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Pamphlets and the Transformation of the Presses

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Pamphlets and the Transformation of the Presses CHAPTER 8 THE WARS OF THE LEAGUE: PAMPHLETS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE PRESSES The wars of religion dominated the French political scene during the second half of the sixteenth century. The outbreak of war in 1562 had followed years of mounting tension between those willing to embrace the new faith and those loyal to traditional beliefs. Though a number of Bretons had been involved in some of the early rebellions, Brittany itself remained remarkably peaceful. There were a few instances of iconoclasm perpetrated by a small number of isolated zealots, but the duchy was untouched by the first wars that caused so much damage and destruction to other parts of the kingdom.1 In 1581, the Protestant author Nicolas Barnaud, writing under the pseudonym of Nicolas Froumenteau, lamented the havoc wreaked by the wars in a survey describing the cost of the conflict region by region. Yet when he turned his attention to the duchy of Brittany he was unable to identify any substantial negative impact other than a slightly increased burden of taxation.2 Until the wars of the league broke out following the assassi- nation of the Guise brothers in 1588, not a single battle or even a major skirmish, took place on Breton soil. Throughout, the duchy remained a heavily Catholic province untroubled by the civil wars. The wars of religion also had a profound impact in the book world. Perhaps one of the most obvious aspects of this change was the devel- opment of a strong polemical literature. In contrast to Germany, it was only in the 1560s that the religious conflicts found a strong echo in print. The virulent exchanges that marked the period immediately pre- ceding the outbreak of armed conflict led to a huge growth of contro- versial literature as both sides used print to rally their own supporters and denounce the opposing confession. The consequence was an expo- nential rise in the number of titles printed in French that would not be equalled until the formation of the Catholic league in the 1580s. 1 A few instances of religious violence are listed in La Borderie, A. Le Moyne de & Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, B.-A.-M., Histoire de Bretagne (Rennes, J. Plihon and L. Hommay, 1898–1914) V, 52. 204 chapter 8 This second explosion in the production of pamphlets was the result of the debates surrounding the future of the French monarchy. In 1584 the death of François de Valois, duke of Anjou, the last surviving brother of Henry III precipitated a constitutional crisis. The heir to the throne was now Henri de Navarre, a Protestant. In the polarised situa- tion of the 1580s this was unacceptable to many Catholics. This dis- content was channelled into the Catholic League, an organisation dedicated to preventing the succession of the Protestant heir. The rise of the League led to the development of a multifaceted pamphlet war between the Protestant, loyal royalist and ultra-catholic factions. But though countless pamphlets flooded the market, up until the final dec- ade of the century, Brittany seemed initially to have been largely unaf- fected by the religious and political controversies. Pamphlets in sixteenth-century Brittany The printed pamphlet would not have been unknown to Breton readers. A well-travelled Breton was bound to have met copies in the streets of most cities and in particular in large conurbations such as Rouen, Lyon or Paris. However, no pamphlets were published in the duchy prior to the wars of the Catholic League. It is also worth noting that there is not a single significant series of sixteenth-century pam- phlets in any of the public libraries in the five present-day Breton départements. This can be taken as symptomatic of the poor penetra- tion of pamphlets into Brittany. The contrast between the large number of surviving sixteenth-century books and the scarcity of pamphlets is striking. This is especially the case when one compares the proportion of pamphlets in Breton collections to that of similar-sized collections in other regions. The ratio of brochure-length items to other sixteenth century books in Rennes and Nantes is less than a third of that of com- parable French libraries.3 There were two main reasons behind this apparent absence of a printed polemical culture in Brittany. The first was the lack of a 2 Wood, J. B. ‘The Impact of the Wars of Religion: A View of France in 1581’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 2 (1984) 131–168, especially p. 144. 3 These figures are derived from the St Andrews database. The other libraries considered were Amiens, Auxerre, Caen, Carpentras, Châlons-en-Champagne, La Rochelle, Lille, Nancy, Orléans and Reims. None of these libraries had as few pamphlets as either Rennes or Nantes..
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