1 of 3

Traveling through Amboise on their way to Paris in 1560, Jean d'Aubigné and his 8-year-old son, Agrippa, came upon a horrible spectacle: the hanging bodies of decapitated Protestant conspirators who had attempted to steal the young King Francis II away from the Catholic dukes of Guise. The father made his son swear to defend the faith for which the men had died, and Agrippa d'Aubigné did indeed spend his life fighting for what become known as La Cause.

D'Aubigné waged his battle for the Huguenot faith on two fronts: the battlefield and paper. He first took up arms at age 12, when he climbed out of his bedroom window and ran off to join the Protestant troops defending the beseiged city of Orléans. He eventually became a key player in the Wars of Religion that devastated France in the second half of the sixteenth century.

Starting in 1573, he served as equerry, adviser, and friend to Henri of Navarre (the future Henri IV) until the latter finally rejected the Reformed faith in 1593. Eventually exiled from France, d'Aubigné spent the last decade of his life in Geneva, where he served on the city's war council.

While brave and forceful as a military man, d'Aubigné is mainly known because of his second weapon, his pen. With the exception of his first collection of poems, Printemps (Springtime), which he later rejected because it deals with worldly rather than divine love, d'Aubigné's works all revolve around his faith and the parti protestant.

Although d'Aubigné has never ranked as highly as the sixteenth-century literary giants François Rabelais, Pierre de Ronsard, and Michel de Montaigne, he is nonetheless considered one of France's greatest authors, due almost solely to his work Les Tragiques. He began the work in the trenches of Casteljaloux in 1577 and, although he had probably finished most of it by 1583, he continued to rework it until he finally decided to publish it—anonymously, clandestinely, and at his own expense—in 1616.

Composed of approximately 10,000 verses, the poem received a cold reception when it appeared because of both its content and style. It was not until two centuries later that the famous literary critic Sainte-Beuve called attention to the greatness of Les Tragiques, and twentieth-century literary critics, for whom the work is "the epic of Huguenot faith," have compared it to the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost.

Les Tragiques (the title refers to the extraordinarily tragic events of the times) is a poetic, and highly polemic, account of the Wars of Religion. It depicts the horrors of the conflicts that ravaged France—with biting satire reserved for those considered responsible, mainly the king, princes, and the Roman Catholic Church—in a way that highlights God's control over history and emphasizes the eventual, sure triumph of the true (Protestant) church.

The epic is divided into seven books. The first, Misères, recounts, as the title suggests, the pain resulting from the civil strife, with chilling details of cruel deaths. The second book, Les Princes, lays the blame for France's problems squarely on the shoulders of those in charge and the Catholic church they upheld. Henri III appears as the "woman King or Queen man," and Catherine de Médicis is none other than Jezebel.

Book three, La Chambre Dorée (Parlement of Paris), indicts the courts for their mishandling of justice. Les Feux (Fires) comes next, largely influenced by Jean Crespin's L'Acte des Martyrs, with vivid portrayals of those burned at the stake for their faith.

next page... |  1 of 3

share this page

RSS Feed   RSS Help