The Church's Pamphleteers, Part 1

by Brett Rutherford

 

Adapted from Victor Hugo, l”Année Terrible, “July 1871”

 

From His mouth, to their ears.

God bellows, not homilies, but
deafening diatribes.
Who gets these divine messages?
Oh, random priests, or Prussians,
or anyone with an urge to scribble
at a madhouse window. Their prose
skims off the surface of religion
the way a beadle mumbles his way
around and through a litany.

 

Each one of them cries “Credo!”
and claiming authority from that,
chides, “Let us pray!”, but, oh,
what’s prayed for is a thrust here,
     and bullets sprayed there.
These clergy may be weaklings
     but their spirit is lively.

 

They are quick to issue, with seal and cross,
some holy proclamation. Their aim
seems random and drenches the uninterested
the way the sloppy bottle-brush
     throws holy water.

Things never move fast enough
to suit their somber pretentiousness.
They prod the executioners’ behinds
and say to them,
     “Get moving, lazy bones!”
It is as though Death came to them,
a supplicant, and begged, “Send more!”
If only they resurrected Besme[1]
and all the assassins who struck
at the Saint Barthomew’s Massacre,
now that would stir things up!
And why not get Leffamas,[2]
     that pamphleteer of old
back up from his place in Hell?
Where then is Trestaillon,[3]
that self-proclaimed mass-killer
exterminating Protestants in Nimes
at the end of The Hundred Days,
whose acts were justified
    as instrumentum regni?
Where are the good Christians
who once chopped up in bits
     their Protestant neighbors —
why not invite them, too?

Since the events of Eighty-Nine
(the Revolution, I mean),
offend you so, go resurrect
King Charles with his arquebus,
and Montrevel, wild beast
    and rough companion?[4]

 

Where are the complicit workers of Avignon
who dragged dead Brune[5] along the Quai de Rhone
after the royalist mob had murdered him?
Are there still great butchers too ready to serve
both altar and throne, whose sweaty brows
beneath the sun of Cevennes, stalked Bâville[6]
to his mysterious “suicide”
and earned the Bossuet’s[7] approval?

 

I am sure Oppède[8] could provide us a president!

How welcome a Laubardemont[9] would be,
to add new twists to the art of torture!
Their rainbow of peace reveals itself
as a great and unsheathed naked sword.

The blade is, after all, the best
thing known to help one sleep at night.
No society can survive without
some threat suspended over it:
a dogma to which we must get used.

If, now and then, to save
us from our own worse selves, the sword
drops down to kill us, so be it.

 

You pamphleteers must be
     in quite a state of confusion.

One day you are the emperor’s lieutenant,
on another, the Pope’s vicar, and all the while
Death’s self-anointed agent, too!

Amid your calls for hush and peace,
you are the ones who bark, and bite, and lie.

 

You come, suspicious, vile, devout,

ready to knock Rochefort[10] to the ground,

that proud archer, the powerful sagittarius

whose arrow is on the side of the fallen empire.

You dig up the grave of Flourens,[11] jackal!

what will you do with his poor bones?

 

When widows weep, you insult their tears.

You mock your victims’ funerals,

painting crows white,
     and blackening the doves.

The sight of a cradle
     wrapped in a shroud
offends you. The stones you throw
wound God in the people,
the child in the grandfather,
the fathers in the sons,
the men in the women remembered.

You think you are strong

because your infamy is shameless!

 

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[1] Besme, a Bohemian named Charles Dianovitz, who led a group of paid assassins against Protestant leaders at the time of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572.

[2] Isaac de Leffemas (c.1587 – c. 1657), a poet and playwright, author of some libelous political pamphlets. Hugo seemed to have a special scorn for him, mentioning him in his drama Marion Delorme.

[3] Jacques Duport, nicknamed Trestaillon, led a massacre and pillage carried out by Catholic zealots against the Protestants of Nimes, immediately after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, and just as the monarchy was being restored. Among other outrages, his men shot anyone who could not recite a Latin prayer. (For a detailed account, see Fox’s Book of Martyrs.)

[4] King Charles … Montrevel. King Charles IX (r. 1550-1574) was responsible for the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of Huguenots, which, after spreading to the provinces, accounted for more than 10,000 deaths. Antoine de La Baume, 8^th compte de Montrevel (1557-1595), was a Gentilhomme ordinaire at the court of Charles IX, and a soldier. He died in 1595 in the Siege of Vesoul, a battle in which French forces, accepting the town’s capitulation, entered and broke their promise of a peaceful occupation with acts of violence and looting.

[5] Guillaume Brune (1764-1815), a Napoleonic military commander and politician, killed in Avignon by a mob of royalists. His body was thrown into the river Rhone, recovered by fishermen, and buried locally. The murder was covered up.

[6] Chrétien François de Lamoignon, marquis de Bâville (1735 – 1789) French statesman who issued the Edict of Versailles in 1787, which gave French Protestants civil rights and freedom of worship. The same edict abolished judicial torture.

[7] Jacques-Bénigne Lignel Bossuet (1627 – 1704) French bishop and theologian who published famous homilies against the Protestants. He was also an ardent orator preaching the divine right of kings.

[8] Jean Maynier (1495-1558), baron of Oppède, led the 1545 massacre of the Vaudois (Waldensians) in Provence. He was the First President of the Parliament of Aix-en-Provence. As for the place called Oppède, Le Vieux Oppède, a mountaintop medieval village in Provence, had a long history of dissension between the authorities on the hill-top, and the villagers and farmers below. During the period of rival papacies, the French Pope Benedict XIII fled from Avignon to Oppède’s fortress, where he was besieged by enemies. The town is a microcosm of civil discord.

[9] Jean Martin, Baron de Laubardemont, (c1590 – 1656), French magistrate involved in the infamous trial of Urbain Grandier, accused of sorcery and child-killing (the basis of Aldous Huxley’s book, The Devils of Loudun.)

[10] Victor Henri Rochefort (1831-1913), a beleaguered journalist and newspaper editor, playwright and pamphleteer who had fled Paris in May 1871, only to be arrested by the government and sentenced to life imprisonment. He had served with Hugo in the National Assembly and, like Hugo, had resigned from it.

[11] Gustave Flourens (1838-1871), writer, journalist, and revolutionary, a general of The Paris Commune. He was summarily killed after his arrest.