Persecution texts
An “oral or written testament that mentions an act of violence that is directly or indirectly collective” invites examination as a possible persecution text.[11] But central to the definition of a persecution text is that its author or authors think that they are relating true stories of genuine crimes met with righteous vengeance.
In other words, the authors are deluded, but they are not liars, because they believe that the victims are guilty.[12] As Girard explains, scapegoating is necessarily unconsciously motivated.[13]Girard further notes that persecution typically arises in communities where members sense “an extreme loss of social order evidenced by the disappearance of the rules and ‘differences’ that define cultural divisions.”[14] [15] Rather than search for the actual cause of the distressing situation, however, the community targets a scapegoat to blame, a marginal person who straddles insider and outsider status, who is both included and excluded from the community in some sense. Moreover, the scapegoat is accused of “a particular category of crimes.”11 These may be “violent crimes which choose as object those people whom it is most criminal to attack: a king, a father, the symbol of supreme authority, and in biblical and modern societies the weakest and most defenseless, especially young children.”[16] Or, alternatively, and most pertinent for this essay, the crimes may be sexual, most often those which “transgress the taboos that are considered the strictest in the society in question.”[17] Such crimes, writes Girard, level social distinctions; they “attack the very foundation of cultural order, the family and the hierarchical differences without which there would be no social order.” To restore distinction, that is, to restore order, persecutors eject the scapegoat from their midst. To consider the Affaire de la Tour de Nesle from this perspective, I begin by noting that the final years of Philip IV’s reign were fraught with political turmoil resulting from the king’s persistent consolidation of power at the expense of the papacy and the grands seigneurs of the realm, along with anger at taxes that the king collected to finance his operations.[19] Philip IV had been skillful in expanding the kingdom, using reversion clauses in certain acts to create apanages and strategically marrying his three sons.[20] But he was often hampered in his attempts to manage gains by networks that formed and functioned quite independently of any of the grands seigneurs who supported him.[21] Despite the cooperation and the support of Otto IV Count of Burgundy and, after Otto’s death, his wife Mahaut ofArtois, much of the nobility of the Franche-Comte rejected Philip IV’s attempts to establish his sovereignty, and, in Flanders, during the last years of his reign the king was unable to gather support among Flemish cities, which were constantly at war with each other and their rulers.[22] But these problems were only preludes to the real crisis of the final year of his reign, when the king was blindsided by a rebellion of the grands seigneurs. This rebellion menaced the hierarchy that made the king the undisputed head of his kingdom. As for scapegoating, scholarship shows royal women to have been particularly susceptible to the practice. Medieval and early modern queens and princesses occupied a complicated in-between position: they belonged to the royal Affaire de la Tour de Nesle in Contemporary Chronicles | 13 family but not exactly;[23] “as highly visible and powerful ‘foreigners,’ ” Janos M. Marguerite, Jeanne, and Blanche were therefore extremely vulnerable. As princesses, they resided both inside and outside of the royal aura of their husbands, as daughters-in-law they were both members of and outsiders to the royal family, and, as Burgundians, they were part of and yet separate from the French kingdom. As incarnations of French alliances with the duchy and county of Burgundy, they became easy scapegoats. As we will see, the family of Jeanne and Blanche came to their aid but succeeded only in having Jeanne restored. Marguerite’s family could not offer timely defense, because the family patriarch, Marguerite’s brother Hugh V Duke of Burgundy, was dying at the time of his sister’s arrest.[27] By the time Eudes, the next in line, assumed the office at his brother’s death in early May 1315, it was too late; Marguerite was already dead. When the claim to the throne of Marguerite’s daughter, Jeanne, was denied in 1316, Eudes did in fact lead the Burgundians against the new king Philip V but eventually settled with him.[28]