The author considers the powerful religious dimension of French royal power even in the seventeenth century, the shift from reluctant toleration of a Protestant minority to increasing aversion, conflicts over the independence of the Catholic church and the power of the pope over secular rulers, and a wealth of other interconnected topics.
The author considers the powerful religious dimension of French royal power even in the seventeenth century, the shift from reluctant toleration of a Protestant minority to increasing aversion, conflicts over the independence of the Catholic church and the power of the pope over secular rulers, and a wealth of other interconnected topics.
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Overview
The author considers the powerful religious dimension of French royal power even in the seventeenth century, the shift from reluctant toleration of a Protestant minority to increasing aversion, conflicts over the independence of the Catholic church and the power of the pope over secular rulers, and a wealth of other interconnected topics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300210460 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/25/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 656 KB |
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The Politics of Religion in Early Modern France
By JOSEPH BERGIN
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Joseph BerginAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21046-0
CHAPTER 1
The Religion of King and Kingdom
In early 1560, the French monarchy suddenly entered a long period of crisis and diminished authority, of which an early casualty was the policy of repressing heresy that had been pursued with increasing intensity during the previous twenty years. It now offered an amnesty to its Protestants, thereby provisionally decriminalising heresy. Yet at that juncture – and indeed for many years thereafter – few on either side of the widening religious divide could imagine that the pre-1560 principle of 'one faith, one king, one law' would not be reinstated. In acting as it did, the monarchy moved into unfamiliar territory, for which there was no road map, nor a ready-made script for action. The precedents – not always successful – for resolving religious conflict by peaceful means elsewhere, especially in the neighbouring empire and Switzerland, were not promising, as France's elites well knew; they even suggested that face-to-face discussion tended to further harden existing convictions among the rival confessions.
Above all, the experiences of these microscopic neighbouring territories simply did not 'fit' the unified political geography of western Europe's largest monarchy. Still seeing itself as God's elect-nation, France had no prior experience of the inter-confessional colloquies of its eastern neighbours, so that when holding discussions with its own Protestants was finally proposed in 1560–61, conservatives fiercely – and not surprisingly – objected to it as tantamount to admitting that heretics were equals with something potentially acceptable to say. Convening an Estates-General, an assembly of notables, or a national council of the gallican church now seemed the best – and perhaps the only – way to defuse the increasingly dangerous hostilities between Catholics and Protestants. Not for the last time in modern history, the solution of simply suspending repression was quickly overtaken by events: that move soon created a void that encouraged unilateral action by rival groups across France ready to mete out their own kind of summary justice, now that the 'normal' forms of justice in relation to religious dissent had been discontinued. To understand how France came to experience religious upheaval almost a full generation after its neighbours, we need to take a brief backward look at the major developments since the 1520s and 1530s.
I
As is well known, the impact of the Lutheran reformation on France had been relatively small, especially when it is remembered that the term 'Lutheran' was attached to many of those seeking religious reform of an Erasmian-humanist kind within the existing church. Where the Sorbonne and the parlements, especially those of Paris or Toulouse, saw heretics to be prosecuted and punished, others saw eager, non-sectarian evangelicals who presented no real danger. This was the view of François I and many of the political and even ecclesiastical elite, until a royal change of mind occurred in the mid-1530s. Despite the beginnings of repression that soon followed, the king remained convinced that scholars and nobles were, for possibly different reasons, largely immune to heresy, which he saw as appealing only to the lower 'mechanical sorts' within society; this view was broadly shared by Henri II, at least in respect of the nobility. Such a persistent misconception – alongside several others – proved to be a major blind spot when the crown encountered serious religious dissent in the 1540s and 1550s.
France's unreadiness in the face of the challenges posed by sixteenth-century religious dissidence may seem surprising at first, especially when it is realised how many medieval 'heresies' had either originated or gained adherents there. Both intellectually and organisationally, the 'persecuting society', which was arguably the outcome of these earlier experiences, owed a great deal to French responses to them; the Inquisition, after all, first saw the light of day during the Albigensian crisis in southern France. But several centuries later, historical memory – or rather, forgetting – had virtually blanked out such precedents and given way, as we have already seen, to the myth of a nation of indefectible Catholic believers which had always triumphed over 'heresy'. The Inquisition still notionally existed, especially in southern France, though only in its older episcopal-diocesan form. In reality, the inquisitors' powers had shrunk so considerably over time that the office seemed largely redundant by 1520. France had not been affected by Europe's late-medieval religious wars that preceded its own wars of religion, unless we include Joan of Arc's crusade to rid France of English occupation as such a war. When heresy did erupt again on a large scale in the 1550s and 1560s, the first parallels drawn by Catholics were between France's Protestants and the Albigensians, with the intention of shaming the crown into dealing with them as resolutely as St Louis had done in his time; but like so many historical comparisons of its type, it failed adequately to measure the novelty of the present situation.
France's sense of enjoying God's special protection against the contamination of heresy did not preclude taking positive action of several kinds that, for a few decades at least, had seemed more than enough to sustain the true religion. Thus the Paris theology faculty vigorously condemned Luther's teachings as early as 1521, and the parlements (those of Paris and Toulouse, at least) showed their vigilance by arresting and executing individual dissidents either side of 1530. In addition, the rash of provincial church councils held in 1528 (duly followed by diocesan synods) and the continuing efforts by the Paris theology faculty, which drew up a set of twenty-six articles of faith (1543) and Europe's first index of prohibited books (1544), signalled that firm action was being taken well before the Council of Trent began its deliberations in 1545. The French church's leaders, its bishops, scarcely saw things any differently, contenting themselves with legislating in a way that often resembled the contemporary campaigns by the crown to codify the customary laws and secular legislation. It would fall to later generations of church leaders to discover – or rediscover – the need for a much wider range of pastoral-administrative activities to sustain and reinvigorate Catholicism. Meanwhile, the measures just cited enabled both church and monarchy to believe that France, having done what was required of her, had no urgent need of a general council, especially one dominated by the Pope or the emperor, to heal the wider church's ills. Gallican solutions seemed more than adequate in dealing with gallican problems. When the affair of the Placards (1534) made François I realise the dangers of religious dissent, the monarchy seemed determined to prosecute those attacking the true religion. A series of royal decrees from 1539 to 1559 defined and amplified the measures to be taken for this purpose and the penalties for infringing them. Royal law courts rather than ecclesiastical courts were entrusted with enforcing these increasingly draconian provisions; that approach was built upon perceptions of the seditious dimensions of heresy – 'the public scandal, popular commotion, sedition or other crimes which involve public offence', as the Edict of Châteaubriant put it in 1551.
France may have been the last major country of northern Europe officially to move the crime of heresy to secular courts, but it caused relatively little surprise when it did so. This meant that in its approach to dealing with religious dissent France differed significantly from Spain, Portugal and Italy, whose relatively recent Inquisitions were much better equipped to deal with religious dissent as a religious rather than a political issue. Precisely because they were ecclesiastical courts enjoying powerful royal support, these Inquisitions could probe people's consciences and offer the prospect of pardon and 'grace' to the repentant. By the time Pope Julius III formally denied lay magistrates in Italy the right to deal with cases of heresy, in 1551, France had already moved in a diametrically opposite direction, effectively 'laicising' the handling of such cases. Already the idea of a Spanish-style Suprema with jurisdiction over everyone, high and low, secular and clerical, was quite unacceptable in France by the 1550s and it would remain so, even when the Catholic League was in the ascendant in the late 1580s. When responsibility for heresy cases was indeed returned to the church courts in 1560, it did not signify that France was about to imitate its neighbours, but that the monarchy was giving up, for the time being at least, on pursuing heretics; the shift was emphatically neither a reinforcement nor a vindication of ecclesiastical jurisdiction within France.
The successive legislative measures of the 1550s both extended and sharpened the earlier provisions against heresy, but the growing severity of the repressive legislation seems to have been illusory. The machinery employed to implement it became gradually less effective – a salutary reminder to historians not to take even the most punitive royal declarations at face value. The figures for the actual punishment of heresy by the French royal courts seem incontrovertible, even when allowing for the limitations of the archival record. Alongside the 450 individuals executed for heresy before 1560, there were at least two or three times as many who were condemned to perform the less feared amende honorable – a shaming ritual of the abjuration of heresy – after which they were mostly either sent to the galleys or banished from their place of residence for a number of years. Proportionately low by (demographic) comparison with other European countries, what these figures suggest is that during the 1550s the agents of repression (which had briefly included the Paris parlement's notorious 'burning chamber') proved increasingly incapable of deterring growing numbers of French people from adopting the new 'Genevan' faith or preventing large quantities of banned books from flooding into France from Geneva and elsewhere.
There are many possible reasons for this mismatch of 'challenge and response'. Some magistrates (and their socio-professional milieu) were either 'adepts' of the new creed, or were growing disenchanted with the policy of repression itself. Whether the gallican-inspired exclusion of the church courts and clergy from the judicial riposte to Calvinism weakened the church's response to heresy before 1560 is harder to say, if only because so many of the 'heretics' were themselves members of the clergy who took the lead in preaching the new gospel. However, this exclusion may have made it easier, from the 1560s onwards, for the more active elements of the Catholic clergy to rejoin battle with their Calvinist adversaries on different terms of engagement. By then they had learned from their Calvinist opponents to use preaching and pamphleteering rather than the law courts and repression as their main weapons of combat, proving themselves far more effective than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. It is hard to imagine the intensity of the confessional conflicts after 1560, or the bloodbath of the St Bartholomew's Day and other massacres, without such mobilisation through preaching.
As the 1550s advanced, the numbers of those attending Calvinist services and joining the new assemblies grew exponentially. For the first time, organised churches began to take shape in more or less clandestine fashion across the country, a significant change from the largely invertebrate Lutheran-evangelical 'circles' of the 1520s and 1530s. They gained far greater organisational cohesion from the fact that they were now overwhelmingly Genevan-Calvinist in inspiration. Where religious dissent took on such dimensions, 'sedition' on a correspondingly growing scale was likely, but how could it be contained? The crown showed little sign of changing its repressive methods, with Henri II threatening in 1559 that rivers of 'Lutheran' blood would run in France as soon as he had disengaged from his foreign entanglements. But the promised blow never fell. His sudden death from wounds suffered during a tournament to celebrate the return of peace in mid-1559, only weeks after he had issued the most draconian of all French edicts (that of Écouen) against heresy, triggered a major political crisis, with unforeseeable implications for the campaign against religious heterodoxy. That campaign was not effectively abandoned until early 1560, when the distinction between heresy and sedition – the religious and the political – was reinstated. As we have seen, dealing with heresy was now left to the church courts, but in reality it signalled that the machinery of repression had come to a standstill.
II
It has often been pointed out that regimes are at their most vulnerable when, having long resisted calls for reform or change, they finally embark on it. The experience of France during the years (1559–62) immediately preceding the first of the wars of religion is a perfect example of this phenomenon. A torrent of events followed each other so breathlessly that it is unlikely that anyone could control the country's political and religious trajectory during these pivotal years which set the stage for so many later developments. Battered by the problems arising from military defeat, financial default and two royal successions in as many years (1559–60), the monarchy was also damaged by the manifest failure of its previous 'thorough' policy of religious repression. By the early 1560s, that policy only seemed to have the opposite of the desired effect, as exemplified by the ever-growing attraction of the new churches to high-ranking nobles and town-dwellers. Political struggles for control of the monarchy after Henri II's death pitted the leading aristocratic factions against each other, but such 'normal' political competition was now overlaid and complicated by the religious choices made by high-ranking individuals and families, who were sometimes imitated by their clients and 'friends' far beyond the court. Yet the situation in these years (1559–63) was far too fluid for religious allegiances to be written in stone; some 'conversions' were short-lived because, uncertain of what joining the new churches really meant, many people, both high and low, hesitated or soon reverted to the old church. As Blaise de Monluc aptly wrote, 'there was no son of a good mother who was not tempted to taste the new fruit'. Even the much-criticised ultra-Catholic Guises were far less 'ultra' at this point than they would subsequently become. However, what made them stand out, then and later, was that they never showed any signs either of abandoning the old church or of fragmenting into different confessional branches like their main aristocratic rivals.
Changing tack on how to deal with questions of religion after years of repression and in a context of severely diminished authority inevitably spelt serious risks for the crown. The measures taken to 'reform' the established church in previous decades now seemed woefully inadequate, while the long-suspended Council of Trent seemed to promise little better. Not surprisingly, then, when the Estates-General met at Orleans and Poissy in December 1560 and June 1561 respectively, the deputies – many of whom were Protestants – brought with them some quite radical ideas for an overhaul of the existing church. Had merely the proposals made there for selling off its property and creating a quasi-salaried clergy been adopted, they would have led to structural and financial changes not to be witnessed anywhere in Catholic Europe until the Revolution of 1789. But these and many other suggestions were much too newfangled for the majority of the deputies, while the senior clergy at the Estates-General and at court effectively thwarted them by offering to help with paying off the crown's debt-mountain. Out of these wholly fortuitous but dangerous circumstances emerged the regular assemblies of clergy which, in subsequent centuries, did so much to define the practical terms of church–state relations in France.
By 1560–62 the agenda for religious reform was inherently difficult to control, and talk of a national council only emboldened those with new ideas. Over several weeks in September–October 1561 an inter-confessional colloquy rather than the previously touted national council was held at Poissy near Paris, precisely so that Theodore Beza, Calvin's future successor at Geneva, and other Calvinists invited by Catherine de Medici, the regent, could attend it. But when leading Catholic figures like the Cardinal of Lorraine and the moyenneurs – literally, those holding or seeking the middle ground – gambled on using the thirty-year-old Lutheran Confession of Augsburg as a basis for negotiation and religious compromise within the framework of gallican Catholicism, the Calvinists present flatly rejected the formula. In reply, they emphasised the radical nature of the true gospel and called on the monarchy to support a godly, root-and-branch reform of the church along Genevan lines. Despite the obvious chasm between the two sides, it is quite clear that nobody at Poissy envisaged more than one church on French soil. Lorraine's via media option was also opposed by many within French Catholicism, including leading participants in the colloquy. Critically, its failure weakened not only him but, above all, the search for a negotiated compromise of a religious kind. Within a year, Lorraine and others like him would consider the newly reconvened Council of Trent to be the best hope for a reinvigorated gallican church; for them, it was another means towards the same end – the preservation of the one true church.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Politics of Religion in Early Modern France by JOSEPH BERGIN. Copyright © 2014 Joseph Bergin. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface, ix,Introduction, 1,
1 The Religion of King and Kingdom, 17,
2 Disputes and Settlements, 43,
3 Gallican Stirs, 64,
4 The Dévot Impulse, 86,
5 The Richelieu Effect, 112,
6 The Fiscal Nexus and its Ramifications, 133,
7 Obedient Rebels? The Protestants from Nantes to Nîmes, 156,
8 Jansenist Dilemmas, 181,
9 A New Gallican Age?, 206,
10 A Huguenot Half-century, 227,
11 To Fontainebleau and Beyond, 252,
12 Enemies Within?, 277,
Conclusion, 299,
Notes, 308,
Bibliography, 351,
Index, 369,