Affray In The Rue Saint-Jacques, September 1557: Summary

This primary source analysis will focus on an account describing the hostile confrontation of French Huguenots unwillingly trapped inside a house by a Catholic Parisian mob on the night of 4 September 1557, Saint-Jacques street in Paris. The document titled ‘Affray in the rue Saint-Jacques, September 1557’ is a 1996 English translation by historian Robert J. Knecht (in the second edition of his compilation of sources French Renaissance Monarchy: Francis I and Henry II) of the French Calvinist theologian Theodore Beza’s (1519-1605) account of the event in the third volume of Histoire ecclesiastique de eglises reformees au royaume de France first published in French in 1580. While the account is impressive in detail and somewhat convincing, it
This damages the reliability of the source as Beza, one of sixteenth-century Europe’s most prominent Protestant figures was not present and wrote upon twenty-three years of reflection on the event, indicating a propensity for bias concerning a case pitting French Calvinism against Catholicism.
The date of the event (4 September, 1557) is significant in understanding how and why a collective of discontented Catholic clergy and citizens assaulted French Protestants due to two important factors preceding the event which exemplifies the period of unrest in Paris: the Edict of Compiegne (July); and the Battle of Saint-Quentin (August). The Edict of Compiegne issued just over a month prior to the Saint-Jacques event on 24 July 1557 by the French Catholic monarch Henry II stipulated that punishments for ‘heresy’ were to be meted out with increased severity , thus, continuing the pursuit of all suspected Protestant conspirators against the kingdom. Consequently, the content of the edict and its close-proximity to the night of 4 September explains one reason why a violent pursuit of Huguenots took
The author even recalls the recent defeat as having had a profound effect on an already insecure public under advice to arm themselves, therefore, the idea of violently descending upon those perceived as enemies of the city was clearly very topical on 4 September 1557. Moreover, the content of the text presents itself as a pro-Huguenot source in relation to the aforementioned events: the author states that the Huguenots (not explicitly, but evidently) met in a house at nightfall for the Lord’s Supper (which is how they are identified as Protestants), indicating that they were trying to avoid detection and ultimately the consequences of the July edict ; the description of the priests having been watchful of the peculiarity of this congregation and the subsequent gathering of a mob highlights the heightened alarm and renewed vigilance of the population in the wake of the defeat at Saint-Quentin . The text is clearly disapproving of the Catholics depicted in the text and sympathetic of the Protestants and thus composed for followers of the latter faith. However, the document is a critique of the Catholic’s irrational behaviour rather than