France in the Age of Henri IV

The Struggle for Stability

Mark Greengrass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138836051
• eBook ISBN: 9781317896296
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This study was the first systematic attempt to reach behind the myth of Henri IV - famous for having brought order to France after long civil war - and explores the reality of his achievement. This Second Edition has been substantially updated.

Chapter One

The French Civil Wars

Sectarian Memories

During the French civil wars, Louis Le Roy (c. 1510–77), professor of Greek at the Collège Royale in Paris, published his world history. Among the notable changes in his own civilisation he was impressed by the invention of printing, gunpowder and the compass and alarmed by the lamentable spread of venereal disease. But the real disease of his own time, he wrote, was the ‘sects [which have] sprung up in all nations, greatly disturbed the public order and withered the well-being of humans one to another … Everywhere, states have been attacked, disturbed or overturned: everywhere, religions have been plagued with heresies. Everything is out of place and in confusion and nothing is as it should be.’¹ To this author it was evident that the decisive event of his century had been the protestant reformation. For the first time, Christendom had been irreparably divided. Families, cities and states were split, not just along the lines of private convictions or theological beliefs, but by rival attitudes, values, political ideas, assumptions and shared experiences.

France could not have expected to escape from the evangelism of persuasive protestant preachers. Yet, in comparison with Martin Luther’s first decade of explosive and liberating influence in Germany, the impact of his message in French-speaking Europe appears initially to have been muted.² More went on than was apparent since French Lutheranism intermingled with a less than strident reforming evangelism and did not wear its convictions on its sleeve. This was, at least in part, because (unlike in Germany) there were tolerably effective royal and ecclesiastical instruments for the repression of heresy in France. Repression of religious unorthodoxy was the stronger, too, because France was a huge country and, for the most part, a very traditional society. Change was particularly threatening and there were strong traditions to identify religious change with heresy.

It has recently been argued that the sudden prominence of eschatalogical beliefs in the popular and almanac literature in France from the 1520s was the sign of a common anxiety, a panic reaction within traditional catholic France to the frightening and novel prospect of religious pluralism.³ The notion that the world would shortly come to an end was part of a belief system in which holy power was immanent in the forces of nature and the world at large. God was engaged mystically and prophetically in a mighty struggle against the forces of evil. Every natural event therefore carried sacral significance. Monstrous births, comets in the sky, plagues and famines were all capable of being mobilised to indicate God’s imminent vengeance upon a society which allowed heresy to flourish in its midst. Heretics were identified as the harbingers of the Last Days. Contemporaries were urged to join in the ultimate battle against the forces of evil, mustering in the reformation.

Historians are still debating how precisely to interpret the significance of this ‘panic literature’.⁴ Was it a reflection of a series of stock responses, well-rehearsed and well-known but more prominent from the 1520s because of changes to the patterns in the surviving corpus of printed material? How seriously did contemporaries take the frequent expressions from the pulpit and in print of their living in the Last Days and under an imminent Judgement? Were such expressions part of an accepted means by which some of those in the privileged bodies of corporate France sought to protect society from change and ruination? For the most part, however, historians accept that one of the most striking features about the reformation in France was the divisive and hostile responses to the prospects for change which were manifested from an early date. These provided the motive power for the gradual harnessing of the forces of repression which took place in the 1540s and 1550s. The failure of persecution to eradicate (as in the past) the roots of heresy contributed still further, we may imagine, to a greater sense of discomfiture. This frustration found its outlet in the violence which has been identified on the printed page as well as on the streets in the later 1550s. This constituted the prelude to the sectarian divisions of the civil wars. However historians interpret these early phases of the religious troubles in sixteenth-century France, the anxiety, frustration and disorientation which greeted the prospect of religious change would have a long history through the sixteenth century and into the reign of Henri IV. It is a central theme of this book that he took the irrational fears which were engendered by it seriously and that he ministered a healing balm to them.

One consequence of the gathering forces of repression, both institutional and more generally rooted in society at large, was the emergence of a brand of protestantism at once less tolerant, more convinced of its righteousness and ultimately more committed than in German-speaking lands. This ‘second–generation’ reformation –Calvinism – spread among exiles from France in the French-speaking parts of Europe, especially in the Imperial Free City of Strasbourg and the newly independent Geneva. Relatively free from constraint, reformers like Jean Calvin (1509–64) were able to develop a strong sense of community within a new model church and to preach the pure kingdom of Christ. The pastors and elders of the Calvinist church organised consistories to enforce a hard, clear moral code on believers. Refugees from catholic persecution in France joined them in increasing numbers after 1545. They were encouraged to see themselves as the precious few, the leaven in the lump, the Elect from whom true reformation would eventually flow. Some of them became permanent exiles. But others were sent out again as an élite – the Saints – to conquer and destroy the ‘great worldly Babylon’ in their native country. Nicodemites, temporisers, those who refused to subscribe to the new faith, were to be cast aside. In 1559, the Huguenots (as the Calvinists became known in France) held their first National Synod in Paris and established their Confession of Faith and Ecclesiastical Discipline. A year later, in March 1560, an edict was issued in the king’s name granting an amnesty for heretics who agreed to abjure, an implicit recognition that repression was failing. The text admitted that ‘great numbers of people of all sexes, ages, qualities and conditions’ had become heretics. The licence of the times, the preachers and pamphlets spreading from outside the realm, especially Geneva, were to blame for leading astray ‘the people of our realm who, lacking in judgement and knowledge, have no discernment in matters of doctrine’.⁵

How many Huguenots were there in France on the eve of the religious wars and how were they socially and geographically distributed? These questions confronted contemporaries as much as they have perplexed historians. Answers depend on whom one asks and where one looks. Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes (1509–73), a marshal of France and a royal councillor, knew without a doubt that it was the townsmen, the lesser people (paisans bourgeois, menu peuple), women, children and vagabonds who were most infected in his native Burgundy.⁶ Well-informed spy and smooth Venetian diplomat, Jean Michieli, reported that the nobility was the most contaminated – especially those ‘under forty years of age’.⁷ His successor, Suriano, estimated that nine-tenths of the kingdom were infected, early in 1562.⁸ Elderly battle-hardened catholic lieutenant of Gascony, Blaise de Monluc (c. 1501–77), blamed heresy on his enemies among the royal officers and financiers of Bordeaux.⁹ One of those magistrates, Florimond de Raemond (1540–1601), reflected from the comparative quiescence of his old age how schoolmasters when he was young had made his contemporaries vulnerable to heresy by teaching them to read, think and, eventually, to act for themselves.¹⁰ In the small catholic bastide town of Gaillac, a hostile witness thought the rich merchants carried heresy with them as it were the plague. In Toulouse, another judge believed that the richer young men and the more beautiful young women were mostly to be blamed for the spreading spores of heresy.¹¹

For the Huguenots, a sense of imminent victory is the hallmark of those pages in the great protestant compilation, the Ecclesiastical History of the Reformed Churches of France which relate to the years 1561–2.¹² Calvin could not believe what was taking place in France and lamented that there were not enough well-trained ministers to fulfil the demand.¹³ A report from the church in Paris to the protestants in Zurich said that ‘the harvest for Christ’ had been excellent. Providence had protected them. ‘We have confidence … there is an extraordinary desire to see the Kingdom of God increase.’ They talked of their congregation changing from being petits gens to becoming ‘the élite of France’ with ‘many nobles and magistrates … women and honourable young ladies and from the best families’ attending the sermons.¹⁴ With an edict of toleration granting them a basic civil liberty (as in January 1562), they flaunted their respectability. A Paris merchant tailor spoke out in public against the cardinal of Lorraine. Leading members of the Paris congregation dressed up in their best clothes so that they could be seen by the queen mother on their way to a Huguenot church service.¹⁵ To those who had been so recently persecuted, this sudden degree of recognition was, in itself, a sign of the Lord at work. In provincial cities, public meetings were held in markets, main streets and even town halls, demonstrating that protestantism had become part of the social fabric of French city life. Communal singing, marriages between the faithful, public burials, organised rallies of the new sect were not just moments when the Huguenots called on the Lord, but ways of demonstrating to those who took part that He really was on their side.¹⁶

Attempts to quantify this consciousness within a statistic are unlikely to be accurate. It is frequently said, for instance, that there were 2,150 Calvinist churches established by May 1562.¹⁷ It is evident that some kind of review was carried out then to establish how many troops the Huguenots could muster in the imminent event of war. But this figure was also inflated in order to impress the queen mother and her advisors of the overwhelming strength of Huguenot numbers. Attempts to reconstitute a list of those churches which had a minister or a deacon at around this date arrive at nowhere near this figure and the best estimate is of about 1,400 communities running right across France with 800 of them concentrated in a broad crescent sweeping across western France and down through the Midi to the Alps.¹⁸ The size of congregations varied enormously, so that any estimate of the numbers of believers is nothing more than an educated guess. Suriano, the Venetian ambassador, was clearly exaggerating their strength when he spoke of nine-tenths of the kingdom; it may have been only as many as 2 million. From these churches came many of the 20,000 who assembled at Orléans under the prince of Condé to fight for the cause in the first civil war.¹⁹

The impressions of contemporaries were all, in their way, correct. Modem, more sophisticated analysis has been directed towards discovering the social status and religious experience of the Huguenots in various cities, provinces and individual social groups. The research confirms the diverse and profound effect of protestantism within the French polity.²⁰ But the Huguenots paid an enormous price for this success. Far from the approaching victory of the New Jerusalem of their dreams, they faced bitter and entrenched catholic hostilities. This swiftly erased their naive optimism which, while it returned to parts of the Huguenot world again in 1566 and 1571–72 and shortly after the peace of Monsieur in 1576, was to be repeatedly crushed by catholic reaction and civil war. France was, in fact, officially at war for most of the periods 1562–63, 1567–70 and 1572–77. Sectarian ten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and maps
• Preface to the second edition
• Abbreviations
• 1. The French Civil Wars
• 2. The Catholic League
• 3. The Pursuit of the Kingdom
• 4. Huguenots under the Law
• 5. Financial Recovery
• 6. Economic Reconstruction
• 7. The Long Robe
• 8. The Old Nobility
• 9. Pax Gallicana
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendix: The Paris Sixteen: a social analysis
• Figures and Maps
• Index