Crunch, Swoosh, Squelch
St, Bartholomew's Night. By Philippe Erlanger. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 32s.) ,1::Irn dreary winter at my preparatory school a it axe to4- ., r paper darts was followed by a craze all things Scottish. Bagpipes, kilts, lochs, _ trds, porridge, Prince Charlie—no personality was toe trivial, no institution too ridiculous to a:eine admiration and even worship. And then, Ile night in the senior dormitory, somebody Started to make fun of the new fetish. Irritated P_ Mt bearing by the nonsense he had heard, he r_ashly proclaimed that Scotland was a remote !fad, disagreeable country full of incommoding Tountains and tribal savages; that Prince Charlie 111_1d the rest of the Stuarts were a set of crooks; ,"-ft kilts were just skirts, bagpipes ,hideous to 4rnaY ciN,ilised car, and porridge made of a cereal h.ic)re Properly kept for horses. The fanatics be- dnfl the craze (mostly boys who claimed Scottish bcent) were promptly notified of the blasphemy al one of their sycophants; disdaining argument j.ild even chivalry, they ganged up on the heretic
tbe school lavatory and speedily reduced him to a tearful pulp. thThis incident has lingered in my mind over
sue,,,Y:ears as a fair example of the kind of ab- ty inch can evoke inflated passions and wic tiesire to persecute. The Scottish worship, eotil its mixture of romance and puritanism, was wkntetnptible; the opposition to it (though some- tialiat better based) was exaggerated and shrill; the outcome W as barbarous. Small wonder, then, Nit Philippe Erlanger's St. Bartholomew's afi"7' an account of the causes, conduct and ermath of the famous massacre, should re- at 11,„(1 The of nothing so much as that vile winter Y Preparatory school. hat1Mci, Erlanger's text limps a bit and is badly but ,I,caPPed by the translator's clumsy English, tkire "Le picture emerges clearly enough—a pic- °f nasty, conceited and self-righteous little a eoiehildren tearing each other to pieces over thestkalid irrelevance. Nor let us pretend that 118uenots were much better conducted than be`e k-atholics: one may sympathise with them trinallse they were in a minority and held doc- aeges which were fractionally less foolish and dis'„tiading, but one should not forget that they sa,.raYed, whenever they had the chance, the e"f.e. treachery, brutality and intolerance (in- pa '1.14 intolerance of moderate men) as any r,P18t of them all. clitr,LesPire a tendency to over-dramatise ('little u-leY know,' etc.), M. Erlanger produces some
cool judgments. As he points out, the origins of the whole affair were political, and lay in Catherine de' Medici's wish to avoid a foreign war. To this end, she decided to get rid of the Protestant Admiral Coligny; but the assassin botched the job, thus alerting the other Hugue- not leaders and making it necessary that ten people should now be killed instead of one. Still acting in the interest of her foreign policy, Catherine gave the word for this to be done. By now, however, the matter was out of control; Catherine's deputies and their deputies in turn, disabled by a superstitious inheritance of cen- turies from thinking in rational terms, took a politic instruction as a religious ordinance. If ten Huguenots were to get the axe, why not the lot? The greater the slaughter, the greater the glory—to which proposition every priest in Paris screeched his Amen.
And so the schoolchildren were on the march. Infatuated by their myth (by its promises and its appeal to amour-propre) they were going to make short work of those who started a rival myth. What matter whether such myths have to do with salvation or Highland chieftains? Just listen to the piping voices from that far-away winter at my prep. school: 'You've insulted (variatim) my mother, my father's regiment, my county cricket side, the public school I'm en- tered for (etc. etc.), and so now I'm going to hit you.' Crunch. Given swords and pikes, we'd have had a bloodbath like St. Bartholomew's itself. 'I'm right and you're wrong.' Swoosh, slit, gurgle, gurgle. 'I'm a Catholic and you're a Huguenot.' Zip, glug. 'I'm a Huguenot •and you're a Catholic.' Squelch.
A plague on both your houses.
SIMON
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