French Wars of Religion

10 Key excerpts on "French Wars of Religion"

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  Beyond the Battlefield

  Reconsidering Warfare in Early Modern Europe

  • Tryntje Helfferich, Howard Louthan, Tryntje Helfferich, Howard Louthan(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The precise phrases of “wars of religion” or “religious war” occasionally appear in documents of the period, but seem to have been relatively rare. A rich language of religious warfare nonetheless permeated the printed pamphlets, treatises, and histories from the period that we know as the French Wars of Religion. The spreading Reformation movement had attracted many converts in France by the 1550s, as roughly ten percent of French subjects and perhaps thirty percent of the noble elites embraced the Reformed faith. 12 Confessional tensions between this growing Calvinist minority and the Catholic majority produced crowd violence, iconoclastic attacks, religious riots, and massacres, especially after the death of King Henri II in a jousting accident in 1559. A series of religious wars between various armed parties of Catholics and Huguenots ensued, lasting with only brief pauses until 1629. Participants and observers embroiled in the conflicts employed the terms troubles, mouvements, malheurs, séditions, émotions, guerres civiles, and rebellions to describe religious warfare. Each of these terms could be used in diverse ways, but they often exhibited overlapping connotations and were employed alongside each other in descriptions of conflicts and grouped together in long lists of the disasters afflicting France. French observers described the initial massacres and armed clashes between Catholics and Huguenots from 1559 to 1562 as “troubles” (troubles). The tragic death of King Henri II in a jousting accident in 1559 produced a breakdown in royal authority that exacerbated religious tensions, and French people described the resulting troubles as creating social disorder and chaos in urban centers and rural villages

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  The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe

  Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change

  • Daniel H. Nexon(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  The composite structure of the French state and the significant autonomy enjoyed by key intermediaries—particularly as coercion-wielders—both limited the ability of the Crown to enforce religious ordinances and rendered it vulnerable to the formation of opposing cross-class and cross-regional religious ties. But this was more than a matter of a weak state unable to capitalize on new military-technical developments. Religious differences exacerbated factional conflicts at the French court by raising the stakes of victory and defeat—not only for great nobles but also for ordinary people who might otherwise be relatively indifferent to which noble house dominated the government. Religion provided a categorical difference through which actors yoked together a variety of groups and interests into relatively well-bounded sites for collective mobilization, whether Huguenot or ultra-Catholic in orientation. This process not only allowed sustained, cross-regional resistance to central authorities, but also deprived the royal government of revenue and manpower for use against internal and external threats.

  The consistent failure of central authorities—or their agents—to broker between opposing confessions and factions also played a key role in the French Wars of Religion. One might argue that these failures were overdetermined: given the weakness of the monarchy, it could not have successfully kept factional conflicts in check even without the added problem of religious differences. But religious cleavages not only made these conflicts much more intractable, they also escalated them beyond a “simple” power struggle at court. The Crown repeatedly proved incapable of making religious concessions that could satisfy Catholics and Huguenots alike. Even Henry IV, who enjoyed a unique position as a bridge between the Huguenots and mainstream Catholics, faced difficulties in his attempts to reconcile the Huguenots to his authority. Violent struggles between the Crown and its Huguenot subjects continued into the Thirty Years’ War.

  The Wars of Religion and State Formation

  We can best understand the impact of the French Wars of Religion on France’s pathway of state formation by considering two features of the civil strife. First, unlike in the Netherlands, France saw a significant Catholic countermobilization against Calvinism. Second, the Huguenot minority in France never made a sustained bid for outright secession. The reasons behind these two aspects of the French Wars of Religion account for how the Reformations accelerated France’s movement along the sovereign-territorial pathway and why religious contestation ultimately favored that pathway in Europe as a whole.

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  The French Huguenots and Wars of Religion

  Three Centuries of Resistance for Freedom of Conscience

  • Stephen M. Davis(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Wipf and Stock

    (Publisher)

  5

  Wars of Religion

  The Wars of Religion first broke out in the spring of 1562 and would last for over three decades. These wars “made clear that France was divided—regionally, socially, and politically—by Calvinism.”163 During these wars there were three periods where the Huguenots wrestled with the dilemma of obedience to the king and obedience to God. The first period dates from the conspiracy of Amboise to kidnap François II in 1560 to Saint Bartholomew in 1572 when the Huguenots endeavored to reconcile their obedience to the king and their obedience to God. They recognized the teachings of Calvin concerning obedience to authority and their duty to honor the king, but the legitimacy of the conspiracy was questioned by Calvin since it was conducted by private individuals rather than by legitimate authority. The second period followed the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre at which time their position grew more radical in retaliation for the slaughter of Huguenots throughout France and reflected their duty to resist unjust rulers. Some historians point to Calvin’s evolving thinking and ambiguity on active resistance to tyranny as justification for Huguenot acts of resistance and retaliation during this time. This period coincided with the rise of the Monarchomaque movement which held to a monarchy by contractual agreement, conditional obedience, and was a precursor to the constitutional monarchy.164 The final period was opened by the death of François d’Alençon (Monsieur ), the last brother of Henri III which placed Henri de Navarre in direct line of succession, in which the Huguenots sought to resolve the conflict tearing at their consciences.165

  The Reformation had reached it numerical peak in 1560 , and the following years would see the numbers ebb. Beginning in 1560 , two years before the wars commenced, lists of Huguenots were created in many cities to deprive people of their rights. One’s name on the list meant running the risk of losing all rights each time a conflict broke out. Throughout these times of trouble, cities used these lists to banish Protestants. Constituted in times of peace, often with the complicity of one’s neighbors, these lists lay dormant for a few months or a few years until needed in time of war to exile Huguenots and claim their homes and all they contained. Their rights were ephemeral, their possessions lost overnight, their communities destroyed, and their future compromised.166 They took up arms to defend themselves, their families, and their religion. They were often used as pawns for political purposes. They lost all confidence in the stability of a world collapsing around them and in the frayed institutions of their nation. Those who rebuffed intimidating attempts to convert them to Catholicism, or refused the supreme allegiance to a monarch owed to God alone, had no other option than to resist. Eight wars took place interspersed with brief periods of peace and compromises, finally ending with the war of three Henris between dynastic rivalries—King Henri III, also known as Henri de Valois and earlier as Duke of Anjou; Henri de Lorraine (1550 –1588 ), Duke of Guise; and Henri de Bourbon, Huguenot leader and king of Navarre, the future King Henri IV. During the Wars of Religion, “so frequent and gruesome were the massacres accompanying these conflicts, so searing the sieges, and so numerous the assassinations of leading political actors, that the events of the ‘time of religious troubles’ burned themselves into French and European historical memory for centuries to come.”167

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  The Causes of War

  Volume III: 1400 CE to 1650 CE

  • Alexander Gillespie(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  When 120 The Wars of Religion in France 21 Skinner, Q (1978) The Foundations of Modern Political Thought , Vol II (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) 215–16, 242, 285, 320; Martines, L (2013) Furies: War in Europe: 1450–1700 (London, Bloomsbury) 12–14. 22 See page 192. 23 The 1577 ‘Catholic League’ in Reddaway, F (ed) (1930) Select Documents in European History , Vol II (London, Methuen) 98. 24 The ‘Edict of Beaulieu, 1576’ in Potter, D (ed) (1997) The French Wars of Religion: Selected Documents (London, St Martins) 163–68; Braghi, G (2014) ‘The Death of Charles IX Valois: An Assassin’s or a Martyr’s Blood?’, French History 28 (3), 303–21. 25 See page 28. the siege of the Protestant seaport of La Rochelle was lifted following a five-month blockade, more than 50 per cent of the Huguenot army of 18,000 men lay dead, dying or had deserted. Nevertheless, they held out against the forces of Charles IX and were rewarded with a further peace in the 1573 Edict of Boulogne. This Edict was a retreat from earlier recognitions of the rights of Huguenots. Now, they were only permitted freedom of conscience in terms of private worship, and only in the three areas which remained under Huguenot control. 21 (ii) Henri III and the Catholic League The French king, Charles IX, died in1574. His successor was his brother, Henri, who had for a few months been the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. Upon accession to the French throne, following more conflict in 1575 and the risk of inter-vention by German and/or English Protestants increasing, Henri III attempted to calm relations with England and reaffirmed the 1572 Treaty of Blois . Furthermore, fol-lowing what he had learnt in his short time in Poland and Lithuania, 22 he disavowed the approach adopted by his brother, Charles IX, and undertook an experiment in toleration with the 1576 Edict of Beaulieu.

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  Western Civilization

  Beyond Boundaries

  • Thomas F. X. Noble, Barry Strauss, Duane Osheim, Kristen Neuschel(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  426 Chapter 15 Europe in the Age of Religious Wars, 1560–1648 Religious and Political Conflict in France and England What conditions led to civil war in France? How did religious and political conflict develop differently in England? In the second half of the sixteenth century, France was convulsed by civil war that had both religious and political causes. A fragile peace was achieved by 1598, but the kingdom was still divided by religion and by military and political challenges to royal authority. England, in contrast, was spared political and religious upheaval in the second half of the century, in part because of the talents and long life of its ruler, Elizabeth I. But in the seventeenth century, religious dissent and political opposition combined to dramatically threaten royal power. The French Religious Wars, 1562–1598 Civil war wracked France from 1562 until 1598. As in the Netherlands, the conflicts in France had religious and political origins and international consequences. The French monarch, like Philip, was unable to monopolize military power. In 1559, the king of France, Henry II (r. 1547–1559), had concluded the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis with Philip II, ending the Habsburg-Valois Wars but died in July of that year from wounds suffered at a tournament held to celebrate the new treaty. His death was a political disaster. Great noble families vied for influence over his young sons, Francis II (r. 1559–1560) and Charles IX (r. 1560-1574). The queen mother, Catherine de’ Medici (day MAY-di-chi) (1519–1589), worked carefully and intelligently to balance the nobles’ interests. But it proved impossible to keep the con- flicts among the great courtiers from boiling over into civil war. Background to Civil War In France, as elsewhere, noble conflict invariably had a violent component. Noblemen carried swords and daggers and were accompanied by armed entourages.

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  Protestant-Catholic Conflict from the Reformation to the 21st Century

  The Dynamics of Religious Difference

  • John Wolffe(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2 Europe’s ‘Wars of Religion’ and their Legacies

  Mark Greengrass

  The inseparability of Christianity from the exercise of power by secular authorities in the Reformation era does not diminish the continuing ideological utility of singling out ‘religion’ as a supposedly discrete domain of human life particularly prone to violence.1

  A recent subject on the French agrégation programme (the examination for senior teachers in the civil service) was ‘Religious Confrontation in Europe from the beginning of the Sixteenth Century to the Middle of the Seventeenth Century’. As usual, it resulted in a flurry of publications seeking to provide intelligible syntheses to candidates.2 For most of the authors, there was no doubt about the importance of the ‘religious confrontation’ of this period to the history of later-modern Europe, its potential to ‘define the political and cultural landscape of the continent for centuries to come’.3 Europe’s ‘wars of religion’ left a profound legacy. When it came to defining the contours of that confrontation for students, however, these authors discovered a baffling polymorphy. On the one hand, there was doctrinal and dogmatic conflict that was exceptionally virulent and took on new and multiple forms. On the other hand, there were armed conflicts generating physical violence that also had a variety of different modalities (formal military conflicts on established lines; civil wars; iconoclastic uprisings; local civil disorders; peasant uprisings, etc). In addition, there was ‘symbolic’ confrontation (iconoclasm; ritualized violence; burning in effigy; the organized destruction of books, etc.), verbal and visual violence, judicial violence (the repression of heresy and dissension by ecclesiastical and secular authorities), extreme physical violence (massacre) and the resistance which was generated in martyrological cults of narration and commemoration. These authors equally had to take into account the significant polyvalence and polysemy in confrontational content

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  Ireland: 1641

  Contexts and reactions

  • Micheal O'Siochru, Jane Ohlmeyer, Micheal O'Siochru, Jane Ohlmeyer(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  11 Language and conflict in the French Wars of Religion Mark Greengrass

  Words, like looks, can kill. If that is so, we should listen to the voices, as well as observe the actions, of those who participated in and contributed to the conflicts of the French Wars of Religion. Yet the history of sectarian conflict in the French Wars of Religion has focused more on the targets of violence, animate and inanimate, than on its vocal manifestations. In 1987, Peter Burke and Roy Porter urged that it was ‘high time for a social history of language, a social history of speech, a social history of communication’.1 This chapter explores the possibilities and problems of writing such an account for these complex events.

  One of the fundamental elements of religious change in the sixteenth century was that it created a contested lexicon. Protestantism generated a ‘speech-community’ whose claims (to speak the truth, to be a godly community) were larger than, and different from, those speech-communities confined by localised customs or specific dialects. Its language was radicalised by the claims to speak for, and to act out, God’s truth and for a reformed life, claims that were impossible to disprove and difficult to contradict, precisely because the language in which they were expressed reinforced their truth-claims. They were deployed by those who would not normally have been expected to have a voice on such matters. Their expression was allowed to those for whom, in other circumstances, it would have seemed inappropriate, offensive or seditious. Language is always a manifestation of cultural power. The force and significance accorded to words used as (or interpreted by others as) hate-speech, oaths and profanities, is a powerful indicator of the significance of language in conflictual circumstances, just as the control of words, and the deployment of oaths of peace are essential instruments of reconciliation.

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  Compassion's Edge

  Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France

  • Katherine Ibbett(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press

    (Publisher)

  4 The writing of the wars involved conflicting and competing genres and voices, building to a cacophony of confused noise. The colloquy of Poissy in 1561, at which Catholics agreed to give the “parti protestant” or Huguenots a hearing, sought to establish some shared ground on forms of worship but was unable to do so. In 1562 Catherine de Médici’s regency government introduced the Edict of Saint-Germain, which allowed a very limited freedom of worship for Protestants and encouraged tolerant relations between the two communities. Yet in March of that same year members of the ultra-Catholic Guise family household attacked a Protestant service and a massacre followed, opening what would be almost four decades of violence. Historians sometimes distinguish between a series of wars—usually eight in total—each brought to a close by an edict or treaty, initially making con-cessions or granting amnesty to the Protestants and insisting on the forgetting of what had come before. 5 On each occasion the suppression of Protestant freedoms started up again soon afterward. In between the promised pauses, Pitiful Sights 31 violence was widespread across most regions of France and across ranks, with hugely damaging effect on the noncombatants dragged in its wake. A partic-ularly bloody turning point was the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Au-gust 1572, in which Protestant leaders and nobles gathered in Paris for a wedding between the king’s Catholic sister and the Protestant Henri de Na-varre were slaughtered by the Guise faction; approximately two thousand died in Paris and three thousand in the provinces.

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  War and Peace in the Religious Conflicts of the Long Sixteenth Century

  • Gianmarco Braghi, Davide Dainese, Gianmarco Braghi, Davide Dainese, Herman J. Selderhuis(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

    (Publisher)

  Bibliography Armitage, D., Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017). Baguenault de Puchesse, G. (ed.), Memoires du vicomte de Turenne, depuis duc de Bouillon, 1565–1586 (Paris: Renouard, 1901). Becanus, M., Disputatio theologica an haereticis servanda sit fides?, in Opuscula theologica, vol. 2 (Mainz, 1614). Bernard, M., Écrire la peur à l’époque des guerres de Religion: Une étude des historiens et mémorialistes contemporains des guerres civiles en France (1562–1598) (Paris: Hermann, 2010). Billacois, F., The Duel: Its Rise and Fall in Early-Modern France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Blair, A.M., Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2010). Bounyn, G., Traité sur les cessions et banqueroutes (Paris: Chevillot, 1586). Brunet, G./Champollion, A./Halphen, E. (ed.), Pierre de l’Estoile: Mémoires-journaux (12 vol.; Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1875–96). Butterworth, E., The Unbridled Tongue: Babble and Gossip in Renaissance France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Calafat, G., “Familles, réseaux et confiance dans l’économie de l’époque modern: Diasporas marchandes et commerce intercultural”, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 66/1 (2011) 513–31. © 2023 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht | Brill Deutschland GmbH ISBN Print: 9783525573259 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647573250 Wars of Religion in the Sixteenth Century and the Problem of Trust 37 Calvin, J., Commentary on the first twenty chapters of the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, trans. T. Myers (2 vol.; Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1849). Carroll, S., Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Christin, O., Une révolution symbolique: L’iconoclasme huguenot et la reconstruction catholique (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991). Christin, O., La paix de religion: L’autonomisation de la raison politique au XVIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1997).

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  Women and Religion in Sixteenth-Century France

  • S. Broomhall(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  5 Religious Politics and Violence This chapter explores women’s participation in religious politics, particularly in the second half of the sixteenth century, when religious differences were transformed into violent conflict in many parts of France. In recent years, historians have increasingly looked to under- stand women’s involvement in political action by terms that take into account the context of female opportunities for power. Research by Sharon Kettering, for example, has questioned the extent of noble- women’s powerlessness in the light of their involvement in domestic patronage and household service and politics. 1 Robert J. Kalas’s case study of the career of Jeanne de Gontault noted how her ceremonial role at court serving the Valois queens gave her the opportunity to voice opinions to the queens in a ‘female world … where some degree of polit- ical power was possible for the wealthy, landed elite’. 2 Kristen Neuschel’s study of noblewomen in times of war argues that they participated in warfare in important material and symbolic ways. 3 This chapter expands such arguments to examine how women of diverse social levels found means to contribute to political actions or military manoeuvres, and to demonstrate their allegiances to the political factions. It contends that women at all levels experienced the devastation to property and lives wrought by the religious violence and sought to express responses with the means at their disposal. Women and national religious politics Women entered into debates on a national scale, often through publication, about the religious troubles that France experienced during the sixteenth century. Several women in the royal family were actively involved in politics despite the fact that Salic law prevented them from 118 ascending the throne. 4 Anne de France was unofficial regent for her brother, Charles VIII, during his minority. Louise de Savoie was twice regent for her son, François I.

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