Chapter 1 – Storms and Stress

1 The Religion of king and kingdom in 16th century France 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 it had 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 people on either side of the religious divide could imagine that there would be no return during their lifetime to the pre-1560 principle of ‘one faith, one king, one law’.1 In taking this step, the monarchy moved into unfamiliar territory, and found itself without a road-map or a ready-made script for action. The precedents – not always successful – for resolving religious conflict by peaceful means elsewhere in contemporary Europe, especially in the neighbouring Empire and Switzerland were not, as France’s élites well knew, promising, and if anything they suggested that even face-to-face discussion served mainly to further harden existing convictions among the rival confessions. Above all, these experiences simply did not ‘fit’ the unified political geography of western Europe’s largest monarchy, which was quite unlike the mostly microscopic Swiss-German neighbours in question. Still seeing itself as God’s elect-nation, France had no prior experience at all of the inter-confessional colloquies of its eastern neighbours, so when holding discussions with its own Protestants was finally proposed in 1560-1, conservatives fiercely – and not surprisingly – objected to it as tantamount to admitting that heretics were equals with something potentially acceptable to say. Convening either 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: it 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. How had things come to such a pass, which saw France experiencing religious upheaval and its 1 William Monter, Judging the French Reformation (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 212. 2 consequences almost a full generation later than most of northern and central Europe? A brief backward look at the major developments since the 1520s and 1530s is essential if we are to understand how this came to be. 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. François I and many of the political and even ecclesiastical elite held the second view, until a first change of heart occurred in the mid-1530s. Even after that shift, the king continued to believe that scholars and nobles were, for possibly different reasons, largely immune to the attractions of heresy, which he saw as appealing only to the lower ‘mechanical sorts’ within society. His successor, Henri II, held broadly the same views, at least in respect of the nobility. Such a persistent misconception – alongside several others – proved to be a major blind spot when the crown found itself having to deal with serious religious dissent in the 1540s and 1550s. France’s un-readiness 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 had given way 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 medieval form of a local official (usually a Dominican friar) within each diocese or church province. 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 3 of English occupation as such a war2. 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 Saint Louis had done in his time; but as with so many historical comparisons of its type, it failed adequately to measure the novelty of the present situation3. 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 reinvigorate Catholicism4. 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, not least because after the affair of the Placards (1534), which led François I to recognise the dangers of religious dissent, the 2 See Norman Housley, Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400-1536 (Oxford, 2002). 3 Luc Racaut, ‘The Polemical use of the Albigensian crusade during the French wars of religion’, French History, 13 (1999), 261-279. 4 J Michael Hayden and Malcolm Greenshields, 600 Years of Reform. Bishops and the French church 1190-1789 (Montreal, 2005), ch 3. 4 monarchy seemed determined to prosecute those attacking the true religion5. 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, something that was considerably facilitated by focusing on the seditious dimensions of heresy – ‘the public scandal, popular commotion, sedition or other crimes which involve public offence’, as the Edict of Châteaubriand put it in 1551. France may have been the last major country of northern Europe officially to move the crime of heresy to its secular courts, but the move, and the form that it took, caused relatively little surprise when it did occur6. This meant that France’s approach to dealing with religious dissent differed significantly from Italy and Spain, 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. It is, therefore, worth noting that when, in 1551, Pope Julius III formally denied lay magistrates in Italy the right to deal with cases of heresy, France had already moved in a diametrically opposite direction, effectively ‘laicising’ the handling of such cases7. The idea of a Spanish-style Suprema with jurisdiction over everyone, high and low, secular and clerical, was already quite unacceptable in France by the 1550s and it would remain so, even when the Catholic League was in the ascendant in the late 1580s8. 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. On the contrary, it was a clear signal that the monarchy was giving up, for the time being at least, on pursuing heretics; the shift was emphatically neither reinforcement nor vindication of ecclesiastical jurisdiction within France. 5 Alain Tallon, La France et le concile de Trente, for the most exhaustive study of this question: see esp part 2, chs 1-3 for the shifts in attitude towards Trent. 6 Monter, Judging the French Reformation, 85.

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