A REJOINDER

JANINE ESTEBE HAS WRITTEN SOME PIONEERING PAGES ON THE CHARACTER

of popular violence in the massacres of St. Bartholomew's Day,1 and
I am happy to enter into dialogue with her on the whole matter of
religious riot. Though she has mis-stated my argument at every
point, the questions she raises are important and direct attention to
central issues in the character of religious behaviour and of religious
change in sixteenth-century France.
To begin with, I do not agree with Madame Estebe that I describe
religious riots as "a self-sufficient structure . . . isolate[d] from a wider
context". Structure, yes; but isolated, no. My goal has been to
give religious violence in sixteenth-century France a more meaningful
historical context than it has previously had. Some have invoked the
collective unconscious or the perennial primitivism of the people
hardly contextual ideas. I have shown how closely related crowd
behaviour was to current cultural norms, either traditional ones
which told people what to do in times of danger or newer ones
forged by the Calvinist movement. Some have linked popular
religion to social experience merely by the familiar chain of price rises
and economic hardship. I have suggested more inclusive connec-
tions, which address themselves more fully to the content of religious
symbolism and the character of liturgy: definitions of community and
its boundaries and expectations about the quality of social relation-
ships.
Madame Estebe goes on to say that I totally reject conjunctural
accidents in explaining popular religious violence. Totally reject?
I merely said that I did not have the extensive data necessary to
account for the precise timing of hundreds of riots spread over two or
three decades. Only one variable did I discount as a systematic
trigger for religious violence in sixteenth-century France, and this on
the basis of evidence from Paris and Toulouse: rises in grain prices.
In fact, hungry crowds did not usually think that the most effective
way to acquire grain was to smash statues or kill a heretic. They had
other techniques: the old white procession, which developed com-
munity solidarity and might open granaries; and increasingly the
grain riot. In another historical situation, with different relations
between the sacred and the worldly, food shortages might regularly
1
Janine Estebe, Tocsin pour un massacre. La saison des Saint-Barthilemy.
(Paris, 1968), esp. ch. 12.

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 132 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 6 7

touch off riots against religious targets. But without evidence to the
contrary, let us grant our sixteenth-century subjects, even when they
are not literate, the ability to discriminate among social goals, and the
possibility of religious concerns that go beyond hunger and confusion.
That inflationary prices were part of the general context of violence
in the last half of the sixteenth century I affirmed in my article.
(I am glad that Madame Estebe now takes a position closer to my own
on this matter.) As for the other factors that account for the chrono-
logical distribution of religious riots, I hope they will soon be
examined by historians with attention to both the national and local
milieu. Madame Estebe's suggestions about the triggering rdle of
certain edicts on religion or violations thereof seem very sensible.
They certainly mesh well with my discussion of the varied cues and
models for behaviour given to crowds by persons in authority.
Madame Estebe next charges that I "completely omit the role of
social tensions in these religious disturbances". I must confess that
my argument here is compressed, complex, and all the harder to
follow because unfamiliar. But I think the patient reader of my
article will not endorse Madame Estebe's verdict. Most evidently,
I first gave several individual instances of urban violence in which
some reinforcement of religious anger by socio-economic resentment
was likely. More important, I pointed to a whole stratum for which
socio-economic conflict might readily converge with religious
commitment: the peasant majority of the countryside.2 But it was
the cities which provided the formative experience for early
Protestantism and which were the arena for the most expressive
conflict between the old and new religions. And if we look carefully
here at the composition of the Calvinist movement up to 1572, at
its statements and conduct we find a new social meaning in the
Reformation, one that cuts differently and in some ways more deeply
than that discussed by Madame Estebe. We find we must imagine
a multi-dimensional model of social structure, one that incorporates
and goes beyond the standard one of socio-economic classes. We find
we must stretch our definition of "social tensions" well beyond the
issue of wealth and poverty. And rather than being "covered by a
religious cloak", the social face of the Reformation is as real as its
obverse, the spiritual face, different sides of the same coin.
My evidence on the social and vocational distribution of the
1
This convergence must not be exaggerated, however. Peasants too were
quite capable of differentiating between economic and spiritual issues, as
demonstrated by the tithe-strikes of Catholics in the Lyonnais and in the
Languedoc.

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 RELIGIOUS RIOT IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE 133

Calvinist movement does not, of course, come from the contemporary

listings of victims of riots. The latter were given for one reason only:
to show that witnesses of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacres,
impressionistic and much more likely to note rich victims than modest
ones, still named artisans "in significant numbers", in some places two
or three times as many of them as merchants. Nor are these
murdered craftsmen all prosperous goldsmiths and masters. In
Orleans, for instance, the victims included cloth-shearers, coopers,
cobblers and stone-cutters not especially lucrative trades. In
Lyon (where I have details about the slain from archival evidence),
among the twenty-three known victims from the metal trades, there
were five who were clearly prosperous, three more who were well-
established masters; and fifteen who were journeymen or masters on
their own account only occasionally. The same spread is found in
other crafts; the victims are often those whom the captain of their
quarter had described a few years earlier as "very obstinate", or
"a fomenter of dissension". Together with the evidence given in my
article about the composition of crowds, these listings simply do not
support the claim of Madame Estebe's Tocsin that the St. Bartholo-
mew's Day massacre was a rising of the people against rich Huguenots.
Nor do the data on the social distribution of urban Protestantism up
to 1572, compiled (as I have said in my article and elsewhere3)
primarily from an examination of about four thousand Protestants in
Lyon, support Madame Estebe's description of the Huguenots as
being only "nobles, men of the law and of the robe, [and] well-to-do
master artisans". The movement was drawn from all levels of the
urban population except the unskilled workers in proportions roughly
equivalent to their distribution in the population at large: consular
and official families; prosperous notables among the merchants and
master craftsmen; and the "lesser people {menu peuple)", including
masters of very modest means and journeymen. In the populous
printing industry, with its labour troubles, most of the journeymen
were Protestants, as were most masters and merchant-publishers.
Here economic opponents were religious allies. In the silk and textile
trades, the 223 known male Protestants range from four of the most
important industrial entrepreneurs in Lyon to dozens of ill-paid
weavers and silk-workers.

"The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France",

Past and Present, no. 59 (May 1973), p. 80; and "Strikes and Salvation at Lyon",
Archiv /Or Reformationsgeschichte, lvi (1965), pp. 48-64. These articles are
reprinted in my Society and Culture in Early Modem Prance (Stanford, Calif.,
i975)> where chapters on "City Women and Religious Change" and "Printing
and the People" also develop other aspects of the argument.

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 134 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 6 7

The arresting thing about the composition of urban Calvinism up

to 1572 (as I suggested in part in note 94 of my article) is its vocational
and geographical distribution: rich or poor, the Protestant males were
more likely to come from the newer, more technical and more literate
occupations and were also even more likely than the Catholic males to
have been born outside Lyon. These were the laymen whose
experience helped make plausible a major goal of Protestantism: the
destruction of a whole axis of social structure, of what we might call
the "socio-emotional" classes of clergy and laity. These were the
mobile city-dwellers for whom living-space and human relations were
not to be channelled and enclosed by the particular powers of saints,
the limits of the confraternity, and the borders marked off by proces-
sions. Sixteenth-century Calvinism was, indeed, "not a religion of
the humble"; but pride is not created by wealth and university
education alone. Protestants were, indeed, working on the margins,
to echo Madame Estebe's happy phrase, but their redrawing of
ecclesiastical and sexual boundaries, their restyling of religious life
was not accomplished only by elites at the centre, but also by indepen-
dent artisans, including women, at the edges of power.4
This brings me to Madame Estebe's last point: the differences in
character between Protestant and Catholic violence. I agree with
her completely that we are dealing to some extent with a clash of
cultural styles (her description is especially compelling now that she
has dropped her earlier characterization of the Huguenots as a foreign
"race"). I thought I made clear throughout my article, both by
illustrative detail and by explicit discussion, what some of these
contrasts were from the contrast between Host and Bible to
the contrast between Protestant and Catholic processions, from the
contrast between Protestant and Catholic perceptions of social unity
to the contrast in their handling of corpses and chalices.
But it is also important to note certain general similarities in crowd
violence, certain expectations and forms of behaviour shared even by
opponents in the same society. However innovative the Protestants,
they still had in common with their Catholic enemies some categories
of thought for defining danger (such as "pollution"), some assump-
tions about the legitimation of violence, and a repertory of actions by
which crowds could punish, humiliate or destroy. Protestant
violence was demonstrative;6 but it also did away with some of the
4
After 1572, the Reformed Church not only became smaller in French cities,
but lost much of its popular base. This was the consequence of persecution,
but also of the new institutions established by the Reformed Church, which cut
off5some of the earlier promise of the Calvinist movement.
"Rites of Violence", pp. 55-6, 83-4.

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 RELIGIOUS RIOT IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE 135

poisonous liars and profane objects dividing man from man and man
from God. Catholic violence was often murderous; 6 but it also was
intended to "teach" the powerlessness of Scripture alone, the
vulnerability of those not protected by the mass or the parish, the
vengeance that would be wrought on the cruel destroyers of saints and
priests. The Catholics of Agen called their gibbet "the Consistory";
the Protestants of Beziers called their clubs "feather dusters".
Renaming symbolizes; so can weapons symbolize. But weapons
also kill.
University of California, Berkeley Natalie Zemon Davis

' Ibid., pp. 77-8, 82-3.

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