Word: journal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...