Twelfth Douglas Johnson Memorial Lecture in French History.
The Society for the Study of French History
and
The Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France
Present:
The Douglas Johnson Memorial Lecture, Monday 17th January 2022.
The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacres 450 years on Professor Penny Roberts (University of Warwick)
The 2022 Annual Douglas Johnson Memorial Lecture will be the 12th in this series, organised by the Society for the Study of French History and the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France. It will be held online, due to the current situation around the COVID-19 pandemic. We were delighted to welcome Professor Penny Roberts (University of Warwick) to give a paper entitled ‘The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacres 450 years on’. Professor Roberts is Vice-Provost and Chair of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Warwick and the President of the Society for the Study of French History. On her talk, Professor Roberts provided the following summary: Michelet famously stated that the Massacre of St Bartholomew was ‘not a day, it was a season’. The historiographical debate about the massacre has proved intense, particularly around where responsibility lay for its instigation, with the crown or with the Guise or even an international Catholic conspiracy. Yet a consensus has also been reached: that the royal intention was to eliminate the Huguenot leadership, who were believed to be conspiring against the crown, not to prompt a general massacre. Nevertheless, in the confusion, local officials and militias made up their own minds how to proceed in Paris and beyond. More recently, through the work of Jérémie Foa, attention has turned to the victims and the perpetrators. In addition, the repercussions of the massacres, the impact in different countries and towns, is to be the focus of a forthcoming volume in French History. My own contribution will return me to the town of Troyes, on which I did my doctorate, to explore its massacre more closely in light of this recent shift in historical interest.
Previous Lectures:
The First Douglas Johnson Annual Lecture:
Julian Jackson (Queen Mary University of London), ‘The Century of Charles de Gaulle’ (November 2010).
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The Second Douglas Johnson Annual Lecture:
Professor Richard Thomson (Edinburgh University), ‘New Wine in Old Bottles: Adapting and Abusing Tradition in French Visual Culture, 1880-1910’ (January 2012).
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The Third Douglas Johnson Annual Lecture:
Professor Ruth Harris, (New College, Oxford), ‘Rolland, Gandhi and Madeleine Slade: Spiritual Politics, France and the Wider World’ (January 2013).
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The Fourth Douglas Johnson Annual Lecture:
Professor Andrew Knapp, (University of Reading), ‘Bombing and Memory: Britain and France, 1940-1945’ (January 2014).
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The Fifth Douglas Johnson Annual Lecture:
Professor John Horne, (Trinity College Dublin), ‘Myth or Model? The French Revolution in the Great War’ (January 2015).
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The Sixth Douglas Johnson Annual Lecture:
Professor Siân Reynolds, (University of Stirling), ‘Children of the Revolutionaries’ (January 2016).
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The Seventh Douglas Johnson Annual Lecture:
Professor Colin Jones (Queen Mary), ‘Rethinking Robespierre and the French Revolutionary Terror’ (January 2017).
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The Eighth Douglas Johnson Annual Lecture:
Professor Malcolm Crook (Keele), ‘How the British and French Learned to Vote’ (January 2018).
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The Ninth Douglas Johnson Annual Lecture:
Professor Máire Cross (Newcastle University), ‘Too Hot to Handle? Flora Tristan (1803-1844) Campaigner for Gender Equlality’ (January 2019).
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The Tenth Douglas Johnson Annual Lecture:
Professor Debra Kelly (University of Westminster), ‘Free French Food: Dining Out With the Free French in Wartime London’ (January 2020).
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The Eleventh Douglas Johnson Annual Lecture:
Professor Michael Boers (University of Oxford), ‘Napoleon as a European: A Certain Vision of France & Europe’ (January 2021).
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