Luc Racaut PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

'There seems to me very little evidence, however, that the Catholics killers wished to
exterminate "a foreign race". This exaggerates and misreads the evidence in regard to
the killing of pregnant women and the castration of males. Heretics were hated for
their polluting, divisive, and disorderly actions, not as a "race".55
For Davis, Protestants were not killed for what they were but for what they
believed, whereas for Garrisson Protestants were killed 'because they were not as
others were, because they were different'. 56 What seems a minor disagreement may
offer, on the contrary, a considerable hindsight for understanding Catholic violence.
As Garrisson suggests, Protestants were not killed for their faith but for what they
were perceived to be. It is clear on all parts that it is the physical presence of
Protestants itself that gave rise to Catholic hatred, unlike Protestant violence that was
directed at symbols, images and figures of authority. 57 Protestants were killed for
what the Catholics believed them to be, not for what they believed-. not as human
beings but as monsters. If we accept this premise, then the demonization of
Protestants in the Catholic polemic is absolutely crucial to the understanding of the
violence of the French Wars of Religion. The members of the Faculty of Theology of
Paris, the Sorbonne, who demonized the Protestants, drew from an earlier tradition of
persecuting heretics.
A major characteristic of Catholic polemic is its reliance on the authority of
precedents which were the building blocks of the legitimacy of any argument during
this period. Catholics plundered the history of the Roman Catholic Church's repeated
brush with heresy from the third century onward, with a particular peak during the
central Middle Ages. The lengthy arguments which had been used against a variety
of heretical groups, ranging from Donatists, Manichees, Albigensians and
Waldensians to mention only the most prominent, were quoted out of context and
55 Davis, Society and Culture, p. 160.
56 Estthe and Davis, 'Debate: The Rites of Violence', pp. 130, 134.
57 0. Christin, Une revolution symbolique: l'iconoclasme huguenot et la
reconstruction catholique (Paris, 1991).
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