All Who Fall

The conference and debate was held on May 17th, 2022, from 18:30 to 20:30 (Paris time), at MSF (14-34 avenue Jean Jaurès, 75019 Paris).

For the Crash to invite a historian specializing in the French Religious Wars of the 16th century to speak about his book, it had to be an exceptionally special and original work. We were therefore very pleased to welcome Jérémie Foa, lecturer in modern history at Aix-Marseille Université and currently visiting scholar at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, to speak about his book Tous ceux qui tombent. Visages du massacre de la Saint-BarthélemyAll Who Fall: Faces of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre published in 2021 by La Découverte.

All Who Fall is a book about a massacre. Telling the stories of the Seine quaysides and the alleyways of Toulouse and Rouen in 1572, it offers a fresh perspective of an often-recounted episode in French history: the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre as narrated from the ground, from the perspective of the victims and the persecutors. Jérémie Foa takes us into the houses of the slaughtered and adds substance to the motives of the perpetrators, to help us understand the conditions that enabled the killings.

These elements, which can be linked to the historiography of more contemporary massacres such as those of European Jews during World War II, and of Bosnians and Rwandan Tutsis during the 1990s, make this book instructive for all practitioners and observers of humanitarian action. The discussion also complemented the work Violences extrêmes. Enquêter, secourir, juger. République démocratique du Congo, Rwanda, Syrie, published by la Maison des sciences de l’homme and presented at a previous conference last November.