ABSTRACT
On 30 September 1569, the Huguenot army of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny (1519–1572) was defeated at the Battle of Moncontour in the Poitou region of France. 1 Angry at their disastrous defeat, the men sought an outlet for their rage. The church of the noble Gouffier family with its luxurious funerary sculpture, in the nearby castle-town of Oiron, served this purpose perfectly. 2 In an act of fury, the Huguenots attacked and mutilated the four tomb monuments erected in the church, breaking the noses off the effigies and chopping off the angels’ heads. 3 This episode of sixteenth-century iconoclasm was primarily an attempt to eradicate idol-worship, but it also went hand in hand with the defacement of, and attacks on, traditional secular and ecclesiastical authorities. 4 Nevertheless, the case of Oiron is not unusual in the French Wars of Religion, as many other monuments suffered comparable or worse damage. 5 The sepulchre of Louis XI in Notre Dame de Cléry-Saint-André, for instance, was completely destroyed during the Wars of Religion and had to be rebuilt in the seventeenth century. Both events are typical of religiously motivated violence targeting French funerary sculpture during the Wars of Religion, producing damage which, in most cases, endures until today. 6 In consequence, tomb sculpture receives little attention from historians of the French Reformation other than in its function as an illustration of iconoclastic destruction and mutilation. 7
