‘Diables incarnez, Machiavelistes, heretiques’: The Villains of Pierre Matthieu’s La Guisiade Reconsidered

This article proposes a new reading of Pierre Matthieu’s La Guisiade (1589), a polemical tragedy written at the height of France’s Wars of Religion (1562–98). La Guisiade constitutes an incandescent response to the assassination on 23 December 1588 of the Duc de Guise, the charismatic leader of the uncompromising ultra-Catholic faction (the Ligue) on the verge of toppling France’s much-maligned monarch, Henri III. Matthieu was a militant ligueur when he composed La Guisiade, seeking to vilify those he deemed responsible for Guise’s murder: the king, his various mignons, and his malevolent counsellors. This article will show how the language of villainy that pervades La Guisiade has much in common — and more so than previously assumed — with the inflammatory pamphlets (libelles) circulated by the Ligue in the late 1580s and early 1590s. Matthieu’s hybrid tragedy combines the vitriolic rhetoric of a pamphleteer with a humanist’s classicizing sensibility. Viewed as such, it becomes necessary to question the scholarly orthodoxy that Matthieu’s villains are predominantly ‘Machiavellian’. Instead, Machiavelli is but one symbol of ligueur hatred alongside other deeply reviled figures, including the Huguenot, the Turk, the politique, and the sorcerer, whose villainy is conceptualized as mutually reinforcing.