8

France

Barbara B. Diefendorf

As in many other areas of early modern religious history, historians of France are still working to fill out the picture that began to emerge more than thirty years ago, when attention shifted from the reformers’ message to the reception of this message on the part of the laity. French historians continue fruitfully to explore the religious choices men and women made, the pious practices in which they engaged, and the social, political, and cultural implications of these choices and practices. This is not to say that important work has ceased on the ideas of the major reformers, but this scholarship too has been imbued with a different spirit, with historians asking not just what the reformers’ message was but how it was delivered and why it was (or was not) attractive to its audience.

This increased attention to religious practice and belief has produced fundamental shifts in historians’ understanding of late medieval piety and, as a consequence, of the nature of religious dissent and origins of the Protestant Reformation in France. A new attention to the spread of ideas through both the pulpit and the printing press has produced fresh insights into the dissemination of Protestant ideas and their adoption or rejection, with attention to both the formal creation of Calvinist institutions and the success of these institutions in forging a distinct Calvinist culture. At the same time, attention to religious propaganda and to the social and cultural aspects of belief has brought the religious dimension of the Wars of Religion into focus. Narratives stressing political tensions within the nobility have given way to studies of popular religious enthusiasm and religious violence. The latter current, moreover, has already produced a reaction on the part of scholars who seek to turn our attention from the brutal episodes in which people killed one another over their religious differences to those longer periods when Protestants and Catholics lived side by side in relatively peaceful, if sometimes tense, coexistence. It seems then that, far from having exhausted themselves, the avenues of inquiry into religious practice and belief continue to produce useful questions and agendas for further research.

The Roots of the Reformation in France

More than seventy-five years ago, Lucien Febvre challenged traditional narratives that rooted the Protestant Reformation in the fertile soil of disaffection from a corrupt church poorly served by an ignorant clergy. Pointing to the many new churches and chapels built in the Flamboyant Gothic style during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, he called on these “witnesses made of stone” to testify “not only that fidelity to the old beliefs remained intact, but also that the traditional piety was manifest with a very special fervor” during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in France.¹ Taking up Febvre’s suggestion that late medieval religious culture remained both vibrant and popular, A. N. Galpern, Nicole Lemaître, Larissa Taylor, Virginia Reinburg, and Moshe Sluhovsky, among others, have given a far more positive assessment of the ways that Catholic ritual, teachings, and forms of association served the broader community than the previous literature allowed.² A notable dissenter from this view, Jean Delumeau, has argued that, owing to the ignorance of the clergy, mechanical repetition of ritual, and lack of instruction in doctrine, the mass of the European population was only superficially Christianized on the eve of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations.³ Although Delumeau’s thesis that the mass of the people remained virtually pagan, practicing a mixture of superstition and magic, has been taken up by some historians of witchcraft and popular culture, historians of religion have generally preferred Jean-Claude Schmitt’s more nuanced view of local religion as capable of absorbing folkloric elements and customs without thereby becoming pagan or losing its foundational core of Christian beliefs.⁴

In keeping with this interest in popular belief, historians of the early Reformation have paid relatively less attention to evangelical reformers such as Jacques Lefèvre and more to the character of popular heresy. David Nicholls suggests that the religious fervor of the later Middle Ages was not incompatible with the skepticism and questioning of fundamental Catholic beliefs that characterized popular heresy in the pre-Calvinist era. He finds this period characterized by “innumerable quests for religious truth” and believes that this chaotic situation hindered the Calvinists’ attempt to impose their vision of a reformed church and society.⁵ Recent studies of publishing and religious propaganda also point to the diversity—and doctrinal confusion—apparent in the early stage of French religious dissent.⁶ If this diversity hindered early Calvinists in their quest for theological unity, it also hindered efforts on the part of Catholic authorities to stamp out dissent in its entirety because, as Timothy Watson argues for Lyon, “there was no clear target to aim at.”⁷

Interest in the character of popular religious dissent is also evident in Gabriel Audisio and Euan Cameron’s productive rethinking of the relationship between Calvinism and France’s long-established dissenters, the Waldensians.⁸ If the Calvinists succeeded in gaining the adherence of this group, they suggest, this is not because the Waldensians already shared key elements of Calvinist theology but rather because, after a new round of persecution in the 1540s, they preferred to ally with another outcast group than to rejoin the church that had persecuted them for centuries. Meanwhile, William Monter has profoundly reshaped historians’ understanding of prosecution of heresy by the high courts of Parlement.⁹ Demolishing the long-accepted belief that the repression of heresy by French courts intensified with the organization and growth of Calvinist churches in France, he shows that, from the 1520s, French courts were eager to act against heresy. Their ability do so was impeded by both internal and external (i.e., political) factors. Convictions for heresy peaked during the reign of François I and not, as has usually been assumed, after Henri II’s introduction of the infamous Chambre ardente.¹⁰ Despite their inclusion in Reformed martyrologies, most of France’s convicted heretics thus belong to the theologically diverse period before Calvinism was effectively introduced into France.

The Creation of Calvinist Churches and Culture

Catholic authorities and Protestant martyrologists made very different use of the spectacularly staged public executions of convicted heretics to reinforce their conceptions of community and faith.¹¹ Conviction for heresy was, however, only one measure of religious persecution. Even if Catherine de Medici’s policies of limited toleration made it very difficult successfully to prosecute heresy cases, suspects continued to be arrested and frequently could be prosecuted on the alternative charge of sedition. Suspected Protestants were vulnerable to attack in religious riots and individual or collective acts of popular violence.¹² Recent work on the creation of Calvinist churches stresses the impact of this troubled political climate. The essays published by Raymond Mentzer and Andrew Spicer, for example, illustrate well the vital role that the threat and reality of persecution played in shaping the Huguenots’ social and cultural values, as well as determining their political priorities.¹³

It was not, however, just the danger of persecution that caused many of those who were initially drawn to Protestant teachings to return to the Catholic Church. Natalie Davis demonstrated forty years ago that the institutionalization of the Calvinist reform in Lyon drove journeymen printers, who had been leaders of the early movement, back into the arms of the mother church. Finding themselves not only excluded from participation in the consistory but also the objects of its moralizing scrutiny, the journeymen, angered by both the church’s reinforcement of traditional social hierarchies and its disciplining function, returned “somewhat lukewarmly” to the Catholic fold.¹⁴ Recent studies have confirmed the tendency for the roles of elder and even deacon to be reserved for men with a higher social profile; they have also stressed the tensions resulting from attempts on the part of Calvinist consistories to impose moral discipline. Mentzer’s articles on the regulation of morals by Reformed consistories are especially useful here.¹⁵ Kevin Robbins’s study of La Rochelle and Philip Conner’s book on Montauban also give precious insights into the relationship between the consistory and the urban elite and the role these institutions played in creating a “godly society.”¹⁶ Conner finds that even when consuls and consistory collaborated, as they did in Montauban, “the initial burst of reforming zeal was not sustained,” and pastors had to temper their enthusiasm for regulating public behavior—especially when it came to pastimes such as dancing, favored by elite as well as popular culture.¹⁷ Philippe Chareyre’s study of Nîmes arrives at similar conclusions. The “tireless activity” of the Reformed consistory in Nîmes peaked between 1578 and 1614, a period Chareyre qualifies as the “golden age of censure among southern French Protestants.”¹⁸ Even during this period, however, the consistory was significantly more successful in reinforcing the family unit and resolving disputes than in repressing traditional festivities and forms of urban sociability.

More work remains to be done to broaden historians’ understanding of the impact of Calvinist moral discipline both chronologically and geographically. With the completion of the catalogue of consistory records Mentzer is compiling, the scattered sources for this necessary research will be markedly easier to find. Exploiting and interpreting these records will nevertheless remain a major challenge. There is a need for comparative studies that look at a single question or type of social issue across a number of consistories, but also for more community-based studies in which consistory records are augmented with careful research in city and notarial archives so as to firmly ground the analysis of Calvinist culture within the existing dynamics of family and class. A related theme deserving of more research is the practice of piety among the Calvinist laity. Here again, Mentzer has made a valuable contribution by exploring ways in which ritual and ceremony reinforced Calvinist identity in France.¹⁹ More can be done, however, to fill out this picture, identify local variations, and trace changes over time.

Historians’ understanding of the institutional context of French Protestantism has benefited from Glenn Sunshine’s emphasis on the importance of equality—a refusal to put one church over another—in the evolution of French synodical structures.²⁰ This collegiality was a necessary development, in Sunshine’s view, given the need to unite churches that were originally highly local and insisted on retaining a large measure of autonomy. It nevertheless resulted in the creation of a church that offended the monarchy by its “republican” character, as well as by its theology. The crown’s reaction to Calvinism has also received thoughtful treatment by Christopher Elwood, who identifies the doctrine of the Eucharist as the subversive heart of Calvinist theology.²¹ When Calvinists rejected Catholic notions of divine immanence as idolatrous, they challenged fundamental notions about the way power worked and undermined the sacred status of the king. Despite their protestations of loyalty and acceptance of monarchical authority, their self-presentation as a holy community around shared participation in the Eucharist identified them as a people apart, awakening suspicion on the part of the king but also violent anger on the part of Catholic preachers and people. The acts of iconoclasm through which some Protestants demonstrated their belief that Catholic worship was idolatrous further exacerbated the already tense situation. Although Protestant leaders distanced themselves from these acts, recent research suggests that at least some ministers secretly encouraged them—just as Catholic crowds suspected.²²

The Wars of Religion

Surveys by Mack Holt and Robert Knecht offer very good introductions to France’s religious wars.²³ Both offer balanced interpretations, with the former emphasizing the religious character of the conflicts and the latter placing more stress on the way aristocratic quarrels played into the religious tensions.²⁴ Knecht’s book has a particularly extensive and useful annotated bibliography. David Potter has produced a useful collection of documents.²⁵ J. H. M. Salmon’s Society in Crisis remains useful on the social and political tensions behind the wars.²⁶ Philip Benedict’s essay on “The Dynamics of Protestant Militancy, 1555–1563” offers an excellent analysis of the period between the formation of the first Calvinist congregations and the outbreak of civil war. In contrast to previous historians who saw French Protestants as merely desiring “recognition,” or freedom of worship, Benedict argues that they wanted to complete the civic reformation they believed necessary to the regeneration of church and society alike and that “once the initial step of assembling in defiance of the law had been taken, other steps came to be seen as justifiable to counter the way in which the government or Catholic opinion reacted to the initial assemblies.”²⁷ Fearing they would be attacked by Catholic crowds or else shut down by government officials, the rapidly growing congregations began to create paramilitary structures, while still stridently insisting on their loyalty to the crown. These structures provided the basis for the Huguenots’ mobilization in 1562, when events surrounding the massacre of Vassy pushed both sides into war. Jérémie Foa, Penny Roberts, and Kevin Gould have also offered useful insights into the fundamental issues prompting the wars by demonstrating the profound impact that conflicts over urban space and places of worship had on both Protestant and Catholic militance.²⁸

James Wood’s history of the royal army helps explain why the wars were so inconclusive and why they dragged on so long.²⁹ It was extremely expensive to keep an army in the field and budget problems repeatedly forced the crown to negotiate with the Huguenots, whose tactic of seizing walled towns allowed them to maintain a stronger defensive position than their overall numbers would predict. The Huguenots’ ability to make the crown pay for the mercenaries they hired to help fight their wars also increased the cost of the wars to the king, as well as to the Catholic subjects whose taxes time and again went to pay off armies that had made war against them. Because the actual fighting was widely scattered, having a far greater impact on some regions than others, the history of the French civil wars is often approached on a regional basis. Michel Cassan has studied the Limousin, and Mark Konnert the towns of Champagne.³⁰ Other urban studies have been done by Joan Davies for Toulouse, Philip Benedict for Rouen, Barbara Diefendorf for Paris, Wolfgang Kaiser for Marseille, David Nicholls for Tours, and Penny Roberts for Troyes.³¹ Stuart Carroll’s study of the Guise affinity takes a different organizing principle and enriches scholars’ understanding of how the Guise family organized support in the areas of their greatest strength.³² His recent book on early modern violence shows the impact of the Wars of Religion on the moral code of the French nobility.³³

Luc Racaut makes a strong case for the role Catholic polemics played in stirring religious hatreds to a fever pitch.³⁴ The classic works on popular polemics nevertheless remain Denis Crouzet’s Guerriers de Dieu and Denis Pallier’s study of the Parisian printing trades during the Holy League. In addition, Philip Benedict has examined the use of images as propaganda during the religious wars; Keith Cameron, Kathleen Crawford, and Alexander Wilkinson have examined the propaganda campaign waged against Henri III; and Michael Wolfe has shown how Henri IV’s image evolved in the contemporary media.³⁵ Of course, the pulpit played as crucial a role as the printing press in stirring popular emotions during the wars.³⁶

Two phases of the Wars of Religion continue to attract special attention. The first is the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre; the second the wars of the League. On the former, Philip Benedict’s 1978 article on the provincial massacres remains the standard. Barbara Diefendorf focuses on the popular killings in Paris and the religious hatreds that prompted them; Denis Crouzet rethinks the role of Catherine de Medici and Charles IX; and Robert Kingdon traces the propaganda value of the massacre at home and abroad.³⁷ Jean-Louis Bourgeon’s works on the massacre should be used with caution; his thesis that the massacre represented a Guise-led revolt of the Parisian bourgeoisie against the crown is based on a very partial and selective use of sources.³⁸

The climactic stage of the Wars of Religion—when ultra-Catholics formed a Holy League and rebelled against a crown that seemed unwilling or unable to put a stop to the Protestant heresy—continues to occasion lively debate about the character of the rebellion and underlying motives of the rebels. Elie Barnavi’s characterization of the Paris Holy League as a sociopolitical revolution on the part of middling classes excluded from urban power structures has been contested by Robert Descimon, who views the revolt as an attempt to reclaim traditional communal values on the part of the same social group, and Denis Crouzet, who interprets it rather as an apocalyptic and millenarian movement.³⁹ Rather than resolving the debate about Paris, studies of provincial cities reinforce a sense of the league as a diverse movement rooted in local conditions and concerns.⁴⁰ Many cities adopted a moderate course, allying with the league or rejecting it only after much debate and without the sort of violent upheaval experienced in Paris. The intense religious passions and zeal for moral reform demonstrated by Parisian leaguers were absent in many provincial cities as well. It seems important, then, not to generalize too broadly from the Parisian case. Jean-Marie Constant’s La Ligue avoids this problem, while incorporating many insights produced by specialized studies, and shows how thin support for the league was outside of a handful of major cities.⁴¹ Henri IV was in a stronger position when he came to the crown than is usually assumed. This does not alter the fact that Henri’s conversion to Catholicism was a necessary step in pacifying the kingdom, as were the steps he subsequently took to buy off his enemies and gain legitimacy.⁴² Moreover, only in retrospect does his 1594 entry into Paris appear to have been a decisive turning point in the league’s fall from power. At the time, many hard-core leaguers looked upon it as a temporary setback and not a permanent defeat.⁴³

The difficult search for an end to the religious wars has been approached from a variety of perspectives. A number of scholars have looked at the theoretical constructs of civil harmony used to justify an end to the quarrels.⁴⁴ By contrast, Jérémie Foa and Penny Roberts have attempted to reassess the actual work of the royal commissions sent out to negotiate enforcement of the pacification edicts in the provinces.⁴⁵ Both argue convincingly that peacemaking was taken more seriously under the Valois kings than is usually assumed and that Henri IV’s ability to stabilize his kingdom built in important ways on the success of his predecessors in maintaining the rule of law. Foa’s article “Making Peace” offers a particularly impressive demonstration of the efforts of royal commissioners pragmatically to negotiate compromise by adjudicating a wide variety of disputes but also issuing guidelines that local authorities could follow. His soon-to-be-completed thesis promises to revise our understanding of the role of the crown during the early stages of the religious wars in important ways.

The study of individuals who sought out a middle path in the wars has also yielded productive results. Thierry Wanegffelen’s massive Ni Rome ni Genève examines a number of prominent individuals who tried to find a middle way and offers a most interesting perspective on attempts to broker a compromise during the reign of Henri IV.⁴⁶ For Theodore Beza, by contrast, there could be no middle ground. Like Calvin before him, Beza strongly condemned any compromise that touched on Protestant doctrine. Beza’s position with regard to the religious wars nevertheless evolved significantly over time. As Scott Manetsch has shown, “Beza himself played a more significant role in subversive activities than is generally recognized,” at least during the 1570s. Ten years later, however, “Beza was advising friends in France to desist from armed confrontation, convinced that it was better to suffer ‘under the cross’ than to be held responsible for the plague of anarchy in the kingdom and the dissipation in the churches.” He continued to be a voice for “patience and political accommodation” after Henri IV’s conversion.⁴⁷

The impact of the Edict of Nantes on the lives of both Protestants and Catholics during the period following its promulgation remains understudied, despite useful case studies of Protestant-Catholic coexistence and conversion by Gregory Hanlon, Keith Luria, Raymond Mentzer, and Philip Benedict.⁴⁸ Benedict has also done important work on Huguenot social demography.⁴⁹ Diane Margolf has studied the adjudication of legal disputes under the terms of the Edict of Nantes.⁵⁰

The Catholic Revival

Early modern Catholicism is the subject of another essay in this volume. The paragraphs that follow will attempt only to round out this essay’s theme of a historiographical shift from top-down histories of the Reformations to works focusing more on popular piety and religious practice. Even more than for the Protestant movement, the Catholic Reformation has traditionally been seen as initiated and controlled by the clergy. For France, moreover, it has generally been seen as a belated movement whose arrival was delayed by the disruption caused by the religious wars. Only when peace returned could the church begin setting its house in order, implementing the decrees passed half a century earlier at Trent, and beginning the reform of both secular clergy and religious. For René Taveneaux, for example, the Catholic Reformation only begins in 1610, at least in its “positive phase.”⁵¹ There is of course some validity to the traditional perspective. The Catholic Church was undeniably centralized and hierarchical in organization, and the spread of new, reformed religious orders largely took place only after the Wars of Religion had ended. The wars, moreover, heightened the customary independence of the Gallican church. The decrees issued from the Council of Trent never were officially accepted by the French government, and they were only belatedly adopted by its Catholic Church in 1615.⁵²

These traditional views are, however, too limited and limiting. The Catholic Church never achieved the centralization to which it aspired. Moreover, as Denis Richet showed in a pioneering essay first published in 1977, already during the Wars of Religion, the Protestant challenge promoted a reinvigoration of popular piety and a new concern with living out one’s faith on the part of Catholic elites.⁵³ Robert Schneider’s essay on penitential processions illustrates this point well. As Schneider demonstrates, participants in these processions did not see themselves as reviving the flagellant confraternities of the later Middle Ages and wanted rather to counter Protestantism by displaying “a Church militant, unified, numerous and purified” but also to mark themselves out as a “spiritual elite.”⁵⁴ Mark Venard has also stressed the “successful marriage” between popular piety and the Counter-Reformation during the era of the religious wars. “It was only later, during the course of the seventeenth century, that a divorce would grow and deepen.”⁵⁵

Diefendorf also locates the roots of the Catholic revival of the seventeenth century in the penitential and ascetic spirituality that characterized the religious wars, especially during the Wars of the League.⁵⁶ Not only did Capuchins, Feuillants, and other Counter-Reformation orders play an important role as preachers during the wars, but admiration for their penitential piety helped spark the desire to reform lax religious orders and found austere new ones in the wake of the wars. In Paris alone, fifty new religious congregations for women were founded during the first half of the seventeenth century. As the penitential impulse that prompted the first of these foundations waned, it gave way to the more extroverted desire for Christian service evident in the foundation of uncloistered teaching and nursing congregations and charitable confraternities. Whether cloistered contemplative convents, active teaching congregations, or lay charities, these institutions were almost invariably created on women’s initiative and with money supplied by female benefactors.⁵⁷ Elizabeth Rapley’s works on the active orders similarly stress the importance of women’s initiative. She argues, moreover, that these new orders should not be seen as “an integral part of the Tridentine reform. The burst of feminine agency was neither foreseen nor welcomed.”⁵⁸ Diefendorf finds more evidence of productive collaboration between male clergy and lay and religious women. More research is needed, however, to clarify women’s role in the Catholic Church of the Reformation. Susan Dinan’s new book on the Daughters of Charity is particularly welcome on this account.⁵⁹

The extent to which the Catholic Reformation penetrated the French countryside is another subject that remains in dispute. Philip Hoffman attributes the movement’s successes to an alliance between devout urban elites and the urban clergy and its failures to the resistance rural groups posed to the social discipline these initiatives implied.⁶⁰ Robin Briggs also emphasizes the controlling impulses of the Counter-Reformation church.⁶¹ By contrast, Keith Luria finds both peasants and city dwellers creatively adapting religious rituals and practices to suit their needs.⁶² These questions of peasant and elite mentalities go beyond the limits of this essay. It is nevertheless clear that, for Protestants and Catholics alike, religion remained a vital component of the early modern world; it framed the way people saw their roles, relationships, and responsibilities, but always within a broader context framed also by social, economic, and political variables.

Future Directions

Where is the field headed? There are two main trends in current research. The first is a continuation of the efforts sketched out in this essay to examine the religious choices early modern French people made and the social, political, and cultural implications of these choices. More specifically, researchers are continuing efforts to question and revise long-held generalizations about the impact of the Reformation, the place that religion held in people’s lives, the origins and character of the Wars of Religion, and the role of monarchy in these troubles. At the same time, scholars are going beyond the study of religious divisions and the conflicts they provoked to ask about coexistence and compromise across religious lines. This essay has cited some results from these efforts, but more research is under way and still more needs to be undertaken

This work demands both intensive archival research and imaginative use of old and new sources. Fortunately, finding aids for French archives are increasingly being put online. The Archives nationales (available at http://www.archivesnationales.culture.gouv.fr) and many departmental archives have posted general inventories of their holdings to the Internet. More detailed repertories of documents are still regrettably rare, but they too are gradually becoming available. Many library catalogs can also be consulted from a distance. The Bibliothèque nationale’s useful site (http://www.bnf.fr) allows convenient searches of not only that library’s collections (through the BN-OPALE PLUS link) but also those of many municipal and specialized libraries (through the CCFr link). The Catalogue Collectif de France is incomplete—the holdings of many libraries and special collections can still be known only by visiting them in person—but increasingly worth consulting. Much more preliminary work can be done before heading off to French archives and libraries than was possible just a few years ago.

Much more sophisticated research can also now be done without ever leaving home, thanks to the proliferation of electronic texts available online. It is now possible to download from the Bibliothèque nationale’s electronic text collection, not just literary texts and dictionaries but also important historical sources, including, for example, the Histoire ecclésiastique attributed to Theodore Beza, Pierre de L’Estoile’s Mémoires-journaux, and François Hotman’s juridical and polemical works. These are searchable through the GALLICA link on the BNF home page but also now appear in the regular catalog. Two special GALLICA projects will also be of interest to early modern historians. The first is the online publication of periodicals published by regional sociétés savantes, many of which contain livres de raison and other precious archival sources.⁶³ The second, entitled Voyages en France, contains a number of classic works for the early modern period, including, among many other things, accounts of royal entries into provincial cities. Only a few manuscript documents are currently available, but these include Pierre de L’Estoile’s fascinating Les belles figures et drolleries de la Ligue (through GALLICA or OPALE-PLUS) and a small but growing collection of pacification edicts and related documents on the Wars of Religion (available at http://www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/archim/desguerresdereligion.htm). These expanding resources will serve as valuable aids to professional historians as well as greatly expand the possibilities for serious research by graduate and even undergraduate students previously hampered by limited library resources.

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