Word: paumier
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...helplessness in the face of roving brigands compelled peasant and townsman alike to form "leagues" to advance their common purposes. Armorers did a brisk business in swords, helmets and arquebuses, forerunners of the musket. In February 1579 the drapers of Romans paraded with weapons and elected a burly colleague, Paumier, as their festival chief. He also became the factional leader of angry craftsmen, tradesmen and plowmen. Soon there were two governments in Romans: Paumier and his followers had seized control of the city gates, a vital link to leaguers in the countryside. By the latter part of 1579, butchers...
Romans' royal magistrate, Antoine Guerin, bided his time in quiet rage. As Carnival began in 1580, the festivities were supercharged with hatred between competing camps of revelers. The parades of these mock "kingdoms" had sinister overtones. Masquers of Paumier's Sheep Kingdom carried rakes, brooms and flails, wore shrouds and grimly offered "Christian flesh" for sale. Guerin's ostentatious Partridge Kingdom mocked the poorer townsmen with price lists offering luxuries for a pittance. More immediately threatening was the Partridge army-a real one - whose men carried new arquebuses and long Swiss pikes. The troops went into action...
Judge Guerin's journal, a self-serving document, claims that the rebels were plotting their own attack on the notables. The historian's only alternative source, a seemingly unbiased royal notary, makes it clear that Paumier was cold-bloodedly murdered. Judicial murder followed, as the surviving rebels were rounded up, tried, and in many cases executed. The rural leaguers were crushed several months later after joining with Huguenot forces. Royal troops killed more than 1,000 at Moirans alone - "a bloodbath," the author observes, "at least by the relatively humane standards of the time, as compared...
...Paumier never becomes more than an enigmatic figure, portrayed only polemically by his foe, and inadequately by the dutiful notary. Beneath the bearskin robe he liked to wear, the rebel leader remains a shadowy image, an unmeasured mix of guile, principle and erratic power. But Guerin's journal reveals the cunning, self-righteous man who rose to the nobility on the corpse of Paumier. "In the worst possible taste," notes Le Roy Ladurie, the unabashed judge chose as his coat of arms an uprooted apple tree - in French, a pommier...
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