Bloodlust

On the Roots of Violence from Cain and Abel to the Present

Russell Jacoby

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781439117569
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

THROUGHOUT HISTORY AND ACROSS CULTURES, the most common form of violence is that between family members and neighbors or kindred communities—in civil wars writ large and small. From assault to genocide, from assassination to massacre, violence usually emerges from inside the fold. You have more to fear from a spouse, an ex-spouse, or a coworker than you do from someone you don't know. In this brilliant polemic, Russell Jacoby argues that violence erupts most often, and most savagely, between those of us most closely related. An Indian nationalist assassinated Mohandas Gandhi, "the father" of India. An Egyptian Muslim assassinated Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. An Israeli Jew assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister and similarly a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Genocide most often involves kindred groups. The German Christians of the 1930s were so closely intertwined with German Jews that a yellow star was required to tell the groups apart. Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia, like the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, are often indistinguishable even to one another. This idea contradicts both common sense and the collective wisdom of teachers and preachers, who declaim that we fear—and sometimes should fear—the "other, " the dangerous stranger. Citizens and scholars alike believe that enemies lurk in the street and beyond, where we confront a "clash of civilizations" with foreigners who challenge our way of life. Jacoby offers a more unsettling truth: it is not so much the unknown that threatens us, but the known. We attack our brothers—our kin, our acquaintances, our neighbors—with far greater regularity and venom than we attack outsiders. Weaving together the biblical story of Cain and Abel, Freud's "narcissism of minor differences, " insights on anti-Semitism and misogyny, as well as fresh analysesof "civil" bloodbaths from the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in the sixteenth century to genocide and terrorism in our own time, Jacoby turns history inside out to offer a provocative new understanding of violentconfrontation over the centuries. "In thinking about the bad, we reach for the good, " he says in his Introduction. This passionate, counterintuitive account affords us an unprecedented insight into the roots of violence.

1

“KINSMEN, NEIGHBORS, AND COMPATRIOTS”

Shortly before sunrise on Saturday, March 27, 1546, Alfonso Díaz, a Spaniard and minor officiant at the Vatican, arrived in Neuburg on the Danube, a village outside Augsburg, Germany. His brother, Juan, was in Neuburg to supervise the printing of a book by a leading architect of the Protestant Reformation. Like virtually all Spaniards, Juan had begun life as a Catholic, but during his studies in Paris he drew close to the Protestants and eventually moved to Strasbourg, a Calvinist stronghold, to join them. Alfonso had remained in the Church.

Alfonso and a companion approached the inn where Juan was staying. They carried a letter for him.¹ As his companion rapped on the door, Alfonso stood out of sight. The servant who answered the door was instructed to awaken Juan, because of an urgent message from his brother. A first-person account by one Claudio Senarcleo describes the scene. “Juan was asleep in a room with me, when the young domestic came in and awakened him. He jumped out of bed, clad only in a light nightgown, and went into the front room to receive the ‘messenger’ with Alfonso’s letter.” Alfonso stayed hidden from view as Juan received the letter. “Dawn was beginning to break, and Juan went over to the window to read it.”

Alfonso stated in the letter that Juan was not safe in Neuburg; he was the object of a plot, and he should leave immediately. Senarcleo’s account continues:

While his attention was thus engaged, the assassin took out the hatchet he carried hidden inside his jacket and plunged it up to the handle into the right side of Juan’s head, near the temple. In an instant all the sensory organs in the brain were destroyed, so that Juan could not utter a sound. So as not to disturb any of us with the sound of a falling body, the assassin caught Juan’s body and eased it quietly to the floor, where it lay with the hatchet protruding from the head. All this was done so quickly and silently that none of us knew anything about it.²

Events three months earlier had set the fratricide in motion. As part of the Protestant contingent, Juan Díaz had attended a colloquy to hammer out religious unity in German states riven by the Reformation. (Like other such conferences, it ended in failure.)³ At this gathering Juan had encountered an old Spanish acquaintance, Pedro de Malvenda, a member of the Catholic delegation, who was shocked to discover Juan among the Protestants. “What! Juan Díaz in Germany, and in the company of Protestants! … No, I am deceived; it is a phantom before me, resembling Díaz, indeed, in stature and in feature, but it is a mere empty image!”⁴

For Malvenda, Spain was the national embodiment of Catholicism. “To conquer one Spaniard,” he reportedly declared, “was more momentous … than to win ten thousand Germans or numberless proselytes from other nations.” Díaz must not “destroy the purity of the word ‘Spanish.’” At the conference he sought in vain to bring Díaz back into the Church. He begged him to confess his sins and ask for repentance from Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and (as Carlos I) King of Spain. Malvenda also alerted Alfonso Díaz in Rome; he had known little of his brother’s religious peregrinations and at once hurried to Juan’s side. Senarcleo reports that Juan

was touched by this sign of fraternal love … and he received Alfonso with great respect and affection. Alfonso told Juan how he had made the long and arduous journey from Rome to persuade Juan to give up his heresy and return with Alfonso to Rome and the true faith. He spoke of the dangers of persisting in his heresy, and of the dishonor Juan was bringing to the family name.⁵

Juan could not be convinced. Alfonso then sought to persuade him at least to return to Spain, where he might practice his new faith among his countrymen. Juan “was sorely tempted to follow the advice of his brother whom he loved.” However, he conferred with colleagues who counseled against it. They feared he would be persecuted and even arrested. They could have been right. By the 1540s the Inquisition in Spain had turned its attention from the so-called conversos—Jews who converted to Christianity—to Christians who had fallen under the influence of Luther, Erasmus, and other reformers. Juan would be a tempting target.⁶

Faced with this refusal, Alfonso made the decision to kill his brother, an act he may well have contemplated as soon as he heard of Juan’s apostasy. He withdrew with his associate to a village a few miles away. They dined with a priest and visited a local carpenter, with whom they evaluated an array of hatchets. “The carpenter produced several,” Senarcleo reports, “which they carefully hefted for efficiency, finally choosing one which they thought would be satisfactory, i.e., small enough to hide under a coat.”

The murder of Juan Díaz by his brother provoked Protestant outrage and Catholic applause. The Spanish humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda wrote that news of the murder was “disagreeable to none of our countrymen.”⁷ Of course, the Protestants did not see it that way. As a leading Protestant reformer, Martin Bucer, declared in his preface to Senarcleo’s chronicle, the “generation of Cain” tracked down Juan Díaz, who was “killed with exquisite perfidy by his twin and only brother.”⁸ Bucer was not alone in his reference to Cain and Abel. Senarcleo’s title translates as “The True Story of the Death of the Spaniard, Saint Juan Díaz, whom His Blood Brother Nefariously Murdered, Having Followed the Example of the First Parricide Cain as He Did to His Own Brother Abel.”⁹ Accounts of the murder often allude to Cain. John Foxe’s popular sixteenth-century Book of Martyrs called this “terrible murder” something that “was never heard of since the first example of Cain who, for religion, slew his own brother Abel.”¹⁰

After the murder, Alfonso and his hired assassin fled, but they were captured. Judicial machinations by the emperor and the pope obtained their release.¹¹ The murder then vanished from history, remembered, if at all, in passing, in histories of sixteenth-century Spain and the Inquisition, old compilations of Protestant martyrdom, and oddball story collections for young Christians.¹²

Twenty-six years after Díaz killed Díaz, Paris was in a festive mood. French Protestants—or Huguenots—and French Catholics had been warring for decades, bloodying the country. But a celebration scheduled for August 18, 1572, promised reconciliation. Catherine de Medici, the mother of the Catholic king of France, Charles IX, had arranged for her daughter Margaret of Valois to marry the Protestant Henri, King of Navarre, a union that might heal France by ending the bloodletting between Christians. All the leading Huguenots arrived to join in the festivities. In her memoirs, Margaret recalled the wedding as a glorious occasion.

I was set out in a most royal manner; I wore a crown on my head with the ‘coet’, or regal close gown of ermine, and I blazed in diamonds. My blue-coloured robe had a train to it of four ells in length, which was supported by three princesses. A platform had been raised, some height from the ground, which led from the Bishop’s palace to the Church of Notre-Dame. It was hung with cloth of gold; and below it stood the people in throngs to view the procession…. We were received at the church door by the Cardinal de Bourbon, who officiated for that day, and pronounced the nuptial benediction.¹³

Among the prominent Huguenot guests was their military leader, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. He wrote to his wife, “Today the marriage of Madame the King’s sister and the King of Navarre was celebrated. The next few days will be passed in feasting and in presenting masques and combats.”¹⁴ But “the next few days” proved something less than celebratory. On August 22, a would-be assassin shot and gravely wounded Coligny. The shooter escaped. Who sent him? We still do not know, but it seems he was linked to the Catholic House of Guise.¹⁵ With the attempted assassination of the Huguenot leader, Paris turned tense. Charles’s brother advised Coligny to assemble his friends and supporters in case of further trouble.

At this point, historians and participants differ as to who orchestrated what.¹⁶ Perhaps the king’s council feared a Huguenot reprisal and to prevent it decided to slaughter its leaders in the capital the next day. Perhaps—and this is what contemporary Protestants believed—a plan to kill them had already been drawn up. After all, hadn’t they been lured to the city for the nuptials and then locked inside as the city gates closed? One sixteenth-century chronicler believed that the “things that followed” proved the strategy had been hatched long ago. “For those whiche might haue by flight escaped out of the suburbs were nowe holden fast inough, being enclosed not only within the walles of the towne, but also within the compasse of one narrow strete.”¹⁷

In any event, “Sometime in the afternoon or evening of 23 August it was agreed that the Huguenot leaders must die,” reports the historian Barbara Diefendorf. They had just been wined and dined in the Louvre but now were targeted to be killed. As the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet put it, “The dinner companions and associates of last night, the officers and captains of the guard, were to be their executioners in the morning.”¹⁸ Did Catherine de Medici, who engineered the marriage of her daughter to a Protestant king to bring peace to France, support this plan? Who played the key role? “The truth will never be known,” Diefendorf concludes. “Everyone who was party to these events had reason later to lie.”¹⁹ There are no independent sources. Many key documents were destroyed. The nineteenth-century historian Lord Acton, who examined the role of Austria, Italy, and the pope in the massacre, noted the missing evidence. “No letters written from Paris at the time have been found in the Austrian archives,” he wrote in an essay, “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew.” “In the correspondence of thirteen agents of the House of Este at the Court of Rome, every paper relating to the event has disappeared. All the documents of 1572, both from Rome and Paris, are wanting in the archives of Venice. In the Registers of many French towns the leaves which contained the records of August and September in that year have been torn out.”²⁰

Before dawn on August 24, the feast of St. Bartholomew—with more wedding celebrations planned for that day and those following—the bells of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, the parish church of the French monarchy, began to peal. That was the signal. The city gates had already been shut. The young duke of Guise, twenty-two years old, head of the hard-line French Catholics, led an armed militia to Coligny’s quarters, where they broke into his second-story bedroom. As the duke waited below, his men slew Coligny, who reportedly said that he wished it were “a man rather than this dirty adolescent who causes my death.” The duke demanded proof that the deed was done and his followers—a motley collection of French and foreign soldiers—hurled the body from the window into the street. With Coligny’s identity confirmed, the duke sent his men off to dispatch the other Huguenots.²¹

The day began, but did not end, with the murder of several dozen Huguenot leaders in their beds. The killing of the Protestant elite triggered a general massacre. Over the next few days rabid Catholics tracked down Protestants throughout Paris. With great ferocity mobs ferreted out Huguenots and hacked them to death. To what extent this bloodbath was expected and organized or spontaneous and unanticipated remains vigorously contested by both contemporary and later commentators. One Mathurin Lussault was killed the moment he opened his door on the evening of the twenty-fourth. When his son came downstairs after him, he too was stabbed, and died in the street. Lussault’s wife tried to escape by jumping out of a second-story window and broke both her legs. She was discovered in a neighbor’s yard and the mob “dragged her by the hair a long way through the streets, and spying the gold bracelets on her arms, without having the patience to unfasten them, cut off her wrists.” Impaled on a spit, her corpse was paraded through Paris before being thrown into the Seine.²² In three days several thousand Protestants were slain in Paris. After that the bloodletting spread to the provinces, where tens of thousands died. “I am sure that the wild beasts are kinder than those in human form,” concluded one Protestant observer of the rampage. He noted that “Huguenot-hunting” had become a popular pastime.²³

The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre stands even today as a symbol of religious vengeance, as well as fratricidal violence. Two centuries later Voltaire, a sworn critic of religious sectarianism, claimed he took ill every year on its anniversary. Some points, however, are still worth making about these events. The conflict was especially brutal, because—not in spite of—the fact that the participants were neighbors. This lesson is difficult to acknowledge. Kinship produced enmity, not affection. In Paris in 1572 neighbors savaged neighbors. These people knew one another—or at least were accustomed to passing one another in the street. They were not strangers or foreigners. As with the Díaz brothers—indeed, as is frequently the case in history—proximity engendered not warmth but rage.

The slaughter cannot be discounted as solely an irrational effusion of popular anger, since it found approval among the learned and the powerful.²⁴ King Charles and his mother both commended the mayhem. The Church was delighted by it. The papal nuncio in Paris, Anton Maria Salviati, wrote that he “desired to fling himself at the pope’s feet for joy.” He was pleased that God had promoted the true faith “so honorably” and that the French monarchy had been able to “extirpate the poisonous roots with such prudence.”²⁵

A Swiss monk at a Jesuit college in Paris reported to his abbot: “I do not think that I shall weary you in telling you at length of an occurrence as unexpected as it is helpful to our cause, one that not only captures the world’s admiration but also raises it to the highest pitch of joy.” He assured the abbot that he could “rejoice” with confidence because the information derived from “unimpeachable sources.” He described “an immense slaughter” that filled the Seine with “naked and horribly ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Flap
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: “Kinsmen, Neighbors, and Compatriots”
• Chapter 2: Uncivil Wars
• Chapter 3: Genocide in History: Kill Thy Neighbor
• Chapter 4: Fearful Symmetries
• Chapter Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Back Flap
• Back Cover