Jérémie Foa
Research Project
“Une grande froidure” : an Environmental History of the Wars of Religion
Project Abstract
During the winter of 1564, a sudden and severe cold wave struck the Mediterranean and all of Europe: “the hands, feet, ears, and genitalia of several men froze as they walked through the fields […]. During these frosts, several men were found dead, who had died of nothing other than cold […]. The combs of roosters and hens froze and fell off their heads a few days later” (Haton, 2001). Historians of the Wars of Religion have extensively studied the Provencal chroniclers for bloody conflicts between Protestants and Catholics. However, a fresh reading reveals numerous unnoticed annotations. The contemporaries faced an invisible enemy, more dangerous than the opposing armies: climate change. Much has been written, rightly so, about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Catherine de Médicis’ supposed Machiavellianism, or the period’s contribution to the invention of religious tolerance or political constitutionalism (Skinner, 1978). He will dedicate his time at Iméra to writing a book on the environmental history of the Wars of Religion, based on the experiences of ordinary Provençals facing a significant climate cooling during a protracted religious conflict.
How did they confront these challenges, interpret them, and attempt to adapt?
The Climate, the True Enemy
Had the contemporaries spoken, they might have painted a surprising picture of the Wars of Religion – quite different from that depicted by specialists. On the ground, what distinguishes the period 1560-1610 is less the soldier than the climate. The real enemy of the predominantly rural population was meteorological. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie demonstrated that the era experienced an extraordinary “push of the Little Ice Age,” a “remarkable offensive swelling of the Alpine glaciers.” Winters were cold, summers cool, and springs rotten, as evidenced by increasingly late grape harvests (September 29 during the Wars of Religion, compared to September 25 in the early 16th century…). In Provence, it rained continuously from October 1561 to February 1562. This severe winter cold almost always led to massive spring floods due to snowmelt. The result was catastrophic famines. Five were particularly memorable: 1562-1563, 1565-1566, 1573-1574, 1586-1587, and 1596-1597. Each time, grain was scarce, prices soared, and people died.
On this weakened population, the opportunistic plague struck and wreaked havoc: the epidemic raged from 1562 to 1567, again in 1573, 1586, and 1596, never disappearing entirely. The ravages of war, the horrors of the climate followed by the plague, resulted in immense population losses. In 1563, France experienced one of its highest mortality peaks: the population decreased by over a million. One in twenty French people lost their lives! Researchers, obsessed with political turmoil or religious controversies, have almost always neglected the environmental and demographic history of the late 16th century. Yet, it offers invaluable insights into the challenges faced by societies confronting climate change. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie wrote: “Imagine today, which is very likely, a press and media devoting most of their coverage to the Tour de France or the Paris-Dakar, almost immediately after a demographic catastrophe causing a minimum of 3 million deaths in our country.”
How to Conduct the Investigation?
The first phase of the work will be to investigate all ego-documents, journals, memoirs, and account books left by witnesses in a wide Provençal area to restore the contemporaries’ experiences. This is a reasonable starting point before considering expanding the investigation to the Mediterranean Europe. The inventory work has been done, and to date, more than 50 account books, chronicles, histories, or journals have been identified and largely photographed. Many are kept at the Méjanes library in Aix-en-Provence, others in Arles, and some in the departmental archives of Bouches-du-Rhône or in Cassis. The time for analysis, writing, and theorizing has come. Among these testimonies, the mentions of environmental history are countless and have never been the subject of any scientific study. To these narrative sources must be added numerous and dispersed archival sources: parish registers, partly online, and municipal archives. Given the vastness of the materials, targeted surveys in specific localities were preferred (such as Salon-de-Provence and Pertuis, where archives are particularly well preserved, as well as Cassis). Finally, a significant secondary bibliography, rich in English. The study will be resolutely interdisciplinary, relying on history, sociology, and anthropology, as well as consulting dendrochronological, palynological, and archaeological research.
Biography
A former student of the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, Jérémie Foa is an Associate Professor with the Habilitation to Direct Research at Aix-Marseille University and a member of the TELEMMe laboratory, honorary member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the Institut Universitaire de France. A specialist in the Wars of Religion and mass violence in the 16th century, he recently published “Tous ceux qui tombent. Visages du massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy,” Paris, La Découverte 2021, where he offers a microhistory of the massacre, a “bottom-up” investigation into both the victims and the ordinary murderers of the summer of 1572, in Paris and in the provinces. He is currently working on a project, in collaboration with Diane Roussel, on the siege of Paris (May-August 1590) which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. His next research project focuses on the environmental history of the Wars of Religion.
