The Unholy Alliance and the Holy Legend of Catherine Ségurane

An essay on siege art

In the Niçard dialect of Provençal, her name is spelled Catarina Ségurana. Now memorialized in bas-relief at the alleged site of the long-gone medieval tower where she supposedly stood in defense of Nice, Catherine Ségurane (French spelling) was reputedly known to her townsfolk as “Malfacia,” or Misshapen, implying ugliness or deformity. Her monuments and images do not portray her as ugly or deformed, however.

Travel writer Sabine Baring-Gould wrote a historiography of the “washerwoman” in A Book of the Riviera, published in 1905. According to Baring-Gould, the very first historical description of Catherine Ségurane appeared in “Discours sur l’ancien monastere des religieuses de Nice” by Honoré Pastorelli in 1608. As the siege of Nice had taken place in 1543, that means some sixty-five years had passed between the chronological event and Pastorelli writing down her legend. The next reference comes from Antonio Fighier in 1654, more than a century after the siege, “who says that the event took place on the Feast of Our Lady in August; that the woman seized the staff of the standard and flung it into the moat.”

As Baring-Gould tells the story, Ségurane “was carrying provisions on the wall to some of the defenders, when she saw that the Turks had put up a scaling ladder, and that a captain was leading the party, and had reached the parapet.”

She rushed at him, beat him on the head with her washing-bat, and thrust down the ladder, which fell with all those on it. Then, hastening to the nearest group of Niçois soldiery, she told them what she had done, and they, electrified by her example, threw open the postern, made a sortie, and drove the Turks back to the shore.

In his 2023 book The Once Upon a Time World: The Dark and Sparkling Story of the French Riviera, historian Jonathan Miles tells the version of the story in which Ségurane “screamed ‘Victory!’” as she snatched the Ottoman flag. “In its most fanciful telling,” Miles says, “the laundress bared her backside to the enemy and scared them off.” It is a tale of defiance, too good be true because it almost certainly is false. During the period that Pastorelli and Fighier wrote their histories, the Savoyards ruled Nice, and Ségurane served their propaganda purposes. After Nice became French, Ségurane served the public purpose of forgetting what a French king had let the Ottomans do to Nice. Whether or not she was real, the sanctified legend of Catarina Ségurana, or Catherine Ségurane, has most likely been a political tool since it first appeared.