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Americans have a skewed image of what civil war entails, mainly because ours was somewhat exceptional, if not unique. Two vast geographical regions squared off and went at it in a large-scale conventional war featuring classical Napoleonic movement of great armies and titanic battles like Gettysburg, Antietam, Chickamauga and the sieges of Vicksburg and Petersburg. Victory or defeat hinged upon one force’s ability to conquer the enemy’s armies and occupy his territory.
Most civil wars are considerably more chaotic than that, with less well-defined territorial identities for the combatants and fewer clear strategic goals. When a society and a polity unravels, it looks more like Syria c. 2011 than it does USA c. 1861. Or maybe it looks like France c. 1572.
*

Catholics and Protestant Huguenots were at sword-point for most of the early modern era in the Kingdom of France.
France had already been embroiled in its Wars of Religion for a decade when the August 18, 1572, nuptials of Margaret of Valois and Henry of Navarre rolled around. Catholics and Protestant Huguenots had been at each other’s throats in a nasty, brutal conflict that mixed armed conflict and popular unrest. The marriage was supposed to bridge ideological and political chasms. Instead, it touched off one of the most incredible slaughters in European history.
From Encyclopedia Britannica:
The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day had for its background the political and religious rivalries of the court of France. Admiral Gaspard II de Coligny, a Huguenot leader, supported a war in the Low Countries against Spain as a means to prevent a resumption of civil war, a plan that the French king, Charles IX, was coming to approve in the summer of 1572. Catherine de Médicis, the mother of Charles, feared Admiral Coligny’s growing influence over her son. She accordingly gave her approval to a plot that the Roman Catholic house of Guise had been hatching to assassinate Coligny, whom it held responsible for the murder of François de Guise in 1563.
On August 18, 1572, Catherine’s daughter, Margaret of France (Marguerite de Valois), was married to the Huguenot Henry of Navarre (the future Henry IV of France), and a large part of the Huguenot nobility came to Paris for the wedding.
Marguerite de Valois.
Henry of Navarre.
The attempt on Admiral Coligny’s life four days later failed; he was only wounded. To placate the angry Huguenots, the government agreed to investigate the assassination attempt. Fearing discovery of her complicity, Catherine met secretly with a group of nobles at the Tuileries Palace to plot the complete extermination of the Huguenot leaders, who were still in Paris for the wedding festivities.* Charles was persuaded to approve of the scheme, and, on the night of August 23, members of the Paris municipality were called to the Louvre and given their orders.
Shortly before dawn on August 24 the bell of Saint-Germain‑l’Auxerrois began to toll and the massacre began. One of the first victims was Coligny, who was killed under the supervision of Henry de Guise himself. Even within the Louvre, Navarre’s attendants were slaughtered, though Navarre and Henry I de Bourbon, 2nd prince de Condé, were spared. The homes and shops of Huguenots were pillaged and their occupants brutally murdered; many bodies were thrown into the Seine.
Bloodshed continued in Paris even after a royal order of August 25 to stop the killing, and it spread to the provinces. Huguenots in Rouen, Lyon, Bourges, Orléans, and Bordeaux were among the victims. Estimates of the number that perished in the disturbances, which lasted to the beginning of October, have varied from 2,000 by a Roman Catholic apologist to 70,000 by the contemporary Huguenot Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, who himself barely escaped death. Modern writers put the number at 3,000 in Paris alone.
* Historians dispute the degree of Catherine’s direct complicity in the killings. Whether it was her idea or not, she certainly gave her consent.
*
I have long been fascinated by the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. It is the setting of two works of art that I find grimly compelling — the 1994 French film Queen Margot (an adaptation of the 19th Century Alexandre Dumas novel), and Tim Willocks’ gory masterpiece Twelve Children of Paris. The power of these works of fiction derive in great part from the vividness with which they portray a society gone utterly insane with hate — when neighbors no longer recognize themselves as being of the same people, and turn on each other with the atavistic fury of aroused tribal instinct. And the chilling thing is, we’re not so very far from those blood-maddened Frenchmen at all…

Marguerite of Valois, Queen Margot, portrayed by the exquisite Isabelle Adjani.
Any society in which factions develop and harden around profoundly powerful aspects of identity — ethnic, religious, ideological — is vulnerable to rents in the fabric that knits it together. When economic, political, environmental stresses begin to tear at that fabric, when political leaders pander to those identities and stoke the flames of discord for their own aggrandizement, when rumor plays on paranoia, we risk a catastrophic and bloody unraveling.
Such unravelings are not 450-year-old artifacts in a museum of human fallibility — we have seen them in our time through the Arab Spring, in Ukraine, in Africa and the Balkans. The institutions of the West remain more robust and resilient than those more volatile societies — but that is no reason for complacency. Resilience is contingent, and without diligence it erodes. Some commentators have opined that the U.S. is already in a “cold civil war,” and it is hard to argue the point. We are an angry, distrustful people, and nihilistic rage is already stacking bodies in the streets.
Matthew says
Great piece, Jim. We are entering a scary time of factional rivalry. Personally, I think this started in the 60s when “the political was personal.” That was a stupid saying. You need to be cool and dispassionate when you deal with policy.
Greg Walker says
Jim,
You knew this was coming…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9j6DE6RnSk
It’s a nice day to…
Start again…
Saddle Tramp says
Good one Jim…
“A cold civil war” may perhaps be an apt description. As you point out so well, this may defy any other past and comparable civil wars (if it truly turns hot) and most certainly compared to our own past. Geographically, it cuts across much more diverse and conflicted border[s] of discontentment then at that time. Today you have the forgotten rust belt and the flyover states as geographic markers, etc., but population wise it moves around a lot and is not in a straight line. This is not a distinct swathe of territory. It zigs and it zags north to south and east to west. The economic crossover is especially very problematic and all the more exacerbated by our interdependence and what has become on the negative side a form of surveillance capitalism and other perverse dependencies in all their abusive applications. This makes this potentially much, much worse in a logistical way. The end result is absolutely disastrous and who among us could put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I do not see anyone. It becomes very factious and crude in any ability to self-organize. Maybe someone can rise to the occasion. Who would be a Solomon and not have the baby sliced in two? I do not see anyone in plain sight anyway with that kind of wisdom leading us. Unfortunately, too many (understandably so) have given in to abdicating a willingness to find resonating examples that cross ideologies, etc. that allow for a way out of this mess other than a collapse of it or some other catastrophic event. Trees only grow so tall after all. Something’s got to give. Instead of giving it appears that many are investing in an inevitability of the failure of it. The irony is that we have every conceivable tool at hand to make it work except for a cohesive cooperation to do so. The Great Depression did not occur because there was a lack of raw materials available both seen and unseen, but rather it was because of the wrong concentration of power and systems at that particular critical moment in time to prevent it. Such is fate when the warning signs are ignored. Maybe we need a little naive optimism too. All of this cruel nihilism is so damn oppressing. Today we are almost blinded by the vast means of communications and information streaming at us. We are trying to drink from a firehouse, but instead the end result is that we are being drowned by it and pissed off by it. We can all no doubt easily stack up huge amounts of what the problems are, so much so that we become inured to it and then retreat to our own little fortresses. Of course if you might be of the view that all hell will be breaking loose with the result being a complete devolving into a total collapse of the system as we know it, then all bets are off. It’s a whole new ballgame with US vs THEM up on the scoreboard. Batter up…
Prescient words indeed;
“World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”
“Privacy invasion is now one of biggest knowledge industries.”
“The medium is the message.”
— Marshall McLuhan (1970
Mechanix Wear - John Cornelius says
Very good piece, Jim. The parallels between France and the USofA, 447 years apart, are certainly pronounced. Drawing from our own civil war experience, one can only hope that the last line of the Gettysburg Address hold true:
“—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Also, thanks for the Billy Idol/Game of Thrones mashup. Who ‘a thunk it?
Bro John
Yeah, but in GoT-world, “hey little sister” has a whole different meaning.
John Cornelius says
Ick. I hadn’t gone there. But now…
You’re still WAY ahead on the Planting-Sights-That-Cannot-Be-Unseen board.
John Cornelius says
Ick. I hadn’t gone there. But now…
Proudly, I might add.
Well said, Jim. This is a period in history I’ve seen referenced recently that I need to learn more about.
Good to hear from you Keith. How go the battles?