Within 30 years after Martin Luther’s nailing of his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg, there were numerous other Christian movements contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church. The teachings of the theologian, John Calvin are of particular importance in France. Calvin, originally a lawyer, outlined a set of Christian beliefs that were fiercely independent of higher authorities, which also emphasized the individual reading of the Bible. Calvin based himself in Geneva, Switzerland on the French border. It was from this city that he trained and sent out pastors to convert French Catholics to his formulation of Christianity. The entry of Calvinist Christianity into the southern regions of France that cause a great deal of conflict during the second half of the Sixteenth century.
During the time that the Reformation took place, life was centered on the local community. Many people worked only to survive on a basic level, and many people in each town or city relied on each other to get by. This model worked well enough in the times preceding the Reformation, when everyone was Catholic and shared a common faith. The introduction of new beliefs meant that the local communities were divided over the nature of salvation. This division was seen by the people of all sects of Christianity as a threat to their desire to get to Heaven in the afterlife.
The images that will be investigated depict some of the early scenes from the French Wars of Religion. We will examine these illustrations not as the result of religious differences, but rather from the differences in opinions of how the society should be constructed. Prof. Mack Holt proposes that the French Wars of Religion:
Were fought primarily over the issue of religion as defined in contemporary terms: as a body of believers rather than the more modern definition of a body of beliefs. Thus the emphasis... is on the social rather than the theological. In these terms, Protestants and Catholics alike in the sixteenth century each viewed the other as pollutants of their own particular notion of the body social, as threats to their own conception of ordered society. 1
What we will need to understand is that the images that were engraved by the French artists Tortorel and Perrissin, is that they depicted the violence between the Protestants and Catholics in a social manner. The massacres being illustrated are not favoring either religion, but rather were intended to be an even-handed investigation and record of the violence during the 1560's.
This set of panels (English translation: Forty Panels) created by the two artists Jacques Tortorel and Jean Perrissin, were commissioned by a pair of businessmen in Geneva as a profit-centered commercial venture. It was during this period of religious trouble in the area of what is now France, that the Protestants (otherwise known as Huguenots) and the Catholics fought, killed and massacred each other in the name of Christianity and God. The Quarante Tableaux are unique in this period in the fact that they are not propaganda, rather they were commissioned to “depict and carve ‘all of a history’” of the Wars of Religion. 2 Although all of the men present when signing the commission contract were religious refugees, who left their home due to persecution, the images were intended to have no religious affiliation. This was highly unusual, as many of the prints from this period (around 1570 CE) used titles to influence their audiences, often employing words like, ’horrible’, ‘cruelty’, ‘wondrous’, ‘glorious’, ‘gruesome’, yet they are entirely absent in the Quarante Tableaux. Historian Philip Benedict proposes that the artists and commissioners did this “to transcend confessional (religious) divisions and sell their prints to Catholic as well as Protestant buyers.” 3
The original preface to the Quarante Tableaux tells the reader by looking at the images in the set, they could ‘truly know’ what happened. The complexity of the images speaks to the numerous stories packed into each picture. Each panel includes numerous stories and events, instead of focusing on a single event. The way that many printed images were produced in the sixteenth century was that there were letters engraved into the picture, with a key listed below describing each separate event. What this effectively shows is an entire story, all shoved into a single image. The events depicted in the Quarante Tableaux have been proven to be mostly factual,4 and can be relied upon as a truthful and useful resource when learning about history. The rest of the website will be used to examine the brief context of a selection of prints, and to use the visual representations of violence to help explain the nature of the French Wars of Religion.
