Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512802252

Citation preview

Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France

Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine Gregory Hanlon

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

T h i s publication w a s awarded the Frank S . and Elizabeth D . B r e w e r Prize o f the A m e r i c a n Society o f C h u r c h History.

Frontispiece ·. L a y r a c street scene with the t o w n hall and parish church steeple, ca. 1920.

Copyright © 1993 by the University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hanlon, Gregory, 1953Confession and community in seventeenth-century France: Catholic and Protestant coexistence in Aquitaine / Gregory Hanlon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8122-3205-4 i. Aquitaine (France)—Church history. 2. Catholic Church—Relations—Reformed Church—History—17th century. 3. Reformed Church—Relations—Catholic Church— History—17th century. 4. Catholic Church—France—Aquitaine—History—17th century. 5. Reformed Church—France—Aquitaine—History—17th century. I. Tide. BR847.A7H36 1993 274.4'7o6—dc20 93-15481 CIP

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii ι

Part ι. "Vivre en union et concorde, unanimement, pour le bien de la Republique"

17

Chapter 1. Was Layrac Typical?

19

Chapter 2. The Institutional Community

39

Chapter 3. Conflict and Arbitration

73

Chapter 4. Sociability and Community

91

Part 2.

. . N'ayant pu ramener son fils a la Religion"

117

Chapter 5. Calvinism from Established Church to Sect

119

Chapter 6. Folk Devotion and the Counter-Reformation

152

Chapter 7. The Nature of Confessional Ambiguity

193

Chapter 8. Religious Identity and Competing Reference Groups

224

Chapter 9. European Dimensions of Confessional Coexistence

262

Sources Bibliography Index

281 287 307

Acknowledgments

Like most books, this one is the result of long years of research, reflection, discussion, and continual revision. I should first thank those agencies who financed repeated trips to the archival well in France: in order of importance, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Research Offices of York University in Toronto and Dalhousie University in Halifax. Also extremely helpful and congenial were the director, Jean Burias, and the staff of the Archives departmentales du Lot-etGaronne in Agen; Lucile Bourrachot, whose familiarity with those archives is prodigious; and Pierre Allouis, who helped me track down important documents in the presbytery of Layrac. The maturation of the ideas in this book was accelerated primarily by American scholars, Philip Benedict at Brown University, Natalie Zemon Davis at Princeton, and Gene Irschick at the University of California at Berkeley, where I taught one enormously stimulating year in 1988—89. If the work remains outside the traditions and trends of American historiography, it is partly due to the training and continued encouragement of my "maitre," Jean-Pierre Poussou, as well as of my former professors at the Universite de Bordeaux. I would also like to express my appreciation to my colleagues at Dalhousie University for their critical reading; to Dr. James Clark for his encouragement of my forays into social psychology; and to Dr. Roy Haines who, having Anglicized the text, caught scores of subtle Gallicisms. As an intelligent nonspecialist reader, Geoffrey Rothwell helped keep the jargon to a minimum. Finally, this book is dedicated to my parents, who financed my undergraduate education in France at some sacrifice to themselves.

Introduction

Peace History? The image of religious strife wherever two or more confessions coexisted in the early modern period is one o f the most enduring in our historical consciousness, and its literature is enormous. This book, however, is about confessional coexistence in a time and place most noted for intolerance. "Peace history" is how Canadian military historian Desmond Morton dubbed a project focusing on the daily interaction and mutual tolerance of Catholics and Protestants in small Gascon towns from the reign of Henri IV to Louis XIV. The notion of coexistence is easily defined, although its conceptual corollary, tolerance, should be clarified from the outset. By "tolerance" I mean a mutual interaction and integration of competing confessional groups into the fabric o f daily social, political, and economic activity within a local community. The subject itself has largely been ignored, outside the history o f the concept of tolerance, although there are passing references to interconfessional harmony in any number of monographs dealing with seventeenth-century Huguenots. 1 To this writer's knowledge, there is a crucial lack of systematic and quantitative analysis o f the phenomenon, not only in France, but in other contemporary European settings. Why are historians uninterested in interconfessional harmony in seventeenth-century France, and in Europe generally? There are several reasons why tolerance and coexistence are not central issues in sociocultural history. Part of the answer lies in the confessional context of so much religious historiography, many historians continuing to i. The recent synthesis by R. Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe isso-i7so (New York: Routledge, 1989), appears to be the first of its kind in English or French to point to research on confessional coexistence in Augsburg and the territory of Osnabrück in particular. The best example in France would probably be the thesis of Robert Sauzet, La Contre-reforme et la reforme catbolique en Bas-Languedoc: le diocese de Nimes au XVIIe siecle (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1979). Older works on Calvinism in the age of Louis XIV tend to ignore the problem of peaceful coexistence: see Daniel Ligou, Le Protestantisme en France, IS98-171S (Paris: S.E.D.E.S., 1968).

2

Introduction

identify, even critically, with confessional beliefs or attitudes judged compatible with the goals of the social and religious militants they study. More than twenty years after Jean Delumeau's Naissance et affirmation de la Reforme, in which both Protestant and Catholic religious reformations were seen as part of the same process, few studies have concentrated simultaneously on differing confessions in a single region, save from the perspective of conflict.2 Many historians still "belong" to either one camp or the other. David Nicholls has isolated several currents of thought dominating even the most recent writing. One is the tradition of Protestant hagiography articulated around the Societe de l'histoire du protestantisme fra^ais. Its foremost exponent, Janine Garrisson, who has contributed more than anyone to the renewal of Huguenot history and its rejuvenation through access to social history, expresses this in a single formula, "Etre Protestant est heroique."3 Most French literature on the subject reflects the same outlook. Protestants are seen as an "elite," precursors of modern thought and sensitivity, the vanguard of "progressive" trends in Western civilization, from capitalism, to individualism, to democratic socialism. The principal weakness of this approach lies in its assumptions about the actual content of religious doctrines and attitudes and in the way these are thought to influence behavior. There is no attempt in Protestants du Midi to make controlled comparisons with Catholics in the same region, to compare at different periods the perceived content of Reformation doctrines and those of the Counter-Reformation, and the manner in which they might have been assimilated by the bulk of the population.4 The bias introduced is far reaching, and as a result the stereotypes of each confession have been relayed into the present. Lingering confessionalism is also evidenced in the spate of works commemorating the tercentenary of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.5 2. J. Delumcau, Naissance et affirmation de la Reforme (Paris: P.U.F., 1968); see also the companion volume by the same author, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris: P.U.F., 1972). 3. J. Garrisson-Estebe, Protestants du Midi i$S9-iS9S (Paris-Toulouse: Privat, 1980), 76. 4. Janine Garrisson and Bernard Vogler have nevertheless published a valuable study comparing Rhenish and Languedocian Calvinists in the late sixteenth century, based on consistorial archives: J. Garrisson-Estebe and B. Vogler, "La Genese d'une societe protestante: Etude comparee de quelques registres consistoriaux languedociens et palatins vers 1600," Annates: Economies, societes, civilisations (1976): 362-388. 5. The five works used for this study are: J.-R. Armogathe, Croire en liberie: L'Eglise catholique et la revocation de l'Edit de Nantes (Paris: O.E.I.L., 1985), in my view the weakest of the lot, essentially an apology attempting to demonstrate that the Catholic Church as an institution had no responsibility in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; B. Dompnier, Le Venin de l'heresie: Image du protestantisme et combat catholique au ue siecle (Paris: Le Centurion,

Introduction

3

That a clutch of significant books should appear simultaneously, proposing different interpretations of the Revocation, bears witness to the vigor of the debate, although the dominant tone is ecumenical. The approach to the history of biconfessionalism in seventeenth-century France is nevertheless fundamentally about conflict, so that the Revocation serves as a moral lesson to warn us all against the consequences of intolerance of ethnic or religious minorities today.6 One need not belabor the point that all reference to the "respect de la difference," apropos of immigrant workers in the late twentieth century, is fundamentally anachronistic, whatever its intrinsic ethical value. One should not condemn—or even look for—this kind of attitude in the seventeenth century, when religious beliefs were a central pillar of cultural reference. Ecumenism still stresses the agency of religious belief operating at the center of individual consciousness. More recently, the loosening of confessional bonds over historians has been replaced with an interest in and emphasis on the notion of "religiousness," or the aptitude for belief in groups and individuals. Belief here might mean the confident acceptance of basic tenets consensually taken to be true. Rather than studying religion as a way of "belonging," the focus is transferred to the study of religion as a way of "believing." A generally positive tone is ascribed to believing, whatever the historical content of its tenets and canons. Since these canonical ascriptions and the more nebulous folk beliefs constituted such a vast category of culture in premodern civilizations, which had no clear frontier between sacred and profane, historians have righdy stressed the place that these had in the coherence—the system—of beliefs of a particular group. Little attention, however, is directed at not believing, both from the angle of doubt and that of crude and inarticulate unbelief. The postulate of consensus and coherence dispenses with the need to explain the diversity of opinion or behavior, save in terms of conflict. The more numerous studies of the Counter-Reformation in both 1985), which examines the ideological stance of the Church when confronted by religious opinions which diverged from its own; J. Garrisson, L'Edit de Nantes et sa revocation: Histoire d'une intolerance (Paris: Le Seuil, 1985), the title of which reveals the content adequately; E. Labrousse, Une Foi, une lot, un roi? La Revocation de l'Edit de Nantes, (Paris-Geneva: Payot/Labor et Fides, 1985); finally J. Queniart, La Revocation de l'Edit de Nantes: Protestants et catholiques franfais de iss>8 a 1685 (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1985), which in spite of its ecumenism, remains a study of confessional conflict. 6. This is particularly true not only of the text but also of the preface to Dompnier's work by Jean Delumeau, in a plea against intolerance, "un mal eternel qui nous menace toujours et qui sevit a nouveau avec une violence jusque-la inegalee sur la plus grande partie de la terre," Dompnier, Le Venin de l'heresie, I.

4

Introduction

uniformly Catholic and in confessionally mixed regions have nuanced our understanding of what used to be called "popular religion," or "local religion,"7 and the focus has shifted rather to "religiousness," whether ascribed to a Christian tradition, as in the work of John Bossy, an "animist" one, as suggested by Keith Thomas, Robert Muchembled, Carlo Ginzburg, or Jean Delumeau, or some admixture of the two. The earlier works of this type, by Louis Perouas and Jean-Fra^ois Soulet, were largely ecclesiastical in conception and tended to overemphasize the role of clergy and its impact on rural populations.8 According to this model, which still has its exponents (Fran9ois Lebrun, Robert Sauzet, Jean de Viguerie, Rene Taveneaux), clerics instilled a "purified" religion and fought "superstition" through catechization and discipline: first monks, then parish priests acculturated illiterate rustics with Tridentine theology. Partly, this was an acculturation of the countryside by cities, their colleges, seminaries, and monasteries. This mission, as we may judge from diocesan archives, is still seen as originating in the social elites and working downward, and conceives of religious beliefs as being "two-tiered" (Natalie Davis), with one tier for the elites and another for the "people." In a recent variation on this model, John Bossy postulates that theological distinctions were more or less assimilated by this rural civilization in a somewhat simplified or garbled form as a consequence of missionary efforts. Geertzian anthropology has been applied to this approach with some enthusiasm, to determine what might have been the affective content and the shared meanings of ritual practices and religious beliefs among individuals in "traditional" or "folkloric" societies. One of its welcome contributions is that it portrays subjects, with particular goals, as knowing participants in religious culture. Despite deemphasizing clerical predominance, however, research along these lines concurs with the broad outline of religious history developed by confessional historians. There is general agreement about a chronology of Catholicization from a period of quasi7. For the notion of "local" religion as opposed to an official one, see W. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); for a recapitulation of the debate over "popular" religion, N. Zemon Davis, "From 'Popular Religion' to Religious Culture," in Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, ed. S. Ozment (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1982), 321-541. 8. L. Perouas, Le Diocese de la Rochelle de 1648 ά 1724, Sociologie et pastorale (Paris: S E V P E N , 1964); J.-F. Soulet, Traditions et reformes reltgteuses dans les Pyrenees centrales au 17c siecle: le diocese de Tarbes de 1602 a 1716 (Pau: Editions Marrimpouey, 1974). Two important works on Aquitaine similarly inspired by what Natalie Davis calls the "priest's-eye view" are B. Peyrous, "La Reforme catholique dans le diocese de Bordeaux, 1600—1719," (These d'Etat, 1981), and A. Dupuy, "La Vie diocesaine dans la province ecclesiastique d'Auch, 1650-1776," (Doctoral diss., Universite de Bordeaux, 1969).

Introduction

5

unanimous, part animist "sacramental" religion of the mid-fifteenth century to imperfect alignment with a more austere and intellectualized doctrine promoted by most ecclesiastics and part of the lay elites in the late seventeenth century. The result was the deepening of a profound cultural cleavage between educated and "popular" cultures.9 Finally, a broad consensus exists among social (and other) historians that "conflict" is the stuff of which history is made, and religious violence in the early modern period seems to be a rich vein, close to the surface and easily mined. Historians have certainly not invented the violence of the period, and it is natural that most of their attention has been fixed on it. For centuries partisans have unearthed evidence to illustrate it. Yet how much do we really know about the widespread violence in the wars of religion? Lives ofthe Martyrs, the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and the atrocities so candidly confessed by Blaise de Monluc impinge on our consciousness.10 Of intracommunal violence, its forms, its apologists, its aftermath, however, the picture is far from clear. A closer reading of Monluc should alert us to the possibility that complicities and compromises might have been normal in local contexts, even during the most paroxysmal phases of the wars of religion. Systematic research has yet to be initiated in Aquitaine, the eye of the storm for every period of these wars. Even apart from spasmodic brutal conflict, historians see violence as the most visible manifestation of relations based on pursuit of power. Institutionalized religious "groups" or "confessions," or "churches," wield power that is legitimized by its "discourse." Religious history of the early modern period is viewed partly as a social and political process distinct from the content of doctrine. The point of departure for this analysis lies again in the two-tier nature of religious belief, and in spite of the ambiguity of the notion of "popular" religion, there was a concerted effort by social and political elites to indoctrinate, or "acculturate" urban and rural populations. Religious history, as the "Anglo-Saxon" historians generally point out, is not only about religion, but about power and who wields it. 11 "Structures" and "systems" of religion in society are pregnant with "contradictions" leading to "conflict" and "struggle," and ultimately, to change. I do not intend to adopt an antithetical viewpoint, but would question whether conflict is the only 9. Perhaps the best overview of this type is the work by John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 10. D. L. Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: La Violence dans lesguerres de religion (Paris, Champ Vallon, 1990). 11. D. Nicholls, "The Social History of the French Reformation: Ideology, Confession and Culture," Social History (1984): 25-43.

6

Introduction

universal aspect o f human societies. Here I would like to invite scholars to invert their analyses postulating conflict at the base o f social relations. History seeking to elaborate social relations in terms o f strategies o f conciliation, cooperation, and avoidance of conflict has not received due attention, save perhaps in narrow studies o f infrajudicial negotiation. In my view, social relations are not fundamentally harmonious, conflictive, consensual, or repressive, but are all of these. None of the approaches adopted adequately demonstrates the existence of gray areas between confessional poles. Coexistence and complicity in early modern France, England, or Germany were reflections o f that, and they are all the more clearly perceptible in that no factors of "ethnic" diversity (that is, Jews or Moors in Spain, with their specific languages, dress, and literature, with roots projecting back centuries) complicated what was primarily a doctrinal cleavage, often amplified by socioeconomic differentiation. Only Elisabeth Labrousse has refused to accept a CatholicProtestant dichotomy. While reminding us o f the near-unanimity of the ideology o f intolerance among seventeenth-century elites, she prefers to situate the Revocation of the Edict o f Nantes in a process of Catholic and monarchical reform toward the "moralization" and the "normalization" o f society. Catholic elites, like Protestants, imposed values o f order, regularity, decorum, common sense, and discipline: they were all values o f the period, classiques et bourgeoises.12 To return to our problem, was local coexistence a "secondary" phenomenon? Was it an isolated situation arising from a set of fortunate circumstances, or was it structurally plausible and widespread? Was it a residual phenomenon resulting from the wars of religion, destined to be "corrected" over time? Was there a dynamic o f confessional coexistence, and what were the processes at work? Beyond these issues, what does religious coexistence in a confessionally mixed community in early modern Europe reveal about confessional identity generally? What if religious toleration was "normal," either regionally or wherever the wars o f religion resulted in confessional promiscuity? These are new questions that this monograph will address. I do not suggest that there is anything like a general rule in the physical sciences explaining the nature o f tolerance, but I am convinced there was a generality at work that transcended local situations and which I attempt to demonstrate in the final section of the book by venturing outside Aqui12. Labrousse, Une Foi, une lot, un roi?, 226.

Introduction

7

taine. The reader must excuse the brusque transition from the local and regional theater to a consideration of early modern Europe generally. The faits etgestes of people in Layrac are of great significance, since only individuals locked into time and place actually create history, in this instance through the mundane art of getting along.

From Behavior to Belief What constituted tolerance in the seventeenth century? The connotations of the term were negative. By tolerance one meant enduring a physically or morally painful situation.13 In our context it was conceded by hostile authorities who could not admit the legitimacy of separation from or opposition to the established religion. Tolerance in no way implied the acceptance of a "right" to be different. It was a reciprocity of weakness, a regrettable situation best mediated in terms of "police," public peace and order, an art de vivre de l'etat which Alphonse Dupront perceives as one of Europe's great opportunities.14 By understanding this kind of grudging tolerance in a local context we may come to understand the ways in which religious orthodoxies were imposed and maintained in society generally. The examination of religious practice in a confessionally mixed environment should therefore teach us something about the nature of religious tolerance, practically conflated with the term coexistence, just as coexistence should teach us something about the assimilation of doctrine in concrete situations. Emphasis here is on the study of practice rather than on discourse or representations, mostly because practice tends to be much more tangible than belief.15 Since the late 1970s, studies of culture in early modern Europe have moved from the orbit of Durkheimian quantification and objectification, into that of "symbolic interaction," or the analysis of systems of meaning in which historical subjects lived and acted, with an attempt to understand the subjective context of past individuals. The interactionist approach entails 13. E. Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue franfaise du seizieme siede (Paris, 1925-66) 7:258, "tolerance: Vertu qui consiste ä supporter ce qui est penible physiquement ou moralement." 14. A. Dupront, "Reflexions sur l'heresie moderne," in Heresies et Societes dans I'Europe pre-industrielle, ne-iSe siecles (Paris: Mouton, 1968), 291 et seq. See also Ν. M. Sutherland, "Persecution and Toleration in Reformation Europe," in Persecution and Toleration: Studies in Church History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) 21:153-161. 15. A model study of attitudes and representations drawn from the minutiae of notarial archives would be Giovanni Levi's Inheriting Power: the Story of an Exorcist (Chicago, 1988).

8

Introduction

an epistemological shift, requiring historians to put themselves in the skin of people in the past, to understand their goals and actions. It also serves to avoid anachronism. This approach has blossomed into a study of language, symbols, rituals, ideologies, and identities. One important gain is that we no longer see people in the past as huddled masses pushed by "great impersonal forces" across the landscape of social history. Seeing them as both individuals and conscious agents, they no longer appear so "unconscious." The more scrupulous studies in this vein have stressed new and valuable facets less commonly presented in "serial" studies of testaments or criminal archives where the sheer number of individuals press faceless into the historian's view, like cells under a microscope.16 This new cultural history deals more commonly with individuals, with unusual and intriguing incidents yielding insight through close analysis of selected texts. Far from being perceived as anonymous automatons propelled by great unseen forces, we are beginning to understand people in the past largely in the way we wish to see ourselves, as conscious of their goals and of the ways available to achieve them. Both social elites and "popular" classes are held to have distilled their actions into a meaningful "discourse," which serves as our window to elucidate understanding. Aside from the complications arising from the permanent competition of multiple and contradictory prescriptions for belief, problems will arise whenever there is a rupture between discourse, which is articulate, and behavior, which is not. There was no permissible discourse in favor of tolerance. In the immense controversial literature the two confessions were seen as antithetical. Yet there remain both theoretical and methodological weaknesses here, if I understand the theory correctly. One drawback is that the subjectivist stance assumes a human requirement for holistic meaning, a problematic assumption which is doubtless the result of an excessively humanistic perspective. In our context, individuals are presumed to assimilate the broad oudine of religious doctrine, to internalize it and to act accordingly. For Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century this should lead to a striking contrast in behavior and sensibility. To use one recent study based on these familiar assumptions and comparing the two confessions at the time of the Catholic League, Pierre Deyon depicts Calvinists as prototypes of the modern "bourgeois" with an active inner life, an acute moral conscience, reflected and lived through a life of sobriety, 16. An example of this might be R. Darnton, "A Police Inspector Sorts His Files: The Anatomy of the Republic of Letters," in The Great Cat Massacre (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 145-189, or Arlette Farge La Vie fragile: Violence, pouvoirs et solidarites a Paris au XVIIIe siecle (Paris, 1986).

Introduction

9

piety and austerity. Persecution was suffered patiently by them as an ordeal endured by the just in their quest for spiritual salvation. Catholics are addressed in contrasting terms: outwardly devout, responsive to a more immanent reflection of the holy, noisily manifesting collective solidarity in community rituals, submissive to conscientious priests and monks who pursued and mediated salvation. 17 The images are limpid, stark contrasts. They allow a clear understanding of confessional doctrines (discourses) because the picture is one of high definition. Scholarship based on such clear ideas tends to advance surefootedly toward wider generalizations or striking metaphors. The most egregious examples are generally based entirely on literary sources. 18 More sophisticated because more deeply rooted in empiricism are the analyses of Natalie Davis, as in her article on the "Sacred and the Body Social," where religion "formed and gave expression" to urban values in sixteenth-century Lyon. The analytical process proceeds from symbols toward an elucidation of their meaning, from the abstract to the concrete. The intellectual process required of the historian is to discover "how religion continuously shapes a sense of urban community and of urban solidarity" (these last assumed to correspond to a particular content). This is determined by revealing the "meanings of the metaphors." Religious options are "languages" or "syntaxes" which tend to promote or inhibit parts of human experience. Catholics and Protestants each had a different amalgam of cultural references, a "grammar" or a "syntax" stemming from central notions of their creeds; these "conceptual structures," or "collective images," were vehicles for interpreting experience and in the measure that they differed from each other, rendered mutual incomprehension likely. When people "interact through religion," two different schemata of reference will lead to misunderstanding and conflict, despite whatever shared cultural patterns may already exist. Professor Davis thus contrasts Protestant "open space" with Catholic closed and sacral space, visible social and ecclesiastical organs with invisible organs, the "communications network" of Protestants with the "body social." 19 All of these abstractions, however,

17. P. Dcyon, "La Propagande religieuse au i6e siecle," Annates: Economies, societes, civilisations (1981): 16-25. This example is a bit unfair to Deyon who is not a specialist in religious history and who has produced admirable work on social and economic history of the period. 18. For example, E. Leites, The Puritan Conscience and Modem Sexuality (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986); D. Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 19. Ν. Z. Davis, "The Sacred and the Body Social in i6th-Century Lyon," Past and Present, 1 (1981): 40—70.

ίο

Introduction

postulate commitment on the part of social agents and an instinctive coherence of ideas expressed by doctrinal notions, and any potential middle ground or dynamic of coexistence goes essentially unexplored. I have problems with these approaches, which might be called "essentialist," because the authors "know" what it is they are studying from the outset, and strive to forge the metaphors and formulae by which the unlearned might apprehend and defer to their interpretation. Reading meaning into metaphors might illuminate selected texts, but it leaves little room for being surprised by the evidence. One difficulty with assigning holistic meaning to symbols, as Roger Chartier maintains, is that the symbolic sign is "unstable," that a plurality of meanings can be given to any particular symbol, and that recognition of a symbol varies from one individual to another.20 While I agree with this, my reservations lie primarily at a deeper level; with respect to the assumption of belief preceding behavior, or the notion of belief and psychological commitment as an all-encompassing causal relation. Much of the history of "mentalities" is built upon assumptions linking articulate thought to behavior in a fairly consistent manner.21 It would be fine if this were true. Even if the confessional discourse were coherent, if it clearly mapped out lines of different behavior, if we could explain the meanings of symbolic systems in the maze of potential explanations, does this still not assume that individuals were committed to their beliefs?22 Do individuals not constandy act out roles, in a state of "suspended disbelief," and prove able to adopt others as circumstances require?23 Is commitment to coherence not rather the trait of a specific type of personality? Here I confess my uncertainty as to the answers to questions at the heart of historical analysis. I would like to nudge the tenor of research in cultural history back into an empirical, even neo-positivist direction.24 My approach would relegate to 20. R. Chartier, "Culture as Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France," in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Steven Kaplan, (New York: Mouton, 1984), 229-253. 21. Can one truly analyze the central values of a culture uniquely through discourse? An ambitious attempt to do so would be that of D. Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 22. Examples of some of the basic psychological literature might be C. Kiesler, The Psychology of Commitment: Experiments Linking Behavior to Belief (New York: Academic Press, 1971) and J.-L. Beauvois and R. Joule, Soumtssion et ideologies: Psychosociologie de la rationnalisation (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1981). 23. S. Budd, Sociologists and Religion (London: Collier-MacMillan, 1973), 8 et seq. 24. By neo-positivism I designate an intellectual stance which posits the existence of an external reality independent of our mental categories, and which can be apprehended (even if only imperfectly) by experimental and rational/deductive methods. It searches for general, if not universal, patterns in view of some measure of predictability.

Introduction

ιι

the periphery the assumption that most contemporaries adhered to both the spirit and the letter of the doctrines they professed or the ideas they expressed. This is not a blanket indictment against hermeneutics or the use of literary sources as illustration in sociocultural history, but rather a plea for methodological eclecticism, refusing the dichotomy and exclusiveness both of symbolic interactionism and of "objective" approaches. Much of this study focuses upon the interaction of individuals "around" religion. Since religion is not an autonomous form of experience, I want to stress its complexities, its contradictions, its "messiness" deriving from its roots in social relations. I would hypothesize that in early modern communities, culture offered multiple references and multiple choices so that individuals could play simultaneously on several fields of commitment or engagement. This was approached with some acuity by Paul Veyne, Les Grecs ont-ils cru ά leurs mythes?2S Religious meaning is received "like a Vulgate." Yet there could be a peaceful coexistence of contradictory beliefs, or half-beliefs, or hesitations. Another psychological possibility holds that belief itself is too unstable to have a consistent effect on behavior for many, perhaps most, persons. In an extreme view, which as yet lacks empirical evidence, verbal reports of belief or attitude states might have little relation to motivation and behavior.26 Even without adopting Steven Stich's extreme theory it would be best to postulate that belief and unbelief should be studied in tandem, to be detected as they seem to appear, in fragments rather than synthesized forms. To quote Paul Pruyser, "consciousness is a batdeground upon which beliefs, disbeliefs and unbeliefs contend." 27 Neither reality nor cultural models are one single indisputable thing to which all have equal access, but they present themselves selectively, situated individuals taking reality to be so and so. 28 Culture cannot be reduced to a few coherent discourses. Motivations were and are complex and often contradictory, and this should be reflected in our analysis of how contemporaries constructed their world. Finally, subjective choices and actions were limited, oriented, prompted by preexisting patterns of mobility, economic relations and structures of authority, and tacit cultural horizons predating the confessional split, which must also be integrated into the heart of our study. Confessional coexistence is a window on the engagement and disengagement of individ25. P. Veyne, Les Grecs ont-ils cru a leurs mythes? (Paris: Le Seuil, 1983), 97 et seq. 26. Stephen Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1983), 227 et seq. 27. P. Pruyser, Between Belief and Unbelief (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 6. 28. Ibid., 206 et seq.

12

Introduction

uals or social actors on the central tenets of their culture. It is difficult to gauge the degree of religious commitment, certainly naive to postulate it from the start as a given. This problem has been approached by Margaret Spufford, in the context of religious fragmentation in seventeenth-century England,29 although she still puts much emphasis on the internal coherence of individuals' religious beliefs.

Methods and Means The monograph provides the proper framework in a study focusing on individual behavior and belief. This work is an "enhanced" monograph, starting with the selection of a reasonably typical community in Aquitaine, Layrac-en-Brulhois. Essentially, I ask only two questions: (i) Was tolerance widespread? and (2) Why was the Protestant minority absorbed despite the absence of overt persecution? In the first four chapters, I demonstrate the existence of tolerance, both through an absence of interconfessional conflict, and through an intense sociability englobing most inhabitants in a cocoon of mutual relations. In the following chapters, with a wider palette of sources, yet still concentrating upon Layrac, I examine the context and processes of doctrinal assimilation for both Catholics and Protestants, and their limits. The second part explores in roughly concentric circles wider areas: the Agenais-Condomois and southwestern France and the Huguenot Midi generally. This regional, as opposed to local focus, is necessary to show the integrative function of regalist and Catholic ideology and the display of outward unanimity which was its instrument. Finally, I shall broaden my range in order to review studies of confessional coexistence elsewhere, from sixteenth-century Münster to the inverted situation of Catholic minorities in Stuart and Tudor northern England, none of which have attempted generalization. Readers may desire more background information on the region than a monograph can be expected to furnish. This book is an outgrowth of my Univers des gens de bien, a study of regional elite culture in the seventeenth century in the small towns comprising the "urban" network of the Agenais.30 Struck by the infrequency of strife in the century following the close 29. M. Spufford, "Can We Count the 'Godly' and the 'Conformable' in the 17th Century?" Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36 (1985): 428-438. 30. G. Hanion, L'Univers des gens de bien: culture et comportements des elites urbaines en Aßenais-Condomois au ιγε siede (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1989).

Introduction

13

of the religious wars, and the way that confessional tension was generated by clergy and outsiders, I found it necessary to go from the general to the particular. Layrac was chosen as the test case because of the range of its sources. There is still much that is missing, particularly sources traditionally used in religious history: the diocesan archives for Condom, and the judicial archives for the Brulhois are virtually nonexistent. Neither livres de raison nor personal correspondence has survived. There are no pastoral visits, no ecclesiastical court records (the archives of the Officialite de Condom would have been invaluable), no inquests on the state of the parish: there are no requests for dispensations. Few documents pertain to the Benedictine monastery or to the tiny Dominican convent. Apart from an ambitious compilation by Pierre Dubourg, the late nineteenth-century cure, there are no chronicles of the town or its history. To compensate for this lack, however, I will return in the second section to such materials dealing with comparable towns in the adjoining diocese of Agen, including a full range of literary and ecclesiastical sources. In spite of such lacunary sources, there is still for Layrac a convergence of vital documents permitting us to trace the overlapping of individual destinies. They can be summarized as follows: 1. Layrac has a Protestant baptismal register and Catholic parish registers, incomplete after 1628, but intact after 1652. E. William Monter and Philip Benedict have explored demographic sources in a number of useful ways: rates of illegitimacy, age at marriage, the significance of baptismal names and designation of godparents, the seasonality of marriage, premarital conception, and so on. 3 1 2. Also for Layrac the consistorial register is particularly rich from 1590 until the end of the public cult in 1671. The consistory was a coopted board of pious Calvinists that administered church property, cooperated with the pastor in church matters, and above all functioned as a kind of informal tribunal to keep peace within the confessional group, and call sinners to account. Consistorial records are of variable utility since their explicitness depends on the zeal of the minister and the consistory. The fear that excessive zeal would drive away members of the flock and only profit Catholic missionaries constitutes a serious flaw in the nature of the source, 31. E. W. Monter, "Historical Demography and Religious History in i6th-Century Geneva,^"Journal of Interdisciplinary History (1979): 399-427; also see P. Benedict, "La Population reformee en France au 17ε siecle,"Annales: Economies, societes, civilisations (1987): 1433-1465·

14

Introduction

3.

4.

5.

6.

since denunciations were generally muted after 1640. It is never easy to generalize; even the most energetic consistory pursued only a fraction of the community during any particular period. One rarely knows if the misdeeds denounced were commonly committed or were rather exceptions to the general godliness of the congregation. This source is supplemented by the decisions of a number of provincial synods held in the province after 1660, in which representatives from Layrac participated and aired common grievances. Municipal proceedings records begin in i6o9*and end in 1673, covering almost continuously the decline of the Huguenot community from the period of its preponderance under Henri IV to the end of the public cult. They are invaluable in defining the nature of the political community and the commonwealth's relation to outside forces. Snatches from the judicial archives of the Senechaussee d'Armagnac have survived. They are composed primarily of a list of civil proceedings recorded for the Brulhois in mid-century and a list of sentences and decisions, without elaboration, stemming from criminal proceedings before the same court, in the first half of the century. The Uwes terriers of 1604,1624, and 1679 furnish lists of landowners living within the jurisdiction, with the extent of their property, their place of residence, and, for the last, their occupation. The exploitation of this source is not without its problems, but it is easy to ascribe confessional affiliation to this quasi-complete list of local households, and some of the relations of land and power. Most importandy, there are eighty-one Hasses, or thick bundles of notarial contracts of various types. Most of these are of an economic or financial nature, "obligations" being the most useful for our purposes. There are few postmortem inventories worth studying, since they were more commonly utilized in larger towns and later periods. Extremely useful, however, are the hundreds of marriage contracts and a sample of 313 testaments permitting more substantial analyses of pious clauses, patterns of succession, family solidarities and disputes, mixed marriages and literacy levels. In addition, there are apprenticeship contracts and accommodements. Notarial archives, like municipal proceedings, reveal better than any other documents with the notable exception of the informations judiciaires the extent of daily interaction in a community.

Introduction

15

There are drawbacks resulting from this focus on Layrac, and inherent in the genre of the monograph. An important one is in the small size of the statistical base. As such, many of the conclusions should be seen as tentative, to be compared with scholars using similar methods elsewhere. 32 Returning to the rich holdings for the diocese of Agen has largely offset the disadvantage of not having diocesan records and literary sources. Church archives, however, emphasize normative discourses and tend to operate according to a binary logic of with/against, good/bad, us/them, and are primarily sensitive to ordering relations around the church group and its specific preoccupations. It is my opinion, however, that nothing can replace the establishment of lists of individuals and their confessional allegiance for the purpose of advancing beyond a superficial impression of religiosity and social relations. It is the method that should be used wherever we have lists of Huguenots and sets of Catholic parish registers, with a good cross-section of notarial documents. I would speculate that the generalization of this approach should alter our fundamental assumptions about the religiosity of early modern Europe. A drawback in the utilization of these sources is that it depends upon name recognition in order to make sense of patterns. The bane of local studies resides in the number of people with identical patronyms, given the scribe's general disinclination to provide socioprofessional qualification. Differing allocation of given names by Catholics and Protestants limits the confusion to some extent, without eradicating it. Crosschecking lists of individuals' names, the occasional list of heads of families and occupations for each confession, and the sheer profusion of notarial documentation still makes it possible to reconstruct a network of social relations with considerable accuracy, though the size of the territory is at the limit of what is feasible. The validity of this method depends largely upon the typicality of our selection of Layrac, upon which there will be more to say in the following chapter. It is hoped that the sympathetic reader will see this study as one awaiting confirmation, where new research may yield important regional variations, and to which I will eventually allude. 32. Philip Benedict has prepared a study of important dimensions on Protestant demography across France, and to which we will refer throughout this work: The Huguenot Population of France, 1600-1685. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 81, part 5,

1991.

Part One cc

Vivre en union et concorde, unanimement, pour le bien de la Republique"

ι. Was Layrac Typical?

A Necessary Cohabitation For a brief moment in 1562, as royal officials Blaise de Monluc and the Sieur de Burie rushed from town to town trying to quell an incipient civil war in Aquitaine, it looked as if the entire region would "revolt" to heresy.1 "Churches" were feverishly established all over France, but particularly in the Midi. As one jurade (municipal assembly) after another declared for Calvinism, church elders elected captains and recruited soldiers to protect their ministers and congregations. There is no way of knowing their precise number at that moment, and the content of the term would have been impossibly vague as doctrine was in the process of formation.2 The turning point came with the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris, August 24,1572, where several thousand Calvinists perished. The event was echoed by a score of local bloodlettings in the provinces and stiffened Catholic resolve to resist forced conversions wrought by Calvinist nobles and magistrates. Protestant numbers quickly collapsed across the north of France, as in the case of Rouen, where numbers dropped from about 16,500 in 1570 to only a few thousand ten years later.3 In response to the Calvinist peril, northern cities were also among the first to experience burgeoning Catholic devotional lay confraternities. Despite scant ecclesiastical support, these organizations formed the armature of resistance within the context of a traditional "exterior" or theatrical religious expression. Penitents and then mendicant friars occupied the center stage in Paris and in other French cities at the time of the Catholic League (1585-1594).4 The ebbing of the northern congregations reinforced the southern ι. B. de Monluc, Commentaires, 1321-1576 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 498. 2. J. Garrisson-Estebe, Protestants du Midi, iss9~wS (Paris-Toulouse: Privat, 1980), 65. 3. P. Benedict, "The Catholic Response to Protestantism: Church Activity and Popular Piety in Rouen, 1560-1600," in Religion and the People, 800-1700, ed. James Obelkevich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 168-190. 4. J. Bossy, "Leagues and Associations in i6th-Century French Catholicism," Voluntary Religion: Studies in Church History 23 (Oxford, 1986), 171-189.

20

Was Layrac Typical?

accent of Calvinism already discernible in the time ofMonluc. Even in 1570, at the moment of their greatest extension, their numbers would not have surpassed two million people, or barely 15 percent of the kingdom. Janine Garrisson-Estebe speculates that by 1600 there were about one million Huguenots in the French "Midi," comprising about one-quarter of the population. The vast arc from Poitou, through Guyenne and Languedoc and northward across the Vivarais and Dauphine to Lyon, contained from twothirds to three-quarters of French Calvinists in five hundred "churches," maybe one-third fewer than at the outset of the religious wars.5 However, the density of their implantation determined their relation to the monarchy and to the Catholic majority. Janine Garrisson once considered the rapid expansion of Calvinism as the manifestation of an inarticulate aspiration to an "Occitanie" on the part of southern elites, akin to the spread of the Cathar heresy in the thirteenth century.6 There was no exact geographical correspondence of Calvinism to the extinct Albigensian doctrine, no sense of direct filiation of a town or a region to particularism through heresy. The argument equates Occitan with Huguenot with altogether too much confidence. Calvinist consistories, their preachers and their Bibles were precocious agents of the French language in the Midi, particularly in rural areas where Catholic pastoral activity was conducted almost exclusively in Occitan dialects. As for the civil wars, they were just that: intercommunity fratricide raising soldiers and money locally.7 Finally, the southern Counter-Reformation was both indigenous and vigorous, expressed in a baroque aesthetic of Italian and Spanish origin. It would be difficult to maintain that the "spirit" of this ethnic group was captured by one confession or the other. "Occitan" society, if indeed it constituted an ethnic entity beyond the similarity of language, was polarized between confessions, warring intermittently between 1560 and 1630. The largest cities of the Occitan-speaking south remained solidly Catholic—Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseille, Aix-en-Provence—along with the 5. Garrisson-Estebe, Protestants du Midi, 83. Philip Benedict revises these numbers downward, estimating about one million Huguenots in all of France, including Beam, in 1600. See his Huguenot Population of France, 1600-1685, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 81, pt. 5,1991. 6. J. Estebe, "Quelques aspects originaux de la Reforme dans le Midi," Actes du g6e Congres national des societes savantes, ip7i, Toulouse. France du Nord et France du Midi: Contacts et influences reciproques, (1978), 1:213-221. 7. For example, the ardor of local nobilities around Nerac in 1621; La Rebellion de Nerac et la surprise de Caumont, par la trahison des rebelles, qui avoient faict la protestation, avec sa reprise (Bordeaux, 1621), 24 et seq.

Was Layrac Typical?

21

vast and archaic rural interior of the Massif Central, Limousin, Gascony, Auvergne, and Provence. Calvinism struck roots in manufacturing, commercial and administrative cities of secondary rank—principally Montauban, Montpellier, and Nimes—along with a sprinkling of minor towns such as Bergerac, Nerac, Pau, Castres, Privas, and Clermont-Lodeve. The "troubles" reduced decades of Valois authoritarian monarchy to a shambles. The epopee of Protestant cities has been chronicled by Janine Garrisson-Estebe and likened to the Dutch revolt against Spain. 8 Their "Estates-General of the Midi" elaborated consultative bodies around the nuclei of municipal authorities, with an "executive" of princes and their warrior clienteles. Seizure of ecclesiastical property and the appropriation of royal taxes by Huguenot towns financed the maintenance of small armies and construction of fortifications. Above all, the Reformed Estates-General embraced towns not connected to each other by continuous territory. Islands of an archipelago in a sea of hostile or at best indifferent peasants, they managed to retain a modicum of political cohesion. The Catholic response was growing dissatisfaction with the alternatively intransigent and conciliatory policies of Henri III and likewise coalesced into a loose association of municipal governments, local lords and ecclesiastics, collecting money and raising troops for protracted, though intermittent, warfare. 9 Languedoc and Aquitaine probably incurred more destruction than any other region in France. 10 Spontaneous local truces broke out across the Midi in the year following Henri IV's conversion to Catholicism in 1593. By then the Calvinist population had acquired the distribution it would retain during the seventeenth century. The Edict of Nantes (1598), which guaranteed legal toleration of Protestantism, merely recognized the military impasse and the inability of the Crown to bring about religious uniformity. It did not sanction a philosophical tolerance based on recognition of any "right" to dissent. Ν. M. Sutherland plausibly describes the recognition of the status quo as the realization that persecution was impracticable, however attractive it might have appeared. 11 Calvinists were accorded the right to a public "cult" in those areas 8. Garrisson-Estebe, Protestants du Midi, 177—195. 9. For Agen, see A. Magen, La Ville d'Agen sous le senechalat de Pierre de Peyronnenc, seigneur de Saint-Chamarand (Paris, 1865). 10. J. B. Wood, "The Impact of the Wars of Religion," Sixteenth-Century Journal (i984):i3i et seq. 11. Ν. Μ. Sutherland, "Persecution and Toleration in Reformation Europe," Persecution and Toleration: Studies in Church History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 198+), 21:153-161.

22

Was Layrac Typical?

where this was already the de facto situation. This entailed the enjoyment of a temple, with its minister and consistory, supported by public levies of money, domestic prayer meetings, public and private singing of psalms, a burial place in town, public education with religious overtones subsidized by local government, and the establishment of institutions of higher learning to educate Protestant elites. There were obligations attached to this permission, however, since Huguenots were required to return usurped ecclesiastical property, pay the tithe for the maintenance of the Roman church, observe Catholic feast days, and permit the celebration of the mass everywhere. In reality Protestant triumphalism varied in direct proportion to its numerical and social preponderance locally. Where Protestants were in a majority, they ate meat during Lent, opened shops and toiled ostentatiously on Catholic feast days, persistently harassed Catholic clergy, and derided their ceremonies.12 Local ascendancy was thought to be guaranteed by secret clauses in the Edict of Nantes pertaining to the upkeep of fortified towns with garrisons subsidized by the Crown. They were buttressed by outlying places of refuge. Almost all towns were walled but Calvinist communities boasted more elaborate works, rendering visible their determination to resist future concessions. Most of the important towns in the hands of Huguenots at the time became places of security. To mention only those in Aquitaine: SainteFoy-la-Grande, Nerac, Lectoure, and Clairac. Smaller towns like Layrac and Puymirol were important too, where scattered flocks could gather in stormy times.13 True protection, however, resided in numbers. The Huguenot Midi displayed a confused pattern of variable density around the perimeter of the great arc. About half lived in compact zones of a confessionally homogeneous society, from nobility to peasantry. Such zones were few in number: in Aunis; along the lower Dordogne, from Castillon to Lalinde in Perigord; at the confluence of the Lot and Garonne; the towns of Montauban, Castres and their pays; some rural pockets in the Vivarais and Dauphine; finally, the largest of these regions, the Cevennes and the Mediterranean coastal plain before them, between Mende and Nimes or Lunel. French Protestant society could be as integrating as any district of Holland or 12. The cavalier attitude of Huguenots to Catholic regulations is clear in the registre d'audiences of the Cour de la Chambre de l'Edit of Nerac, 1608-1609; Archives Departmentales Gironde (Bordeaux) (hereafter cited as Arch. Dep. Gironde), Serie Β Tournelle 5228. 13. Ε. Haag, La France protestante (Paris: J. Cherbuliez, 1846-59) 10:258. In a list ofplaces de sürete in 1598, Layrac is noted as belonging to "Monenx" (Merenx?), with thirteen men in garrison. Puymirol figured on the list with fifty-one soldiers and Lectoure with 120.

Was Layrac Typical?

23

Scotland. This is particularly true of the Cevennes where an intransigent stance against the "Popish" church was maintained until the early years of the personal reign of Louis XTV.14 Regions of dense Huguenot settlement were less extensive elsewhere. The stretch of parishes from Moncrabeau along the Bai'se south of Nerac in the Condomois to Castelmoron-sur-Lot in the Agenais connected Nerac, Clairac and Tonneins, where Huguenots comprised an absolute majority in a densely settled alluvial valley. Almost everywhere else Protestants lived cheek by jowl with Catholics. This is less evident from statistics for overall distribution of the number of Huguenots by colloquy or by province compiled by Samuel Mours, as by more detailed calculations of the effectives of each "church." 15 Mours estimates that in 1660 there were 49,900 communicants in Guyenne, or about ninety thousand individuals, of whom at least 37 percent belonged to small communities on the fringe. An incomplete estimation by Theophile Claparede on the number of "communicants" (sic) in 1660, published in 1866, presents a reasonably accurate distribution for the churches listed, and the most recent estimates by Philip Benedict corroborate these numbers.16 Twenty-five churches are listed for the Condomois, with a total of 12,350 members; of these at least 3,900 lived scattered among Catholics in seventeen churches from Meilhan in the Bazadais to Labastide d'Armagnac on the southern edge of the Landes. In the Colloquy of the Haut-Agenais, 16,600 communicants were distributed across twenty-three churches, 5,700 belonging to thirteen enclave communities where Huguenot minorities were blended with Catholics. In the Colloquy of Perigord at least 4,100 Huguenots of an estimated 11,700 belonged to isolated flocks. Finally, in the Bas-Agenais, from Bordeaux to Duras, scattered contingents comprised nine of the eighteen churches, and 5,050 communicants of a total of 9,250. Their dissemination was even more scattered than this calculation implies, for thousands lived in villages and towns entirely without a public cult, and

14. R . Sauzet, La Contre-Reforme et reformt catholique en Bas-Languedoc: le diocese de Nimes au XVIle siede (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1979), 245 et seq. 15. S. Mours, Le Protestantisme en France au XVIle siecle (Paris: Librairie protestante, 1967), 7 0 - 7 1 . These figures have been revised downward, to about 730,000 in 1680, by Philip Benedict, " L a Population reformee de France de [600 a 1685," Annales: Economies, soeietes, civilisations (1987): 1433—1459. 16. T. Claparede, "Liste des eglises, pasteurs et nombre de communiants en 1660," Bulletin de la societepour l'histoire du protestantismefranfais (hereafter journal cited as BSHPF) 15 (1866): 513-526. While Claparede ostensibly counts communicants, a glance at known churches suggests that the list indicates total number of people, or "souls." Even then there are serious errors. Bergerac and Clairac are listed as having four hundred communicants each, whereas the Protestant population was closer to four thousand people in each.

24

Was Layrac Typical?

had to attend Calvinist services wherever they could. This is true in towns such as Le Mas d'Agenais, near Tonneins, where scores of Huguenots lived. 17 There is no record of a pastor ever having functioned there, although a consistory was active until at least the 1620s. In Damazan, not far away, Huguenot peasants and townsmen without a temple frequented Monheurt or Lavardac.18 In the Midi, as in northern France, Huguenots comprised small-town elites engulfed by a mass of Catholic peasants. However, tiny pockets of them were scattered throughout rural areas as well. They are quite visible in the meticulous pastoral visits of Nicolas Villars, bishop of Agen (1594—1608). It is, however, sometimes difficult to penetrate the imprecision of his formulae; for example, in one village, "le sixieme sont Huguenots." Nevertheless, it seems that there were 128 parishes each with less than one hundred Protestants in 1600.19 Claude Joly's less extensive pastoral visits between 1665 and 1673 still denote heretics in forty-six out of 112 parishes visited, in small clusters of three to a dozen houses.20 I have classed these in rather loose categories since it is impossible to establish firm population figures for all of the towns. Nonetheless the reader will see that in most areas Calvinism was anything but an integrated society.

A Typical Example? Layrac-en-Brulhois was founded as a Benedictine priory in the late eleventh century, a dependency of the abbeys of Moissac and Cluny. The agglomeration in 1675 might have comprised eleven hundred people, with a rural parish population of somewhat greater numbers and a jurisdiction beyond of three additional parishes, Saint-Denis de Sauveterre, Sainte-Catherine de Gudech along the Garonne to the north, and Saint-Pierre de Goulens to the Gascon south (see Figure 1.1). The total population of town, parish and jurisdiction hovered between three and four thousand.21 Like many towns, 17. M. Joret, "Le Protestantisme au Mas d'Agenais," Revue de l'Agenais (1925): 237-268. For the activity of the consistory, see the journal kept by one of the elders, Jean de Lorman, Archives Departmentales du Lot-et-Garonne (Agen) (hereafter cited as Arch. Dep Lot-etGaronne), 2J 12: Livre de raison de Jean de Lorman 1615-1654· 18. P. Dubourg, Histoire de Damazan depuiskXIe Steele jusqu' a nos jours (Villeneuve-surLot, 1911), 163 et seq. 19. Arch. Dep. Lot-et-Garonne, Serie G/C-2: Visites pastorales de Nicolas de Villars, 1594—1608. 20. Arch. Dep. Lot-et-Garonne, Serie G/C-4 to C-12 bis: Visites pastorales de Claude Joly, 1619-1620. 21. No census exists for the parish or its jurisdiction until the early nineteenth century; my figures are calculated from the average number of baptisms, and multiplied by twenty-five. For Catholics, Arch. Dep. Lot-et-Garonne, Serie Ε Supplement 234 and 235: Registres par-

26

Was Layrac Typical?

it was tugged in various directions by overlapping feudal, administrative, judicial and religious jurisdictions. This web of bonds was a source of ambiguity and contradiction, always an advantage for local procrastination or manipulation. Paris was very remote. The feudal bailliage of the Brulhois, a score of communities along the south bank of the Garonne, from Serignac to Auvillar, hardly amounted to much, apart from some civil suits at its seat in Laplume. More important were the Senechaussee andpresidial in Lectoure. Through the senechaussee, Layrac was attached to the sovereign jurisdictions of the Parlement of Toulouse, the Cour des Aides in Cahors, and the Chambre de l'Edit in Castres. These benches were all staffed by the magistrates of Toulouse. Royal officials, on the other hand, like the Intendants after 1625, resided in Bordeaux, and subsequently in Montauban. Before 1660, the governors or their lieutenants often resided alternately in Bordeaux and in Agen, a scant nine kilometers away. Finally, Layrac was situated at the edge of the diocese of Condom. For much of the century, this last was a discrete locus of power and influence. The prior of Layrac, seigneur of the town, was permanently absent and almost invisible until after 1660 when Prior Charles-Louis de Lorraine was nominated bishop of Condom. The town itself was unprepossessing, situated on a low butte overlooking the river Gers about a kilometer from its mouth, at the edge of the rich and densely populated alluvial plain of the Garonne. Before 1622 its most remarkable feature would have been its fortifications. 22 The records of the jurade, or municipal assembly, indicate three earthen bastions set in a ditch, "ä la huguenotte," possibly brick-faced and screened with palisades. Behind this stood the mixed stone and brick medieval rampart with its several towers. Over the principal gate in the south wall, the Porte de Salens, stood the "citadel," probably just a large tower resembling the one still extant in nearby Bruch (see Figure 1.2). Behind the ramparts crouched squat wood, brick, stone, and wattle houses. There were few imposing buildings, apart from the priory church of Saint-Martin with its Romanesque steeple and facade, just beyond the oissiaux de Layrac, 1628-1710. For Protestants, a baptismal register only (1595-1674) has survived: Arch. Dep. Gers, Serie Η , Hopital de Condom, HopitaJ-General, H-80. 22. None of these works survived the seventeenth century, nor is it possible to visualize their configuration through aerial photography. This is still possible for other towns, like Tournon and Monflanquin, which have not experienced much construction around the circuit of the old ramparts, now demolished. Arch. Dep. Lot-et-Garonne, Photographies aeriennes; Mission Fumel, 052 Monflanquin; Mission Fr. 122/150 Langon-Valence d'Agen, no. 317 Tournon d'Agenais.

Figure 1.2.

28

Was Layrac Typical?

medieval wall. A town hall stood adjacent to the parish church of NotreDame, sharing the same low belfry. This church was in such a state of decrepitude that it had to be abandoned and services transferred to the priory. The remaining buildings of any size huddled around a small market square, the holies or cornieres. The better dwellings, those of nobles, bourgeois and minor officials, had stone foundations, ground floors and arcades if they faced the market. Most others were wood and wattle constructions of two stories, with a workshop on the ground floor and a couple of rooms above, covered with tiles, and often flanked by a tiny garden or courtyard. Even bourgeois houses were cheap and flimsy, like that of Pierre Larroque, surgeon (Protestant), given to the curate as a presbytery in 1670, costing a paltry 750 livres. Few houses stood outside the gates, even in 1772. 23 The range of nonrural activities in Layrac was typical of similar communities in the region and probably serves as the best criterion for applying the term "urban" to the agglomerated habitat. Despite their mediocre appearance, Gascon towns were distillations of the region's noble, economic and administrative elites, with a complement of artisans, some laborers and impoverished widows. The functions they performed were quite as urban as those of larger agglomerations. 24 The accompanying graph illustrates how similar in social composition Layrac was to Beauville (650 inhabitants) and to Nerac (three thousand inhabitants), though the size and composition of their respective hinterlands no doubt varied (see Figure 1.3). While for Layrac no census or capitation tax roll survives, it is possible to piece together an image from several sources: three terriers, from 1604,1624, and 1679, as well as the parish registers after 1676, thanks to the conscientious precision of the new vicar Brossard. 25 The sharp focus in the late 1670s constitutes the most accurate assessment of urban residents but the other terriers provide a convenient starting point, especially for the upper classes whose quality was usually mentioned. The striking feature before mid-century was the score of noble or quasi-noble families with residences in town, who were probably present for part of each year. Only two families were content with rural manors, but their proximity to the town made them semiurban. By 1679, although there remained eighteen noble families with property in the jurisdiction, only eight seem to have resided there. They were flanked by forty-four bourgeois, twenty officials 25. Plan de Layrac, 1772, Arch. Dep. Gers, C245. 24. For an analysis of the social composition of Gascon towns, see my Univers des gens de bien (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1989), 18-19. 25. Arch. Dep. Lot-et-Garonne, Serie Ε Supplement 235: Registre paroissial.

SOCIAL COMPOSITION OF AGENAIS TOWNS (ECCLESIASTICS EXCLUDED)

bourgeois and professions

NERAC

1699

officials and notaries

I

\

artisans and boatmen

Ο

brassiers" and unspecified

Ο

widows

CLAIRAC

1699

and spinsters

CASTELJALOUX

LAYRAC

1679

BEAUVILLE

A-

Arch. Drip. L o t - e t - G a r o n n e ,

Ε

D:

Arch. Ddp·

L o t - e t - Garonne,

Figure 1.3.

Ε

Ε

nominatlf

Supplt. 2 4 0 9 . I"· Role du Don Gratuit

L o t - G a r o n n e , Ε Supplt. 216".

E: Arch. Ddp. L o t - e t - G a r o n n e , [gh_

1679

Supplement 3104'- Role dee failles

B*· Arch. Dip. L o t - e t - G a r o n n e , sdrie G / H - 129'· Ddnombrement C : Arch. Dip.

1767

Livre

Supplt. 2 8 l :

terrier

Livre de charges et dtfcharges

30

Was Layrac Typical?

and minor scribes of the basoche, (that is, low-level legal personnel) and fifty merchants, all designated as "habitants." Using only the terrier as a guide, it appears that these elites constitute almost half of the town's population, though only 14 percent of that of town and country combined. The number of merchants is particularly impressive. We have glimpses of their activity in the obligations: a major one was transshipment of agricultural products from the unnavigable Gers valley to boats on the Garonne.26 Judging from the scale of credit, it was unusual around 1615 for a single transaction to involve more than a hundred livres: even in the 1680s the outlay for a shipment of grain destined for Bordeaux infrequently involved more than three hundred livres, though this may have reflected the modest dimensions of the various boats plying the waterways. Merchant functions were common both within the walls and along the river's edge. Few of the artisanal trades, on the other hand, were specifically urban, and there were more artisans living outside the walls than within (fifty-nine as opposed to eighty-one). Only one, a Protestant sculptor who carved church images, had an artistic vocation and bourgeois status. The nomenclature of this elite is in any event imprecise even allowing for some inflation of terms in cases where individuals exercising several functions flaunted the most prestigious of them. The elites were to varying degrees landowners or else drew income from the administration of noble or bourgeois estates. They were both a curious and typical amalgam, operating halfway between a commercial economy, which they serviced, and a rural notability inclined to seek autarchy in their basic necessities. There is no mistaking the relationship between land, power, and professional activity in the terriers.27 Compiled under the auspices of the jurade, with roughly identical criteria and organization, they were years in the making (six years for the terrier of 1679), and were kept up to date by a swath of scribblings on subsequent pages. It is difficult to know how many residents are not included, but I am inclined to think that the proportion after 1624 was modest: partly because of the infinitely small holdings inscribed, up to an eighth of a picotin, just over one-thousandth of a hectare. 26. The best view of Layrac's commercial contacts would be drawn from the "obligations" conserved in the notarial minutes. For Layrac's role as a point of transshipment along the Garonne, there are glimpses in the personal correspondence of an important Clairac negociant, Arch. Dep. Lot-et-Garonne, i j 324: Correspondance de Mr Sageran Paine de Clairac, lettre datee 22 janvier 1699. 27. Arch. Dep. Lot-et-Garonne, Serie Ε Supplement 215 and 216: Terriers of 1624 and 1679. The terrier of 1604 is less perfect, consisting of a copy made by the abbe Dubourg in 1906, conserved in a cupboard in the presbytery of Layrac. Eighteen entries have no area total, while those estimations given are overwhelmingly even numbers. N o holdings of less than eight picotins are indicated.

Was Layrac Typical?

31

Moreover, to multiply each local landowner by four (each corresponding to a feu, or hearth) would be greater than the population of Layrac and its environs, judging from the parish register. The impressive meticulousness of every entry, detailing each separate hovel, garden, row of vines, and patch of field or pasture masks for a moment some of the problems of its exploitation. One finds numerous widows, filles, various "heirs," but not many married women; this is perhaps a sign that dowries, when constituting real estate, were subsumed under the husbands' management. Sons living with their parents might have had their property listed separately, but this is impossible to determine. I am also perplexed by the absence of a few men of means from each compilation. Perhaps they were momentarily absent from the jurisdiction, although it would be difficult to explain the lack of mention of holdings—unless perhaps they were included under the title of various "heirs." Finally, there is no indication of property held by any of the landowners in jurisdictions beyond Layrac. This obviously concerns the wealthiest group, owning land in neighboring or even distant parishes, but also simple peasants and artisans living on the fringes of the jurisdiction, whose other property would be registered in Caudecoste, Fals, AstafFort, or Moyrax. These considerations obscure the details of property distribution. The general picture nevertheless seems clear. The rural economy of the region could be summed up in two words: polyculture and minifundia. Cereal crops such as wheat, rye, and some maize; leguminous crops such as beans and peas; an omnipresent but fragmented vineyard; some small-scale livestock breeding, primarily sheep; commercial textile crops such as flax and hemp, together formed the economic base. Farming methods were generally archaic, biennial rotation being the rule. All three terriers demonstrate an extreme imbalance between tiny holdings for the great majority, and large sharecropping estates owned by local or nonresident notables. We return here to the noble families. In 1604, twenty-one nobles held fully 36 percent of the total area. Those residing within the jurisdiction held 26 percent. The five separate branches of the Catholic Carbonneau family controlled among them 14 percent, especially to the south around Goulens where the baron of Lassalle-Goulens owned a casde. The second noble house, the predominantly Protestant Monguinhon family with four branches, owned less than 5 percent. In 1624, the eighteen local nobles (excluding several from Agen) still possessed 26 percent of the total area. Fourteen families (not all noble) owned over three thousand picotins (thirty-four hectares) each, comprising 34 percent of the jurisdiction.

32

Was Layrac Typical?

Despite the seigneurial title of the priory, lands owned by the first estate were inconsequential. The area owned by Layrac secular clergy and local monks in 1624 amounted to less than 1 percent of the whole, and with land belonging to Agen chaplaincies the total was a mere 2.3 percent, unchanged since the turn of the century. Perhaps the most meaningful category is the landowner's place of residence. In 1604, the town dwellers, comprising 43 percent of the landowners, held 61.5 percent of the surface, or 5.4 hectares apiece on average. Rural dwellers in the jurisdiction made up half the number of landlords, but held a mere 20.6 percent of the land, for an average 1.6 hectares each. Outsiders living in Agen and elsewhere accounted for 7 percent of landholders, but held 18 percent of the territory: if the average surface for each was 10.3 hectares, thirty-two possessed about 1.4 hectares apiece, while eighteen "seigneurs" owned 30 hectares each, their extensive holdings here but a fraction of domains scattered all over Agen's hinterland. In 1624, of 1,030 entries, 360, or 34 percent lived within the ramparts. Collectively they owned 55 percent of the land, with 4.5 hectares each, on average. Over half (56 percent) of the total number of owners resided in the oudying area, but owned only 24.7 percent of the surface area, with 1.25 hectares apiece. Those who resided elsewhere comprised 9 percent of landowners, owning 20 percent of the land, for 6.6 hectares each. Despite fewer landowners (938) in 1679, the image is strikingly similar, although the hold of town dwellers has diminished. At that time 31 percent of the owners were town residents, with 44 percent of the land, averaging 4.4 hectares each. Peasants and other rural dwellers comprised 65 percent of the owners, owning 30 percent of the land, with 1.4 hectares each. Outsiders constituted but 4 percent of inscribed landowners, and held 26 percent of the area, usually in large holdings, with an average of over 15 hectares each. I suspect that some names inscribed as Layrac residents actually lived in Cuq, Fals and Caudecoste, and that the difference is partly due to imprecision. If this were the case, however, the extent of their holdings would still be limited. Apparendy, concentration of holdings profited more powerful notables living in Agen and perhaps beyond. Landowning status and socioprofessional activity appear more difficult to explain. To take the "robins" or officials as an example, in 1624 the judge, with eighteen hectares is honorably placed, although outclassed by the seigneur's attorney with fifty-six hectares. Other lawyers, prosecutors, and solicitors possessed from one to twenty-five hectares. Some of the disparity can be explained by ownership of land in other jurisdictions, but it may also stem from differences of age and marital status. The same disparity

Was Layrac Typical?

33

is true of merchants and bourgeois (the terms being used without rigor). Their landholdings varied from almost nothing to 94 hectares, and an average has no significance, though few merchants held over 10 hectares. The seven Protestant bourgeois held on average 15 hectares, while fortythree merchants had an average of 4.3 hectares. Hidden from view in the terrier is the stock, capital in boats, warehouses, barrels, and paper assets. Among artisans, holdings rarely surpass a single hectare. In 1679 twenty-two noble or quasi-noble families owned property in the jurisdiction, holding 23 percent of the surface. Of these, perhaps only eight resided within the jurisdiction and these were fractionated into separate families. Layrac nobles held a mere 7.5 percent of this territory, and the three Carbonneau branches only 1.7 percent. Perhaps this indicates a decline of that family. Just as likely, it could entail displacement to a distant city, like Bordeaux, Toulouse, or Paris. Ecclesiastical holdings increased, on the other hand, as a result of energetic policies to recover alienated land. Their long list of twenty-four entries included Agen chaplaincies and other estates bought by the Chapelet nuns in Agen. Land belonging to Layrac ecclesiastics amounted to only 0.7 percent of the area, and total church holdings were still a mere 4 percent. Along with an influx of outside notables, was there a process of concentration among bourgeois and nobles? In 1604, fifty landowners possessed more than one thousand picotins, or 11.4 hectares, out of 781 entries. In 1624, sixty registrants (seventeen of them outsiders) held more than one thousand picotins. In 1679 the number was fifty-four, but with fewer owners overall. As in 1624, fourteen landowners enjoyed over 34 hectares apiece, holding 30 percent of the surface. One group certainly consolidating its holdings in relation to its number was the Protestants. In 1604 Protestants constituted 179 entries (23 percent), fully 43 percent of town dwellers, but a mere 7 percent of those living in the country. Together they held 31 percent of the area, 5.1 hectares apiece on average. In 1624, they formed 19 percent of landowners, holding 25 percent of the jurisdiction. In 1679, they had only ninety-three entries, half the previous number, but still held 25 percent of the surface. Layrac's claim to significance, but not to originality, was its confessional composition. In 1600 about one half or less of its "urban" population was Huguenot, if we project a figure based on the terriers and on rough estimations of the number of "communicants" recorded by the consistory. 28 The Calvinist "church" at that time comprised about seven hundred 28. Philip Benedict employs a coefficient of 25 applied to the annual average number of baptisms. (Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France, 1600-1685, 18). Benedict's coefficient

34

Was Layrac Typical?

people from the town, the farms or hordes around it, and small clusters of Huguenot merchants and artisans living in the neighboring towns of Caudecoste, Astaffort and Donzac. The judicial and military elites were entirely Calvinist as were most of the merchants. Even a large segment of the artisanal population had adopted the Reformation. Only a fragment of this group, including some very modest merchants, remained Catholic. There is little information on the origins of Calvinism in the town. It was one of the first communities to "revolt" against Monluc in 1562, just as newly converted Astaffort Protestants rose up against the seigneur of Cuq. In the early stages of the religious wars, most of the towns in the region were controlled by Reformers at some point. Layrac appears among the insurgent towns along with Agen and Port Sainte-Marie, which both ended the civil wars on the side of the Catholic League. The town's site made it valuable as a crossing point on the Garonne, and the Huguenots held a fort on an island in the Garonne at Sauveterre to intercept passing boats. 29 With Puymirol to the north they skirmished to the gates of Agen. The sources remain silent, however, as to the composition of the town militia, and as to the number of Catholics remaining. The evolution of their respective numbers can be calculated from the annual movement of baptisms, beginning for Protestants in 1595, and for Catholics after 1628 (see Figure 1.4). Using Philip Benedict's coefficient of 25, we can project a rough figure of Protestants living in Layrac and its immediate jurisdiction at 775 before 1610, with the years after 1618 constituting a first crisis. Protestant numbers then hovered around 600 until the 1640s, and dropped quickly along with those of Catholics, plunging dramatically during the plague of 1652—53. Royal policies of restriction against them limited their effectives after 1660 to about 250, while the Catholic population soared to its previous level of 2,500. As the Huguenot component diminished in numbers, it retained or even augmented its "elitist" character (see Figure 1.5). They remained concentrated within the town itself, in the fertile valley and at the edge of the Garonne. From periodic contribution lists for the upkeep of the minister, one can calculate their approximate social contours. The rolls established in 1641 and 1661 probably mirror the overall structure well because of the large number of widows for the size of a feu is 4.5, which I believe is too high for the Agenais. Based on a very detailed census in Clairac in 1699, I would fix the average size of a feu at 4.1. Arch. Dep. Lot-etGaronne, Serie G/H-129: Denombrement des nouveaux convertis a Clairac. The consistorial registers provide occasional glimpses of numbers of communicants; levels of population can be determined for Catholics by comparing numbers of "communicants" with numbers of souls, at a coefficient of 1.8. 29. P. Dubourg, Histoire du prieure et de la ville de Layrac depuis leXIe Steele jusqu'au XIXe Steele (Agen, 1896), 472 et seq.

36

Was Layrac Typical?

SPATIAL

AND

STATUS

Protestants/catholics

DISTRIBUTION

IN

1679 source

(in'feux)

Livre

terrier

Figure 1.5. included, and the modest sums inscribed for them. In 1679, well over half of them could be categorized as part of the elite, especially bourgeois and merchants, with few peasants even outside the walls. In 1685, for which we possess a nearly complete list of conversions, the social configuration of the group is virtually the same.30 30. Arch. Dep. Gers, Serie Η, Höpital de Condom, Höpital-General: Archives du consistoire de PEglise Reformee de Layrac, H-78, Recepte par Coustos pour Mr Thoron, ministre, 1641; H-79, Cotisation de Mr Bories, 10 novembre 1661; H-87, Rolle de ceux qui sont

Was Layrac Typical?

37

Beyond the walls, society was Catholic from top to bottom, from the warrior nobility to the mass of rural micro-holders in the parish of Layrac and the neighboring villages of Goulens, Gudech and Sauveterre. This distribution of Huguenot elites in the town, Catholic peasants beyond, was entirely typical of the region (see Figure 1.6). Of the forty-odd similar "towns" of the Agenais-Condomois with more than 500 or 600 inhabitants, Layrac shared this pattern with Miramont, Duras, Seyches, La Sauvetat du Dropt, Gontaud, Castelmoron-sur-Lot, Casteljaloux, Damazan, Le Mas d'Agenais, Prayssas, Puymirol, Tournon, Castelsagrat, Montreal, Meilhan, and Valence d'Armagnac. 31 Smaller Huguenot ratios are to be found in most of the remaining towns, which like Agen and Lectoure, sometimes had temples and ministers of their own. Nothing predisposes Layrac to be of special interest among other confessionally mixed towns but the conservation of archives relating to it. They permit detailed study of social interaction constituting the very substance of interconfessional coexistence. Was this territorial unit a community, a territorial network of interpersonal relations? I intend to answer this question in stages, throughout the section dealing with confessional coexistence. The notion of the community need not imply social homogeneity, nor should it preclude numerous personal contacts between members of the Layrac elite with people of like status elsewhere. 32 cotizes pour Mr Bories pasteur, I 6 6 7 ( ? ) . Arch. Dep. Lot-et-Garonne, Serie Ε Supplement 2 3 6 : Abjurations a Layrac en 1 6 8 5 . 1 will refer to the Layrac consistorial archives hereafter simply as "Consistoire." 31. This is just an estimate based upon the comparison of the list provided by Claparede (n. 16) with the total population of the Catholic parishes indicated by the bishop of Agen during his pastoral visits, and through known statistics for each community after 1800. For parish populations in the diocese of Agen around the year 1670, see the pastoral visits of Claude Joly, 1 6 6 5 - 1 6 7 8 , Arch. Dep. Lot-et-Garonne, Serie G / C - 5 , C - 6 , C - 7 , C - 8 , C - 9 , C-10, C-n, C - 1 2 bis. 32. The notion of community itself has been the object of criticism due to the lack of precision in its definition. Alan Macfarlane, following the anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers, proposes criteria of frequent interpersonal contacts, endogamy, group feeling in emergencies, parochial sentiment, attitude to outsiders, the power of local saints, and a "moral community" in which shame and guilt are felt. C. J. Calhoun, in a rather severe criticism of Macfarlane's lack of a stronger theoretical framework, highlighted social bonds and political mechanisms and more formal organizational structures. Virtually all of these aspects have been examined for Layrac, in as much detail as the sources allow. Macfarlane, "History, Anthropology and the Study of Communities," Social History ( 1 9 7 7 ) : 6 3 1 - 6 5 2 , and by the same author, Reconstructing Historical Communities (Cambridge: 1 9 7 7 ) , 1 0 . In reply see Calhoun, "History, Anthropology and the Study of Communities: Some Problems in Macfarlane's Proposal," Social History (1978): 363-373·

Ο"

SAUVETERRE

Ο I • tig·««

o

Ό

Ο Ο L«IH

^ LA REOLE

ST-MACAIftE

CASTILLONES

T ) „

^•pMONFLANQUlN

ο

FUMEL ' -NVILLENEUVE

CONFESSIONAL

STRENGTHS

IN TOWNS

ca. 1660

Agenais, southern Perigord, northern Gascony, Baza dais

..CASTELJALOUX

Ό STE - LIVRAOE

1CLAIRAC

Ο

C AieUILLOH

Ο "Θ

Prayitai

Ο

Ο 500- 1000 v( ) 1000- 2000 ^ inhabitant« —'

Ο

Ζ 000-6.000 LAYRAly^^} Coudtcottl

Lapl«·»^

all Catholic mostly Catholic

o " "

75%*

ο

SO

Ο mostly )

Protestant

all Protestant

0

5

ο

90%

10

Ο

km

gh

Ο"'

Figure 1.6.

VIC-fCZENSAC

2. The Institutional Community

The Mechanics of Local Government Institutional life was shaped by an explicit set of rules known as the coutume, established for Layrac in the thirteenth century and confirmed in 1527. In 1600 this was both the "constitution" of local government with its attendant set of representative institutions, and a pact of privileges and obligations between the inhabitants and their seigneur, the prior of Layrac.1 Municipal government consisted of (a) an executive body, the consulate, comprising four members of descending status, elected annually, and (b) a deliberative assembly, the jurade. The consulate was co-opted at the beginning of every year, with each consul proposing two replacements. The jurade could oppose these nominations in order to circumvent conflicts of interest arising from family ties to other consuls, or else to prevent the election of either debtors or creditors to the community. Once the jurade had settled on a final list of eight candidates, ranked in pairs from first to fourth, the seigneur's attorney would choose one from each. The new consuls would then swear to uphold justice and fairness to both rich and poor, don their livery, and take office. The mechanics of this system of government were almost universal in towns across southwestern France.2 The representative nature of the consulate and the jurade, and its competence, on the other hand, varied significandy according to the balance of power struck between the local oligarchy and the seigneur.3 Participation was limited to thcßens de bien, independent heads of households resident within the jurisdiction, although not necessarily from the town. First consuls were usually petty nobles or established 1. P. Dubourg, Histoire du prieure et de la ville de Layrac, (Agen, 1896), 63 et seq. 2. Μ. Bordes, Institutions et vie communales dans les campagnes meridionales auxXVIIe et XVIIIe siecles (Auch: Bouquet, 1977). 3. This representivity could be strictly limited where seigneurial power was strong. Auch, where the archbishop and the king were co-seigneurs, is a case in point; see M. Bordes, ed., Histoire d'Auch et du pays d'Auch (Roanne: Horvath, 1980).

40

The Institutional Community

"bourgeois" who could claim deference and obedience accruing to their status. Ideally, the other consuls would be wealthy bourgeois, near-nobles, notaries, surgeons, and leading merchants whose fortune denoted respectability, integrity, and solvency. Royal officials were excluded from consular government since their interests would be prejudicial to local autonomy. In practice, of course, wealthy inhabitants were too few and families too closely knit to permit absolute separation. H o w concentrated was consular office? We have annual lists of consuls from 1586 until 1672, and then fragmentary data until 1702 when the list is complete again until 1722. In the period of the mixed Catholic/Protestant consulate at the end of the reign of Henri IV, 1603—1612, thirty-three men filled forty positions, with none serving more than twice. Some of these individuals were related but there were twenty-eight patronyms for these offices. For the ensuing period of the Catholic monopoly of consular charges, the sample period 1633—1642 shows thirty-four men filling fortyone positions, with none serving more than twice. There were twenty-five patronyms or a slightly greater concentration, although the level of intermarriage and alliance remains unknown. Finally, for the absolutist decade, 1662—1671, there were thirty-one people serving forty positions, with one, the noble F r a ^ o i s de Sayras, sieur Desmazes, serving three consecutive years as first consul. Here, there are twenty-six patronyms, a figure comparable to other periods. Consular function was thus passed around the elite with some alacrity. The reality of power was by no means so simply determined, as only a closer reading of the registers of the jurade reveals. Gaston Depau was only twice consul but he wielded great influence as the leader of the devot faction in association with the curate. Other jurats, especially nobles, were linked to overlords outside the community, and their influence could be felt even though they wore no livery. The social contours of the jurade were more fluid. Any former consul was automatically a lifelong jurat. There seems to have been a minority of jurats—surgeons, merchants, or leading landowners of Goulens or Gudech—never considered socially eligible for the consulate, but their opinion on public matters was recognized as legitimate. Excluded at all times was the mass of smallholders, vintners, and artisans—the menu peuple, or gens de nennt, comprising the great majority of inhabitants. It is never easy to calculate the eligible number of heads of households. At the election of January 1609, coinciding with the beginning of a new register, one finds sixty-one names, followed by the formula "et plusieurs autres jurats et

The Institutional Community

41

habitants."4 The controversial "Concordat" of 1645, petitioning the return of the Huguenots to the consulate, bore sixty-four signatures, omitting those who opposed the arrangement.5 Could one propose a hypothetical figure of seventy-five to eighty heads of households, or 10 percent of the adult male population, as nominal participants in public life? Ten percent active, if intermittent, participation was a respectable level for the highly stratified society of the seventeenth century, but a large turnout was exceptional, usually confined to meetings designating tax collectors and the establishment of the tax rolls themselves. Absentee jurats were threatened with heavy fines in February 1610, but this threat rarely recurred. Consuls were responsible for the maintenance of public order, and could mobilize the townsmen as a militia for this purpose. They held the "ordinary" or lower court administration of criminal justice. Local government distributed relief to the poor, regulated prices and supply and weights and measures, repaired roads in their jurisdiction, employed surgeons and doctors in times of epidemic, and subsidized a schoolmaster. Early in the seventeenth century, the jurade even elected Catholic churchwardens. The municipality employed a secretary, a messenger, and a clocksmith. Above all, and herein lay the nub of consular power and the source of its contestation, urban magistrates were responsible for drawing up land registers, for establishing tax rolls from them, for farming out taxes and revenues, and for supervising their collection. The consuls were therefore both defenders of local interest and indirect agents of the Crown. They were keenly aware of the inherent contradictions since they were occasionally imprisoned for failing to transmit the required amount to royal tax officers. At the elections of 1610, for example, Jean Vilatte (C) refused at first to don livery as fourth consul, the position most likely to bear the brunt of fiscal responsibility. He was finally badgered into consent by the seigneurial attorney and the jurade.6 Yet 1610 was a period of low fiscal intensity; pressure would increase immeasurably thereafter. 4 . Arch. Dep. Lot-et-Garonne, Ε Supplement, 197: Registre des deliberations de la jurade, January 1, 1609. I will refer herein to the "Jurades," consisting of the following registers: (a) Ε Supplt. 197: January 1609 to May 1632; (b) Ε Supplt. 198: January 1636 to February 1651; (c) Ε Supplt. 199: June 1651 to October 1665; (d) Ε Supplt. 200: November 1665 to April 1673. 5. Jurades, February 13,1645. 6. Jurades, January 1,1610. (C) = Catholic; (P) = Protestant; arrows (e.g. P—> C ) denote conversion.

42

The Institutional Community

The minutes of the jurade are not as transparent as one could wish. Secretaries recorded decisions without revealing the names or numbers of the dissenters. In the terminology employed by the scribes, decisions were either "unanimous" or "by majority." This interpretation not infrequently depended upon the impartiality of the scribe, who might have ignored the opinion of some of those present. Dissenting opinions were not often committed to paper, nor were personal attacks and intemperate language. Because of this discretion, it is not easy to discern the exact features of political forces at work. I have never encountered a case in which the jurade as a corps confronted a united consulate. The former body formed a pool of experienced representatives regularly employed as arbitrators, technical advisors, or delegates to higher powers. Together the two bodies were highly integrated and capable of maintaining a united front ofgens de bien against the pretentions of fiscal immunity by the local aristocracy or the mass of peasants and artisans seeking alleviation of their burden. Collaboration and integration between levels of government did not preclude a certain amount of improvisation, of bickering over procedures, or dispute over the perceived deficiencies of different consuls. Consular elections, especially, were the scene of heated, sometimes paralyzing debate over the merits and handicaps of proposed candidates. These were scrutinized in terms of their influence, their alliances, and their personal solvency. In the 1612 elections, captain Jean Labarre (P) was opposed for being the father-in-law of outgoing consul Guilhem Marrasse (C). The fourth consul nominee, Joseph Laville (C), was reproached by some for not having lived the requisite ten years in the jurisdiction and by others who cast doubt upon the value of his assets. The jurat Pierre Lartigue (P) denounced both candidates for the office of first consul, Augustin Coustos (P) and Jean Labarre on account of their allegiance to the outgoing consul Carbonneau de Pradin (C). The nominee for second consul, notary Arnaud Cazenove (C), was even belittled for his limp. In this particularly acrimonious session, exposed by the quill of a candid secretary, outgoing consuls blithely rejected these charges and submitted the nominees to the selection of the seigneurial procurator. 7 There are multiple examples of this kind of expediency. In the worrying atmosphere of impending civil war in January 1616, Catholics were simply excluded from the consulate. The Catholic jurats led by Jean Depau protested formally, but only in June, and were restored without recorded 7. Jurades, January 1, 1612.

The Institutional Community

43

debate in January 1617.8 Recurrent improvisation followed the general drift of power. The institutional history of Layrac in the seventeenth century is an excellent case history for the assertion of royal power over local elites. There were several distinct periods in the arrogation of initiative by the Crown. From 1603 to 1622, in the framework of a mixed Catholic/Protestant consulate, the Calvinist establishment enjoyed undisputed social ascendancy. This advantage, however, was not expressed through close alliance with the Protestant "lobby" of court nobles or major cities, for whom revolt was a tool of policy. In Layrac the predominant desire was for the maintenance of the status quo of the Edict of Nantes. A second period opened with the dismantling of the town walls and the elimination of Protestant consular positions by order of the Crown, in 1623. If Protestants were no longer eligible for the consulate, experience would prove that local government was well-nigh unworkable as a result, impeding the collection of royal taxes. Finally, after the devastating plague of 1653, with Huguenot numbers irreparably compromised, there was a clear Catholic predominance with general submission of all to royal officials who alone could lift the burden of fiscal arrears. Much of the community's energy and money was expended in fighting off outside interference, whether religious, fiscal, military, or of some other nature. Local autonomy was desired throughout the entire period, but this required close confessional collaboration and complicity in the face of external pressure.

The Huguenot Ascendancy There is no source relating the institutional history of Layrac during the wars of religion. We do know that Layrac was one of the first towns to declare openly for Calvinism in 1560. The Protestant consistory and municipal council imposed a militantly intolerant institutional front with a monopoly over the mediation between God and humanity. The "body militant" of the church was the consistory, a cohesive minority which drew from its norms a program for action and enabled it to direct a larger but amorphous majority. There is no trace of an early compromise between 8. Jurades, June 1,1616: The political context was especially tense, since at that time it was forbidden for the jurade to assemble without the knowledge of the governor Moncaup. By June the crisis seemed to be over, since the consuls decreed the opening of all three gates and the resumption of normal commerce.

44

The Institutional Community

Catholics and Protestants, such as one finds in Laplume or Casteljaloux, born of the desire to keep out soldiers of any army.9 The Huguenots appear to have taken official control after 1572, and ushered hundreds of individuals into the ranks of their church before 1580. Simultaneously, the mass was abolished, and the priests and monks were expelled. Huguenot control over the town was secure during the last decades of the sixteenth century. 10 This is clear from the list of consuls as the "captains" strutted into prominence. In 1593, the last year of intensive conflict, two of the four consuls were soldiers. These captains, six in all, were members of the consulate every year from 1590 to 1601. This military hold was reinforced by a Protestant governor, the Sieur Merenx, and a Protestant predominance in the consulate. Huguenots were clearly stronger in the town itself, although the rural district was Catholic. Catholics retained a continuous presence in both the jurade and the consulate during the wars of the Catholic League. 1 1 With the multiplication of local truces after 1594, the various organs of royal government began to function anew, intent upon reining in the power that had drifted to the consulates and regional nobility in the course of the civil wars. Confessionally mixed sovereign tribunals, the Chambres de l'Edit, were established in Castres and in Nerac. 12 The royal lieutenantgovernor, the Corsican marshal Alphonse d'Ornano, applied his energy to rebuilding royal authority in the area. It was through him that local Catholics obtained the "regularization" of municipal government in a mixed consulate based upon models already working effectively in Casteljaloux, Castelmoron, and no doubt elsewhere. A declaration made by the consuls in 1602 to the executors of the Edict of Nantes contended that the two confessions coexisted harmoniously and that the Catholics consented to share the traditional cemetery with Huguenots, 13 although Catholic desires 9. E. d'Antin, "Une commune gasconne pendant les guerres de religion d'apres les archives de Laplume," Revue de l'Agenais, (1893) 311 and 473; (1894): 52,152, 230, 352,535; (1895): 262, 354. The great fear among the inhabitants was enemy intelligence in the town. The town remained predominantly Catholic, and the policy of the consuls was to maintain an equilibrium in order to avoid having a garrison of one or the other party imposed upon them. 10. Dubourg, Histoire du prieure et de la ville de Layrac, 569 et seq., list of consuls, 15861722. 11. Jurades: Catholic consuls before 1603 were merchants Michel Thoron, Georges Garbay, and Blaize Cappot, and the notary Arnaud Cazenove. In 1596 and 1597 two of the four consuls were Catholic. 12. M. Saucaze, "Les Chambres mi-parties dans les anciens parlements: la Chambre de l'Edit de Castres, 1595—1679," Bulletin de la Societe pour l'histoire du protestantismefranpais,3 (1855): 363-377. Hereafter I will simply refer to the BSHPF. 13. Bibliotheque de la Societe d'histoire du protestantisme fran^ais, Ms. 561/2: Organisation des eglises, fol. 56, Layrac. Elie Benoist mentions this consular declaration to the "commissaires executeurs de l'Edit" that "les Catholiques et les Reformez vivoient en paix, et que les

The Institutional Community

45

to acceed to consular positions were not addressed. Catholics nevertheless resented the idea that their participation should be subjected to the goodwill of the Huguenots. Protestants found it distasteful that poor papists should precede, judge and command Calvinists of superior wealth and social status. There was enough desire for equity within the Calvinist ranks for debate to split them into groups of moderates and zealots. In January 1603, after some wrangling, and after the intervention of Henri IV, Catholics in the jurade were finally admitted to regular consular participation.14 The mechanism adopted was simple: Each outgoing consul would nominate two successors from the alternate confession. In addition, the jurade appointed duplicate paupers' advocates, secretaries, emissaries, and eventually, schoolmasters. For the rest, the consulate chose Catholic or Protestant representatives on the basis of diplomacy and tact. Catholic emissaries made a better impression on the arch-papist Parlement of Toulouse. Protestants might fare better at the fiscal Cour des Aides in Cahors. Whatever the composition of ad-hoc delegations, municipal government adopted a deliberate policy of religious equilibrium. Once this pattern was established, the jurade was able to convey an image of consensus which events would not betray (see Figure 2.1). 15 The central political problem for the gens de bien of Layrac was the maintenance of a strict loyalty to royal policy of interconfessional conciliation, while retaining some vestige of local autonomy or confessional affiliation. There were small factions, both Catholic and Protestant, zealous enough to pressure the opposing party. Protestant capitaines like David

Catholiques n'entendoient pas meme disputer aux autres la liberte qu'ils avoient d'enterrer leurs morts dans le cimetiere de l'eglise paroissiale. Cela portoit un temoignage bien expres d'une possession paisible, acquise avec un plein consentement des catholiques." Benoist, Histoire de l'Edit de Nantes (Delft: Adrien Beman, 1693), 4:189. In nearby Puymirol, also a mixed community, the bishop of Agen, Claude Gelas, noted that the church belfry served Catholic and Protestant services as well as for the jurade. There were 300 Catholic communicants, while half the consuls were Catholic. Half the population, and almost the entire elite was Calvinist, and the town was a Huguenot stronghold. Arch. Dep. Lot-et-Garonne, G/C-3: Visites pastorales de Claude Gelas, p. 15. 14· Lettre du Marechal d'Ornano a Henri IV, 19 fevrier 1603, Archives historiques de la Gironde, t. 14, no. 273, 391-393. 15. That the town magistrates were able to act unanimously in a crisis was illustrated shortly thereafter when they closed the gates to some tax officials and their archers; Jurades, January 1, 1609. The marshal d'Ornano prohibited citizens from effectively demonstrating: "expresses inhibitions ä faire aucune monopole, ny de sonner aucun tambour." This did not prevent a general mobilization when an armed band led by fiscal agents presented itself at the gates on July 13: "certaines personnes inconnues, trente ä quarante, armes d'arquebuses, pistolets, piques et demi-piques, pertuisanes et espees . . . desirant d'entrer. Le peuple craignoient que ce soient des brigands pour les voler." Jurades, April 28,1609.

FLOWS OF POWER IN LAYRAC 1 THE MIXED CONSULATE (1603-1622) Elite Heads of Household· in Loyroc, 1624 Simplified illustration of the interaction of Protestant·

political ond confessional power structures.

78

Absent are the Senechaueeee d'Armognac, Cour des Aidee and royal court foctions. ConfUct Is between Afferent branches of regional government, the town's governor

^ ^

official·

^ ^

bourgtol* end mtrehdnt·

Figure 2.1.

and the Jurade.

SoMr