News, Politics, and Civil War: Printing the Day of the Barricades (Paris, 12 May 1588)

This paper examines a corpus of printed news pamphlets published in the immediate aftermath of the Day of the Barricades (Paris, 12 May 1588), one of the most decisive episodes of the French Wars of Religion. Rather than treating these texts as transparent accounts of events, it approaches them as interventions in an ongoing civil war, situated at the intersection of information circulation and political discourse. By reconstructing the chronology of publication and analysing the relationships between successive pamphlets, the study shows how news was continuously reshaped through processes of selection, amplification, correction, and polemical reinterpretation. Particular attention is paid to competing narratives concerning responsibility for the outbreak of violence, the opposition between spontaneity and conspiracy, and the construction of legitimacy through print. The paper argues that these publications did more than report the Barricades: they transformed a local urban uprising into a political event endowed with broader meaning, contributing to the formation of public voice and to the symbolic struggle between the Catholic League and the royal government. In this perspective, printed news emerges as a central instrument in the communication and experience of civil war.