2. The obscure are, traditionally, the mass upon whom
history is made, not the makers themselves: the screen for the movie. This is a
strong remnant of what was once, in Europe, a very stable class structure, with
the nobles on top. The noble as the hero of history still trails behind it many
many popular histories. Whereas the statistic as the hero of history trails
behind it much academic history. The obscure, though, between the statistic and
the hero – they are hard to voice.
3. Among the very obscure are the massacred. Our dead rely,
for the most part, on the family to keep them dimly alive, ghosts that
sometimes populate the stories we tell each other. Without ghosts, is there even
such a thing as a family? And though literacy has injured this monopoly the
family has on the past, it has not at all destroyed it. For instance: my boy
knows about my great grandfather Louis because I have told him stories that
were passed down to me from my parents and grandparents. Louis still exists,
dimly, in the extended Gathmann family; and not so much elsewhere. Yet if the
Gathmanns were wiped out, would Louis walk after death, or would his ghost
story be extinguished? Who, after all, would be interested?
4. This is the ethical component of the micro-history.
5. Jérémie Foa is not an internationally known historian – yet. In
France, though he is relatively young, he has already been the center of a
special issue of the Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine for his
book, named after a Beckett play: Tous Ceux qui Tombent: Visages du massacre
de la Saint-Barthélemy. Surely someone somewhere in Anglophonie is translating
this book. Which is on the same frequency as Ginzburg’s The Night-Battles,
in as much as it is an effort to disinter the voice, the experience of the
obscure.
6. Saint Barthelemy’s massacre of French protestants started
in August, 1572, in Paris, and spread to the major towns and cities of France
in the fall of that year. Formally, it is much like the massacres in Bosnia and
Rwanda – it is a genocide of circumstance. It arose from the assassination of
the Protestant admiral, Gaspard II de Coligny, who, while tying his shoe in his
room, was shot dead by a Catholic
fanatic, one Charles de Louviers, who aimed at him from across the street. This
happened on August 22. Almost immediately afterwards, the tocsins sounded in
the streets of Paris. Come out, come out, whereever you are.
7. Foa’s approach is not so different from that of the
detectives in the TV show, The Wire: it is a matter of casting a broad
associative net, finding properties, bystanders, property documents, marriage
documents, memoirs of survivors and brags of the murderers. After one has a
denser sense of what was happening on the street, and in people’s lives, at the
end of August in Paris, or the end of September in Toulouse, or elsewhere, the
event with its amorphous edges comes into focus.
8. An example of the method is Foa’s uncovering the
itinerary of one of the great Prot persecutors,
a man named Thomas Croizier, who boasted of killing four hundred Protestants
that August. Many of the victims were taken out
and, alive or dead, dropped in the Seine. By sheer legerdemain in the
archives, Foa found property records for one of the drop off points for the
mass murder, a place known as the Vallèe de la Misère, since obliterated by
Parisian urbanists, but located in 1572 at the foot of the Pont du Change near Notre
Dame – about a half a mile from where I sit, typing this. And by looking at the
property records, Foa found that Croizier was a part owner of one of the houses
there – more or less confirming a “legend” from the Prot martyrology about a
house with a red door where many were taken, their throats slit, their bodies plopped
into the river – thus “cleansing” Paris of a heretical stain.
9. Foa is not afraid of allusion, of rhetoric, of a high
style that can include bits of René Char and quotations from Derrida’s
Archive Fever. But this style works for him in creating a way of historiographic
“listening” – taking seriously the work of Arlette Farge, the strong advocate
for a history that is aware of voices. In this vein, Foa also pays attention to
recent work on genocide. He quotes from Helene Dumas, a sociologist who has
written about the Rwandan massacres, finding her comments pertinent:
“At the heart of social intimacy in its affective and
topographic aspects, with regards to killers and victims, is the fearsome
question of the reversibility of the ties forged in the time before, when
neighbors, friendship, religious practice and even family ties are mechanized
as so many means favoring their tracking down and execution.”
To know another person on a deep level is to know things
about that person, their habits, their residence, their stuff, their other
connections.
10. Foa notes that in the accounts of survivors, it wasn’t
the tocsins sounding, the civil alarms which rang out, that signified murder. Rather,
it was the tapping at the window, the ringing of the door chimes, the voices
outside going aunt? Uncle? Or a nickname, which roused the sleepy resident and
got them to open the door on the unexpected crowd outside, equipped with knives
and axes, who quickly moved in. I was reminded of that terrifically horrifying
scene at the beginning of Jenny Erpenbeck’s End of Days when a crowd
moves in to lynch some Jews:
“Her husband tried to see who was throwing the stones and
recognized Andrei. Andrei, he shouted out the window, Andrei! But Andrei didn’t
hear him — or pretended not to, which was more likely, since he knew perfectly
well who lived in the house he was throwing stones at. Then one of Andrei’s
stones came hurtling through a window pane, passing just a hair’s breadth from
her head, and crashed into the glass-fronted bookcase behind her, striking
Volume 9 of the leather-bound edition of Goethe’s Collected Works that
her husband’s parents had given him as a gift when he finished school. No
breath of air disturbs the place, / Deathly silence far and wide. / O’er the
ghastly deeps no single / Wavelet ripples on the tide. Hereupon her
husband, filled with rage, flung open the front door, apparently intending to
seize Andrei by the collar and bring him to his senses, but when he saw Andrei
running toward the house with three or four other young men, one of them
brandishing an axe, he slammed it shut again at once. Quickly, he turned the
key in the lock, and together with his wife tried to take up the boards that
always stood ready beside the door, waiting for just such an emergency, taking
them and trying to nail them over the door. But it was already too late for
this — where were the nails, where the hammer? — for the door was already
beginning to splinter beneath the blows of the axe. Andrei, Andrei. Then she
and her husband ran up the stairs, banging on the door behind which the wet
nurse sat with the baby, but she didn’t open the door: either because she
didn’t understand who was asking to be let in, or because she was so frightened
she was unwilling to open it. The woman and her husband then fled to the attic,
up one last steep flight of stairs, while down below, Andrei and his men were
already bursting into the house. On the ground floor, the intruders smashed the
remaining window panes, ripped the window frames from the wall, knocked down
the bookcase, sliced open the eiderdowns, smashed plates and jars of preserves,
threw the contents of the pantry out into the street, but then one of them must
have heard her and her husband trying to lock the attic door, for without
stopping on the second floor, the men now raced up the stairs…”
11. It should be noted, in this year, 2026, that the
genocidal wannabes around Trump know about this reversibility in their guts. They
were sure that a little push, the ICE in the street, would activate a popular
massacre of immigrants and people of color – this was the whole point. They
openly derided empathy, those connections that keep us from using our knowledge
of the other to track them, to take their stuff, to drag them out, to put them
in the truck and never see them again. So far, though, this has been a massive
failure. What works on Twitter doesn’t work in the street.
12. This time.
13. One of the interesting sidelights in Foa’s book is a
pre-history of revisionism. Holocaust revisionism, with its weird nitpicking of
details, its false frame of references in which a sort of mathematics can be
applied (how many people could fit into a crematorium?) was preceded by Saint
Barthelemy revisionism. One Abbe Jean Novi de Caveirac, in 1758, published just
such an account of the massacre. Caveirac
attacks, for instance, the figure of 1100 murdered by alluding to a document
that shows eight gravediggers were employed to bury the bodies, and by seeing
how long they took before they were finished with their work, proves to his own
satisfaction that the murdered must have amounted to a mere hundred or less. “It
is almost impossible for eight gravediggers in eight days to bury 1100 bodies.”
Case closed.
We can recognize, here, the ancestor of the denialism that
recently, applying bogus stats and gut feelings, has swept the alt right about
COVID: turn out nobody died of COVID!
14. Bones, buried in the ground, turn up. For instance: when
the Eiffel Tower was constructed in 1887, the evacuation of the foundation revealed
a mass grave. It was at a strata that indicated that these were bodies from the
massacre. The bones were removed, for the most part, the concrete was poured,
and the Tower was erected. What visitor to the Eiffel thinks of the massacred
upon which the Tower has, in part, its footing?
Answer: nobody.
Right?
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