Of Blood and Blindness: Islam and Huguenot Identity in Aubigne's "Jugement" (Tragiques Vii) (Agrippa D'aubigne) (Report‪)‬

ONE of the major figures in religious polemics during the French civil wars was the Turk. A versatile imaginary construction, the Turk served both Catholic and Protestant pamphleteers and authors of political treatises to denigrate their opponents. The ideological conflict growing ever more acerbic after the outbreak of the fist war in 1562, Catholic polemicists often equated Huguenots with Muslims to imply that a new crusade was needed to purge France of her heretics from within. Some alleged that Protestants had requested support from the Ottoman empire for their fight against the Spaniards and the Pope: "Ilz sont prests a coeffer le Turban et prendre la Circoncision de Mahommet." (1) On the other side, Calvin did not hesitate to invoke Islam in his condemnation of Catholic rites and "superstition," especially the adoration of relics. He wondered how idolatrous Catholics would explain their form of worship "au Turc qui se moque de leur folie," but not without distancing himself immediately from both sides: "il suffit qu'entre eux ils vident leur debat. Cependant nous serons excuses de ne croire ni a l'un ni a l'autre" (Rouillard 412). In Protestant pamphlets the Ottoman empire was also cited as a model for religious tolerance that France could emulate to find a way out of its religious and political impasse (Yardeni 87-88). As religious violence escalated and the kingdom threatened to collapse, impassioned calls for a new crusade against the Turk could be heard from both camps. (2) Ronsard was among those who encouraged Charles IX to reunite the French behind a common cause and lead them against the infidel in Istanbul. (3) Evocations of the Turk and Islam then were pervasive in the religious and political discourse of the second half of the sixteenth century. It therefore does not come with surprise that they also play a significant role in Les Tragiques, Agrippa d'Aubigne's epic staging of the drama of French Protestantism, which he began to compose in 1577 and published first in 1617. The Ottoman empire emerges in books I, V, and VII, and although references to the Turk and to Islam are relatively few in number, Aubigne makes a very targeted use of them. They contribute to the complexity of his endeavor to foster Huguenot identity. Mostly linked to the epic's satirical attack on Catholics, the Turk becomes the poet's unexpected accomplice in creating a vision of France as a reformed nation that nonetheless reunites Catholics and Protestants.