The French Wars of Religion 1559-1598

R. J. Knecht

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317862307
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the second half of the sixteenth century, France was racked by religious civil wars and peace was only restored when Henry of Navarre finally converted to Catholicism, deciding – in his immortal phrase – that 'Paris is worth a mass'.

In this lucid introduction to a complex period in French history, Robert Knecht:

• Explains the evangelical and Lutheran origins of the Huguenot Church in France
• Challenges simplistic interpretations of the religious conflict as purely a cloak for political rebellion
• Provides concise analysis of the wars themselves and the ferment of political ideas which they generated
• Evaluates the extent of France's recovery under Henry IV

This third edition has been updated throughout to take account of the latest scholarship, particularly on the Massacre of St. Bartholomew and the reign of Henry III when the monarchy almost succumbed to the challenge posed by the Catholic League. There is a new colour plate section and the main text is supported by a full glossary of terms, maps and three detailed genealogical tables, as well as a carefully chosen selection of original documents.

Each book in the Seminar Studies in History series provides a concise and reliable introduction to complex events and debates. Written by acknowledged experts and supported by extracts from historical Documents, a Chronology, Glossary, Who's Who of key figures and Guide to Further Reading, Seminar Studies in History are the essential guides to understanding a topic.

Part 1

ANALYSIS

Introduction

Many people nowadays attach little importance to religion. Consequently, they find it difficult to believe that it played a major part in the civil wars that tore France apart in the late sixteenth century. They look for other reasons: political, economic and social. Religion, they argue, was merely a ‘cloak’ used by the great aristocratic families to give respectability to their ruthless pursuit of power. But the sixteenth century was not the twenty-first: religion did rule the lives of thinking people; it offered them the hope of personal salvation in the next world. Even today religion can move people to action, as is daily demonstrated in the Middle East and India. But civil wars and revolutions are seldom the result of a single cause or grievance. Many interests are usually involved and the cross-currents can be bewilderingly complex. Material interests, including brutal power-hunger and greed, were certainly present in the French Wars of Religion, but religion was also crucially important (Holt, 1993).

The Wars of Religion are sometimes treated as if they were a self-contained phenomenon of the second half of the sixteenth century. They began officially in 1562, and historians have not always given themselves the trouble to look for causes further back than 1559. That, indeed, was an important year, when France and Spain signed the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, bringing to an end the long series of Italian Wars. Both countries were virtually bankrupt, and the end of the war created an unemployment problem as many impoverished nobles had previously been employed in the fighting. The crisis was exacerbated by the accidental death of King Henry II in a tournament held to celebrate the peace. He left a widow, Catherine de’ Medici, four sons and two daughters. The eldest son, Francis II, was only fifteen and was married to Mary, Queen of Scots, who belonged to the ultra-Catholic family of Guise. This family now gained control of the government, much to the disgust of the other two powerful aristocratic houses of Bourbon and Montmorency. Thus on top of a serious economic crisis, there was a buildup of faction. But this was not all. France had been for some time deeply disturbed by religious dissent. In fact, one of the reasons for the recent peace treaty was to give both sides a chance of dealing with the growing menace of heresy. To appreciate the role of religion in the overall crisis we need to look back beyond 1559.

It was during the reign of Francis I (1515–47) that Protestantism in the form of Lutheranism first entered France (Knecht, 1994: 156–9). To many it seemed to answer a spiritual need. There was a spirit of evangelical reform in the air, keen to breathe a new inner life into a Catholic faith that had become largely a matter of idle theological speculation. In May 1519 a Swiss student in Paris reported that Luther’s writings were being received ‘with open arms’. The Sorbonne did not condemn them until April 1521, so that they were able to circulate freely for more than a year. At first Francis I did not act very vigorously against Lutheranism. He was bound by his coronation oath to root out heresy in his kingdom, but in the early days of the Reformation heresy was not easily recognised or defined. It had much in common with the kind of evangelical humanism that had been tolerated in France for some time. The king was not prepared to accept any definition of heresy, not even the Sorbonne’s, if it clashed with his personal inclinations and the encouragement he liked to give to the New Learning. His indecisiveness, whatever his reasons may have been, helped Lutheranism to take root in France. Warnings of its rapid diffusion were repeatedly made by the secular and ecclesiastical authorities. The ‘contagion’, as they liked to call it, did not spread from east to west, nor along the principal trade routes; it sprang up in disconnected places spontaneously and found support in most social groups. After 1530 it was found in almost every province.

Sorbonne The Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris.

Francis I’s attempt to steer a middle course between reaction and reform ended abruptly in 1534 following the Affair of the Placards. On the night of 18 October Protestant placards or broadsheets were publicly displayed in a number of towns. One of them was even put up on the door of the king’s bedchamber at Amboise. The affair was swiftly followed by an unprecedented wave of persecution, which the Parlement of Paris almost certainly instigated (Knecht, 1978). The repression was evidently a response to the message contained in the placards, which was a vitriolic attack on the Catholic doctrine of the Mass. The affair revealed how far French Protestantism had moved since its first appearance in 1519. For the placards were not Lutheran, but Zwinglian or Sacramentarian in their uncompromising rejection of the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. In January 1535 a well-informed observer noted that all the people in France who were called ‘Lutherans’ were, in fact, Zwinglians (i.e. followers of the Swiss reformer, Ulrich Zwingli), an opinion endorsed four years later by Calvin. This reorientation of dissent towards the Swiss Reformation is easily explained. Many Protestants had grown dissatisfied with Luther’s moderation and looked to more radical reformers for leadership, although it is difficult to know how widespread Sacramentarianism had become in France. Switzerland had a stronger appeal to French dissenters than Germany because it offered them opportunities of writing and preaching in their own tongue. The shift of allegiance is well illustrated by the career of Guillaume Farel, a Frenchman who gave up Lutheranism for Zwinglianism in the early 1520s. He settled in Switzerland and turned the town of Neuchâtel into a base for an evangelical offensive against his own country. It was here that the placards of 1534 were written and printed.

Parlement The highest court of law under the king, also responsible for registering royal edicts and with administrative duties. Apart from the Parlement of Paris, there were seven provincial parlements (Aix-en-Provence, Bordeaux, Dijon, Grenoble, Rennes, Rouen and Toulouse).

Sacramentarianism A body of Protestant thought, held mainly by Zwingli and his followers, which rejected the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

The Affair of the Placards, it has been claimed, turned French Protestantism into ‘a religion for rebels’ (Kelley, 1981: 13–19). This may be an exaggeration, but it certainly made the battle lines between orthodoxy and dissent much clearer. From 1534 onwards the attitude of the French monarchy to heresy hardened. Although the Edict of Coucy ( July 1535) offered an amnesty to religious exiles, it specifically excluded Sacramentarians and even made the amnesty conditional on the recantation of beliefs previously held. From June 1540 onwards, when the Edict of Fontainebleau gave the parlements overall control of heresy cases, the flow of repressive legislation continued virtually without interruption. Meanwhile, the Sorbonne provided the persecutors with clear doctrinal guidelines, and in 1542 it drew up the first index of forbidden books. The last seven years of Francis I’s reign saw a steep rise in the number of heresy prosecutions by the Parlement of Paris. Elsewhere the action of the parlements was uneven. In Dauphiné, Normandy and Guyenne they were lethargic, but in the south, where Roman law held sway, they were savage. Under Henry II (1547–59) the religious crisis in France gathered pace at an alarming rate. During the first three years of the reign more than 500 heretics were sentenced by the Chambre ardente, a special court set up within the Parlement of Paris. In July 1547 judges lost the right to vary punishments in heresy cases: henceforth death was to be the only penalty. Yet the repression did not check the progress of Protestantism. At first the congregations were left to look after themselves, but under Henry II they began to fall under the powerful influence of John Calvin.

Chambre ardente The popular name for the chamber of the Parlement created in 1547 to try cases of heresy.

1

The growth of Calvinism

• John Calvin (1509–64)

• The creation of a militant church

• The Conspiracy of Amboise (1560)

• The impact of Calvinism

The Reformation is often depicted as a single movement of revolt against the Catholic church begun by Luther and continued more effectively by Calvin. This is a simplification. Calvin did follow Luther in time, and did take over the leadership of the Protestant movement, but he was an independent figure whose contribution to the Reformation was personal and distinctive (Bouwsma; Gordon).

JOHN CALVIN (1509–64)

John Calvin was a Frenchman, born at Noyon in Picardy. As a youth he was sent to Paris to study theology, but in 1528 he took up legal studies at Orléans and Bourges. In 1531 he returned to Paris and devoted himself to the classics. His first published work was a commentary on a text by Seneca. It was probably in 1533 that Calvin was converted to Protestantism. In November his friend, Nicolas Cop, the rector of the university, preached a sermon which betrayed Lutheran sympathies. It caused an outcry and Cop fled to Switzerland. Calvin (who was at one time suspected of having written the sermon) retired to the south of France.

During the persecution that followed the Affair of the Placards Calvin fled to Basle, where in March 1536 he published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. This contained a long preface, addressed to Francis I, in which Calvin defended his evangelical brethren against the vicious persecution that had been unleashed against them. He argued that they were the legitimate heirs of the early Christian church and denied that they had any seditious intentions. Although the Institutes were subsequently modified and enlarged, the original Latin edition contained the essence of Calvin’s doctrine. It emphasised the majesty and absolute sovereignty of God and the hopeless corruption of man as a result of the Fall. Though predestination was implied, Calvin did not stress it at this stage. Another important aspect of his doctrine was the authority attached to Scripture, but he showed that reading the Bible was not enough: it had to be understood with the help of the Holy Spirit. Calvin had no time for subjective mysticism. Finally, while believing that the true church was invisible and made up of the elect of God (i.e. those predestined for salvation), Calvin believed in the necessity for a visible church, independent yet related to the state. In later years he devoted much time to the elaboration of the Institutes. The sixth and last edition of 1559 was five times larger than the first and differently arranged. The publication of the first French edition in 1541 did much to popularise the Reformation.

In 1536 Calvin returned to France to attend to some family business. He then planned to go to Strassburg, but the direct road was blocked by Imperial troops, so he made a detour to Geneva, expecting to stop there just one night. He found the city in the throes of a religious revolution led by Farel, who begged Calvin to stay and help him. Because of the strange set of circumstances that had brought him to Geneva, Calvin convinced himself that God wanted him to build a model Christian community there. The task proved difficult, as many of the leading citizens were moved by political rather than religious considerations. When Calvin and Farel tried to discipline them by the use of excommunication, they resisted and forced the reformers to leave. Calvin went to Strassburg, where he became minister to a congregation of French exiles. Under the influence of the local reformer, Martin Bucer, he developed his views of predestination and church organisation. Meanwhile, the situation in Geneva turned to chaos, and Calvin was invited back by his friends. He reappeared in the city in June 1541 and soon afterwards drew up a new constitution for the Genevan church – the Ecclesiastical Ordinances.

The chief innovation of the Ordinances was the recognition of the four offices of pastor, teacher, elder and deacon. The pastors, numbering five at first, constituted the ‘Venerable Company’: they were responsible for preaching the Gospel, administering the sacraments and admonishing members. The teachers had the duty of instructing the young in ‘sound doctrine’. The twelve elders were laymen responsible for enforcing discipline; each supervised one of Geneva’s districts and was expected to visit every family at least once a year. The deacons assisted the pastors in supervising poor relief, visiting the sick and the needy and administering the city’s hospital. The core of the constitution of the Genevan church was the consistory, made up of the twelve elders and five pastors. It met once a week to admonish, reprimand and correct citizens who had opposed the official doctrine, stayed away from church or behaved in an unchristian way. The consistory could also excommunicate.

Geneva lay close to France’s eastern border, and in the 1540s, as religious persecution intensified in France, numerous French Protestant exiles converged on the city. In 1559 the city council began to keep a register of refugees applying for the status of habitant. By 1560 almost 5,000 names had been recorded, but there may have been even more in reality (Greengrass, 1987: 31). Such a huge immigration inevitably changed the face of Geneva. Accommodation and educational facilities had to be provided for the exiles. In 1559 the Genevan Academy was set up, partly to train those refugees who wished to enter the ministry. Its first rector was Théodore de Bèze, who eventually succeeded Calvin as leader of his movement. At Calvin’s death in 1564 the Academy had 1,500 students. Another important development was the rapid growth of Geneva’s printing industry. Between 1550 and 1564 it published over 500 titles (as compared with only 193 between 1540 and 1550). There were about 130 presses employing mainly French religious exiles. Their literary output was controlled by a small group of Calvinist zealots, including Jean Crespin, author of a famous martyrology.

THE CREATION OF A MILITANT CHURCH

The origins of the French Calvinist or Huguenot church are obscure. All that is known for certain is that here and there in France during the 1550s Protestants gathered in secret to worship. As yet they had no common confession of faith and no national organisation. Gradually, however, the influence of Geneva began to give shape to these scattered communities. In 1554 Calvin wrote to the faithful of Poitiers, advising them on how to set up or ‘gather’ a church (Potter and Greengrass: 152–3). He praised them for getting together to praise God and seek instruction, but warned them that the administration of the sacraments required the services of a suitable minister duly elected by themselves. They also had to ensure that the recipients of the sacraments were ‘not still contaminated with papal superstitions’. In Paris the first Calvinist church was set up in September 1555 by the sieur de La Ferrière, a nobleman from Maine, who had come to the capital with his family to escape notice because of his religion. Soon afterwards his wife gave birth and he asked the faithful to have his child baptised, saying that it was impossible for him to go to Geneva. They allowed La Ferrière to administer the sacrament himself and this marked the beginning of the Parisian church.

A central direction, regarding both doctrine and church organisation, was urgently needed to give cohesion and discipline to the Huguenot communities in France, and Calvin’s Geneva set about providing it. Between 1555 and 1562 it sent eighty-eight missionaries into France to help organise the new church. Many were Frenchmen who had gone to Geneva as religious exiles and had since been trained as pastors. The provenance of sixty-four is known: sixty-two were French by birth and almost every province was represented among them. Many came from Guyenne and Dauphiné. The social origins of forty-two missionaries are also known and they tell us something about the social distribution of French Calvinism: they included fourteen nobles (mostly younger sons), twenty-four bourgeois and four artisans. None came from the peasantry (Kingdon, 1956: 5–13). These statistics are consistent with what is known about the geographical and social distribution of early French Protestants in general (Greengrass, 1987: 42–62). Most of them were to be found south of the River Loire within a broad arc (the so-called ‘Huguenot crescent’) stretching from La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast to the valleys of Dauphiné in the east. North of the Loire, there were relatively few Protestants except in Normandy, where they were strongly represented (Nicholls, 1980). Socially, the Calvinists were very mixed. Every social group and a bewildering variety of occupations were represented among them. But Calvinism was preponderantly an urban faith; it made relatively few converts among the peasantry.

How numerous were the Calvinists? It is impossible to give a precise figure, since only a few of their baptismal registers survive. In March 1562 Coligny allegedly prepared a list of 2,150 churches for presentation to the regent, Catherine de’ Medici, but this was probably an inflated figure aimed at impressing her. A more realistic estimate puts the maximum number of churches at between 1,200 and 1,250 in the decade 1560–70. Some individual congregations were very large. Rouen, for instance, had 16,500 in 1565, but this was exceptional. It is unlikely that the total adult Protestant population exceeded 2 million or roughly 12 per cent of France’s population. The French Huguenots were never more than a national minority (Greengrass, 1987: 42–3).

The Calvinist missionaries underwent a rigorous training in Geneva (Kingdon, 1956: 14–29). They had to learn Latin, Greek and Hebrew so as to know their Bible really well. At first there was no formally organised training institution, so that Farel and Calvin themselves had to teach them, but in 1559 the Genevan Academy was able to take over this task. After completing their studies, the missionaries usually took up pastoral duties in Switzerland. This gave them useful experience: it attuned them to the strict, collective self-discipline of the Calvinist churc...