Cannibalism at the Siege of Sancerre with Amanda Coate

Today's special episode is by Amanda Coate. Amanda is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Stanford University. She works on the cultural and intellectual histories of early modern Europe, with a geographical focus on the British Isles, France, and Germany. She is particularly interested in animal-human interactions, the history of medicine and related fields of knowledge, and how people have conceptualized human nature. Her dissertation, "Experiences and Meanings of Hunger in Early Modern Europe, c. 1550-1700," examines early modern European cultural understandings of hunger and food scarcity. Today's episode is on cannibalism in the Siege of Sancerre 1573.

Content Warning: This episode contains descriptions of cannibalism, capital punishment, and violence.

It is July 1573. The Fourth War of Religion is raging in France, as tensions between Protestants and Catholics have erupted once again into violence. Sancerre, a town overlooking the Loire River in the present-day department of Cher, has been besieged by French royal forces for several months. Famine has overtaken the town, and suffering abounds. In the midst of all this, pastor Jean de Léry hears of a horrible event: a couple, along with a woman staying with them, has begun to cannibalize the body of their deceased three-year-old daughter. In his account of the siege, Léry recounts that he saw the aftermath of this event and reflects that the sight distressed him very much.[1] He also records the details of the incident, as well as the subsequent investigation and criminal sentencing of those involved. In this episode, I will be discussing Léry’s account of this event and his reflections on the experience of hunger.

Jean de Léry was born in Burgundy in 1534.[2] Little is known about his early life: he was either a cobbler or a member of the minor nobility. He was a Protestant—or Huguenot, as they were called in France—in a time of religious conflict. The Reformation had led to the formation of a branch of Christianity known as Protestantism. There were also several different groups of Protestants with varying beliefs. Léry, for instance, was a Calvinist. At this time, religion and politics were closely intertwined. Proper religion could signify a person’s membership within a community. It was important to many rulers that their subjects observed what they considered to be the proper religion, and many people felt that it was important that their neighbors and community members share the faith that they believed was the right one—otherwise, they could be considered dangerous and corrupting. Religious difference could also be seen as a form of rebellion or dissent. These social and political aspects of early modern religion only intensified the potential for religious conflict.

In France, conflict between Protestants and Catholics led to violence and war. The French Wars of Religion, usually dated from 1562 to 1598, were a series of conflicts in France, punctuated by periods of peace. In August 1570, the Peace of Saint-Germain ended the Third War of Religion. Two years later in August 1572, anti-Protestant violence broke out in Paris in what became known as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. This was a response to growing tensions between Catholics and Protestants, as well as Catholic fears about Protestant influence at the royal court. The marriage between King Charles IX’s sister Marguerite and the Protestant Henri of Navarre seemed to substantiate these fears. On August 22, there was an assassination attempt on Protestant leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who was in Paris following the royal wedding. It has been debated who arranged this assassination attempt. Commonly proposed culprits are the King’s mother Catherine de’ Medici or the powerful Guise family. In any case, after this, a strike was ordered against the Huguenot leadership in Paris. King Charles IX’s exact role in this decision is somewhat unclear, with some historians arguing that he was convinced by his mother and other council members that a preemptive strike was necessary to prevent a Huguenot uprising. On August 24 (St Bartholomew’s Day), many Huguenot leaders, including Coligny, were killed in Paris. Civilians, too, began participating in anti-Protestant violence in Paris, perhaps bolstered by their belief that they were acting in accordance with royal wishes. The violence also spread to the provinces.[3] Then a pastor in La Charité-sur-Loire, Jean de Léry fled the violence and went to Sancerre, one of the bastions of Protestantism in France at the time. Soon after Léry arrived, Sancerre was surrounded by royal forces. Sancerre was besieged from January to August 1573, when the city capitulated due to famine.           

When he experienced famine during the siege of Sancerre, Léry was no stranger to cannibalism, nor to hunger. In 1556, Léry joined the first Protestant mission to the Americas. Led by Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, the expedition party traveled to an island in the Bay of Guanabara, in what is now southeast Brazil. Léry and other Calvinists joined the expedition believing that they would be establishing a mission and refuge for Calvinism.[4] However, following conflict between Villegagnon and the Calvinist members of the expedition, Léry and his compatriots had to leave the island. They escaped to the mainland and lived there for two months, awaiting a ship back to France.

According to his account of his time in Brazil, Léry witnessed the Tupinambá people practicing ritual cannibalism. Although this was ritual cannibalism, not famine-induced cannibalism, these experiences provided Léry with an additional frame of reference with which to understand what had happened in Sancerre. Léry also experienced severe hunger during his travels. On his voyage back to France, he and his traveling companions endured food scarcity when a navigational error resulted in the journey taking longer than expected. Léry described this experience vividly. He reported that he and his fellow travelers first ate scraps from the ship’s store, which they made into a thick, black gruel. Then, when this food source ran out, people ate monkeys and parrots from Brazil that they had intended to bring back to France. They also ate leather from shields and shoes, lantern horns, and candles. Finally, Léry and his fellow travelers hunted and ate the rats and mice onboard the ship. In short, Léry reflected, “what would we not have eaten, or rather devoured, in such extremity?”[5] Léry also described how he and his fellow travelers experimented with different recipes for cooking the ingredients they had on hand. Some people, he recalled, cut and boiled pieces of their leather shields, but this did not turn out to be a good cooking method. More successful was the method designed by some others, who cooked these pieces of shield on coals. In Léry’s opinion, cooking the shield leather in this way made it taste like grilled bacon rind.[6]

Léry and the others who had survived made it back to France in 1558. He recalled that when they landed, some merchants warned them to be careful not to eat too much while they were recovering from their experience of scarcity. The merchants recommended eating soups, goat’s milk, and foods that were good for “enlarging our shrunken intestines.”[7] According to Léry, many of those who did not heed this advice died from eating too much. Léry also mentioned some other health impacts of the hunger he and his fellow travelers experienced for several weeks after they landed in France. They lacked appetite, their bodies were swollen, they had digestive problems, and some had strange cravings. For a while, they even thought they were losing their hearing and eyesight.[8]

Léry did not publish his account of his travels in Brazil until 1578. According to him, this was in part because he lost the manuscript that he had written and could not recover it until 1576.[9] In the meantime, he had witnessed and experienced hunger again in the siege of Sancerre in 1573. This event influenced how he described his experiences on his voyage back to France, as he referenced it a couple of times. For instance, he reflected that although the famine during the siege of Sancerre was severe, it was not as bad as the one he endured at sea. In the city, people at least had access to things like roots and plants to eat.[10]

Léry wrote and published about the siege of Sancerre shortly after it occurred. He wrote the first version of his description of the siege-induced famine in exchange for his safe passage out of the city.[11] An expanded account of the siege was published in 1574. One of the most striking features of Léry’s account is his story about cannibalism. According to Léry, three people were discovered cannibalizing the remains of a deceased three-year-old girl: the parents of the deceased child, along with a woman living with them at the time, who Léry described as “old.” Léry went into great detail about this event, as well as the resulting investigation and sentencing. Of course, it is often difficult to know whether reports of famine-motivated cannibalism were based on true events, or merely rumors and stories designed to entertain and scandalize. Some instances of famine cannibalism likely did occur during times of scarcity in premodern Europe. Léry’s story of cannibalism during the siege of Sancerre contains more detail than many other premodern accounts of famine cannibalism, which lends it somewhat more credence. Léry included specific dates and details about the incident and the investigation into it. He also revealed the names of the individuals involved. In addition, the incident was mentioned by another person who was present in Sancerre during the siege, theologian Matthieu Béroald. His notes about the siege unfortunately survive only in fragments, but they record that on July 23, a couple was executed for having cannibalized their deceased three-year-old daughter. An older woman who had lived with them was also punished.[12] It is entirely possible, then, that this case of cannibalism did occur.

However, of more interest than whether cannibalism actually occurred at the siege of Sancerre is how Léry described and interpreted the incident. Léry’s report of cannibalism is part of the tenth chapter of his account of the siege, which describes the food scarcity that the populace experienced. He recounted that people ate all kinds of things, including horses, donkeys and mules, cats, rodents, dogs, animal hides, pieces of parchment, leather, herbs and roots, and bread made from straw. As he did in his account of the famine during his voyage at sea, he even provided details about how people prepared some of these ingredients, such as animal hides and parchment.[13] For instance, Léry informed his readers that the best way to prepare pieces of parchment was to soak them, scrape them off with a knife, and then boil them until they were soft. When ready, the parchment could be fricasseed or prepared with herbs and spices like a stew.[14]

This list of unusual and undesirable foodstuffs culminated in the story of cannibalism. In many ways, Léry’s narrative of the famine during the siege of Sancerre is typical of early modern European accounts of famines and siege-induced food scarcity. Cannibalism often served as an attention-grabbing anecdote and an illustration of the severity of the deprivation that people experienced. In early modern Europe, there was also a religious framework for interpreting famine-induced cannibalism. Several books of the Bible establish famine cannibalism as a potential outcome of divine punishment, through its relationship with war and famine. For instance, Deuteronomy states that God will punish disobedience and sin by sending enemies to besiege people in their towns. The resulting famine will be so bad that people will be forced to cannibalize their own children. In addition, there are a couple of instances in which famine cannibalism is said to have occurred during sieges. There were also non-Scriptural, historical examples of famine cannibalism to which early modern Europeans often pointed.[15]  

For early modern Europeans like Jean de Léry, Biblical and historical precedents illustrated how siege warfare could cause famine and cannibalism. In his account of the famine at Sancerre, Léry compared the siege of Sancerre to historical and Biblical examples of siege-induced famines, some of which also included incidents of cannibalism.[16] This situated his story of cannibalism at Sancerre within a Scriptural and historical tradition. At a broad level, then, the incident of cannibalism at Sancerre served as an extreme example of the dire conditions to which the city’s populace was subjected during the siege.

However, the incident of cannibalism at Sancerre also seems to have raised some questions in Léry’s mind. The big question for Léry and the authorities in Sancerre seems to have been who exactly the couple and the woman were. What explained their cannibalistic act? After the couple and the woman were arrested, the authorities in the city embarked on an investigation into the incident and the reputations of those involved. Before her execution, the mother of the cannibalized child explained to the authorities what had happened. Her and her husband’s three-year-old daughter died of hunger. The mother went into town, hoping to bury the child when she returned. The couple had an older woman staying with them at this time. While the mother was away, the older woman convinced the father that they should cannibalize the child. The father agreed, and they began preparing the child’s body for consumption. When the mother returned, they convinced her to join them. The three were caught in the middle of their cannibalistic act and taken to prison. According to Léry, they had eaten several parts of the child’s body by this point.[17]

There were some questions as to the exact motivations of these people, at least according to Léry. He reported that the authorities had found out that the couple and the woman had received alms of soup and wine on the same day that they had engaged in cannibalism. Given the state of famine in Sancerre at the time, this was considered sufficient food. Because of this, Léry concluded that they had been motivated not only by the famine, but also by a “disordered appetite.” The implication of this statement was that they wanted to eat human flesh, rather than being forced to do so by hunger. In further illustration of the couple’s propensity to disorder, Léry added that they were reputed to be drunkards and gourmands, as well as cruel to their children. The husband had also apparently killed a man. Moreover, they were not part of what Léry considered proper, Christian society. They had been excommunicated from the Reformed Church for getting married without proof of the death of the wife’s previous husband.[18] By referencing their alleged past behavior and their excommunication, Léry portrayed this couple as not being part of acceptable society even before their act of cannibalism.[19]  

Léry cast aspersions on the older woman who was staying with the couple, as well. According to Léry, the wife confessed to the authorities that the older woman had told the husband that the child’s body should not be wasted, and that the liver would be good for healing her swelling.[20] The woman’s intention to use the deceased child’s liver for medicinal purposes suggested, once again, that her motivation was not solely starvation. To conclude his discussion of this incident of cannibalism in Sancerre, Léry drew a comparison between this woman and the alleged behavior of older Tupinambá women. While he had been in Brazil, Léry had apparently noted that the older women there seemed to desire and enjoy human flesh much more than men, young women, and children did.[21] This information implied that the woman from Sancerre, by virtue of her age and gender, experienced the same appetite. Combined with her intended medicinal use of the child’s liver, she did not seem much like a woman motivated by starvation. In fact, in his book Cannibals, scholar Frank Lestringant has argued that Léry placed the majority of the blame on her as the instigator of cannibalism and framed the incident as a sort of “[gender-]inverted Fall,” in which the older woman acted as Satan, the father as Eve, and the mother as Adam.[22] That is, the older woman tempted the father into the sinful act of cannibalism, after which the father convinced the mother to participate in the sin, as well.          

After this investigation and deliberation, the authorities handed down their sentences, which were carried out on the 23rd of July. The father was burned alive, while the mother was killed and then had her body burned. The body of the older woman, who had died in prison the day after her arrest, was unburied and burned as well.[23] The post-mortem punishment of criminals who had died before their sentences could be enacted was not uncommon in early modern France. According to historian Paul Friedland, post-mortem punishments both demonstrated the inescapability of justice, as well as allowed the community to heal and move on from the crime.[24]

Despite Léry’s efforts to paint the couple and the woman in a bad light, he still seemed concerned that his readers would find their punishments too harsh.[25] Léry defended their punishments by arguing that tolerating this act of cannibalism would have risked encouraging the people of Sancerre to begin killing and eating each other.[26] In Léry’s mind, the danger was high that the thought of cannibalism would begin to occur to others besieged in Sancerre—and it would not just be thoughts of cannibalizing people who were already dead. To further support his opinion, Léry offered the example of a similar story that he had heard, which also resulted in a death sentence for the culprit. During a famine in France in 1438, a woman living near Abbeville found herself with nothing to eat. To remedy this, she kidnapped and killed several children, whose remains she preserved for consumption. Upon discovering this woman’s crimes, the authorities sentenced her to being burned alive.[27] Again, it is difficult to know whether this story was true. But Léry clearly thought it was, using it to argue for the legitimacy of the punishments ordered in Sancerre. Léry ended his discussion of cannibalism at Sancerre, then, seemingly on the side of the authorities who had punished the people involved.

Jean de Léry died in 1613. During his lifetime, his account of the siege of Sancerre was translated into at least one other language (German), and his report of cannibalism at Sancerre circulated among other French authors.[28] Meanwhile, his account of his time in Brazil received multiple editions.[29] His publications remain of interest today, and his report of cannibalism during the siege of Sancerre has attracted the attention of numerous scholars.[30]

Léry’s descriptions of famine on his voyage back from Brazil and during the siege of Sancerre leave us with valuable information about how early modern Europeans experienced and interpreted hunger and food scarcity. Léry’s experiences of hunger seem to have affected him greatly, both emotionally and physically. In his account of his time in Brazil, he noted that he had continued to have problems with his stomach since enduring famine on his voyage and at Sancerre. He explained, “It is true that as far as my stomach goes, it has been rather weak ever since; the experience having been repeated in the interim, about four years ago during the siege and famine of Sancerre, I can say that I will feel the effects all my life.”[31]

Léry also reflected on the emotional impacts of hunger, both in himself and others. He wrote,

I will speak here in passing of something I have not only observed in others, but felt in myself during these two famines, as harsh as any that man has survived. When the bodies are weakened, and nature is failing, the senses are alienated and the wits dispersed; all this makes one ferocious, and engenders a wrath that can truly be called a kind of madness. The common expression we use for saying that someone lacks food is very accurate: we say that such and such a person is mad with hunger.[32]    

According to Léry, his experiences of hunger had made him understand why God said in Deuteronomy that, as punishment for sin, he would send a famine during which the nicest and gentlest of people would desire to eat their neighbors and family members. Léry even recalled that

during our famine on the sea we were so despondent and irritable that although we were restrained by the fear of God, we could scarcely speak to each other without getting angry, and, what was worse (may God pardon us), glancing at each other sideways, harboring evil thoughts regarding that barbarous act.[33]

Ultimately, it was perhaps this aspect of hunger that made Léry argue that the couple and the woman who engaged in cannibalism during the siege of Sancerre deserved to be punished so harshly. In Léry’s view, the madness that hunger inspired was dangerous.[34] It demanded a response, lest society descend into chaos.        

[1] Jean de Léry. Histoire memorable de la ville de Sancerre ([Genève], 1574), 147, Bibliothèque de Genève, https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-6290. A critical edition of Histoire memorable is provided by Géralde Nakam, Au lendemain de la Saint-Barthélemy: Guerre civile et famine (Éditions Anthropos, [1975]).

[2] For Léry’s biography, see Janet Whatley, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Whatley (University of California Press, 1992), xvi-xviii, xxi; Nakam, Au lendemain de la Saint-Barthélemy, 11-40; Adam Asher Duker, “The Protestant Israelites of Sancerre: Jean de Léry and the Confessional Demarcation of Cannibalism,” Journal of Early Modern History 18, no. 3 (2014): 256, 264-265.

[3] On the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacres, see Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 82-96; R. J. Knecht, The French Wars of Religion 1559-1598, 3rd ed. (Longman, 2010), 43-52; Barbara B. Diefendorf, The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009), 19-24.

[4] Whatley, “Translator’s Introduction,” xx.

[5] Léry, History of a Voyage, trans. Whatley, 211.

[6] Léry, 209.

[7] Léry, 215.

[8] Léry, 215-218.

[9] Léry, xlv-xlvi.

[10] Léry, 211.

[11] Duker, “Protestant Israelites,” 274. The manuscript of the first version is transcribed in Bruna Conconi, Le prove del testimone: Scrivere di storia, fare letteratura nella seconda metà del Cinquecento: l’Histoire memorable di Jean de Léry (Pàtron Editore, 2000), Appendice I, 171-188.

[12] Béroald’s notes survive in a manuscript housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and are transcribed in Conconi, Le prove del testimone, Appendice II, 189-201.

[13] Léry, Histoire memorable, 135-138.

[14] Léry, 138.

[15] Deuteronomy 28:47-57; Lamentations 4:10; 2 Kings 6:26-32; Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War, trans. Martin Hammond (Oxford University Press, 2017), 321-322.

[16] Léry, Histoire memorable, 130, 145-146. For discussion of these comparisons, see Duker, “Protestant Israelites.”          

[17] Léry, 147-148.

[18] Léry, 148-151.

[19] See Janet Whatley, “Food and the Limits of Civility: The Testimony of Jean de Léry,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 15, no. 4 (1984): 397-398.

[20] Léry, Histoire memorable, 148.

[21] Léry, 153.

[22] Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne, trans. Rosemary Morris (University of California Press, 1997). 75.

[23] Léry, Histoire memorable, 150-151.

[24] Paul Friedland, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France (Oxford University Press, 2012), 109-111; Paul Friedland, “Beyond Deterrence: Cadavers, Effigies, Animals and the Logic of Executions in Premodern France,” Historical Reflections 29, no. 2 (2003): 307-309.

[25] See also Whatley, “Food and the Limits of Civility.”

[26] Léry, Histoire memorable, 151.

[27] Léry, 152-153.

[28] Johann von Lery, Die Gedechtnusswirdige History der Statt Sancerre ([Bern], 1575), https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-50557; Christophe de Bordeaux, Discours lamentable et pitoyable sur la calamite, cherte et necessite du temps present (Rouen, 1586), sig. B4v-Cr, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k74710m/f6.item.

[29] Whatley, “Translator’s Introduction,” xxxviii.

[30] See, e.g., Whatley, “Food and the Limits of Civility”; Lestringant, Cannibals, 74-80; Véronique Lacarde, “Jean de Léry et le siège de Sancerre,” in Histoire d’un voyage en la terre du Brésil: journées d’étude (10 et 11 décembre 1999), ed. F. Argod-Dutard (Centre Montaigne, 2000); Robert Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food among the Early Moderns (University of Chicago Press, 2006), 243-274; Duker, “Protestant Israelites”; Hope Glidden, “Communities under Siege: Léry, Famine, and the Cannibal Within,” in Memory and Community in Sixteenth-Century France, ed. David P. LaGuardia and Cathy Yandell (Ashgate, 2015).   

[31] Léry, History of a Voyage, trans. Whatley, 218.

[32] Léry, 212.

[33] Léry, 212-213.

[34] On the early modern idea that hunger is “dangerous,” see Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef; Eivind Engrebetsen, “The Catholic Counter-Reformation and the idea of hunger. A close reading of two appeals for alms from the Paris area in the year 1662,” Social History 38, no. 4 (2013): 487.