First President Duranti repaired unattended to the sittings at the Hôtel de Ville, while Toulouse was torn asunder between loyalty to the King and the pretensions of the Leaguers. For three successive days, he sought to appease passions by his sheer presence and eloquence. Shortly thereafter, an armed populace would drag him from the convent wherein he was confined and slaughter him before its charred gates.
The Catholic League had spread throughout the provinces of the realm amidst the convulsions of the late sixteenth century. In Toulouse, Jacques Daffis, Advocate General to the Parlement and brother-in-law to Duranti, championed royal authority beside him. According to Champagnac, the magistrates had initially lent their countenance to the League so long as they believed it devoted to the protection of the Crown; they turned away once they perceived that the chieftains of the House of Guise were pursuing their own aggrandizement. This interpretation belongs to an author partial to the monarchy, whose assessments of political motives must remain strictly attributed.
The Duke of Montmorency had written to the townsmen, exhorting them to obedience. The municipal leaders responded by convening the common council and proposing to strip Duranti of all administrative authority. President Bertrand endeavored to silence those clamoring for this exclusion, while the advocate Grégoire raised his voice against what he denounced as the oppression of free suffrage. The Leaguers, holding the majority, entrusted the custody of the city to the Council of Eighteen, which swiftly arrogated supreme power to itself. A municipal gathering intended for the notables was overrun by six hundred additional men, most of them armed, who demanded a voice in the deliberations. The ensuing tumult compelled the capitouls to adjourn the session without reaching a resolution.
Notwithstanding the peril described in the chronicle, Duranti continued to repair to the Hôtel de Ville without a guard. He attended the assemblies for three consecutive days, striving to pacify his adversaries. On the third day, a fierce debate arose concerning the allegiance owed to the King and the exile or imprisonment of the sovereign’s loyal servants. The advocate Tournier maintained that the oath of fealty was dissolved; Chapelier demanded the removal of the King’s portrait hanging in the hall. Daffis protested vigorously against these motions, asserting the royal prerogative. Duranti at last prevailed upon the assembly to refer the matter to the Parlement. Daffis, despairing of bringing the multitude to reason, withdrew to his country estate, two leagues distant from Toulouse.
On January 29, 1589, a crowd assembled before Duranti’s residence, pressing him with entreaties and menaces to convene the Parlement in extraordinary session. Opinions were divided, and Duranti dissolved the assembly before any measure was determined. Armed men awaited the outcome without; Champagnac asserts that several among them, emissaries of the principal Leaguers, had resolved to assassinate the magistrate. As he departed, they struck his carriage with swords and halberds, several blades piercing the wooden panels. Duranti had crouched low in the interior and escaped untouched. His coachman laid his whip to the horses; near the magistrate’s dwelling, the conveyance violently struck the coping of a well and overturned.
Duranti took sanctuary in the Hôtel de Ville. The King’s adherents fled Toulouse or went into hiding; shops shuttered, heavy chains were drawn across the streets, and barricades were raised.
On February 1, the Parlement decreed the transfer of the First President to the Convent of the Jacobins. Duranti proceeded thither accompanied by the Bishops of Comminges and Castres, two capitouls, and an armed escort. A guard was posted before the gate with strict injunctions to admit no one, not even Duranti’s only daughter. Only his wife, Rose de Caulet, and two domestic servants were permitted to share his confinement, on the express condition that they should neither leave the precincts nor communicate with any living soul. His residence and papers were rigorously searched, without discovering, according to the text, a single item that could be laid to his charge.
Champagnac asserts that the faction then sought to remove Duranti to the Great Tower of Saint-Jean, in the hope that the mob would fall upon him as he passed through the marketplace. The President’s infirmity prevented his removal. On February 2, letters dispatched by Daffis to Bordeaux were intercepted; in them, he appealed for reinforcements. He was seized at his country house and conveyed to the Conciergerie to undergo interrogation. Daffis replied that in writing he had done no more than discharge the duties of his office. The letters indicated that Duranti was not yet dead. The chronicler relates that the ringleaders, dreading lest he should escape and confound their designs, determined forthwith to put the President to death; yet he adduces no independent document to corroborate this secret decree.
On February 10, 1589, towards four o’clock in the afternoon, men whom the chronicle brands as assassins, followed by a multitude of near two thousand souls, presented themselves before the Jacobins. According to the narrative, a rumor had persuaded the populace that Duranti intended to deliver Toulouse into the hands of the Protestants. The mob attempted to batter down the convent gate; failing in this, they set it on fire. The guards offered no resistance. Chapelier was the first to enter the President’s presence, haling him toward the burning portal.
Duranti fell upon his knees and took leave of Rose, displaying, according to the chronicler, steadfast fortitude and resignation to the Divine Will. Brought before the multitude, he asked what crime could have earned him so bitter a hatred. His address and serene demeanor gave a momentary pause to the tumult. Thereupon, a man armed with a musket took aim and shot him through the breast. Duranti raised his hands toward heaven and, as Champagnac relates, prayed for his murderers. The rabble then threw themselves upon his body, heaping blows upon it; they dragged him by the heels to the Place Saint-Georges and bound his corpse to the pillory for the night, behind an effigy of King Henry III. The chronicler further records indignities inflicted upon the remains, which we leave here undescribed.
At that same hour, the crowd proceeded to the Conciergerie, dragged Daffis forth, and butchered him. His body was left lying in the public square. Duranti’s mansion was sacked and his library, assembled at lavish expense, utterly destroyed. The portrait of the King, torn down from the hall of the Hôtel de Ville, was bound with a rope and dragged through the mire amidst savage outcries. These acts were not aimed solely at two magistrates; they struck at the material emblems of royal authority, which the Leaguers contested within the city’s institutions.
On the morrow, a capitoul caused Duranti’s body to be wrapped in a winding-sheet alongside the royal effigy, and conveyed without solemnity to the Great Convent of the Cordeliers. The body of Daffis was recovered the same day and buried in the Cordeliers’ church of Saint-Antoine. The chronicle makes no mention of any criminal inquest instituted against the ringleaders of the assault, nor whether any judicial sentences were ever pronounced.
The slaughter of the two magistrates prompted the King to translate the Parlement to Carcassonne and to remove the other courts of Toulouse to neighboring towns. Champagnac portrays the victims as upright citizens and devout Catholics, initially adherents of the League, but subsequently foes to those who, in his estimation, had perverted the association from its pious ends. Such is the thesis of his narrative; the facts he adduces show above all how municipal assemblies, intercepted correspondence, whispers of treason, and the trappings of royal sovereignty were engulfed in a common convulsion. In Toulouse, the authority of magistrate and law succumbed to the violence of the street, and the populace asserted, for a season, its own summary justice.