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Visages du massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy

The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre is one of proximity, perpetrated by neighbors upon neighbors. More than the murderers’ motivations or the why of the slaughter, historian Jérémie Foa is interested in the “how”: how a handful of men behind most of the killing—Thomas Croizier, André Mornieu, Claude Chenet, Nicolas Pezou—went about it. Where they lived, what they did in their daily lives, how they acquired the experience necessary to butcher thousands of human beings? Although the massacre was not premeditated, the groundwork for it was laid in the years leading up to 1572. It did not spring up from nowhere, armed and ready, on a summer’s night.

Far from palaces and courts, from Catherine de’ Medici, great men, and the illustrious dead, closer instead to all the nameless victims usually left out of history books, Jérémie Foa gives life to the ghosts of St. Bartholomew’s.

Jérémie Foa, a former student at the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, is a lecturer of modern history at Aix-Marseille Université-CNRS and a member of the TELEMMe laboratory (Time, Space, Language, Southern Europe and the Mediterranean). He also wrote a graphic history illustrated by Pochep: Sacrées guerres. De Catherine de Médicis à Henri IV (Holy Wars: From Catherine de’ Medici to Henri IV, Volume 10 of the History of French in Comics, La Revue dessinée/La Découverte).