Chapter 4 - A Wake-Up Call and A Call to Arms

Summary

Chapter 4 turns to Huguenot texts printed in the aftermath of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres: the Reveille-matin des François, a pair of dialogues which features a Politique character, and several texts from Simon Goularts Mémoires de l’estat de France sous Charles IX, especially the dialogue ‘Le Politique’. Here we see a figure sometimes overlooked in historiography: the explicitly Protestant politique. In these writings there is a sense that politiques could turn bad, and an attempt to prevent that. This chapter addresses the connection between the figure of the Machiavel and the politique, and the status of the politique character in Protestant arguments for liberty. I argue that these issues are bound up with Renaissance practices of reading and writing. The paradigmatic example of the connection between the issue of liberty and somewhat coercive textual practices is the illicit, unattributed printing of extracts of Etienne de la Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire in the texts discussed. Finally, the chapter addresses the question of memory and the wishful ‘poetics of memorialisation’ at work in these representations of politics and politiques.