELEMMe laboratory, and an honorary member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Institut Universitaire de France. A specialist in the Wars of Religion and mass violence in the 16th century, he recently published Tous ceux qui tombent. Visages du massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy, Paris, La Découverte 2021, in which he proposes a micro-history of the massacre, an investigation “from below” of both the victims and the ordinary murderers of the summer of 1572, in Paris and in the provinces. Next book : Survivre. Une histoire des guerres de Religion, to be pushed, Seuil, 2024. He is currently working on a project, in collaboration with Diane Roussel, on the siege of Paris (May-August 1590), which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths.