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From Martyr to Mourner: the Politics of the Un-Extraordinary

IN THE 1630s AND40s, PARIStheatre audiences witnessed the precipitous rise of a sub-genre in the form of a group of plays dealing with the death of a saint. There are some obvious precedents for these plays. Both provincial mysteries and Jesuit college drama had commonly staged the lives and deaths of saints, but both modes of drama were quite removed from the increasingly professional Paris stage, and so these newly popular plays make a somewhat startling appearance in an arena that had long been wary of sacred drama. Their speedy production seems to speak to a growing popularity for the form, which even received political support in the form of the approval of Cardinal Richelieu.1 This article will not venture an account of the specificities of the genre. Instead, I will look briefly at only two of the plays: one professional and Parisian, La Serre's Thomas Morus (published 1642), and one amateur play from Lorraine, Madame de Saint-Balmon's Jumeaux martyrs (published in Paris, 1650). These texts are paired with images from the period, and I read both forms of representation in the context of a changing understanding of what it might mean to be a martyr, arguing that such a change might be of especial interest in this period of a new drive towards state centralisation.2 That move towards absolutism reconfigures the relation between the centre of power and its periphery, as well as between the spectacular and the ordinary; both relations can be traced in the works under discussion here. The plays and paintings discussed in this article focus on what might be termed the politics of the un-extraordinary, on the translation of the spectacular into the sphere of the quotidian. In recent years, there has been a tendency to think of political theatre in Early-Modem Europe as a theatre of spectacle and pomp. In such work, the argument goes, political authority in the seventeenth century is dependent upon visibility and exemplified in theatrical display. In the texts and images to be discussed here, one can trace something that resists this model; in these works, the muting of spectacle proves to be equally useful to the project of the state.3 It is all too easy to imagine that the popularity of these dramas stems from the inherent theatricality of the source material. From the earliest accounts, the significance of the martyr's death is predicated upon its visibility. The word martyr comes from the Greek martus, or witness, for the act of the martyr bears witness to the Christian faith. The value of such an act depends then upon other witnesses, who will understand the significance of that death within a community. Thus, in the heated narratives of medieval martyrologies, the sight of such deaths inevitably