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Ok, so I am going through the KP Theme Mastery course and working through my various books, trying to resuscitate them, and it has been really fun. However, I have come across a problem. In one of my books I cover the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) and I am rather unsure what to do with it thematically.
A quick historical context. For roughly the last ten years France had been torn apart by religious/civil wars, between the pro-Roman Catholic Church and the Huguenots or Protestant Church. To end this conflict a wedding was agreed between the Protestant King Henry of Narrave and the Catholic Margaret of Valois. This seemed like the surest method of ending the war, (they had tried before by regular peace treaties but these had not lasted) and so most of the Protestant nobility came to the wedding at Paris. Shortly after the wedding, by the king’s command the soldiers and townspeople attacked the Protestants, and killed between 1 000 to 10 000 in the city of Paris, and up to 100 000 in the rest of France as the news spread.
Now my problem. I thought that a pretty reasonable to look at a theme on Just War or something like that. My focusing question is roughly, “When, if ever, is religious war right?” Here are some of the possible answers.
1. Heretics should be cleansed from the land (a view expressly held by some)
2. This war is entirely wrong and no one should take any part in it.
3. This war is wrong, except as a measure of self defense.The problem is, both of the bottom views, which I suspect most of us accept as true, are views that directly lead to the attempt at a peace treaty, which history shows us leads to the massacre. So by simple poetic justice, it looks like even trying to make peace would be inherently wrong.
Short version of question. How do you resolve the issues of poetic justice and history when they seem to be out of line?
It looks to me as if the Catholic side was still taking part in the war even when they pretended peace. So technically they weren’t fulfilling any of the two right answers. They were the ones who attacked, so they continued to take part in the war. You can write it in such a way that the massacre is the consequence of the Catholics refusing to make peace, rather than the consequence of the Huguenots trying to make peace. I think that would illustrate your point well.
But I’m taking the course myself, so I’m definitely not an expert. @aratrea @daeus
Read to explore worlds, write to create them.
@Timothy-Young welllll… considering that the whole point of storytelling is that it mirrors real life, trying to assign your own interpretation to a historical event for the purpose of making a thematic point can be dangerous. My advice to you would be, don’t try to fit a real event into a pre-existing framework, but study the event until you can figure out the framework it has already.
Reality is more complex than story.
In the case of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, I won’t try and tell you what to do. But the ‘thematic lesson’ of that piece of history seems to be a caution rather than an example. By which I mean, it seems to be a negative example, not a positive one to be followed, or to be looked upon as the poetic justice and reward for wanting peace. It’s been a while since I studied that particular event, but if you’re going to try and fit it into that theme somewhere, my instinct says you should probably use it to seriously challenge the EiLs of peace and change the definition of peace. If the characters were looking for peace with man, this could help them realize that the only peace worth having and that will never fail them is God’s peace.Anyway. There’s my two cents. 😉
@timothy-young Yes, Kate is right. Some real life events are complex and it requires an intricate understanding of their complexities to be able to approach them from the right angle.
I think the essence of your question is “what is poetic justice if good people are so often punished?” The answer is that God is handling all the people in the earth at once and we only get to see small parts of the big picture. Some apparent tragedies are blessings in disguise. Some actions have elements of good and evil in them that require delicate poetic justice. Sometimes God shows especial mercy. It’s really complex. As humans, this is confusing for us, but sometimes we get snapshots of the big picture, and then everything makes sense. Well, not everything, but the idea that there is a universal purpose in it all seems no longer strange, but undeniable.
Now (and this is the answer here), the purpose of fiction is to help us remember those broader picture snippets we’ve seen in our lives. The great blessing of novels is that they show us the big picture. This trains us to think big picture, which is a huge benefit to our lives. It’s not your duty to understand exactly what God was doing in a historical event to the nth degree, but you simply need to express the multifaceted poetic justice the best you can.
So, for instance, ask yourself such things as:
.Might the massacre of the Protestants (in some degree or another) have been due to their own sins?
.Might one of these sins have been seeking an alliance (not a peace, but an alliance through a forbidden marriage) with unbelievers? (Sorry Catholics. Official Catholic doctrine is that Protestants are damned, so it’s all good and fair.)
.Did the French King ever seem to suffer poetic justice for his part in the massacre?
.What good did the massacre bring about?🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢🐢
@timothy-young Like others mentioned, I think that’s a hard FQ to make work for a historical event. The question Daeus put down (“what is poetic justice if good people are so often punished?”) may work as a much better FQ for that story! If I were writing about that event, I would probably focus the story on the problem of evil and what it means to trust God in the face of seeming-defeat like that. Also remember that PJ can be complicated in the case of martyrs. Characters can sometimes get positive poetic justice even in the face of death if they’re obtaining that which they most desire.
Editor-in-Chief Emeritus. Guiding authors at Story Embers.
Thank you to everyone! These were all really helpful and have given me a lot to work through! 🙂
@sleepwalkingmk. That is something that I had not considered! Thanks. I should have thought of that from their angle. It would probably fix the theme, or at least make a start towards it.
@kate-flournoy. I will be keeping the two cents. They will be an expansion to my treasury. 🙂
While I agree that it is dangerous to try and make everything fit into a framework, I thought it made a reasonable question to ask, as it bugged me writing a paper recently.
But yes, it would be safer to look at it as a negative example, then to try and say that the best course of action would have been to just keep fighting, or something equally wrong.
The peace with God vs. peace with man is something I will have to really think through as it holds a lot of potential. Thanks 🙂
Also, what are “EiLs”?
@daeusThanks, you make some really helpful points. And this question “what is poetic justice if good people are so often punished?” is roughly what I want to pursue in the second book, extensively.
About the French King, he does die, (possibly of insanity) within the next year, and the rest of French nation is wracked by wars between three different parties for the next thirty odd years. So yes, I suppose I had zoomed in a little too close on the occasion.
When I talked to my dad about the good from the massacre, and the most obvious that comes to my mind is that it kept England from ever willing trying to return to the Roman Catholic Church. Also, now that I think about it, this could have easily happened as Queen Elizabeth was actually engaged to be married to the Duke of Anjou (younger brother to the French King), so yes there is that. 🙂
@aratrea
I do have a bit of trouble making focusing questions that do not come out into either dichotomies or two extremes basically that with a ‘balanced’ position. I do need to work on that.I suppose there must be a way to work out the poetic justice, even in there. It is worth a try at any rate. 🙂
@Timothy-Young errgg. *comical grimace* I’m sorry, force of habit. 😛 EiL stands for Experiment in Living— a term that now dominates my thematic brainstorming because of KP’s amazing Theme Mastery Course they released recently and that absolutely changed my life and that every serious writer ever should always and forever get and learn from because it’s just amazing okay?
Experiment in Living is basically just a more apt term for a person’s worldview. 😉
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