The Politics of Religion in Early Modern France 9780300210460

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THE POLITICS OF RELIGION IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE

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THE POLITICS OF RELIGION IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE

∂

J O S E P H B E RG I N

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON

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Copyright © 2014 Joseph Bergin All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers. For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact: U.S. Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.com Europe Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.co.uk Typeset in Minion Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bergin, Joseph, 1948 The politics of religion in early modern France/Joseph Bergin. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-300-20769-9 (cloth: alkaline paper) 1. Church and state—France—History—17th century. 2. Christianity and politics— France—History—17th century. 3. Catholic Church—France—History—17th century. 4. Protestantism—France—History—17th century. 5. France—Politics and government— 17th century. 6. France—Religion. 7. France—Church history—17th century. I. Title. BR845.B4337 2014 322'.1094409032—dc23 2014014242 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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In memory of Bridget (1913–91) and Cornelius (1914–96) Bergin

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Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction

1

1 The Religion of King and Kingdom

17

2 Disputes and Settlements

43

3 Gallican Stirs

64

4 The Dévot Impulse

86

5 The Richelieu Effect

112

6 The Fiscal Nexus and its Ramifications

133

7 Obedient Rebels? The Protestants from Nantes to Nîmes

156

8 Jansenist Dilemmas

181

9 A New Gallican Age?

206

10 A Huguenot Half-century

227

11 To Fontainebleau and Beyond

252

12 Enemies Within?

277

Conclusion

299

Notes

308

Bibliography

351

Index

369

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Nos rois . . . n’ayant pu ce qu’ils voulaient, ils ont fait semblant de vouloir ce qu’ils pouvaient (montaigne) Unable to do what they wished, our kings pretended that what they could do was what they wished

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Preface

O

ne way to describe this book might be that it is ‘history with the politics put back in’, as Patrick Collinson wittily put it a generation ago, although in the present case, the context and objectives are somewhat different from his. Having published a few years ago a book entitled Church, society and religious change in France 1580–1730, that largely left out the politics, on the essentially pragmatic grounds of the need to produce something that was both coherent and manageable in scale, it was obvious that a socio-cultural history of religion inevitably ignored several important aspects of the subject for the period with which that book dealt. What follows is an attempt to make up for that deficit by exploring the multiple relations between politics and religion during a broadly identical period of early modern history. The terms of this book’s title have been chosen with a view to avoiding, as far as possible, misconceptions or disappointment on the part of its readers. It attempts to delineate the shifting relations between political power and religious affiliation in an age when the long-familiar landscape was severely altered by the Protestant Reformations and their consequences. Many of the unresolved conflicts around religious questions during the seventeenth century were inherited from the sixteenth, but the new century also rose to the challenge of developing some of its own. The alternative title of ‘politics and religion’ seemed both too vague and too vast, likely to produce an essentially chronological political narrative. The following pages will attempt to combine the history of ideas and ‘political’ history, broadly speaking, with the underlying intention of anchoring the ideas in question in the political praxis as exemplified by the gallery of actors that will figure therein. Among other things, it seeks to show that at a time when the French monarchy was increasingly detaching itself, in theory at least, from anything that would subordinate royal authority to purely human controls, the process of borrowing political ideas from theology, in the broad sense, continued to be necessary. But

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borrowing from an often unwilling or uncomprehending lender is likely to produce misunderstanding and recrimination, as the different parties try to protect what belongs to them. As in previous centuries, debates on the nature of the church and its authority structure – questions which formed the subdiscipline of theology known as ecclesiology – had immediate implications, as contemporaries were quick to notice, for political power. In her study of the gradual unfolding of ideas of absolute power in sixteenth-century France, Arlette Jouanna warned against seeing it as a normal, predetermined evolution of the French monarchy, and identified the religious division as the decisive factor in its uncertain history. Other, even more short-term historical events, such as the successive assassinations of Henri III and Henri IV, also acted as effective accelerators of that development. But the logic of ideas did not always work as we might expect. The adoption of the discourse of absolute obedience to royal authority by France’s Protestants before and especially after the 1620s did not bring the dividends that they hoped, even if it may have stayed the hand of persecution for longer than might otherwise have been the case; it certainly did not prevent their Catholic opponents from pinning the label of incorrigible ‘rebels’ on them, and declaring that their professed political beliefs were just a sham. This latter point is a reminder that the monarchy, even under Louis XIV, was constantly, and at various times unwisely, drawn into confrontations concerning religious and inter-confessional issues, and that it was not always the sovereign arbiter that its propagandists proclaimed it to be. And when serious religious controversies erupted, it was not always able to foresee or control their ramifications. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that by the end of the seventeenth century the urge to ensure a reduction à l’obéissance was reaching into spheres beyond the monarchy’s actual capacity, and reviving political impulses that it would have preferred to see dead and buried. The encounter between politics and religion did not take place purely in learned treatises or pamphlets. It would be absurd to imagine, for example, that the Jansenist movement that developed in France after 1640 was derived from or traceable to one of the most arduous theological treatises of its day, Cornelius Jansen’s Augustinus; it would be no less misguided to believe that once it got going, it became a sort of fixed essence which did not vary thereafter. This is why the following pages try to connect the analysis of the movement of ideas to real-life politics in which churches, the papacy, law courts, universities, clerical assemblies, religious factions or ginger groups were active. It is also the ultimate justification for the book’s title – the politics of religion. Although what follows is an exploration of the politics–religion articulation within a single state, it cannot be satisfactorily or straightforwardly

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PREFACE

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presented in the single narrative structure that is familiar in political history. Such a straitjacket would foreshorten or exclude the analysis of particular developments – often intellectual – whose significance was long term (but whose presence might be episodic). For this reason, the book may be regarded as a set of connected essays of a thematic kind. This has inevitably led to perhaps more repetition and overlap in the pages that follow than is desirable, but it is primarily intended to assist readers to find (or re-find) their bearings. At the same time, it is a useful reminder of the persistence and continuity of certain themes or problems within the politics of religion of the period. Thus, depending on the theme under discussion, individual chapters briefly anticipate discussions to come in later chapters or reach backwards to take a look, from a different angle, at issues that may already be familiar from earlier chapters. It is hoped that such an approach will, cumulatively, generate a sense of how connected the different and sometimes elusive questions discussed in these pages actually are. Although the objective is not comprehensiveness in itself, it should be clear by the time the book concludes in (literally) the last days of Louis XIV’s reign how much the politico-religious landscape had altered since the later sixteenth century where it begins. The debts accumulated while writing this book are far too numerous to itemise here, as they go back many years and apply to earlier researches. I beg the indulgence of the many if I mention only a few here. Thanks to Nicole Reinhardt, I benefited from a short but enjoyable stay at the Max Weber Kolleg at Erfurt. That was followed by a full academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Nantes. Both institutions, as well as their staff and resident researchers, provided ideal conditions to write this book, which was completed in Nantes. I am particularly grateful to Robin Briggs, Dermot Fenlon and Nicole Reinhardt, who took the trouble to read the ensuing manuscript and provided me with challenging comments and suggestions for improvement. I am only too conscious of the imperfections and mistakes that remain, for which I claim exclusive responsibility. Almost thirty years ago, I dedicated my first book to my parents for the sacrifices they made to enable me to receive an education. Now, in the year in which they would have become centenarians, I am more conscious than ever of the good fortune that was mine. This book is dedicated to their memory.

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Introduction

I

F

or much of the ‘long’ 1680s, which coincided roughly with the reign of Pope Innocent XI (1676–89), the French monarchy and the papacy were in open conflict. The clash itself was originally sparked by a royal edict of 1673 extending for the first time to the dioceses of southern France: the régale, which consisted of certain financial and patronage rights, temporal and spiritual, that escheated to the crown during episcopal vacancies. It appeared to most observers, leading figures within the French church included, that the edict was not worth fighting over; it was a matter of Louis XIV rationalising his prerogatives within the boundaries of his kingdom. Consequently, only two of the fifty-nine southern bishops affected by the new measure protested against it. But when the two persisted and appealed in 1677 to Pope Innocent XI, tensions between Rome and the French escalated; they led, among other things, to the famous declaration of the four gallican articles of 1682 by a specially convened assembly of clergy. That in turn was followed by the cessation, until 1692, of all confirmations by the papacy of incoming French bishops, as well as a pre-emptive French appeal of 1688 to a future general council of the church against any potential papal censure of Louis XIV. It took Innocent XI’s death, in 1689, and the quick succession of two popes to open the door to negotiation and eventual reconciliation between France and Rome during 1692–93.1 This ‘gallican’ crisis, by far the most severe and most famous of the seventeenth century, seemed at various points to be leading France into imitating Henry VIII of England’s break with Rome in 1534. Yet that did not happen. Despite the underlying danger and the long periods of posturing, ill-humour and stonewalling on both sides, as a result of which the French church was short of nearly forty bishops by early 1692, there was no inexorable logic of ideas at

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work during the crisis. It is, in fact, worth briefly enumerating the many possible moves or gestures that were not made during that decade of confrontation. Firstly and crucially, the papacy abstained from formally censuring the declaration of 1682, which it must have been sorely tempted to do, given that it was a zealous assembly of clergy, rather than the crown itself, which had taken the initiative in adopting the gallican articles in the name of the French church. Secondly, because the Pope refused to grant their bulls to two of the deputies to the 1682 assembly who were nominated to vacant bishoprics immediately after the assembly closed, it was the French government which decided not to put forward any royal nominees for papal approval so long as these two nominees were denied their episcopal confirmation by Rome. It was emphatically not the papacy that refused to confirm French episcopal nominations generally. On the contrary, Rome was quite keen to do just that, as success would have wrecked the French boycott, but the French crown deterred any of its nominees from breaking ranks. As for the French appeal to a future general council of the church of 1688 – a spectacularly out-of-season gesture that recalled the ‘withdrawal of obedience’ tactics employed by the monarchy against the papacy during and after another major crisis, that of the great schism (1378–1418) – it was fraught with unseen dangers. Unlike previous appeals of its kind, that of 1688 was kept rather low-key and quickly faded into obscurity.2 Contrary to yet another tenacious legend, there was no secret excommunication of Louis XIV and his ministers in 1687 by Innocent XI, who had every reason to avoid such a perilous and provocative move. Instead, he merely informed the king that he had incurred the automatic penalties (principally excommunication) contained in the annual ‘Good Friday’ papal bull, the notorious In Coena Domini, which was directed against those, rulers in particular, who infringed the ‘liberties of the church’. But Innocent XI knew full well that this bull, to which virtually all Catholic rulers of the time vehemently objected, was not ‘received’ in France and, therefore, that the effect of its censures on the king would be entirely non-existent.3 Finally, towards the end of the negotiations to terminate the stand-off in late 1693, Louis XIV made a more unexpected offer to the Pope. Having already mollified Rome by agreeing not to enforce the four gallican articles of 1682 as the official teaching of the French church, he offered to abandon outright his claim to exercise the régale as a crown right, if the Pope would grant it to him by a special indult. He repeated this offer several times over the following years, but each time Innocent XII declined to enter negotiations. It was not the first time that early modern conflicts of this kind petered out without a clear resolution, leaving the participants free to keep their powder at least half-dry for future skirmishes.4 We shall return later in more detail to this especially heated moment in the tripartite relations between monarchy, church and papacy, but it is worth

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INTRODUCTION

3

emphasising here how naïve it would be to imagine that the many connections between religion and politics in early modern France could be fully grasped on a first reading, even of events as well known as those of the 1680s. In the case just outlined, a much broader analysis of the various dramatis personae, but also – and especially – of the ideas and interests that lay behind the dispute, is required for such a full understanding. In addition, the references made above to the right of régale, the ‘great schism’, the appeal to a future general council of the church, or the bull In Coena Domini, all need historical exegesis before they begin to be comprehensible to the average reader. Beyond that, it would be even more naïve to imagine that the ‘religion-and-politics’ nexus that will be studied in this book was limited to issues or confrontations of this particular type. After all, this was a classic dispute between the monarchy and the papacy, with precedents going back over several centuries, although it had its own particular resonances. Not unusually, such disputes frequently helped to spark off other actions that had not been envisaged at the outset. Thus it was in late 1685, during this dispute with Rome, that Louis XIV took another momentous decision: finally to revoke the Edict of Nantes of 1598 which had enabled Protestants to live and worship under the protection of the law within France. Whatever the principal motives for this decision were, it was certainly hoped that it would persuade the papacy to soften its stance on the régale affair, but that confident expectation was also to be dashed by an unimpressed Innocent XI. These, and many other scenarios involving different parties and issues familiar to the trio of church, state and papacy that we have just observed, will appear in the pages that follow. A study of them should provide a broad basis for an understanding of the kinds of problem that aroused contemporary passions, as well as of the ways in which they were articulated and handled. Many of them were accompanied by public controversy, increasingly in print and in the vernacular, which in turn helped to move the goalposts with regard to the relations between politics and religion. As a result, the ‘landscape’ with which we shall be dealing was one in which perceptions and priorities shifted with the passage of time, so that a debate or conflict arising around 1700 could have a different significance to a similar-looking one arising a century or more earlier. By the same token, changes of alignment – sometimes purely tactical and short-lived – among the different parties involved would ensure that the meaning of certain positions or conflicts would also vary across time. As we have already noted, an awareness, however skewed, of certain historical events that were still considered to be of contemporary relevance could quickly surface in the course of a conflict and shape the way in which positions were defined. This was no less true of France than of Rome, insofar as gallican positions – and indeed French political thinking generally – depended heavily

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on the flying buttresses of historical precedent for documentation and argument. The historian’s perennial problem of how to deal with sameness and difference, and how to give due attention to each of them, is particularly acute whenever such historical awareness among the participants is itself an element in the situation to be explored. II The preceding discussion suggests that in order to understand the French ‘ways of proceeding’ where the relations of religion and politics, church and state, monarchy and gallican church during the post-Reformation are concerned, an excursion, however brief, into the historical past is indispensable. No more than a limited number of points can be raised in this introductory vade mecum to the chapters that follow. It is widely accepted that during the two centuries or so before the Protestant Reformation both the French monarchy and the church were increasingly characterised by a powerful sense of their distinctiveness and autonomy – the monarchy in relation to the Holy Roman Empire, and both the monarchy and the French church in relation to the papacy and its claims to enjoy temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction within Christendom. Equally, the French church and monarchy were depicted as intimately connected – as befitted the constituent parts of something unique and mystical that transcended the relations between more ‘ordinary’ institutions. Much has been written about the emergence of France as a ‘holy land’ and the elements of ‘invention’ that went into making such a precocious sense of historical identity or self-image, one which was initially (and for a long time) confined to the political and ecclesiastical elites. A large corpus of ‘historical’ writing, both local and national, ecclesiastical and secular, played an important part in this cumulative process, with the result that early modern French political thinking in the broadest sense remained for long heavily freighted with historical argument and illustration, as it constantly ransacked both the ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ materials for evidence to support its claims. Histories of local saints, essentially as the holy founders of churches, dioceses and other monumental sites abounded, and were still being written well into the seventeenth century. This kind of ‘sacred’ history, which culminated in the massive Gallia christiana project of the mid-seventeenth century, was practised in many other parts of Europe. In France, however, there was a much stronger agenda accompanying it, one which involved church and monarchy, both of which promoted these histories as the basis of a particular concept of France and its origins – and, therefore, of its ‘special’ political and religious status.5 The community of interest between monarchy and church was so powerful that Joseph Strayer could argue that by the later Middle Ages

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INTRODUCTION

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it enabled the French ‘to avoid, to a very large degree, any feeling of contradiction between their duties to the church and their duties to the state’.6 From the early fourteenth century onwards, ‘proving’ that France had historical origins that owed little or nothing to imperial Rome became increasingly prominent in political and historical writing. This explains, to take one example from many, the recourse in the fifteenth century to the myth of the French as descendants of, successively, the Trojans, the Gauls and the sons of Noah. Such a genealogy of the French nation served the purpose of asserting independence from Rome – especially from imperial Rome, because of the claims of the Holy Roman Empire to be heir to Rome’s higher authority. The choice of ‘national’ saints such as Clovis, St Louis and St Michel was designed to enhance the monarchy and the unity of the nation, and especially to buttress the thesis that the king of France was ‘emperor in his own realm’ and not subject to any temporal power.7 This in turn had implications that were far wider than ‘temporal’ in nature, since ‘history’ showed that such imperial equivalence entitled the monarchy to exercise certain powers in relation to the church; by the sixteenth century it would lead to controversy over whether the church was ‘in the republic’ or vice versa. Meanwhile, there was another declared heir to the Roman Empire – the papacy; dealing with its claims involved the French church as much as the monarchy. Hence, to take another example, the need to distinguish France from kingdoms like Sicily or even England, which were considered inferior precisely because, in the view of French writers, their princes owed their title to rule to papal investiture in earlier centuries.8 Alongside the efforts of theologians and increasingly of lawyers (canon as well as civil), this kind of writing was essential to affirming and protecting what became known as the gallican liberties, which were conceived as an essential element of France’s patrimony and which belonged equally to the monarchy and the church. The inconvenient fact that this early growth of France’s gallican sense of identity itself owed no small debt to the support of the papacy during its struggle with the Holy Roman Empire during the central Middle Ages was much less easy to acknowledge in subsequent centuries; such reminders were usually brushed off as a matter of the papacy acknowledging pre-existing gallican circumstances rather than something to which the popes of the day contributed. Yet French kings acquired the title of ‘most christian king’ and ‘the eldest son of the church’ from the papacy, which also acknowledged their subjects as the most Catholic of all Christendom. This latter assertion was elaborated and broadcast via numerous literary genres and media, and was particularly evident in the widespread recourse to the phrase of St Jerome, ‘Gaul alone has no monsters’ (i.e. only France knows no heresy). These words became an endlessly quoted mantra, and never more so than during the decades immediately before the wars of religion which would so dramatically disprove them.9

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It would be mistaken to conclude from this that the French people, or nation, were somehow placed on a par with the monarchy or the gallican church in contemporary thinking. Leaving aside altogether the problem of what the terms ‘nation’ or ‘France’ might have meant at that point, it was the monarchy which, over time, increasingly appropriated for itself most of the religious attributes – and benefits – of this fidelity to, and zeal for, the true religion.10 Such accumulation was itself an essential part of the much longer process of the fashioning of what has often been called a religion royale that was still visible in the seventeenth century. Its most obvious elements – the coronation ceremony at Reims, the ‘royal touch’ which healed those suffering from the ‘king’s evil’ (scrofula), the elaborate ‘liturgies’ enveloping key moments of the king’s existence, the iconographic representation of the king as either a priest or a Christ-like figure and, not least, his elaborate funeral ritual – have all been extensively examined by historians.11 For most of the time, this steady accretion of attributes paid substantial dividends, as it rendered the king of France a quasi-sacerdotal figure, with all the symbolic and even practical political capital that it generated; because of its connections to the cult of the saints, this kind of monarchy was projected more widely, and more effectively, by its liturgico-religious forms than by the medium of the written or published word.12 But in times of acute crisis, and most of all during the wars of religion, the monarchy’s sudden inability to live up to its obligations to protect the true religion produced severe problems, leading to the alienation and even outright hostility of many of its subjects. Its traditions scarcely prepared it for the enduring confessional division of the kind experienced in the sixteenth century, yet it managed to invent solutions to this which went much further than anything attempted elsewhere in Europe. III The real partner of the monarchy in the age before religious division was not so much the nation (for all its supposed virtues) as the gallican church. With it, we encounter perhaps the most slippery word of this entire study. The meaning of the term ‘gallican’ – which, as we shall see later, ought not to be confined solely to the church – is by no means straightforward, regardless of whether it is used as an adjective or a noun. It was certainly never as fixed as the later, nineteenth-century substantive ‘gallican-ism’ would lead us to believe. In most of the historical contexts with which we shall be concerned, ‘gallicanism’ suggests something that is over-defined when in reality it was highly elusive.13 It was more than the sum of the respective rights and responsibilities of the French crown and the church in France. Along the broad spectrum of ideas, practices and images associated with gallican thinking there were varying

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INTRODUCTION

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degrees of precision and clarification, firstly in the work of the theologians concerned with defining what was meant by the term ‘church’ (ecclesiology) and, later, in that of the lawyers and jurists who were crucial in giving wider ‘real-world’ substance to gallican aspirations. Like so many other neologisms employed by historians, the term gallicanism still remains a convenient shorthand, dispensing with cumbersome or tedious circumlocution. As we have already seen, the sixteenth-century gallican mindset represented, before and beyond the specific rights or claims associated with the term, a common history with a powerful religious core to it. To some extent it filled the void left by the decline of the older concept of Christendom by the early sixteenth century. Alain Tallon has usefully suggested that because of the strong proto-national sentiments present in France by that juncture, the gallican church can be regarded as a ‘national’ church, but not a ‘state’ church. Certainly, its sixteenth-century defenders had no difficulty making such a distinction or repudiating the Anglican state–church on precisely such grounds.14 During the crisis of the great schism (1378–1418), leading figures in the French church had played a major part in developing a ‘conciliar’ vision of the church, which placed the authority of a general church council above that of the Pope, whose power was thereby limited. Such a restriction fitted well with the gallican conception of a universal church whose constituent parts – and especially France – enjoyed a considerable degree of self-rule. Thus, conventional gallicans viewed the French church as being in full communion with the Pope, in whom they recognised the successor of St Peter as head of the church, while denying him the primacy of jurisdiction and the personal infallibility that early modern popes, especially after the Council of Trent, would increasingly assert was theirs. Such a limitation of papal authority fitted into the idea of a gallican church which had enjoyed its ‘liberties’ since antiquity. Derived from its autonomous apostolic origins, those liberties made it largely self-governing and self-contained; it was not subject to direct papal jurisdiction, with the rights of intervention that that implied. In reality, these liberties had developed as an increasingly self-conscious reaction to the growth of papal power since the thirteenth century, while claiming to be much older than the papal power in question; ‘historical’ priority was creatively used here to trump emerging papal theory. Henceforth, the gallican liberties stood firmly in the way of France being subjected to an extension of papal control over the church, regardless of what happened in other parts of Europe. Moreover, while the plural form of the term – ‘liberties’ – and the shifting, often vague content of those liberties may have annoyed both outsiders and opponents, especially in Rome, these same attributes were no mean weapon of defence. Originating in the mists of time, like the gallican church itself, they seemed all the more authentic because they could not be

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clearly dated nor their content precisely pinned down, unlike well-documented papal concessions. In some cases, early church councils, such as Sardica (347), and their disputed canons were invaluable in reinforcing the gallican arsenal. For that reason, that arsenal continued to be ‘work in progress’ throughout the early modern period, requiring updating in order to defend a wide variety of causes. When the Dupuy brothers set about compiling their celebrated volume on the gallican liberties which appeared in 1639, they found relatively few reliable treatises antedating the mid-sixteenth century.15 The partnership of monarchy and gallican church was itself, needless to say, subject to gravity shifts and redefinition over time, and these were frequently the consequence of political events which need not be narrated here. From the conflict with Boniface VIII during Philip IV’s reign (1294– 1314) to the crisis of the great schism and beyond, it was increasingly the monarchy which took the initiative and steered the actions of church and clergy in ways that suited its interests; it found that national councils or assemblies of clergy could be helpful instruments during conflicts with the papacy or, as during the schism, a particular pope. Because the great schism lasted so long, and was much more than a simple clash of gallican and papal interests, it had a lasting impact on the gallican church. If the second of the 1682 gallican articles explicitly referred to the Council of Constance’s decree of 1417 concerning the ultimate superiority of general councils of the church over the Pope, and the need for the Pope to govern the church in collegial communion with bishops and local or national churches (like that of France), it was precisely because that view of the church’s ‘constitution’ had been fashioned during the schism and, specifically, during the general councils of Constance and Basle. At that point, the most vocal defenders of the tenets of ‘conciliarism’, as this enduring ecclesiological position is still called, were French churchmen like Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly and especially Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris.16 It was no accident, as we shall see, that Gerson’s works were republished during the first major state-versus-papacy crisis of the seventeenth century, that of the Venetian Interdict of 1606. The 1688 appeal to a future general council mentioned above expressed a long tradition built upon historical precedents forgotten almost everywhere else in Europe. In the two intervening centuries the gallican traditions had been used – and sometimes abused – by both the monarchy and the gallican church in their successive quarrels with Rome. Until the upheavals of the mid-sixteenth century at least, gallicans tended to celebrate the harmony and equilibrium of church–monarchy relations in France. The wars of religion would change all that quite dramatically. Until then, the liberties were credited not just with protecting the autonomy of the French church and monarchy against unwarranted papal intervention, but

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INTRODUCTION

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also with preserving France in the integrity of the faith of the old church, just when it seemed that other parts of Europe were succumbing to Lutheran or other versions of schism and heresy. But this display of unanimity was not the full story. Gallican maxims were, as noted above, not solely ecclesiastical in character. There were ‘liberties’ which justified and delineated the quite distinctive rights of the king to intervene in the affairs of the French church itself. Another increasingly prominent strand of gallican thinking was still being developed by the secular courts and royal magistrates in opposition to the exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction within France in relation to both clerics and laypeople; dislike of such jurisdiction was not confined to France and was commonplace across later medieval Europe, but the gallican idiom provided secular magistrates with powerful means to sharpen it.17 By the early seventeenth century, the French clergy were, if we can judge by the tone and range of their complaints to the assemblies of clergy, genuinely incensed by the ways magistrates were behaving in this domain. However, among the clergy themselves there were often sharp differences between bishops, cathedral chapters and religious orders on matters of jurisdiction and privilege – and, therefore, in their understanding of the ‘liberties’. The universities, and in particular the Paris theology faculty, developed and taught their own synthesis of gallican and conciliarist ideas which would prove increasingly influential during the seventeenth century when growing numbers of the clerical elite were taking theology rather than law degrees. It will be clear from this brief sketch that the ‘maxims of France’ were not a single, coherent ideology and, crucially, that some of their individual strands could end up in opposition to each other. For example, the incorporation of conciliarist ideas into French thinking, with their provision for a representative body placed above the Pope and for legitimate resistance to misrule, had potentially worrying implications for a monarchy keen to establish its divine-right foundations. But in the short term, these contradictions attracted little attention. Notorious for being ‘easy to invoke, but impossible to define’, the sheer range of accumulated gallican traditions was bound to continue influencing the relations of church and monarchy, regardless of whatever other changes might occur.18 The different parties could readily agree on what united them when it came to opposing the papacy or (decreasingly) the empire, but as ‘gallicanism’ began to acquire a more ‘systematic’ and codified format at the hands of both theologians and lawyers, that earlier unanimity was increasingly likely to crack open. The Concordat of Bologna, signed in 1516 between Leo X and François I, was a major example of this, and deserves brief comment here, since the fallout from it lasted for virtually a century. It had a prehistory, of course, during which the crown steadily extended its grip on church patronage at the expense

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of a weakened Renaissance papacy; but the concordat also enhanced royal patronage at the expense of cathedral chapters and monastic houses (especially abbeys) within France itself. At this date, the French monarchy proved far more successful in extending, and formalising, the kind of regalist claims to authority over the church that other European rulers were pursuing while never managing to clinch such a spectacular deal over them with the papacy. The 1516 concordat, which also spelt out in considerable detail the limitations on papal jurisdiction within France, may have created very little that was genuinely new, but it was its codified form – a deal cut between the king and the Pope at the expense of third parties – that was significant in revealing, in a highly public manner, the crown’s hard-headed ambition.19 Without ever admitting it openly, the monarchy had discovered that papal collaboration could be indispensable to furthering its ambitions at the expense of the other parties seated in the gallican tent. Not surprisingly, therefore, the response to the concordat from within France was largely hostile, in part perhaps because a recent, bad-tempered ‘conciliar’ conflict with the papacy (1509–12) had openly aired several familiar anti-papal, gallican themes, only for the king to put them back in the box and selfishly ditch the common cause in order, so it seemed, to further his own interests; from being the high protector of the gallican liberties, the king had become their principal beneficiary. Surprisingly perhaps, some of the heaviest criticism came from the magistrates in the Paris parlement, precisely because the concordat gave the king too much power within the church. In their view, the historical balance, the equilibrium of church–state–papacy relations, was seriously damaged by Bologna – and they vigorously protested for an unprecedented number of years against it. So too did sections of the French church, particularly the Paris theology faculty, which was unhappy with the patronage rights the French king now possessed of directly nominating for papal confirmation bishops and abbots within the church; his patronage rights within his kingdom exceeded those of the Pope within the papal states.20 Those critics who had long defended elections and self-government as key elements of the gallican tradition against comparable papal encroachment could hardly escape sensing that that, too, was being sacrificed behind their backs. IV In the short term, the French monarchy managed to brush aside these objections, but they did not disappear for all that. In normal times, they usually remained out of sight, but ready to resurface when conditions made that possible. Within a generation after Bologna, France’s Protestants would present themselves as the ultimate gallicans, ready to cut all ties to Rome and

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INTRODUCTION

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create an independent French church. Soon after that, the heated debate over whether to officially accept the Council of Trent’s decrees in France opened up an entirely new front on which to defend the gallican liberties. Other champs de bataille, as we shall see, would follow during the seventeenth century. All of these issues brought into play, to one degree or another, dramatis personae whom we have so far only fleetingly encountered, and who need to be briefly introduced here. The long-term origins of the conflict between Louis XIV and Innocent XI with which this chapter began lay in the part played by the parlements in formulating the juristic basis of rights belonging to the French crown. During the previous centuries, since at least the reign of Philip the Fair (1285–1314), the French royal jurists collectively labelled as the gens du roi (the king’s advocates, procurators and court recorders or greffiers) and based in the Paris parlement, had become the most active promoters of the crown’s prerogatives, religious and ecclesiastical as much as political, although they did not always persuade the parlement or the king officially to adopt their ideas. For example, it took the crown nearly seventy years to accept their arguments for extending the régale throughout the kingdom, but the régale was only one of many causes close to the parlement’s heart. Before that, the successive crises of the wars of religion forced them to rethink some of their key notions about royal power and religious unity, most of all when, after August 1589, the nominal king of France was a heretic; this acute succession crisis made it possible to reconceptualise the relationship between God, the king and his subjects in a way that would endure and expand during the following century. Some of the best-known parlementaires of the sixteenth century – Jean du Tillet, Étienne Pasquier, Pierre Pithou and Louis Servin – also rank among the most celebrated gallicans tout court, men whose works and ideas were frequently taken up by subsequent generations. The development of government by royal council(s) in the early modern period meant that the historic closeness of the Paris parlement to the king and its participation in decision-making was, for these historically minded writers, a thing of the past; this change gave the parlement a stronger incentive than previously to position itself as the zealous guardian of the crown’s rights, even to the extent of clashing with kings and ministers over them. Finally, despite the fact that some of their magistrates remained clerics throughout the early modern period, the parlements already had a well-documented antipathy towards church courts and ecclesiastical jurisdiction generally, whose workings they would continue to curtail during the last centuries of the ancien régime, especially by expanding the scope of appeals available against church jurisdiction. The French church frequently deplored the ease with which individuals could make such appeals to the royal courts (via the appel comme d’abus, as it was known), but its protests were

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severely weakened by the fact that many such appellants were themselves clerics. It will come as no surprise that the most committed defenders of the notion that the church was ‘in the republic’ were the parlements and, more generally, France’s jurists.21 By contrast, it would seem relatively easy to identify and present the ‘church’. But, as befits a concept elaborated and refined by generations of canonists and theologians, even that term has a range of meanings that need to be specified in order to avoid confusion or simplification in certain instances. Fundamentally, the term encapsulates the universal church conceived either as a body of believers (the preferred gallican view) or as a hierarchical, visible organisation. On a more mundane level it refers to its French ‘component’, whose role within the universal church would be viewed differently by those of a gallican or an ultramontane persuasion. Was it the ‘church of France’ or merely the ‘church in France’? Gallicans preferred the first of these terms, for obvious reasons. The ecclesiological lexicon is less useful when we move from the theological to the practical-institutional sphere. Was the French church a collective entity personified, for example, by its bishops who together constituted the kind of leadership that provided its institutional visibility? And if so, how could – or did – that leadership manifest itself on a monarchy-wide scale? Did it require a ‘national’ council of bishops for that to be the case? But no such council ever met in the early modern period, despite one or two threats, in 1551 and 1715 respectively. By contrast, actual assemblies of clergy, whose membership consisted of elected bishops and other elected clergy, did meet with growing regularity, but only after 1560. To paraphrase a historian of England’s parliaments of this period, the assemblies of clergy were for a time events rather than an institution.22 Even after they had become institutionalised, their claim to speak in the name of the French church was limited in many ways, particularly because their primary raison d’être was to vote financial assistance to the monarchy. On occasion, their decisions were rejected by individual bishops who argued that they alone should decide what should be done within their dioceses – an argument which itself had impeccable gallican foundations. That very gallican sense of their own authority which France’s bishops possessed did not always make for a harmonious relationship between individual bishops or among their collective number. Above all, it should make it easier to understand why neither the crown nor the papacy wished to see the French church establish powerful institutional sources of independent decision-making, leadership or action. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the regular assemblies of clergy played a major part in adding real substance to the notion of a visible gallican church and were capable of acting as an effective mouthpiece of that church, despite the extent to which they were dominated by France’s bishops.23 The gallican articles

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INTRODUCTION

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of 1682 have nearly always been cited as the clearest evidence of this development, but we shall observe other such moments along the way – and indeed well after 1682. This exploration of the gallican church should include at least one player whose role is perhaps the least obvious from a modern perspective – the universities, and specifically their theology faculties. Historically, Paris and its theology faculty stood head and shoulders above all the others, not just in France, but across Europe generally.24 This was, of course, why Luther’s works and Henry VIII’s divorce case, among others, were submitted to it for examination in the 1520s. Universities and their corporation of ‘masters’ were a kind of fourth estate whose teaching mission included an obligation to defend truth and orthodoxy; they exercised a magisterium that was all the more important during the centuries when the papacy did not yet claim a monopoly on that responsibility. Thus, universities were quite logically represented at medieval church councils, and the Paris doctors made major contributions at the great councils of Constance and Basle.25 Then and later, their role in developing conciliar and gallican ideas was no less important than that of the jurists, although the two sides came to diverge on several key questions. Over the centuries, the evolution of their thinking on the nature of the church – the subset of theology known as ecclesiology – was of major importance, since it also had consequences for conceptions of political authority and its status in relation to the wider society. Diffusing these ideas among the elite of the French clergy through their teaching was no less crucial to the universities’ wider reach. Around 1500–50, the ‘Sorbonne’ – the usual shorthand for the Paris theology faculty – still viewed itself as the oracle of Christendom. Its 1543 articles of faith became part of French law once adopted by François I and registered by the parlement of Paris; the articles even formed the basis of subsequent confessions of faith that had to be made by royal officials taking up office.26 But for all its accumulated influence, the ground had already begun to move under the faculty’s feet.27 Its members proved far less influential at the Council of Trent than at previous councils – partly because Trent was the most ‘episcopal’ of all councils to date. Between them, the post-tridentine papacy and the French crown would gradually whittle away much of the faculty’s historical supervision and powers to censure unorthodox ideas and books.28 Moreover, its subsequent involvement with the Catholic League after 1588 proved quite disastrous to its authority and wider influence.29 During the first decade of the next century, the faculty’s most famous syndic, Edmond Richer, would attempt to restore its historical lustre, which he associated with the age of Gerson (chancellor of the university 1395–1415), by reforming its statutes and ‘codifying’ its teaching, but his version of gallicanism was,

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as we shall see, too extreme for most of his fellow doctors and his reforms were partially aborted. Simultaneously, the crown and papacy continued to shrink the faculty’s claims to authority, thus signalling the relegation of ‘mere’ theologians to secondary, advisory roles. At the same time, the Paris parlement, in its self-appointed but highly unwelcome role as ‘protector’ of the faculty, claimed the right to oversee its activities and ensure that they were consonant with the ‘maxims of the kingdom’; the successive ‘reforms’ of the university from 1536 onwards served also to reduce the autonomy that its doctors prized so much.30 And, as we shall see more than once, an unexpected rival also appeared after 1600, but especially during Louis XIV’s reign, in the form of the French episcopate, whether in the shape of an assembly of clergy or of individual bishops claiming to act as doctors of the faith within their dioceses. Nevertheless, many of the ideas about church–state–papacy relations broadly speaking first surfaced within universities, even though, as was the case for the gallican jurists, their subsequent progress into the public domain might not be a simple matter. It was in theology faculties that gallicans and their ultramontane rivals most frequently confronted each other in the seventeenth century. The celebrated gallican articles of 1682 were originally debated in the Paris faculty in the early 1660s, yet the faculty was the only major institution in France openly to protest against the articles being made the official teaching of the French church twenty years later. It objected, quite logically, that such a step removed the historical ‘liberty of teaching’ (libertas docendi) and debate which it had always favoured and which, it argued, was its lifeblood.31 But much bigger forces were at work by the 1680s – and indeed long before then – which set little store by such academic considerations. V It should be obvious by now that whenever historians use terms like ‘church’ and ‘state’ they need to specify and contextualise them as far as possible. Over a century of scholarship on the subject means that they can no longer use them in ways that were common during the long nineteenth century. The different, and at times conflicting, forms of gallicanism may make the historian’s task a difficult one, but they are a salutary reminder of the need to think in the plural rather than in the singular if we are adequately to do justice to the historical developments under consideration here. Specific contexts and the interests at stake determined whose voice would be raised and heard on particular issues and at different times. In this respect, it is essential to introduce here a final player who, by blurring the boundaries that we might too readily perceive from an intellectual-history vantage point, actually made moderation and

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INTRODUCTION

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compromise more easy to achieve than the terms of a conflict or controversy might suggest. Alongside the magistrates, lawyers and theologians mentioned above, we should not overlook the prélats d’état, as they have been called – France’s equivalents of Cardinal Wolsey or Archbishop Laud. In France as in England, the early to middle decades of the sixteenth century were the high-water mark of the prélat d’état, when high-ranking clergy served the monarchy in an impressive range of political, diplomatic and even military roles. Their golden age, corresponding to the reigns of François I and Henry VIII, may have been long over by 1600, at least judging by the numbers of churchmen in government service as ministers, councillors, ambassadors, fixers and troubleshooters, but this generalisation hardly allows us to dismiss the age of Richelieu and Mazarin as insignificant for France’s politico-religious history.32 And within only a few years of the death of Louis XIV, who had kept clerical politicians out of the limelight, the latter made a strong return in the guise of Cardinals Dubois and Fleury (1723–26 and 1726–43 respectively). Dubois himself understood the historical record when he declared in 1721 that ‘we need to find an opportunity to restore ecclesiastics to those positions in government which they alone occupied for a long time and from which they have been removed’. Senior clergy always remained in the running for high political office down to the eve of the Revolution. In this perspective, it would be easy to imagine the more than fifty years of Louis XIV’s personal rule (1661–1715) as relatively insignificant where politico-religious questions were concerned. In fact, the opposite was the case, as the king, ministers and advisers sometimes displayed spectacularly bad judgement – which need not always be attributed to a lack of understanding of religious issues. Keeping senior clerical figures on the margins of influence where religious issues – especially concerning the Jansenists and the Protestants – were concerned only seemed to breed a climate of intrigue and back-stabbing among them, one in which counsels of moderation did not tend to prevail.33 In addition, the extent to which the French royal confessor was privy to major politicoreligious decisions probably also differed from the practices at other Catholic courts of the time. But the fact that after 1603 such a potentially key figure was always a Jesuit had its own significance, regardless of his actual access to the arcana imperii. Few Catholic countries developed such a black legend about the Jesuits as France, where their ambition to dominate and their capacity to corrupt was the stuff of enduring fantasy. Uneven as they were, developments of this kind evidently did not lead France’s clergy, from the Cardinal of Lorraine to Loménie de Brienne, to lack for either political experience or ambition. The continuing presence of senior church figures in, or very close to, high political office ensured that in most

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instances negotiated compromises, rather than outright triumph or defeat, would be the outcome of most of the conflicts that we shall encounter in the following chapters. It is hardly an accident that on several occasions during our period, the Paris parlement, which never surrendered its claim to be the king’s ‘true’ council, should have tried to debar French cardinals from holding high political office. That objective was never attained, and it was probably not furthered by the parlement’s allegations that the Pope would be privy to the king’s secrets if cardinals were members of his council.34 VI This tour d’horizon would be seriously incomplete if it did not briefly indicate those issues that proved beyond settling by the customary methods. It was the completely unexpected emergence, mainly from the 1550s onwards, of a separate confession and independent church viscerally hostile to France’s Catholicism that did the most to disrupt the traditional politico-religious landscape. The Genevan variant of Protestantism which took root in France was quite different in several respects from Lutheranism, Zwinglianism or Anglicanism, and it is particularly significant that some of its core convictions happened to concern power and the locus of authority within both church and state. For these reasons, the challenge of Protestantism in France could hardly have been sharper; its impact on existing politico-religious traditions was profound and enduring, and the responses that it provoked were crucial to the subsequent evolution of the relations between politics and religion within the kingdom. No attempt to deal with those relations during the century and a half after 1560 can afford to ignore it, but in many of the existing studies they receive little space for the generations following the Edict of Nantes, and tend to be considered as ‘foreign’ appendages to the main narrative. Secondly, the Jansenist conflict within Catholicism involved the crown, the parlements, the French clergy and the papacy from the 1640s onwards, but France’s Jansenists survived every successive attempt to purge them over the following century. In the process, they left their mark on the way in which religious issues, especially those which smacked of heresy, were dealt with in France, and by that token they, too, helped to refine the boundaries between what can be called church and state.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Religion of King and Kingdom

I

n early 1560, the French monarchy suddenly entered a long period of crisis and diminished authority, of which an early casualty was the policy of repressing heresy that had been pursued with increasing intensity during the previous twenty years. It now offered an amnesty to its Protestants, thereby provisionally decriminalising heresy. Yet at that juncture – and indeed for many years thereafter – few on either side of the widening religious divide could imagine that the pre-1560 principle of ‘one faith, one king, one law’ would not be reinstated.1 In acting as it did, the monarchy moved into unfamiliar territory, for which there was no road map, nor a ready-made script for action. The precedents – not always successful – for resolving religious conflict by peaceful means elsewhere, especially in the neighbouring empire and Switzerland, were not promising, as France’s elites well knew; they even suggested that face-to-face discussion tended to further harden existing convictions among the rival confessions. Above all, the experiences of these microscopic neighbouring territories simply did not ‘fit’ the unified political geography of western Europe’s largest monarchy. Still seeing itself as God’s elect-nation, France had no prior experience of the inter-confessional colloquies of its eastern neighbours, so that when holding discussions with its own Protestants was finally proposed in 1560–61, conservatives fiercely – and not surprisingly – objected to it as tantamount to admitting that heretics were equals with something potentially acceptable to say. Convening an Estates-General, an assembly of notables, or a national council of the gallican church now seemed the best – and perhaps the only – way to defuse the increasingly dangerous hostilities between Catholics and Protestants. Not for the last time in modern history, the solution of simply suspending repression was quickly overtaken by events: that move soon created a void that encouraged unilateral action by rival groups across France ready to mete out their own kind of summary justice, now that the ‘normal’

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forms of justice in relation to religious dissent had been discontinued. To understand how France came to experience religious upheaval almost a full generation after its neighbours, we need to take a brief backward look at the major developments since the 1520s and 1530s. I As is well known, the impact of the Lutheran reformation on France had been relatively small, especially when it is remembered that the term ‘Lutheran’ was attached to many of those seeking religious reform of an Erasmian-humanist kind within the existing church. Where the Sorbonne and the parlements, especially those of Paris or Toulouse, saw heretics to be prosecuted and punished, others saw eager, non-sectarian evangelicals who presented no real danger. This was the view of François I and many of the political and even ecclesiastical elite, until a royal change of mind occurred in the mid-1530s. Despite the beginnings of repression that soon followed, the king remained convinced that scholars and nobles were, for possibly different reasons, largely immune to heresy, which he saw as appealing only to the lower ‘mechanical sorts’ within society; this view was broadly shared by Henri II, at least in respect of the nobility. Such a persistent misconception – alongside several others – proved to be a major blind spot when the crown encountered serious religious dissent in the 1540s and 1550s. France’s unreadiness in the face of the challenges posed by sixteenthcentury religious dissidence may seem surprising at first, especially when it is realised how many medieval ‘heresies’ had either originated or gained adherents there. Both intellectually and organisationally, the ‘persecuting society’, which was arguably the outcome of these earlier experiences, owed a great deal to French responses to them; the Inquisition, after all, first saw the light of day during the Albigensian crisis in southern France. But several centuries later, historical memory – or rather, forgetting – had virtually blanked out such precedents and given way, as we have already seen, to the myth of a nation of indefectible Catholic believers which had always triumphed over ‘heresy’. The Inquisition still notionally existed, especially in southern France, though only in its older episcopal-diocesan form. In reality, the inquisitors’ powers had shrunk so considerably over time that the office seemed largely redundant by 1520. France had not been affected by Europe’s late-medieval religious wars that preceded its own wars of religion, unless we include Joan of Arc’s crusade to rid France of English occupation as such a war.2 When heresy did erupt again on a large scale in the 1550s and 1560s, the first parallels drawn by Catholics were between France’s Protestants and the Albigensians, with the intention of shaming the crown into dealing with them as resolutely as St Louis

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had done in his time; but like so many historical comparisons of its type, it failed adequately to measure the novelty of the present situation.3 France’s sense of enjoying God’s special protection against the contamination of heresy did not preclude taking positive action of several kinds that, for a few decades at least, had seemed more than enough to sustain the true religion. Thus the Paris theology faculty vigorously condemned Luther’s teachings as early as 1521, and the parlements (those of Paris and Toulouse, at least) showed their vigilance by arresting and executing individual dissidents either side of 1530. In addition, the rash of provincial church councils held in 1528 (duly followed by diocesan synods) and the continuing efforts by the Paris theology faculty, which drew up a set of twenty-six articles of faith (1543) and Europe’s first index of prohibited books (1544), signalled that firm action was being taken well before the Council of Trent began its deliberations in 1545. The French church’s leaders, its bishops, scarcely saw things any differently, contenting themselves with legislating in a way that often resembled the contemporary campaigns by the crown to codify the customary laws and secular legislation. It would fall to later generations of church leaders to discover – or rediscover – the need for a much wider range of pastoraladministrative activities to sustain and reinvigorate Catholicism.4 Meanwhile, the measures just cited enabled both church and monarchy to believe that France, having done what was required of her, had no urgent need of a general council, especially one dominated by the Pope or the emperor, to heal the wider church’s ills. Gallican solutions seemed more than adequate in dealing with gallican problems. When the affair of the Placards (1534) made François I realise the dangers of religious dissent, the monarchy seemed determined to prosecute those attacking the true religion.5 A series of royal decrees from 1539 to 1559 defined and amplified the measures to be taken for this purpose and the penalties for infringing them. Royal law courts rather than ecclesiastical courts were entrusted with enforcing these increasingly draconian provisions; that approach was built upon perceptions of the seditious dimensions of heresy – ‘the public scandal, popular commotion, sedition or other crimes which involve public offence’, as the Edict of Châteaubriant put it in 1551. France may have been the last major country of northern Europe officially to move the crime of heresy to secular courts, but it caused relatively little surprise when it did so.6 This meant that in its approach to dealing with religious dissent France differed significantly from Spain, Portugal and Italy, whose relatively recent Inquisitions were much better equipped to deal with religious dissent as a religious rather than a political issue.7 Precisely because they were ecclesiastical courts enjoying powerful royal support, these Inquisitions could probe people’s consciences and offer the prospect of pardon and ‘grace’ to the repentant. By the time Pope Julius III formally denied lay

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magistrates in Italy the right to deal with cases of heresy, in 1551, France had already moved in a diametrically opposite direction, effectively ‘laicising’ the handling of such cases.8 Already the idea of a Spanish-style Suprema with jurisdiction over everyone, high and low, secular and clerical, was quite unacceptable in France by the 1550s and it would remain so, even when the Catholic League was in the ascendant in the late 1580s.9 When responsibility for heresy cases was indeed returned to the church courts in 1560, it did not signify that France was about to imitate its neighbours, but that the monarchy was giving up, for the time being at least, on pursuing heretics; the shift was emphatically neither a reinforcement nor a vindication of ecclesiastical jurisdiction within France. The successive legislative measures of the 1550s both extended and sharpened the earlier provisions against heresy, but the growing severity of the repressive legislation seems to have been illusory. The machinery employed to implement it became gradually less effective – a salutary reminder to historians not to take even the most punitive royal declarations at face value. The figures for the actual punishment of heresy by the French royal courts seem incontrovertible, even when allowing for the limitations of the archival record. Alongside the 450 individuals executed for heresy before 1560, there were at least two or three times as many who were condemned to perform the less feared amende honorable – a shaming ritual of the abjuration of heresy – after which they were mostly either sent to the galleys or banished from their place of residence for a number of years.10 Proportionately low by (demographic) comparison with other European countries, what these figures suggest is that during the 1550s the agents of repression (which had briefly included the Paris parlement’s notorious ‘burning chamber’) proved increasingly incapable of deterring growing numbers of French people from adopting the new ‘Genevan’ faith or preventing large quantities of banned books from flooding into France from Geneva and elsewhere. There are many possible reasons for this mismatch of ‘challenge and response’. Some magistrates (and their socio-professional milieu) were either ‘adepts’ of the new creed, or were growing disenchanted with the policy of repression itself.11 Whether the gallican-inspired exclusion of the church courts and clergy from the judicial riposte to Calvinism weakened the church’s response to heresy before 1560 is harder to say, if only because so many of the ‘heretics’ were themselves members of the clergy who took the lead in preaching the new gospel. However, this exclusion may have made it easier, from the 1560s onwards, for the more active elements of the Catholic clergy to rejoin battle with their Calvinist adversaries on different terms of engagement. By then they had learned from their Calvinist opponents to use preaching and pamphleteering rather than the law courts and repression as their main

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weapons of combat, proving themselves far more effective than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe.12 It is hard to imagine the intensity of the confessional conflicts after 1560, or the bloodbath of the St Bartholomew’s Day and other massacres, without such mobilisation through preaching. As the 1550s advanced, the numbers of those attending Calvinist services and joining the new assemblies grew exponentially. For the first time, organised churches began to take shape in more or less clandestine fashion across the country, a significant change from the largely invertebrate Lutheran-evangelical ‘circles’ of the 1520s and 1530s. They gained far greater organisational cohesion from the fact that they were now overwhelmingly Genevan-Calvinist in inspiration.13 Where religious dissent took on such dimensions, ‘sedition’ on a correspondingly growing scale was likely, but how could it be contained? The crown showed little sign of changing its repressive methods, with Henri II threatening in 1559 that rivers of ‘Lutheran’ blood would run in France as soon as he had disengaged from his foreign entanglements. But the promised blow never fell. His sudden death from wounds suffered during a tournament to celebrate the return of peace in mid-1559, only weeks after he had issued the most draconian of all French edicts (that of Écouen) against heresy, triggered a major political crisis, with unforeseeable implications for the campaign against religious heterodoxy. That campaign was not effectively abandoned until early 1560, when the distinction between heresy and sedition – the religious and the political – was reinstated. As we have seen, dealing with heresy was now left to the church courts, but in reality it signalled that the machinery of repression had come to a standstill.14 II It has often been pointed out that regimes are at their most vulnerable when, having long resisted calls for reform or change, they finally embark on it. The experience of France during the years (1559–62) immediately preceding the first of the wars of religion is a perfect example of this phenomenon. A torrent of events followed each other so breathlessly that it is unlikely that anyone could control the country’s political and religious trajectory during these pivotal years which set the stage for so many later developments. Battered by the problems arising from military defeat, financial default and two royal successions in as many years (1559–60), the monarchy was also damaged by the manifest failure of its previous ‘thorough’ policy of religious repression. By the early 1560s, that policy only seemed to have the opposite of the desired effect, as exemplified by the ever-growing attraction of the new churches to high-ranking nobles and town-dwellers. Political struggles for control of the monarchy after Henri II’s death pitted the leading aristocratic factions against

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each other, but such ‘normal’ political competition was now overlaid and complicated by the religious choices made by high-ranking individuals and families, who were sometimes imitated by their clients and ‘friends’ far beyond the court.15 Yet the situation in these years (1559–63) was far too fluid for religious allegiances to be written in stone; some ‘conversions’ were shortlived because, uncertain of what joining the new churches really meant, many people, both high and low, hesitated or soon reverted to the old church. As Blaise de Monluc aptly wrote, ‘there was no son of a good mother who was not tempted to taste the new fruit’.16 Even the much-criticised ultra-Catholic Guises were far less ‘ultra’ at this point than they would subsequently become. However, what made them stand out, then and later, was that they never showed any signs either of abandoning the old church or of fragmenting into different confessional branches like their main aristocratic rivals.17 Changing tack on how to deal with questions of religion after years of repression and in a context of severely diminished authority inevitably spelt serious risks for the crown. The measures taken to ‘reform’ the established church in previous decades now seemed woefully inadequate, while the longsuspended Council of Trent seemed to promise little better. Not surprisingly, then, when the Estates-General met at Orleans and Poissy in December 1560 and June 1561 respectively, the deputies – many of whom were Protestants – brought with them some quite radical ideas for an overhaul of the existing church.18 Had merely the proposals made there for selling off its property and creating a quasi-salaried clergy been adopted, they would have led to structural and financial changes not to be witnessed anywhere in Catholic Europe until the Revolution of 1789. But these and many other suggestions were much too newfangled for the majority of the deputies, while the senior clergy at the Estates-General and at court effectively thwarted them by offering to help with paying off the crown’s debt-mountain. Out of these wholly fortuitous but dangerous circumstances emerged the regular assemblies of clergy which, in subsequent centuries, did so much to define the practical terms of church–state relations in France.19 By 1560–62 the agenda for religious reform was inherently difficult to control, and talk of a national council only emboldened those with new ideas. Over several weeks in September–October 1561 an inter-confessional colloquy rather than the previously touted national council was held at Poissy near Paris, precisely so that Theodore Beza, Calvin’s future successor at Geneva, and other Calvinists invited by Catherine de Medici, the regent, could attend it. But when leading Catholic figures like the Cardinal of Lorraine and the moyenneurs – literally, those holding or seeking the middle ground – gambled on using the thirty-year-old Lutheran Confession of Augsburg as a basis for negotiation and religious compromise within the framework of gallican

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Catholicism, the Calvinists present flatly rejected the formula. In reply, they emphasised the radical nature of the true gospel and called on the monarchy to support a godly, root-and-branch reform of the church along Genevan lines. Despite the obvious chasm between the two sides, it is quite clear that nobody at Poissy envisaged more than one church on French soil.20 Lorraine’s via media option was also opposed by many within French Catholicism, including leading participants in the colloquy. Critically, its failure weakened not only him but, above all, the search for a negotiated compromise of a religious kind.21 Within a year, Lorraine and others like him would consider the newly reconvened Council of Trent to be the best hope for a reinvigorated gallican church; for them, it was another means towards the same end – the preservation of the one true church.22 Despite all the efforts made at Poissy to find common ground and avoid issues of fundamental disagreement, the hard edges of irreconcilable difference, doctrinal and practical, lurked around every corner. One of the many spheres of Calvinist thought likely to alienate the monarchy was its conception of the church – its ecclesiology. The Calvinist view of the church as essentially nonhierarchical, self-governing and anti-ritualistic contained a barely concealed political subtext, which would have been even more subversive had it adopted Jean Morély’s controversial proposal, first made in 1562, to replace the Genevan formula of individual local churches governed by an oligarchy of elders and pastors with a form of church democracy. Moreover, early Calvinist thinking made scant provision for rulers dominating the church and religious issues; the drama of salvation itself seemed so far beyond the reach of political arrangements that political power was relegated to a secondary sphere. Despite these tenets and their corrosive implications for French ideas of monarchy, the Calvinists tried hard to present themselves as the ultimate gallicans, who would finally liberate France from the clutches of the papacy. But this message fell on truly deaf ears, even at a time when the French monarchy and church were often exasperated with the papacy.23 At this juncture, however, France’s Calvinists still felt confident that God and time were on their side and that, despite the failure of negotiation, their reformation would soon triumph across France. This expectation clearly entailed the mise en place of Calvinist churches nationwide, which would replace outright the old church and its religious practices. By 1562 they may have accounted for one-tenth of France’s population, with no sign of the rise in numbers abating. That a considerable proportion of their adherents were of noble, or at least ‘notable’, social status was much more significant than their overall numbers. Having also worked hard to produce a French confession of faith and a basic organisational structure of Genevan inspiration capable of giving their churches real coherence, they remained as firmly opposed to the

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prospect of mutual toleration as the old church was. And wherever they took power locally in these years, as in the Dauphiné or parts of Languedoc, they engaged in ‘thorough’ reformation, which involved exiling the existing clergy, dismantling the old church, and outlawing non-Calvinist forms of religious practice. Beza’s tart repudiation around this time of liberty of conscience as ‘a thoroughly diabolical dogma’ left little room for the possibility of liberty of worship or religious practices generally.24 It was only later, when their hopes of religious victory had been blunted, that France’s Calvinists would have to rethink that position. When the decriminalisation of heresy and subsequent attempts at negotiated religious compromise failed in the early 1560s, the levels of disorder and violence involving local confrontations between Catholics and Protestants began to rise. Although the worst of the ‘rites of violence’ were yet to come, the need to devise some kind of political fix, however provisional in nature and duration, became increasingly urgent. The numerous assemblies of the years 1560–62 acted, in effect, as sounding boards for such efforts, during which the new chancellor, Michel de l’Hôpital, supported by the regent, Catherine de Medici, best articulated the crown’s shifting approach to dealing with religious conflict. At the outset, like virtually everyone of his age, L’Hôpital could see no virtue at all in religious plurality, but he gradually came to accept the need for some form of temporary confessional coexistence. While deploring the dangers of two religions within one kingdom, he began to argue that preserving the public peace might require departing from historic principles and allowing provisional coexistence until such time as a council, whether general or national, could resolve France’s religious divisions.25 The ensuing Edict of SaintGermain (January 1562) was the first of many royal decrees to deal with the political ramifications of religious division in a manner that contrasted sharply with those of the 1540s and 1550s. It only allowed a severely limited form of freedom of worship to France’s Protestants, and its main clauses retained much of the previous obsession with religious difference serving as a cloak for seditious activities. The struggle to come to terms with the wider consequences of religious division is clearly evident throughout the entire document, even in its more innocuous-looking clauses, one of which reads as follows: those of the new religion shall be required to observe our politic laws, even those which are received in our Catholic church concerning feast-days and non-working days, and those concerning marriage and the degrees of consanguinity and affinity, in order to avoid the disputes and lawsuits which might arise as a result, and which would lead to the ruin of most of the leading families of our kingdom and to the dissolution of the ties of friendship which are created by marriages and alliances among our subjects.26

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This ‘naïve’ evocation of what we might call the ‘society–religion compact’ manages to convey the scale of the moral disarray of France’s Catholics, both in 1562 and later, in the face of a development whose logic remained genuinely incomprehensible to most of them – namely, the Calvinists’ determination to withdraw from the body of believers that was the church of their ancestors. Meanwhile, in February 1562, with the parlements stubbornly resisting the registration of legislation which broke with the ‘one faith, one king, one law’ triad, the crown felt compelled to issue a brief but revealing ‘interpretative declaration’ concerning the new edict. It insisted that it did not ‘intend to approve two religions in our kingdom, but rather one only, which is that of our Holy Church, in which the kings our predecessors have ever lived’.27 This attempted backtrack, which contradicted some of L’Hôpital’s claims, had no practical impact, since less than a month after its publication the first of the eight wars of religion erupted, and a pattern was soon set that would be repeated for an entire generation. We need not enter the bewildering detail of these successive conflicts here. Suffice it to say that each successive war would begin, at least in part, as a (hostile) response from one party to the terms of the most recently negotiated settlement, framed as an edict of pacification; while the conclusion of each subsequent war would be accompanied by a new edict whose terms were dictated by calculations based on the politico-military balance of the moment. Because successive arrangements for restoring civil peace were based on short-term events, rather than on any long-term ambition of the parties involved to disentangle politics and religion, we should not be surprised to find at times substantial differences of scope and tone in the edicts where questions of liberty of conscience and worship were concerned; they demonstrated little consistency, let alone a visible developing trend, precisely because they could not possibly satisfy equally the rival confessions whose aspirations were so diametrically opposed.28 Judged purely in terms of royal legislation, which in turn was determined in large part by negotiation, France experienced expanding and contracting degrees of religious coexistence from 1562 to 1585, while the years from 1585 to 1598 were, in law at least, ones of religious exclusivism that coincided with the arrival of the Catholic League. Within these two broad cycles there was also further variation, so that, for example, we find the ‘generous’ (to France’s Protestants) edicts of 1562 or 1576 being followed in relatively quick succession by others which sought to curtail these concessions in order to register – but also to rein in – the powerful Catholic backlash against them. Of course, it need scarcely be said that such periodisation, based purely on the contents of royal legislation, is woefully inadequate as a guide to the actual experience of the provinces and localities. Philip Benedict has, however, suggested that cessations of Protestant worship did indeed occur in many places when it was

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banned by law during the 1560s and early 1570s, but less so during the reign of Henri III (1574–89).29 That said, local experience ranged all the way from vicious confessional enmities to a willingness to find workable mechanisms for communal coexistence, exemplified in some places by the ‘pacts of friendship’ which operated largely according to their own local logic.30 It is quite probable that the ‘rites of violence’ of the 1560s and early 1570s owed as much in practice to local prehistories as to some universal or generic set of attitudes, Catholic or Protestant, towards the use of violence against religious enemies.31 As a result, the royal commissioners despatched to the provinces to implement the successive and often mutually inconsistent terms of pacification – which the local parlements and law courts were either unwilling to do or debarred from doing – frequently found themselves powerless to enforce the king’s will; they often had to engage in extensive local diplomacy to achieve even modest results which frequently did not work for very long anyway.32 It is impossible accurately to convey what was altered in such attempts at translating the national into the local, but not hard to imagine the confused patchwork on the ground that resulted from the process. Implementing legislation arising from confessional division across the entire realm was by far the biggest test of the sixteenth-century monarchy’s authority, since the demands of upholding Charles IX’s royal motto of ‘piety and justice’ pulled it in essentially opposite directions.33 Montaigne’s pithy summary of the history of these years hit the nail plumb on the head: the kings of France, he noted, ‘unable to do what they wished, our kings pretended that what they could do was what they wished’.34 As already noted, the monarchy never thought of the problem that it faced in terms of the equality of the confessions, any more than the latter did themselves. Such a renunciation of centuries of congruence between religion and politics was not on anyone’s agenda. The medieval tradition of tolerantia, which had made it possible to ‘put up with’ Jews and Muslims as the lesser evil in the pursuit of a higher good, constituted a familiar starting-point for thinking about and dealing with religious divisions within Christianity itself.35 Formal acts of toleration did not have to come from a principled belief in tolerance.36 For that reason, the concessions made to the Protestants were announced as temporary and provisional, made solely in order to prevent a greater evil and pending a reunion of all people in the one true church. This was an objective which it was still quite possible to sustain in a gallican environment even after the Council of Trent’s doctrinal pronouncements had seemed to put paid to any such chances; the desire to leave that particular door ajar was one powerful reason for the crown’s firm refusal formally to ‘receive’ the Council’s decrees into French law then and later. Chancellor L’Hôpital may have concluded that it was futile to coerce individual consciences, but he was nevertheless committed to long-term religious unity.37 It remains hard to

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measure the strength or sincerity of such objectives over time, but for the rest of the century at least, the notion of a reuniting of the churches within a gallican framework, which would not be bound by Trent’s most contentious decrees, remained alive. These developments are perhaps easier to grasp because the terms traditionally used by historians to understand the shifting relations of politics and religion as a result of Europe’s reformations have been re-examined in recent years. The thorniest question for contemporaries to deal with was, as already intimated, liberty of conscience. We have already seen what Theodore Beza made of such a concept. Across the sixteenth century, only a very few esprits forts, such as Sebastian Castellio in his Conseil à la France désolée (1562), defended liberty of conscience and the open-ended religious pluralism that it logically entailed as a matter of principle rather than as a necessity dictated by immediate circumstances. Calvin himself had demanded – and secured – the execution of Michael Servetus for precisely this form of heresy, exactly as the old church would have done in the same circumstances. For the vast majority of Calvinists and Catholics alike, the only acceptable conscience was the one that adhered to the truth; a conscience in manifest error could not claim any such rights. The prolonged experience of religious strife in France would lead a small, if distinguished, number of individuals to adopt a ‘neither Rome nor Geneva’ position, deploring the excesses of confessional conformity.38 But in many instances, even for such a famously free spirit as Montaigne, this position was reached only very gradually, and it owed as much to the cumulative experience of religious violence and inconclusive civil war as to principled thinking on the subject in its own right. Meanwhile, the status of France’s Protestants remained consistently ‘unequal’ in another sense. They began life in the 1520s as ‘the sect of the Lutherans’, a term still used to describe them in the 1540s and early 1550s; by the 1560s, the term ‘Huguenots’ was increasingly and enduringly used. The Calvinists’ key theological concept was that of ‘the church of Jesus Christ’, while describing their own actual creations on the ground as ‘our churches’. But neither the Catholic church nor the French monarchy would consent to describe them as a properly constituted church (or churches). The term ‘the new religion’ was used in royal legislation, around and after 1560, but that was emphatically not a compliment, since anything labelled as ‘new’ in religion was deeply suspect to contemporaries. Gradually, one of the most lasting and gratuitous forms of condescension in French public language came into universal usage. France’s Protestant sect became officially known as the ‘religion prétendue réformée’, namely the self-proclaimed or so-called reformed religion (usually abbreviated to RPR). Formally used as early as the Edict of Roussillon (1564), the term was actually made official by the 1576 ‘Peace of

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Monsieur’; it became so widespread thereafter that even Henri IV saw nothing amiss in using it to describe his former co-religionists in the Edict of Nantes and elsewhere. Such language and habits conveyed the unmistakable message that the Protestants were indeed a nuisance which had, for the time being, to be ‘tolerated’.39 Indeed, it is hard to avoid the impression that the more substantial the concessions that were made to them over the years, the more the crown (and the majority of the population) were determined to disqualify them by using the label of ‘the so-called reformed’: there would be no equivalence between the concessions they enjoyed and the language used to describe them. In the next century, as we shall see, the RPR would find themselves being increasingly referred to as ‘schismatics’, a label that identified them as religious rebels who should be treated as such, and who certainly did not constitute an authentic separate church. In the early 1560s, however, the unresolved tensions about how to put an end to religious discord showed in the measures taken by the crown. The edict of January 1562 was the most generous towards the Huguenots, as they themselves later realised, since they were allowed relatively extensive freedom of worship, so long as their services were conducted outside walled towns and during daylight hours. Most of the subsequent edicts were, as a result of the ensuing Catholic backlash, far less generous in this regard. Thus, the Edict of Amboise (March 1563), issued at the end of the first war of religion, contained the first public recognition of the notion of liberty of conscience itself, while simultaneously reducing the actual liberty of worship accorded to Protestants the year before. Moreover, the terms in which liberty of conscience was phrased in 1563 – ‘each person may live freely in their house anywhere without being investigated, vexed, forced or constrained in connection with their conscience’ – clearly show that such liberty, in addition to being temporary, was both individual and private, and conferred no automatic right to speak or worship freely with others outside – or perhaps also inside – one’s private space.40 Such startling (to the modern mind) combinations of liberty of conscience and refusals of the right to worship were emphatically not confined to the early 1560s, when such ‘inconsistency’ might seem at least understandable, as a brief glance at the record shows. Thus, although later royal edicts in 1568, 1577 and 1598 reiterated this recognition of liberty of conscience, they connected it quite explicitly to hopes that the Protestants would ‘return and reunite with us and our other subjects in the union of the holy, Catholic church’. And whereas the 1563 Edict of Amboise, and many others that followed it, indicated the kinds of place where Protestant worship might legally occur, those of 1568 and 1585 placed a total ban on the practice of the Protestant religion and expelled Protestant ministers from the kingdom, while explicitly preserving liberty of conscience. If the crown was so inconsistent in

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handling the problem of freedom of worship, it suggests that it clung more strongly than is usually imagined to its hopes for religious concord based on a reunion of the warring confessions.41 Nor should it be forgotten that, after 1560, religious toleration in France was limited in other respects, too: it was conceded only to ‘those of the RPR’. All other religious sects (e.g. Anabaptists, Swiss Brethren) were openly excluded from its terms, as were, a fortiori, freethinkers, libertins or unbelievers. III The decoupling of sedition and heresy, the painful but minimal acceptance of the freedom of conscience, and the continually shifting terms of the much less acceptable civil toleration of a minority confession – all were bound to generate serious repercussions in France’s body politic. This would have been true even without the repeated civil wars, the unprecedentedly high levels of intra-communal violence, and the gruesome character of massacre and counter-massacre that characterised the 1560s and the 1570s, when repeated pleas for oubliance, friendship, and the control of the passions were drowned out by the mutually hostile propaganda being pumped out by the rival churches. Yet the relative falling-off in religious violence after 1572–74 did not herald a return to peace, and if anything the following decade saw the kingdom lurch towards ever higher levels of near-systemic ungovernability.42 In the wake of the 1572 massacres, the Huguenots not only published inflammatory justifications of resistance to tyranny and of killing kings who had become tyrants, but those of southern France went as far as drawing up a republican ‘constitution’ designed (but never really implemented) to remove them from subordination to royal rule altogether. Political disorder was also fanned by the formation of ‘parties’ (such as the aristocratic Malcontents in 1574–75) that a seriously weakened monarchy was not well equipped to contend with. In addition, numerous leagues, associations and confraternities – some purely local, some more widely federated – were already establishing themselves as potentially alternative power structures, especially for Catholic self-defence, in several provinces. The brief existence of the first Catholic League of 1576–77 illustrates the dangers that such initiatives represented, with Henri III’s decision to impose himself as its chief in order to control it (and even to snuff it out) only advertising the crown’s dilemma.43 Instead of steering clear of such an obviously partisan organisation, the crown found itself being sucked into factional politics, as it already had done by assuming responsibility for the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Historians have long been puzzled by the crown’s failure to prevent the wars of religion from becoming one of the longest internal wars in European

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history. In the absence of a single overarching explanation, an approach comprised of complementary reasons may offer the best alternative. The failure and ultimate abandonment of the policy of judicial persecution of heresy in the 1550s gave France’s Protestants very considerable confidence in their capacity to cope with repression, and that confidence, as we have already seen, was soon reinforced by the adherence of powerful nobles with military experience of the Italian wars and with extensive local clienteles. The seizure, in 1562 and later, of numerous cities which were then fortified and energetically defended by the Protestants during the successive wars put the crown on the back foot at a time when military unpreparedness and chronic financial weakness severely limited its capacity to wage internal war; attacking welldefended cities like La Rochelle or Montauban was, as would be demonstrated again in the 1620s, nearly always too great a risk – in reputational as much as in purely military or political terms – for Charles IX and his successors. The Protestants could usually recruit substantial foreign mercenary forces which would help to disperse the crown’s military resources and prevent the latter from delivering a knockout blow to opponents who were spread widely across France.44 Finally, it would be a mistake to ignore the fact that within the royal court and council, factions that were for or against war waxed and waned, so that the question of engaging in military offensives against the Protestants always had to be weighed against the state of France’s relations with its neighbours, and the Spanish Habsburgs in particular.45 In their own way, the increasing length and detail of the successive edicts, treaties and declarations of the years from 1570 onwards highlight the everwidening ramifications of the religious conflicts. Not only did they contain further concessions on the conditions and permitted places of religious worship for France’s Huguenots, but more and more articles were devoted to the civil, military and political consequences of the deepening confessional identities. These included many hotly disputed questions – the tenure of office in the king’s service by Protestants, the creation of special chambers in the parlements to hear lawsuits involving Protestants, the maintenance of garrisoned ‘places of security’ for Protestants, the provisions for Protestant burials, the observance of Catholic festivals by Protestants, to mention only a few of the most intractable of them. But the social and political experience of hardening religious identities was always a step ahead of the efforts to capture them in negotiation or legislation. Increasingly, the pressure to consider an expanding spectrum of demands from all sides, some of which unashamedly promoted the interests of individual ‘party’ leaders, shows just how far religious issues and conventional politics had become entwined. The rival confessions had also come to depend heavily on aristocratic figures who were certainly not averse to exploiting them as cannon fodder to pursue their own objectives.46

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If it has not been difficult to identify the aristocratic malcontents of the mid–1570s, the existence and role of another stalwart of this period in French history, the politiques, is much more problematic.47 Generations of historians argued that a relatively small but coherent party of politiques, beginning with Chancellor L’Hôpital, directed their efforts initially to establishing confessional coexistence of Catholic and Protestant, and then to defining royal power in the face of religious and factional self-interest. An influential French variant of ‘Whig’ history, this account easily located precursors of political liberalism among the politiques who were seen as adopting a precociously ‘modern’ agenda of preserving the civil order in the face of religious division, insisting that the state should seek to transcend such ultimately ‘private’ concerns by developing an alternative, proto-secular conception of its own raison d’être. As might be expected, this search for a genealogy of modern politics was highly teleological in its approach, succumbing all too readily to the temptation to pit progressives against reactionaries in an epic struggle. In addition, it was particularly prone to latch on to phrases or statements which seemed to encapsulate such ‘modern’ thinking, while paying scant attention to their historical context or the possibly different meanings that they held for people of another age. The result was to systematise and modernise what was not much more than a political tendency, and certainly not a recognisable party.48 The term politique itself was not much used until the 1570s, and even then it conveyed little or no sense of a continuity of ideas or groups over time. It was during Henri III’s reign (1574–89) that the label began to acquire a more consistently negative meaning, especially in the mouths and pens of the Catholic intransigents who would later form the Catholic League. The term had more to do with suspicion than with a clear political ideology, let alone with a consistent royal policy of toleration. In particular, it enabled the League retrospectively to pin the responsibility for all the misguided religious policies pursued by the monarchy since 1560 on a third party of hypocrites and dissimulators whose agenda of civil peace and religious coexistence made them de facto allies of the Protestant minority. Until at least the late 1580s politique was essentially a term of abuse for an ill-defined but highly useful bogeyman; with the rise of the League, those identified as politiques became targets for attack and ran the risk of assassination or execution.49 IV With the assassination of the still-young Henri III on 1 August 1589 by a Dominican friar, the question of the king’s own religion became a subject of nationwide consequence, immediately exacerbating existing problems.50 Could France be governed by a Protestant king who, on the evidence from

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elsewhere in Europe, would surely seek to compel his subjects to adopt his religion? Would the vast majority of his subjects be content to be governed by a king whom they regarded as a heretic? Such questions had been widely, but of course hypothetically, discussed, especially since Henri of Navarre became the heir apparent to the throne in 1584. Five years later, they were no longer avoidable, and the divisions they produced showed how uncomfortable contemporaries were with anything but a religious ‘union’ between ruler and subjects. But the question of the king’s religion did not suddenly arise, ex nihilo, in 1584 or 1589, as the above allusions suggest. It requires further attention here so that the predicament of Henri IV in and after 1589 can be placed in its proper context. Historians have usually contrasted the inherited religion royale of the French monarchy that we have already briefly encountered with the tenets of the Protestant movements of the sixteenth century, in order to show the impossibility of an entente between them. Denis Crouzet has argued that France’s Renaissance kings, and especially François I, were warrior-kings, whose violence and valour were also God’s instruments against disorder, which might, of course, include heresy.51 Such a confident self-image did not sit well with the core principles of French Calvinism as they were revealed before and after the colloquy at Poissy in 1561. François I had also been happy to see himself as patron and protector of Erasmian-evangelical circles attempting to generate religious reform, and they, in turn, eagerly sought royal support for their efforts. By the 1550s and early 1560s, this cumulative experience of dealing with heresy as seditious and disorderly had seriously stacked the odds against the prospect of the crown abandoning its Catholicism, least of all for a Calvinist confession that seemed to possess so many unpalatable traits. As already pointed out, several features of Calvinist thinking were always likely to alienate the French monarchy and threaten its ideological foundations. Its emphasis on God’s total sovereignty and on the misery of the human condition, that of princes included, offered scant comfort to a monarchy accustomed to seeing itself as quasi-sacerdotal in character and living in close communion with God. For France’s Calvinists the sacred was not to be found in human actions, material objects or institutions, but was transcendent and otherworldly; rulers were as fallibly human as mankind in general, and their elevated rank could not ultimately disguise this. Moreover, Calvinism’s nonsacramental form of worship and its aversion to all forms of liturgical and iconographic embellishment cut directly across the religious culture of the French monarchy and the elaborate rituals associated with it. Calvin’s insistence that subjects owed an absolute duty of obedience to rulers did little to counterbalance the actual disorder that his followers generated in their pursuit of a godly church. Dedicating the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian

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religion (1536) to François I, Calvin vigorously defended France’s evangelicals against accusations of seeking to overthrow kingdoms, but equally he called on the king to adhere to the true gospel and institute it throughout his realm.52 Every subsequent edition of the Institutes carried this forceful preface, but the royal response to it remained unchanged. The colloquy of Poissy in 1561 would show just how far removed not only the theologians but also the wider cultural world of the French monarchy and its court were from the Calvinist message.53 Yet the fact that the colloquy had occurred at all, with leading Calvinist figures invited to court, soon gave rise to suspicion about the monarchy’s intentions. As efforts at diplomacy continued and the crown sought a way of dealing with France’s religious divisions, rumours circulated concerning the court, especially when, after Poissy, Catherine de Medici asked Beza to remain in Paris, where he also preached. With princes of the blood like Condé and the Bourbon-Albret of Navarre organising their own Calvinist religious services at court, it was easy enough to imagine that the royal family as a whole, led by the queen mother, was somehow dabbling in ‘heresy’. The ensuing edicts encouraged such suspicions within the Catholic fold, and they were not seriously dispelled until the royal tour of France of 1564–66 showed that the king and his mother were practising Catholics who visited Catholic holy places and pilgrimage sites as they progressed around the country.54 Yet suspicion and mistrust were not so easily killed off, and whenever a king – from Charles IX to Henri IV – made what seemed like unacceptable concessions to France’s Protestants, doubts about his religious fidelity invariably returned in force, and with them the urge to step into the king’s place and cleanse the realm of heresy. Charles IX’s perceived dependency on the Huguenot leader, Admiral Coligny, in the lead-up to the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, was the most notorious instance of such easily triggered suspicion, which may in turn have played a part in the king’s declaration that he had personally ordered and sanctioned the massacre.55 Such doubts about the monarchy’s religious commitment to the true religion were almost certainly compounded by the gradual abandonment, during the decade after 1560, of the warrior-king image by the monarchy, and its gradual replacement by that of a king of justice and peace. Violence and the passions generally were now to be repressed, beginning with those of the king himself, who should also seek to control those of his subjects.56 Nowhere was this transition, and the misunderstanding that it generated among contemporaries, more evident than in Charles IX’s younger brother and successor, Henri III, whose religious behaviour left Catholics even more puzzled and exasperated.57 As duke of Anjou he had been one of the most prominent Catholic military leaders before 1572–73, yet as king after 1574 he behaved

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quite differently to contemporaries’ expectations of him. The extensive concessions that he made to Protestants and other malcontents as early as 1576 rekindled those earlier gnawing doubts about his reliability as the defender of Catholicism. His later attempts, either side of 1580, to reform the realm, the church included, did not suffice to negate his reputation for prodigality, especially towards his closest favourites, and the increasingly onerous fiscal demands that it generated. In this context, his sometimes highly public religiosity – which included walking barefoot on pilgrimage and flagellating himself with fellow members of a confraternity of penitents – simply could not compensate for failing in his royal duty to protect the true religion. This critical stance shows how well contemporaries could distinguish not so much between religion and politics as between the kinds of obligation in regard to religion that differentiated rulers from their subjects. The religion royale was emphatically not meant to be confused with that of private dévots, even when disciplinary and penitential practices became widespread within French Catholicism during the 1580s.58 Paradoxically, religious practices which attracted stinging criticism as being misplaced and unseemly for a king of France were a godsend after 1584 to the revived Catholic League, which proved far more successful in instrumentalising them – especially via its elaborate processions – in its revolt against both Henri III and his successor.59 Henri III’s policies and actions were also – and above all – the focus of a radical de-sacralisation of monarchy during his last years. With the possible exception of Louis XVI, no French king before or after Henri III was subjected to such vilification in public or in print. A degree of royal de-sacralisation, at least at the theoretical level, had already been delivered, mainly by Huguenot political writers, in the wake of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, but in the late 1580s a much more personalised form of de-sacralisation was directed against the king himself, but this time with radical Catholic League rather than Protestant preachers and pamphleteers in the vanguard. The paroxysm of such attacks came during the months that followed Henri III’s ‘execution’ of the Guise brothers at Christmas 1588, when pamphleteers regularly compared him to the ‘villain Herod’ and other tyrants. They even began refusing to refer to him as Henri III, calling him merely ‘Henry de Valois’ – as the later revolutionaries would call Louis XVI ‘Louis Capet’.60 When Henri III in turn fell to the assassin’s knife on 1 August 1589 and thus became the first French king to be murdered since Childeric II (675), it was his assassin, and not the king, who was swiftly proclaimed, by the Catholic League, to be a martyr for the true religion.61 Because of the Guise murders, Henri III himself died an excommunicate, and was denied the traditional royal burial at Saint-Denis. Resurrected in 1584–85 by the Guises and their allies because of the prospect of a Protestant succession, the Catholic League put down roots

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in numerous cities across France in the following years, but it did not burst into public prominence until 1588–89, when its initial defiance of Henri III led to the murder of the Guise brothers during the second Estates-General of Blois in December 1588. Such a desperate response by the king in turn suggests something of the scale of the League’s dominance of the EstatesGeneral, but also its inability to corner Henri III politically. The Guise murders triggered a first phase of adherence to the League, while the regicide of August 1589 produced a second such ralliement. It was from the towns and cities that it drew its most radical supporters, who were scarcely less hostile to Catholic moderates or temporisers than to Protestants, as its principal advocates demonstrated in their bitter attacks on their fellow-Catholic politiques. The reputation of the radical League was clinched by its elimination through assassination or summary trials and executions of well-placed backsliders in Paris, Toulouse and elsewhere. Such internal tensions were almost inevitable, since the majority of the League’s supporters had only come out in favour of it in 1589 or later, and under the impact of events. Moderates at heart, they made reluctant rebels in subsequent years, but rightly feared their more extremist bedfellows. The sometimes chilling rhetoric of the League’s radicals disguised their own fears that moderate members of the League would be too easily seduced by talk of a royal conversion and return to their natural loyalism.62 V With the assassination of Henri III, the burning question of Henri IV’s own religion, and whether he was in any sense acceptable as the next king of France, finally became unavoidable. For the committed Leaguer, the answer was quite simple, but for everyone else it became increasingly complicated during the months and years after August 1589. In Henri IV’s case, the question of the king’s religion already had a long and hotly contested history. Brought up a Calvinist from the age of eight by his mother, Jeanne d’Albret, he had converted in extremis to Catholicism in August 1572 in order to avoid possible murder during the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, only to return to Calvinism on escaping from court in 1576.63 That first conversion, about whose precise form and content very little was known, sparked controversy when he emerged as a possible future king of France in the 1580s. His supporters, Catholic as much as Protestant, tried to explain it away as performed in private and under duress, and therefore as devoid of validity. But his adversaries branded it as proof of Navarre’s unprincipled opportunism, and considered his subsequent apostasy as a demonstration of his fundamental commitment to the Calvinist cause. Either way, they argued, it was impossible to trust someone who had already

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changed his religion three times (1562, 1572, 1576); yet another conversion to Catholicism could be nothing more than a travesty. The fact that Pope Sixtus V, in his bull Brutum Fulmen of 1585, had not only excommunicated him but also obligingly declared him incapable of the royal succession on the grounds of ‘manifest’ heresy was additional ammunition for the Catholic League in its campaign to place an alternative king on the throne.64 It is not necessary to follow in detail the confused chain of events between August 1589 and Henri IV’s final conversion to Catholicism – a prospect feared by many, increasingly wished for by others – in July 1593. But several interlocking developments merit attention, given how much they would shape the politico-religious alignments and convictions of later generations; they deposited enduring ‘memories’, which became points of historical reference for subsequent confrontations.65 Henri IV knew perfectly well in August 1589 that for most of his subjects he was king in name only, but also that any premature attempt to convert to Catholicism would be greeted as pure opportunism by most Catholics and as treason by his own Huguenot followers, whose support he simply could not afford to lose. This being the case, it is obviously impossible to say at what point he accepted that conversion to Catholicism was the only possible outcome if he truly wanted the crown.66 In August 1589 (the Declaration of Saint-Cloud) and subsequently, he went as far as he felt he could, without risking the loss of Huguenot support, to retain the loyalty of those French Catholics who already supported him, especially in the army, and to dissuade those French Catholics not already committed to the Holy Union from joining it. Despite successive declarations that he would fully preserve Catholicism throughout the kingdom, he was only partly successful on both counts, and his use of the language of bon français patriotism to rally all of his subjects to a common cause produced few tangible results in the short term. Significant figures, both Catholic and Protestant, promptly withdrew their support for his cause; subsequent military victories did little to generate irresistible political momentum in his favour, while even a single setback always threatened to undo whatever progress had been made towards gaining control of the kingdom.67 In the case of Paris and other cities, the king’s major adversaries in the Catholic League mobilised the religious fears and energies of the population against ‘the heretic’ – as they usually dubbed Henri IV – notably through elaborate processions and other penitential activities designed to effect the mystical union of God and his people. But with each passing year, the grind of war and ever-rising taxes ensured that ‘union’ was increasingly difficult to find, which in turn led to different factions openly emerging within the Catholic League. Some extremist Leaguers were prepared to advocate the succession of Philip II of Spain’s daughter – and niece of Henri III – rather than Henri of

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Navarre, despite the obstacle of the ‘Salic’ law which debarred royal succession in the female line. These divisions ensured that the Estates-General of the League that was intended to elect a successor to Henri III had to be postponed more than once; when it did finally meet, in early 1593, many of its members sensed that it was already too late, and were ready to engage in negotiation with Henri IV.68 Such deepening fractures created the opportunity for the latter to appeal more strongly to Catholic moderates and to make the first tentative moves on a journey which culminated in his conversion to Catholicism at Saint-Denis in July 1593. This ‘second’ conversion was nothing if not singular, despite efforts to compare Henri IV with France’s first royal convert, Clovis.69 The event itself was prepared, organised and orchestrated by a committed group of royalist figures within the higher Catholic clergy; despite promises to the contrary, Calvinist ministers were excluded from the process. The king had announced more than once since 1589 that he intended to seek ‘instruction’ in the Catholic faith with a view to conversion, but that prospect only became real in early 1593. The need for this conversion to be a public event was obvious enough, given the attacks on his previous one, though such ‘publicity’ was itself no guarantee that it would be well received throughout France. The experiences of Henri III’s reign were perhaps an additional warning against trying to focus too much on the content of the king’s religion, while his continuing need of Protestant supporters also urged caution as to precisely what he was renouncing and what he was adopting in its place. For these overlapping reasons, the abjuration had to be carefully crafted: it consisted of an oath to live and die in the Catholic faith, protect it against all-comers, and renounce all heresies hostile to it. What the king assented to beyond that promise for the future was not disclosed. This extreme discretion was interpreted by a famous contemporary and former ligueur, Guillaume du Vair, as showing that ‘the hearts of kings are in the hand of God’. Yet if the king’s personal convictions were not open to scrutiny by mere subjects, nothing prevented scoffers and doubters in the mid-1590s from construing them more sceptically – and perhaps more dangerously – or from concluding that the conversion itself had been yet another charade. The immediate response of the League’s ultras, preachers and pamphleteers to the royal abjuration was predictably combative and withering, indicating that the opposition to Henri IV was not about to collapse of its own accord.70 This was hardly unexpected, as the Catholic League’s principal spokesmen had spent years denouncing what they saw as a politique conspiracy to subvert the established relations between the political and the religious within the respublica christiana. The most radical of all the Parisian League’s preachers, Jean Boucher, who was also steeped in the traditions of the theology faculty, fiercely

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opposed any argument for a monarchy whose basis lay in a form of divine right. Political power had an important role to play in maintaining a Christian society, but that role was secondary and subject, at least indirectly, to control by the church. He did not deny that royal power was ‘from God’ but insisted, as did the scholastic tradition, that it was devolved ‘by the people’ – a statement which justified the League’s attempts, via the Estates-General, to elect a new monarch. The politique assertion that the law of succession of the French monarchy was itself of divine institution was anathema to Boucher and the Catholic League; it presumed that as God’s elect the king was on a radically different plane, and implied that he alone was privy to God’s will for his subjects.71 The highly personal invective before and after Henri IV’s conversion reflected a fierce determination to undermine the politique arguments through ad hominem attacks. Thus the format and content of Henri IV’s conversion raised at least as many questions as they answered. After a virtually secret and decidedly untransparent ‘instruction’ in the Catholic faith, designed to spare the king’s royal dignity, the highly public abjuration with its minimal commitments gave these critics plenty of ammunition. One effect of all this was that it was not until a full six months later, in early January 1594, that the first Leaguer town, Meaux, timidly opened its gates and recognised Henri IV as king. His subsequent coronation in late February 1594 at Chartres – the normal place for royal coronations, Reims, was unavailable because it was still under Guise control – was timed to capitalise on his recent military and political gains, and especially to trigger further acts of recognition.72 Yet after nearly five years of continuous effort and with Paris still in Leaguer hands, the overall slowness of the League’s collapse made Henri IV increasingly conscious of the need to take a further critical but contentious step – to seek the papal absolution that would bury remaining Catholic doubts and opposition to his legitimacy. Gallican aversion to such overtures to Rome had been strengthened by recent papal interventions in French affairs – which included, inter alia, the 1585 bull against Henri IV himself and the disastrous ‘invasion’ by a papal army in 1591. Despite that, misgivings about the validity of the 1593 absolution issued by self-appointed French clerics were widely shared and did not seem to be diminishing. Moreover, as the conversion occurred during an interruption in Franco-papal relations, it sparked rumours of the convening of a gallican national council and the establishment of an autonomous patriarchate within France. Such ideas had a long past and usually surfaced in times of overt conflict with Rome, when they tended to be orchestrated by the crown in order to browbeat the papacy.73 But in the early to mid-1590s, it was historically aware gallicans, mostly magistrates, who canvassed such possibilities, but in a context of acute political uncertainty which hardly offered the best prospects for their effective realisation.

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Henri IV was not the first French king to grasp that direct negotiation with the papacy could resolve problems, actual or potential, that might otherwise remain intractable if kept within France itself; by strengthening his own legitimacy, such a pact would further weaken remaining opponents and detractors, and close off alternative courses of action. In envisaging this, he was responding to the desires of moderates in both the royalist and Leaguer camps, neither of whom had been fully convinced by the conversion itself. But it was not until 1594 that the papal curia finally began to drop its previous hostility to overtures from Henri IV, who had made all of the diplomatic running since as early as October 1592.74 Even when he did begin to envisage reconciliation with the king, the ultra-cautious Clement VIII faced some formidable opposition, which came as much from the Roman Inquisition as from pro-Spanish forces in Rome. The ensuing royal absolution was a victory for the Pope and his circle over the would-be curial hegemon, the Inquisition; to that extent it mirrored the king’s own decision to ignore opposition at home in order to seek papal approval. Because the absolution was slow in coming (17 September 1595) and Henri IV was cast in the role of supplicant of the Pope’s grace, its every detail was painstakingly negotiated. A major reason for the delay will not come as a surprise: the French negotiators sought to ensure, firstly, that the papal absolution complemented rather than superseded the 1593 absolution by French clerics and, secondly and critically, that the lifting of the king’s earlier excommunication contained no implication that the Pope was in some way exercising the power to rehabilitate him politically and to enable him legitimately to succeed to the throne. Gallican sensitivities on these precise issues were exceptionally acute by the mid-1590s, and were shared by many of the clergy, not least by those (the future cardinals Ossat and du Perron) who were sent to negotiate the terms of the absolution in Rome.75 But the papacy was equally intent on seizing what was a rare opportunity where France was concerned to press its own accumulated demands. Both as an individual and as king of France, Henri IV was subject to a set of conditions for absolution – as he would in a ‘normal’ rite of penance. The papacy’s list of conditions ran to thirteen headings in all. The principal ‘public’ ones were considerable in their scope: restore Catholicism in his patrimonial principality of Béarn; raise the prince of Condé, then heir to Henri IV’s throne, as a Catholic; apply the Concordat of Bologna faithfully; and ‘receive’ the decrees of the Council of Trent in France. Additional papal demands – revoke the Edict of pacification of 1577 (which Henri IV had restored in 1591); permit only one religion within France; recall the Jesuits expelled in 1594; ratify the decisions of papal legates and nuncios made during the League years; and join a league against the Turks – all proved far more difficult to agree upon. They were finally excluded from the ‘public’ list, but

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were accepted by Henri IV as personal commitments.76 These and other related issues would figure on the agenda for the rest of Henri’s reign. VI The royal conversion and its sequels, it need hardly be said, had wider consequences, some relatively immediate, others more long term. Between them, they secured the Bourbon succession to the throne which had been in some jeopardy and which, in their absence, might not have lasted very long. In addition to copper-fastening the Salic law for the royal succession, which the Catholic League was prepared to overturn, the conversion introduced another fundamental law of the kingdom, that of the Catholicity of the monarchy itself; the throne was henceforth constitutionally inaccessible to non-Catholic claimants. Strongly promoted since the 1580s by the Catholic League, this new law defining the religious affiliation of all future kings was the most permanent result of the uncertainty of Henri IV’s religion. When it was proclaimed by the Paris parlement alongside the Salic law, in June 1593, the magistrates already knew that a royal conversion was imminent, yet they could still not bring themselves to recognise Henri IV as France’s legitimate king, only weeks before he actually returned to Catholicism.77 Historians have long discussed the wider consequences, political and ideological, of the change. Their verdicts have diverged widely, as did those of contemporaries and posterity generally, for whom the king’s own authentic or supposed quips – such as ‘Paris is worth a mass’, or ‘taking the dangerous leap’ (i.e. the conversion) – have long served as all too facile ‘prompts’. What is increasingly clear is that the inherited notion of Henri IV as a cynical opportunist or hard-nosed realpolitiker does not fit the case, but that for him religious choice and political obligation as king of France created acute dilemmas of decision and action which could not be easily or quickly reconciled. All the evidence that we have suggests that he ‘grew’ into Catholicism after his conversion, especially its ceremonial and ritual elements, while retaining some healthy Calvinist scepticism about individual elements of its teaching. Attempts to explore either his conscience or his individual beliefs, whether in 1589, 1593 or later, seem pointless. As far as his public identification with Catholicism is concerned, his assiduous visits to Catholic churches, monasteries and other such sites in the aftermath of his conversion were designed to allay the population’s doubts about his religion. But one particular moment of a few years later stands out as decisive. During the conference of Fontainebleau in 1599, Henri overtly championed Cardinal du Perron in his defence of the Mass against the attacks of his own former political adviser, Duplessis-Mornay. Precisely because it was one of those elements in Catholicism to which France’s

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Protestants were most hostile, the king’s stance was taken as proof that his conversion was complete and irreversible.78 For some historians the royal conversion was a decisive step towards absolute monarchy, since it enthroned the king of France above the confessional fray in which everyone else was mired. The fact that the king’s personal religion was placed beyond scrutiny was a necessity to begin with, but in due course it became part of a royal mystique which would form a leitmotif of absolutist rule, French style.79 In a similar vein, the conversion has been viewed as the ultimate triumph of ‘political reason’. ‘The religious pacification of France brought about by Henri IV’, writes Denis Crouzet, ‘was the result of a veritable revolution in political ideology.’ This revolution installed him as a ‘king of reason’, which meant that the age of the primacy of religious reason was over, and the religious angst that had culminated in the politico-religious crisis of the succession was overcome by such a leap of reason.80 Olivier Christin offers a similarly broad version of the outcome of the religious conflicts, inside and outside France, which he characterises as ‘the autonomisation of political reason’, emancipated by the imperative of dealing with the otherwise insoluble political problems of religious provenance; in the course of these tasks political reason became detached from its religious moorings and its previous subordination to higher, religious priorities.81 The plausibility of such arguments relies on a large dose of hindsight and on ignoring certain counterfactuals. Henri III’s efforts to sacralise the monarchy had failed disastrously because his wider political actions undermined those efforts. Likewise, Henri IV’s conversion might have been ‘stillborn’ had he not managed to deal with an accumulated raft of challenges, political and military as well as religious and diplomatic, which, once they had been resolved, even temporarily, then became elements of an emerging political stability in subsequent years. Certainly, the conversion offered a valuable starting-point for the re-sacralisation of the monarchy during the following century, but this was a process that would only become fully visible under Louis XIII.82 Whatever Henri IV contributed to it was limited by the fact – and the memory – that he had been a Protestant until his fortieth year. And the idea that the king alone was privy to God’s secret designs for his subjects was not to everyone’s taste, especially among the highest echelons of the monarchy – the royal family, the grands and the parlements, for example.83 There is no doubt that pamphlets, sermons and other texts urged the new king’s subjects to abandon their passions and hatreds, which had proved so destructive, and to submit entirely to a restored royal authority which would spare them the horrors of the previous generation if only they put their complete trust in the king as God’s anointed. But measuring their impact is as difficult as evaluating earlier efforts to stir people into a crusading frenzy against ‘the

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heretic’. It has been shown that even the politiques who promoted a strong monarchical power were still hesitant in the 1590s, despite the experience of the wars of religion, to accept the idea of ‘absolute’ royal power as ‘normal’. The much-touted ‘absolute’ monarchy was ‘fragile’ and ‘work-in-progress’, where serious mistakes and setbacks were always possible. The notion that from 1593–95 onwards France was on a ‘high road’ to absolutism – rather like Stuart England being on a similar ‘high road to civil war’ – hinders rather than helps us to understand subsequent developments; and it does so because so much of the impetus behind the shifts in political ideology was itself a consequence of recent religious divisions.84 It is evident that in his remaining years as king between 1595 and 1610, Henri IV benefited from numerous favourable circumstances, such as war-weariness and a yearning for civil peace. But that was hardly new in the mid-1590s, and it took political skill to maximise the opportunities to repair royal authority without reopening the troubles de religion. The next chapter will explore both that challenge and the royal responses to it during Henri IV’s reign.

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CHAPTER TWO

Disputes and Settlements

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he complex process whereby Henri IV became a Catholic king offered the prospect of civil peace but, equally, it could have sparked further conflicts across France. If peace was to be restored, it would require the right combination of luck and good judgement; it was an agenda with many offshoots, to which much of the reign of Henri IV was – and needed to be – devoted. Dealing with the different and sometimes directly opposed expectations of confessional groups certainly tested the political skills of the king, his ministers and other advisers. It was fortunate that not all problems needed to be faced at once but allowing particular resentments to fester by neglecting them for too long was equally dangerous. The two decades either side of 1600 witnessed both successful strategies of reconciliation and continuing rumblings of discontent by individuals and groups convinced they had not been treated as well as they deserved. Above all, these two decades ended with a royal assassination which suggested that the matter of the king’s religion had not, after all, been definitively resolved and that one determined regicide could rekindle old anxieties about the political dangers of certain religious convictions. That the royal conversion enabled the previously divided Catholic elites to re-form around the new Bourbon monarchy is clear enough. This was not an instant or homogeneous process, any more than the conversion itself was; but it was probably less difficult than it might appear from the often-exaggerated differences between Leaguers and politiques. Certainly, there were diehard Leaguers who rejected any form of reconciliation with the ‘heretic’, even after the papal absolution, and a handful of them preferred permanent exile, mainly in the Spanish Netherlands, from where they continued to fight on for many years.1 But many more Protestants took equally badly Henri IV’s ‘desertion’, as they saw it, in 1593, and were tempted to seek alternative leadership and other means of defending their cause; his relations with them over the previous two

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decades had been fractious enough for such defections to be explicable, even if only a minority actually did leave.2 If we remember that politique was a bogeyman image conjured up primarily by the early Leaguers in the 1580s, then we may avoid mislabelling French Catholics and their politics at this point. The majority of the so-called politiques could just as well be called ‘Catholic loyalists’ who, after 1589, staked everything on Henri IV’s conversion as the only way to close the gulf between religious and political commitment. Ultimately, they sought the same outcome as the Leaguers: a Catholic France governed by a Catholic king, but they wanted it to be reached by methods which respected France’s fundamental laws and avoided dependency on Spain or the papacy. This is not to deny that a Catholic politique was likely to be demonised by his Catholic League counterparts until at least the mid-1590s, or to overlook the fact that a handful of them – among them some eminent magistrates – were executed for their ‘crimes’ in Paris and Toulouse. The fact that their most prominent figures were royal magistrates and jurists made them especially conscious of France’s monarchical and gallican traditions, and some of them were embarrassed by the very idea that they might themselves constitute a political faction, or ‘party’, within the kingdom. Yet it remains doubtful whether most of the politiques were really prepared, as their propaganda affirmed, to obey a Protestant king indefinitely, or to contemplate a long-term religious coexistence of rival confessions.3 Thus from 1589 onwards, they both defended the ‘historic’ rights of the crown, especially against successive papal interventions, and also tried to exert pressure on Henri IV to convert. When, in late 1592, a group of politiques in Paris ‘summoned’ him again to do so, the gesture earned them the nickname of the sémonneux. Perhaps the most provocative feature of that particular appeal was that they explicitly accepted Henri IV as their rightful sovereign. Although nothing concrete came of it in the short run, it gradually opened up divisions within the Catholic League itself over the monarchy’s future, and thus extended the common ground between moderate Catholics on both sides of the internal divide in the months leading to the conversion of mid-1593.4 By the time the latter event occurred, only a minority of the deputies to the Catholic League’s Estates-General were still hard-line opponents of Henri IV.5 Also exposed in this regard were the numerically small group of courtbased Catholic clergy who accepted Henri IV as king from the outset in the firm conviction that he would convert to the true church, and who were not afraid to threaten the papacy in 1591 with the prospect of a schismatic French church. Such gestures, which were more like political tactics than fixed positions, were badly received by Catholics but also by Protestants, whose leaders knew that the court clergy’s real objective was to pave the way for Henri IV’s

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conversion. However, they gradually persuaded other clergy to follow their lead.6 In many parts of France, it seems that local experiences of hostile relations with the Catholic League constituted a significant factor in their ralliement to Henri IV’s cause. By 1591–92, a growing number of bishops were lying low, biding their time, or no longer residing in their dioceses because of their political preferences, or they had fallen foul of the local League and its military or political leaders.7 When the royal conversion finally hove into view in July 1593, more members of France’s senior clergy gathered at Saint-Denis than had been present at the recent Estates-General of the Catholic League. It may be doubted whether they and other ralliés would have supported Henri IV indefinitely had he refused to convert; they could accept the theoretical need for subjects to obey a ‘heretical’ but legitimate ruler because they gambled so heavily on it not being necessary in the longer term. Neither the assertion nor its defenders were ever put to the ultimate test, and after July 1593 it was consigned to the textbooks of political argument produced by the wars of religion. I The focus of most discussions of the ending of the French wars of religion has usually been the Edict of Nantes and its gestation. But in fact the edict was itself a rather delayed response to a multitude of earlier settlements with Catholic opponents of the new Bourbon regime, and it cannot properly be understood outside that context. Henri IV’s conversion, coronation and papal absolution both accompanied and triggered the reconciliation of Catholic nobles, towns and regions which had refused to recognise him in or after 1589. Despite the numerous oaths of union on which it was built in 1588–89, the Catholic League was no monolith, and its component parts were as keen to defend local rights as to crush heresy. Indeed, once it began to lose support and momentum by 1593 onwards, it increasingly resembled a loose federation, something that was both a help and a hindrance in the process of reconciliation. It helped in that there was no unified party defending the hard-line Catholic position with which the king simply had to negotiate face to face. Instead, an array of aristocratic leaders or cities with divergent interests could be dealt with one by one, thus allowing for both tactical manoeuvre and possibly fewer concessions to each of them separately. This may suggest that they just capitulated and surrendered when the time came, but that would be seriously misleading.8 Even when they did consent to negotiate terms, they could be canny and slow to strike a final deal; they had, after all, considerable experience of ‘playing hardball’ with royal commissioners over implementing edicts of pacification since the 1560s. Thus, for example, it

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took over two years to conclude terms with the towns of Languedoc and the jurisdiction (ressort) of the Toulouse parlement; the talks, which only began in 1594, collapsed twice because of determined opposition to recognising a ‘heretic’ as king.9 This is only one instance of the kinds of protracted haggling which, cumulatively, made these individual reconciliations a hard slog. From the outset, Henri IV was firm in his determination not to ‘recognise’ any leader-figure, not even Mayenne, the League’s principal figure, or his nephew, the young duke of Guise, as entitled to negotiate on behalf of the Catholic League as a whole; in addition to making such a figure an over-mighty subject, that would have recognised the League in its decline as something bigger than it was in its prime – ‘un party formé dans son Estat’, as Henri IV himself put it.10 In the case of Languedoc mentioned above, that produced not one, but two settlements, one for the duc de Joyeuse, the lieutenant-general of the province, which dealt with his and his (mainly) noble clientele’s particular interests; and the other for the Leaguer towns. The inherent slowness of this case-bycase approach – the ‘hindrance’ factor – helps to explain why Henri IV was still negotiating with Catholic resisters on the eve of the Edict of Nantes in April 1598. Dealing with the Protestants was, as we shall see, a very different matter, with a correspondingly different format and chronology. Apart from suggesting that what we are observing here is a de facto version of contractual rather than absolute monarchy – a point on which historians disagree11 – the overall effect of this hatful of local settlements between the king and his Catholic subjects was to reinforce the dominance of Catholicism in the places to which they applied. Unlike the previous edicts of pacification, this was the first time that the crown made negotiated concessions specifically to its Catholic subjects, and the concessions in question partly predetermined those that could subsequently be offered to the Huguenots. Between January 1594 (when Meaux was the first to negotiate with Henri IV) and March 1598, over seventy such ‘treaties’ were agreed, signed and promulgated. Inevitably, many of them had similar features and content, despite some specific local characteristics.12 Time and time again, they reiterated either an outright ban or a strict limitation on Protestant worship in the places concerned. In Paris, for example, the treaty entailed the exclusion of Protestant services from the city, despite its significant Protestant population. As a result the nearest Protestant church was located several miles outside the walls, at Charenton, while Protestant preaching was banned within a radius of sixty miles of the capital. Broadly comparable conditions were granted to other Catholic cities, such as Lyon, Toulouse, Bourges and Sarlat, to take a few examples, whose immediate environs were also to be considered off-limits for Protestant religious services. In Lyon, it was the territory of the provincial governorship which was so protected.13 In similar vein, the Catholics of Troyes initially demanded that

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Protestant worship be banned throughout the entire governorship of Champagne and Brie, but even a clement Henri IV found such presumption too much to swallow, and they had to settle for terms concerning only Troyes itself.14 Once solemnly agreed and accepted under oath, these bilateral agreements could not be unilaterally revoked or ignored by the crown in subsequent years; they formed part of the ‘privileges’ of the localities concerned, which successive monarchs could be expected to confirm on their accession. Their negotiated character was disguised by both the format of a royal edict in which they finally appeared and the vocabulary of royal grace and authority in which they were dressed up. For the towns in question, this form of reconciliation was attractive; it promised a return to the earlier, Renaissance entente cordiale between the crown and its bonnes villes, whose rebellion during the League years owed as much to ruthless financial exploitation by the crown as to religious passion. It did not turn them into urban republics, as most of them had considerable internal weaknesses – debts, factional rivalries and so on – which offered ample scope for royal intervention in their affairs thereafter.15 Given such a format, it is easier to understand why it was virtually unthinkable to pardon, let alone punish, previous adversaries for their supposed rebellion or misdeeds. Au contraire, they actually believed – or certainly claimed to believe – that it was their steadfast religious fidelity that had been instrumental in triggering the royal conversion itself; it was as if they were now recognising Henri IV as their legitimate king precisely because he had accepted that to rule France he must be a Catholic like them! Despite the use of possibly prearranged formulas designed to exonerate everyone involved, such a line of reasoning explains why the reconciliations did not – and perhaps could not – include explicit pardons, but were effected under the banner of oubliance, which signified the active forgetting of past conflicts, misdeeds and recriminations, all of which were covered by a comprehensive amnesty.16 As we have already seen, oubliance had been familiar as a general and relatively unsuccessful ‘mantra’ since the early 1560s, but the return to peaceful confessional coexistence under Henri IV might not have been possible without it, despite the many real problems that its implementation generated on the ground. In a country with so much to forgive and forget, it may even have helped that the king’s own chequered religious past itself stood to benefit from a good dose of oubliance. Moreover, his willingness to offer royal clemency to individuals who might otherwise have remained off-side politically for fear of retribution acted as a catalyst to many reconciliations. Above all, the fact that Henri IV was prepared to confirm urban privileges, allow former Leaguers to retain their offices, and spend very large sums of money – 32 million livres in all, according to Sully – to buy off towns and major Catholic leaders, played a key

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part on the road to pacification.17 This led Henri IV to confide that instead of his subjects giving him their loyalty, he had had to purchase it.18 Such steps were an integral part of a policy of appeasement by a monarch shrewd enough to realise – and, crucially, to disguise – the fact that he simply did not have the power to coerce the great and the good of France into recognising him. Within this perspective, the king’s search for a negotiated rapprochement with Rome seems far less peculiar: when it duly materialised, it facilitated the next round of bargaining with the most recalcitrant Leaguers, giving them a perfect facesaving justification for coming on board politically.19 If such an approach to peace-making seems obvious in retrospect, it is worth noting that as late as mid-1598 it was still capable of worrying the most senior magistrates of the realm to the point of rebuking the king to his face. They insisted that clemency could be misused by princes and misunderstood by subjects, who should be punished, not rewarded, for their crimes and disobedience. Steeped in the political vocabulary of ancient Greece and Rome, the magistrates feared the repetition of historical mishaps from past history if the French monarchy departed from established maxims.20 Not surprisingly, this was not the last clash between Henri IV and the parlements. II The process of building bridges between the new Bourbon monarchy and France’s Catholics was, not surprisingly, of growing concern to its Protestants, who followed it with a mixture of anxiety and annoyance. Their own position was in flux from 1589 onwards, even though they had few options but to continue to support Henri IV.21 Yet his successive declarations to maintain Catholicism in its entirety and to seek instruction in it were bound to dismay those among them, such as Philippe Duplessis-Mornay who, despite being ‘pierced to my soul by the pain of these changes’, understood the logic behind them.22 Thus a number of Navarre’s closest companions, among them military commanders whose support was of considerable importance, promptly retired from his service in early August 1589. It took Henri IV nearly two years to offer the Protestants some limited reassurance when he rescinded the terms of the 1585 and 1588 royal edicts which had imposed Catholic worship exclusively throughout the kingdom. Although the Huguenots themselves had anticipated such changes by resuming religious services in many places after August 1589, Henri IV’s Edict of Mantes (July 1591) did no more than reinstate the terms of the Peace of Bergerac and Edict of Poitiers (1577), in the making of which he himself, as official ‘protector’ of the Protestant churches, had played an important part.23 But the Poitiers edict was not especially generous towards the Huguenots, and Mantes was ignored by the Catholics

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and by the parlements, only two of which registered it; it could only be implemented in those areas that already recognised Henri IV as king. Consequently, the king’s gesture did not significantly improve the overall situation of the Huguenots in the early 1590s.24 Seen from their point of view, the subsequent compromises between the king and Leaguer towns and nobles served only, as we saw, to further extend an already unfavourable status quo. The lead-up to and format of the 1593 conversion also left them out in the cold. Despite earlier suggestions that it would be conducted within the framework of a gallican national council in which they would be participants, that rather utopian prospect evaporated as Henri IV ultimately opted for the traditional role of the roi très chrétien.25 It is, thus, hardly surprising that by mid-1593 the Protestants’ unease reached the point where their political assemblies were cranking into action again, seeking to assert themselves independently of, and to extract further concessions from, Henri IV. In 1594, they began reviving their own politico-military institutions, which had been in abeyance since 1589.26 Yet despite his return to Catholicism, the king still regarded himself as protector of the Protestant churches, and for several years thereafter he stuck doggedly to his view that the reinstated 1577 edict was sufficient in principle and needed only to be implemented more effectively; in 1595, he pressed the parlement of Paris to re-register that edict, but its reluctance and the Huguenots’ dissatisfaction with its content meant new negotiations.27 In one sense, the more successful he was in handling the Leaguers, the less immediate pressure he was under to satisfy the Huguenots’ demands. Thus in dealing with their successive assemblies, and their delegations to court between 1594 and 1596, he remained stubbornly unmoved by their pleas, taking an apparently tactical view of how, or what, he might have to concede to them if the circumstances required it. As late as March 1597 he declared that if ‘those of the Religion continue to demand something that I cannot give them without dividing my subjects even more, they will increase my pain and hurt to such an extent that I am sure they will regret what they have done’.28 These were precisely the years in which most of the ‘treaties’ with the Catholic League nobles and towns were concluded; the more generous the king seemed to be in negotiating royal settlements with his former adversaries, the more anxious the Protestants became about their own position. With their prospects arguably worsening rather than improving at this juncture, they contrived a thinly veiled threat of independent military action during the war with Spain in 1597–98, and that sufficed to bring about the change of heart on Henri’s part that led to the final negotiations which produced the Edict of Nantes in early 1598.29 Coming when and as it did, this, the last major act of pacification under Henri IV, was in many respects the most pre-conditioned of them all, given the number and scope of the settlements with the Catholics in previous years. By

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comparison with them, the detailed content of the edict is arguably less significant than the simple fact that it formed a general settlement designed to be valid across France as a whole. This was because, unlike the settlements obtained by the Catholic Leaguers, Nantes was from start to finish negotiated by the Huguenot national assembly in virtually permanent session and Henri IV’s own specially delegated commissioners. The difference between them is perhaps most evident in the example of the ‘security towns’. The Catholic Leaguers were adamant in their negotiations with Henri IV in not wanting to see either citadels or garrisons within their towns, and he accepted that position. The Protestants’ stance was quite different, with guarantees of their security still the major concern it had been since the late 1560s. Thus, when their assembly presented to Henri IV the list of towns to be garrisoned and financed at royal expense, it was not responding to overtures from the individual towns in question, but rather seeking to obtain the strongest possible general settlement with the crown. Thus, ‘retaining the security towns was a priority of the Huguenot party, not a local demand’.30 On the other hand, as all the experiences of efforts at pacification since the 1560s had shown, the more general the terms of a settlement were, the more problematic it was likely to be. On almost every issue, general principles ran into particular, local contradictions, while the major law courts, beginning with the Paris parlement, set themselves against the granting of exceptions which, in their view, undermined France’s ‘constitution’ and the integrity of royal law. As the successive attempts at pacification over the years had become ever more elaborate, owing to the widening number of issues that they dealt with, it also became more difficult to present them as a homogeneous package. Nor should the fact that the Nantes settlement was negotiated as a nationwide deal – and yet another quasi-contract between monarch and subjects – lead us to conclude that its content was always general and systematic; its very scale and internal make-up indicate there were almost as many particular interests and exceptions to be satisfied within the Protestant camp as among the Catholic Leaguers.31 As a consequence, the internal composition of what historians label for the sake of convenience the ‘Edict of Nantes’ reflects the continuing difficulty of devising, not to mention implementing, a general politico-religious settlement for the Huguenot minority which would not send France back into civil war. What emerged was a highly complex and calculated bundle of four separate documents, whose status in law and, pour tout dire, in political reality, was by no means coherent.32 The main edict itself followed the standard format of its predecessors, and many of its ninety-two articles were copied, virtually word for word, from the 1577 Edict of Poitiers whose adequacy Henri IV himself, as we have seen, had so strongly defended during the 1590s. Little of its detailed content would, therefore, have been wholly unfamiliar to

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contemporaries. It was accompanied by fifty-six so-called ‘particular articles’, which were designed – as during previous efforts at pacification – to gloss some of the more thorny articles in the main edict. These articles – often called ‘secret’ despite being formally registered and published – amplified and, in some cases, actually contradicted the public ones, thus raising all kinds of questions of compatibility and relative ‘priority’ among them for the future.33 But only the pacification edict itself needed to be made public and, more crucially, to be registered by the law courts to become enforceable. Finally, there were two brevets, whose format made them personal royal commitments lacking any ‘public’ status beyond the king’s own word. Deciding which issues should be consigned to which document was central to the whole slippery process of negotiation and political decision-making in 1598, as misjudgements could generate renewed alarm and criticism. But the ‘fit’ between the two sets of decisions is by no means obvious; as Greengrass has remarked, it remains unclear why some issues were consigned to the ‘particular’ articles rather than the pacification edict itself.34 At the time, nobody could foresee that these aspects of the settlement’s format and internal contradictions would prove a godsend to the Catholic lawyers of the next century determined to undermine it. Understandably, the Protestant negotiators pressed in 1598 for all the agreed points to be contained in a single edict whose terms, once registered, would enjoy equal legal status, but they failed to obtain this. The brevets, which contained the most contentious concessions to the Protestants – essentially the royal commitment to pay for the garrisoning of a long list of Protestant ‘security’ towns and the pastors of their churches – were, like some of Henri IV’s promises to Clement VIII, covered only by the royal signature. The concession of security towns was also the most explicitly time-limited and provisional, and was intended to lapse after eight years. By making concessions whose legal status and proposed lifespan varied so considerably, Henri IV the political tactician was plainly seeking to turn a dangerous situation to his advantage: the knife-edge showdown of 1597–98 with his former co-religionists became an unexpected chance to make their future even more dependent on him and royal goodwill generally.35 III The scale and detail of the Edict of Nantes (and its ‘appendices’) need to be borne in mind when, for reasons of analytical convenience, it is discussed under a number of key headings. The edict reiterated several points already considered here, such as the amnesty for and forgetting of past misdeeds, the recognition of Protestants as full subjects of the king with the same rights to schools, the professions and offices as Catholics, and so on. It emphasised the

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royal desire for the return of his subjects to the one true church to which he had converted.36 Its provisions for liberty of conscience remained largely unchanged from earlier edicts, but in relation to Protestant freedom of worship, Nantes was somewhat less ‘liberal’ than the edicts of 1562 and 1576, perhaps because the crown realised that both of these had been undone by a powerful Catholic reaction against them. Worship was permitted in all towns where it had existed in August 1597 (the culte de concession), as well as in the suburbs of two towns per bailliage (the culte de permission); in these ‘cult’ towns, Protestants were entitled to build their own temples, and have their separate burial spaces, both of which had been perennial sources of communal strife over the years because of the ‘incidents’ they tended to trigger. Because so much attention has been devoted to those towns in connection with the Protestants’ worship and ‘security’, it has not always been realised that Nantes actually devoted far more space to consolidating the position of ‘seigneurial’ Protestantism (the culte privé), which was still strong in rural Normandy, the north-east and various other parts of France beyond its southern heartlands. This is a reminder that, in social terms, the real political and military ‘clout’ of the Huguenot cause ultimately lay with the nobility. The extent of freedom of worship allowed on nobles’ estates was directly tied to the judicial powers that they held as seigneurs on their estates.37 The granting of ‘security’ towns in 1598 to France’s Protestants was not new: it was merely on a much greater scale than previously. From just four such towns in 1570, eight in 1576, and fifteen in 1577, the figure rocketed to approximately eighty in 1598. These were the ‘security’ towns sensu stricto, whose garrisons and upkeep the crown now promised to pay for. But they were dwarfed in turn by the large number (nearly 500) of other towns held de facto by the Huguenots in August 1597, which they were allowed to retain along with their existing fortifications and militia. The terms of these ‘guarantee’ clauses, as they are collectively known, were only meant to last for eight years. They should not lead historians to overlook the genuine paradox that, even in 1598, pacifying France involved the maintenance under arms, in peacetime, of a religious minority which had proved its capacity to trigger civil war many times. These military concessions were negotiated en bloc by the Protestant ‘party’ as a whole, and that, as has already been noted, differentiated them – and the Nantes edict generally – from the settlements made earlier with the Leaguer towns and nobles. Not surprisingly, this facet of the pacification proved troublesome in subsequent decades. It would lead Cardinal Richelieu to describe the Huguenots as a ‘state within the state’, a characterisation that historians have often repeated over the years. It is more useful to see it as giving the Huguenots significant political leverage, since the other elements of the 1598 settlement clearly

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decreed the end of Huguenot political assemblies and institutions generally. Henri IV, it should not be forgotten, nearly always had fractious relations with these assemblies, especially since 1594, no doubt in part because they had been highly sceptical of him long before his conversion. Under the terms of Nantes, only religious assemblies (colloquies and synods) were allowed henceforth, although their potential to mutate into a political forum was probably realised at the time. The guarantee of access by the Huguenot minority to schools, universities, the professions, and offices in the service of the crown was not new in 1598, but reaffirming it then was vital in ensuring that they did not retreat into a possibly dangerous ghetto existence and mentality. Like its many predecessors, the Edict of Nantes was primarily designed to pacify France by nipping in the bud all those potential conflicts arising from religious division. Because the judicial framework was central to that purpose, it was laid out in far greater detail than any other aspect in the public edict itself; after all, no fewer than fifty of the ‘public’ articles alone were devoted to it. As with the other clauses, what was proposed was not especially original, since it built upon similar efforts, which had begun as long ago as the edict of 1576. Then and later, the response to these efforts at ‘juridification’, as the process is sometimes called, was far from favourable, especially among the Catholic population and the magistracy itself. Juridification in this context entailed establishing judicial mechanisms for the purpose of dealing with the myriad disputes, both criminal and civil, arising from the coexistence of Catholics and Protestants. By ensuring that the new courts’ magistrates were drawn from both confessions, though not necessarily in evenly matched numbers, the main objective was to boost Protestant confidence in the legal system’s capacity for conflict resolution. The aim was not merely to avoid religious questions per se but to depoliticise them by diverting them into judicial channels, and thus ensure that inter-confessional conflicts were henceforth two steps removed from armed confrontation. But the existing law courts, from the parlements downwards, were notoriously reluctant to accept this consequence of religious coexistence. Anything that smacked of tribunals ‘of exception’ was anathema to them, not least where religious questions were concerned; and they were already disgruntled enough at the temporary powers granted to the special royal commissioners implementing the edicts of pacification. Yet since the mid-1560s, with their short-lived chambres neutres, and especially since 1576, most efforts at pacification had involved some provision for special chambers in the existing parlements that would handle lawsuits involving Huguenots. Nevertheless, resistance to them increased significantly when attempts were made to ensure that the chambers in question would have equal Protestant and Catholic membership (chambres mi-parties, as they were called).38 When it is realised that Henri IV himself was not especially

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enamoured of institutions that diminished existing forms of royal justice, we can more easily see why they remained controversial.39 Thus Nantes prudently made provision for just four chambres de l’édit (a fifth, that of Rouen, was added in 1599). Three of them – in the parlements of Bordeaux, Toulouse and Grenoble – were intended to be fully bipartisan (mi-partie) in their membership, doubtless because that mattered most in those areas of jurisdiction where the majority of France’s Protestants were located. In contrast, the make-up and membership of the Paris and Rouen chambres was left more vague, which helps to explain why they ended up with just one Protestant magistrate each. The Aix, Dijon and Rennes parlements did not have any chambres imposed on them.40 Throughout their chequered existence, these chambres were often a litmus test of the state of the triangular relationship of Protestants, Catholics and the French monarchy. The Edict of Nantes has, along with the treaty of Westphalia, often been treated as a landmark in the emancipation of politics from religion in modern history. The fact that, unlike its many predecessors, it lasted, on paper at least, for almost a century appears to confirm that claim. But, as we shall see in more detail later, it hardly seemed so during its lifetime. Its highly asymmetrical format – edict, secret articles, brevets – underlined the provisional intent which made it highly unstable. Nowhere else in Europe was it imitated; even the Dutch Republic, which did acquire a growing reputation for its tolerance as the next century progressed, felt no need for such legislation. And those areas of Europe, especially Poland and the Austrian lands, which were precociously tolerant of religious dissidence during the sixteenth century, became far less so in the following one. The French experience of religious coexistence had become one in which efforts to legislate for and administer religious coexistence through special privileges and judicial bodies themselves polarised opinion. Patience and perseverance were needed for this most recent recipe to work. Despite the efforts to remove its most contentious elements from the public articles, the sovereign courts still resisted registration throughout 1598. Henri IV himself famously intervened in order to compel the Paris parlement to register it – which it did only under explicit royal command in the lit de justice of January 1599. The parlement of Rouen only completed such formalities ten years later, although it is clear it had accepted it, reluctantly and with important restrictions, much earlier, in September 1599; the other three parlements concerned (Grenoble, Toulouse and Bordeaux) proved more compliant, but only once Paris had caved in to royal pressure.41 Previous experience showed that minimal co-operation could be expected of the law courts post-registration, which meant there was little alternative to the by now traditional remedy of despatching special commissioners to oversee the operation of the new

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dispensation between 1599 and 1601. And, as with previous commissions, making peace in localities was a time-consuming business of bargaining and persuasion that was far removed from any literal reading of the edict – something which would be systematically exploited decades later to undo the so-called Nantes settlement at local level.42 The fact that the signature of the edict, probably on 30 April, was not published but kept under wraps until November 1598 suggests considerable uncertainty as to its reception.43 But this time round the Catholic preachers and pamphleteers who lambasted the edict were unable to rouse significant opposition. ‘Stirrings’ were certainly feared in dangerous cities like Paris, where the lack of a major purge of Leaguers in the previous years made them more likely, but they were largely nipped in the bud.44 Tolerating heresy was, of course, a scandal, and suspicion of the king’s own leanings was rekindled, but what would have sparked revolt in previous years was now offset by the guarantees which Catholic France had extracted from the new monarchy in the mid-1590s – and which the new edict was neither overriding nor abrogating. Indeed, the edict made it clear that Catholicism remained the ‘true’ religion of France. The opening preamble, written apparently by JacquesAuguste de Thou, evokes the king’s regret at the lack of religious concord and his firm desire to see it restored; the early articles assert that Catholicism should exist everywhere in the realm, with strong injunctions fully to restore its clergy and services, and that, wherever this was not the case, church properties seized by Protestants should be restored. The Huguenots knew that even their success in obtaining the edict simultaneously boxed them into a corner, with little hope of help from outside should they reignite civil war. These factors, as much as the war-weariness usually adduced to explain such resignation, were critical to the lack of hostile response to a now-familiar remedy. IV Although the response to the Edict of Nantes was, at least on the Catholic side, ‘noisy’ rather than violent or threatening, it was certainly a reminder to Henri IV that much remained to be done to convince France’s Catholics of where his true religious loyalties lay. Some of the measures capable of changing perceptions of him had been identified during and after his conversion, and were then itemised by the papacy during the absolution negotiations of 1595; others were to emerge unexpectedly in these and following years. Furthering some of the unfinished business of Catholic restoration and reform could, therefore, rebalance the king’s account with the majority of his subjects in the wake of the Edict of Nantes. One advantage here was that he could, for the most part, pick which of the measures to deal with – and when. But such eclecticism made

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them individually vulnerable, as we shall see, to being overtaken or jettisoned in favour of more important or more urgent priorities. It might seem that the demand that Henri IV restore Catholicism in his own principality of Béarn would have been easy enough to fulfil. It was, after all, Albret family patrimony, and not yet incorporated into the kingdom of France. His mother, Jeanne d’Albret, had Calvinised it ‘from above’ during the late 1560s, seizing church property, expelling the Catholic clergy and banning religious services. Restoring Catholicism there was consistent with the principles advocated in the Edict of Nantes, even though the edict did not apply to Béarn.45 Finally, in April 1599, the Edict of Fontainebleau was published to do just that, though it was soon criticised as too timid and limited in scope. Its contents are familiar from the edicts of pacification that we have already seen, except that, for once, the exceptions and limitations – specified places of worship, for example – applied to the Catholics and their religion; if they sought, as did the Protestants at Nantes, places of security in Béarn, they did not obtain them. Nor were the secularised church lands restored to the Catholic church. Only days after the terms of the Fontainebleau edict had been agreed, the Protestant governor of Béarn, La Force, could write serenely to a correspondent: ‘since this was something that had to happen, it could not have been done better, and I hope that it will bring neither alteration nor change to the affairs of the province’.46 And so it proved, since the revival of Catholicism there would be very slow, blocked for many years by powerful local elites. Twenty-one years after Fontainebleau, the enduring impasse over how to deal with Béarn would be instrumental in reigniting the wars of religion in 1620, when Louis XIII decided to go a significant step further than his father and publish a full-scale edict of restitution for Catholicism in Béarn. The formal reception into French law of the decrees of the Council of Trent was, as noted earlier, one of Clement VIII’s demands when absolving Henri IV of heresy in 1595, and it would have been a powerful royal gesture in the direction of reform-minded Catholics, whether former Leaguers or not. A perfect exemplar of how politics and religion were entwined, it was also a real hornet’s nest by the 1590s. The status of Trent’s decrees had been highly contentious since their official publication in 1564, when ‘receiving’ them would have been seen as an overt provocation, if not a casus belli, by the Protestants, while also closing the door to current or future efforts at religious reunification within France. Subsequent efforts by the papacy and the French church, via its assemblies, to have the decrees received came to nothing, but not for that reason only. Trent’s decrees did not merely divide Catholics and Protestants. Gallicans of most stripes, led by the powerful parlements, were hostile to Trent from the outset, fearing that it would be a Trojan horse for the advancement of papal

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authority over the church in France. Its doctrinal decisions and many of its decrees on reform were in themselves unobjectionable, but the spectre of expanding papal power associated with Trent took on a life of its own and nourished gallican polemics during subsequent generations. The substantial incorporation of the main tridentine decrees into the royal Edict of Melun (1579) and Ordinance of Blois (1580) and then, with royal approval, by several provincial church councils convened during the 1580s, did nothing to resolve the political problem posed by the formal reception of Trent. In particular, the years after 1589 witnessed wide-ranging and heated polemics on the gallican liberties, during which the tridentine decrees were regularly attacked. The fact that the Catholic League’s Estates-General of 1593 had formally received the decrees was hardly an advantage in subsequent years, not least because it was Henri IV himself who had actually quashed that decision. Thus, by the time the Pope demanded their reception in 1595, the battle lines were well drawn and the reactions highly predictable. Once diplomatic relations with Rome were resumed after 1595, the papal envoys to France were regularly instructed to pursue the Pope’s agenda. In the wake of the Edict of Nantes, and despite the unexpected papal silence on it, Henri IV himself felt the need to rebalance the confessional see-saw by attempting to meet these expectations. The French church itself was also divided on the issue by then. Its episcopal leadership was increasingly supportive of such a reception, and the papacy’s record in taking the leading role in promoting religious reform since Trent had made the episcopate far more pro-papalist than it had been previously.47 But the second-order clergy, especially those of the cathedral chapters, were less impressed: having lost much of their wider influence since the Concordat of Bologna, they feared that receiving Trent’s decrees would further enhance episcopal powers, threatening the gallican liberties and the special privileges that they enjoyed under the status quo. The nearer Henri IV came to receiving the decrees, the stiffer became the gallican opposition, led by the Paris parlement. Extensive discussions during ordinary and ‘extended’ council meetings held throughout 1599 culminated in March 1600 with the drafting of letters-patent for the reception. Interestingly, the latter document included three major limitations on the Council’s reception – the preservation of the crown’s rights in religious matters, the gallican liberties, and the edicts of pacification – none of which were, by definition, specified in any detail. Even if no other complications had arisen at this point to make Henri IV abandon the project, it is hard to see that Clement VIII could have accepted such broad-brush restrictions.48 But it was the king who blinked, knowing that the opposition was all but insuperable, although he was at least able to claim that he had done his best to honour his promise of 1595. Thereafter the subject hovered in the background, regularly brought

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up by papal nuncios and assemblies of the clergy, but it never again figured on the Henrician royal agenda. It did resurface in the quite different context of the Estates-General of 1614 where, as we shall see, gallican opposition was no less determined, while the monarchy was in a much weaker position.49 On one other papal condition for Henri IV’s absolution in 1595 – that of the return of the Jesuits from banishment – the king proved, perhaps unexpectedly, more successful. Both their initial expulsion in 1595 from the jurisdiction of the Paris, Dijon, Grenoble and Rouen parlements – and not from France as a whole – and their return nearly a decade later, in 1603, had both short- and long-term ramifications, practical and ideological, for France. This did not become clear until the final phase of the wars of religion, which makes it essential to grasp its context and key features here.50 Along with the Capuchins, the Jesuits were among the most active new religious orders of the Catholic Reformation. Later controversies over their foreign origins or character made it all too easy to forget that the Jesuits’ history actually began in the Paris of the early 1530s, whose evangelicalreformist groups had not yet been dispersed by threats of persecution. But almost as soon as they first requested permission formally to settle in France in the 1550s reservations began to be voiced about the Jesuits’ constitutions and accompanying papal privileges as not conforming to gallican convention.51 Even the colloquy of Poissy was drawn into that discussion: reluctantly it only allowed the Jesuits to ‘establish a society and college and not a new religion [i.e. religious order]’. When they tried to open a college in Paris in 1563, further opposition surfaced, this time from the University of Paris, which feared that a Jesuit college ‘de plein exercice’ in the Latin Quarter would drain away large numbers of the university’s own arts students. The ensuing lawsuit of 1564 at the parlement of Paris over the Jesuits’ demand to teach and award degrees was a key moment in their French history, its inconclusive outcome notwithstanding: the parlement decided that they could teach in their college, but not award degrees or be incorporated into the University of Paris, which was a major setback for them.52 This outcome became unfinished business for later generations of Jesuits and anti-Jesuits. Disputes between the university and religious orders were common coin for centuries, but in this case it fuelled a long-festering and bitter enmity on the part of the university, which found allies, especially within the parlements, to combat the propapalist, ultramontane tendencies of the Society. Yet during the conflicts of the religious wars and especially the Catholic League that followed, the Jesuits were far less prominent than the Franciscans, Dominicans or Feuillants; only a handful of them acquired a reputation for firebrand or politically subversive oratory, even when that became commonplace after the 1588 Guise murders. The fact that the Jesuit, Edmond Auger, became Henri III’s confessor is a far

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better indicator of where their instincts led them – the prince and the court – as it proved elsewhere in Catholic Europe.53 It was during the early 1590s that things seriously began to change, though not because of anything unusual done by the Jesuits themselves. A combination of the recognition of Henri IV as legitimate king by institutions such as the University and parlement of Paris, whose own recent pasts needed some serious forgetting, as well as successive attempts to assassinate the king (August 1593 and December 1594), led to the relatively rapid emergence of a ‘Jesuit problem’. Until then, even the most outspoken gallican figures such as Étienne Pasquier (who had been the university’s barrister in the 1564 lawsuit) and the royalist pamphleteer Antoine Arnauld had made no explicit connection between the Jesuits and France’s recent woes.54 Indeed, as late as 1592 Pasquier and Arnauld were pointing the finger mainly in the direction of the Dominicans, to whom Henri III’s assassin, Jacques Clément, had belonged. By 1593–94, however, recent events began prompting a significant reinterpretation of France’s history, one that rendered Spain and its surrogates primarily responsible for the country’s divisions. And as it developed, this vision gradually found the Jesuits to be agents of Spain as much as of the papacy; it now seemed that ever since they had been allowed to settle in France, they had consistently plotted the ruin of the kingdom, under orders from Philip II. Pasquier himself confessed in 1593 that he had not previously properly understood what the Jesuits and their agenda had been all along. Thus, when in mid-1594 the university resumed the still unresolved 1564 lawsuit against the Jesuits, it provided a timely cue for Arnauld, then avocat-général in the parlement, to sharpen his recent attacks in print upon the Society. It was not until Jean Châtel’s attempt on Henri IV’s life, in December 1594, that this first version of the Jesuit black legend gained real purchase. Until that point, even the gallican magistrates of the parlement found Arnauld’s version of the Jesuits’ role in recent history to be largely groundless – and they said so. With the Châtel case, however, the situation changed radically in one stroke, and wider questions about the Jesuits’ own politico-theological positions as sworn ‘enemies’ of gallican France were immediately raised. In the ensuing trial of the Jesuits after Châtel’s act, Arnauld went much further than previously, pointing in particular to Jesuit support for the papal power to depose secular rulers and for tyrannicide.55 Both of these issues were anathema to gallicans of every hue, as they would demonstrate in the decades that followed. As a result, in December 1594, the parlement swiftly took decisive advantage of the opportunity to defend kings and, despite well-founded protests from some magistrates that there was no evidence against the Jesuits collectively, it condemned them en masse to banishment from its jurisdiction, which covered virtually half of France.56 The parlements of Dijon, Rouen and Grenoble

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followed suit soon afterwards, but the four remaining ones (Aix, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Rennes) successfully resisted pressure to do likewise. These events overlapped closely with the negotiations for the papal absolution of Henri IV in late 1594 and 1595, so it is hardly surprising that the recall of the Jesuits figured on the papal agenda. As we saw, Rome did not manage to make their recall one of the formal conditions of the royal absolution – it was far too sensitive an issue at this point – but French negotiators accepted it as a private commitment for the king to discharge in due course. In 1594, Henri IV himself faced a genuine dilemma, as he had good reasons both to support and oppose the Jesuits’ expulsion; he found a convenient escape route by silently permitting the expulsion to happen under the parlement’s authority.57 At no time was there an explicit royal decree or declaration sanctioning the expulsion, which would have pleased many a gallican but which would, by the same token, have raised serious doubts, especially in Rome, about the sincerity of the royal conversion. The fact that the Jesuits were not expelled from France as a whole, but were free to live within the jurisdictions of the other, mostly southern parlements, meant that their removal was far less comprehensive than that imposed by the Venetian Republic in 1607, and which took nearly sixty years to reverse; their partial excision from France by judicial means rather than by royal order left the door open to a return at some later date. The decision to readmit the Jesuits to northern and central France in 1603 was quite different from the original expulsion, however, and this time the parlements were kept well out of the picture. This did not make it any less complex, and a framework for their return only materialised after prolonged negotiations between the crown, the Jesuits and the papacy, during which each of the different parties had reservations about how, or under what conditions, it should be effected. When Henri IV berated the Paris parlement a second time for its obduracy over registering the Edict of Nantes in early 1599, he described himself as ‘a Catholic king, a Roman Catholic, but not a Jesuit Catholic’.58 Such an emphatic distinction is evidence of how contemporary perceptions had congealed. For that reason, the Jesuits’ return highlights some important features of the religious politics of Henri IV’s later reign.59 When Henri IV first put the question to an ‘enlarged’ royal council in late 1599 and early 1600 – at a moment when Trent, as we have seen, was also being discussed – there was significant opposition, primarily from the senior parlementaires present. But even those counsellors who favoured a full recall argued that the Jesuits needed to be ‘regulated’ within France as a whole – i.e. that explicit conditions of settlement be imposed on and accepted by them.60 Thereafter, very little happened before 1601, because the timing of such a move proved too elusive during the intervening years. Yet the noisy reception of the Edict of Nantes, among other things, reminded Henri IV of the

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continuing need to rally sceptical French Catholics. Tactics also mattered for, given the parlement’s continuing anti-Jesuit sentiments, little would come from pressing it to revoke its decree of expulsion; that would simply provide, as in 1594, an ideal platform for gallicans to engage in further anti-Jesuit polemics. Although a royal decree of recall, which would require registration by the parlements, could also stoke up controversy, it gradually came to seem the best way to ‘regulate’ the Jesuits henceforth. The negotiations only began in earnest in 1601 and by the time they were being finalised in 1603, the papacy and the Jesuits’ own Roman hierarchy were largely sidelined in favour of a bilateral agreement between the crown and the French Jesuits, one that was decidedly gallican in format. The recall of the Jesuits would take the form of a royal pardon, the quid pro quo for which would be the acceptance by the Jesuits of conditions that had not previously applied to them – or indeed to any other religious order within France. These conditions, laid out in the preamble and nine articles of the Edict of Rouen, reveal something of what the term ‘gallican’ could mean around 1600 where religious affairs were concerned. All Jesuits resident in France should henceforth be French subjects, unless they had obtained a special dispensation; all new Jesuit foundations would require explicit royal approval. The Jesuits would also be subject to the royal courts and the French church’s hierarchy, still a very sore subject indeed after centuries of quarrels between secular and regular clergy. And because of recent history, it was added that a Jesuit should reside at court in order to ‘answer’ for the behaviour of his confrères. Above all, the Jesuits were to take an oath of allegiance to the king of France, a condition that cut right across their famous fourth vow of obedience to the Pope and something that no other religious order was required to do. The general context is as worth noting here as the specific contents of the edict. At one level, it was an attempt to isolate France from unwelcome foreign influences, in this case the theologico-political ideas concerning tyranny and legitimate rule with which the Jesuits had by now become associated. Not only that, but for the first time the Jesuits were to be bound tightly to the monarchy, which became their true patron and protector, thereby tying their fortunes closely to each other. Put differently, it was the beginning of a long exercise in gallicanising the least ‘French’ of religious orders, an exercise that was only possible because at this juncture the Jesuits were on shaky ground and were so desperate to return to central and northern France that they accepted conditions at which they would normally have blenched. It would have taken great prescience to see around 1603 where this decision would lead or how soon its consequences would become visible. The Jesuit superior-general in Rome had major reservations about the edict: it did not acquit the Jesuits of the so-called ‘offences’ for which they had been

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condemned in 1594, while the oath of allegiance to the king threatened to separate France’s Jesuits from the rest of the Society. But in the end, the price to be paid seemed worthwhile if the Jesuits could resume their activities throughout France. Equally useful was the fact that, for the first time, the edict provided them with the firm legal foundation for their presence within France which they had failed to obtain over the previous half-century. From the papacy’s point of view, Henri IV’s action was timely evidence that he wished to promote Catholic revival and, perhaps no less importantly, to scotch fears about his religious leanings by associating himself with a religious order of impeccable orthodoxy. Within the Catholic fold, it was undoubtedly France’s gallicans (and their supporters in other parts of Europe) who felt most exasperated by the recall, not least because, as we shall see, the Jesuits were becoming embroiled in ever-more heated debates about the relations between the church – especially the papacy – and secular rulers. But in the short term, and within France, the mix of conditions which Henri IV persuaded the Jesuits to accept limited the scope for a full-scale gallican backlash. The principal negotiator of the Edict of Rouen on the Jesuit side was Pierre Coton, whose subsequent career mirrors that of the French Jesuits more generally. Even before negotiations were completed, Henri IV had begun promoting Coton, especially by inviting him to preach at the court; within a relatively short time he became the king’s acting confessor. He had to wait for the nominal confessor René Benoist’s death before assuming the actual title in 1608 and thus becoming the first in a long, unbroken line of Jesuit royal confessors to Bourbon kings on both side of the Pyrenees until the Society’s suppression in the mid-eighteenth century.61 Such an audacious step also confirmed the bona fides of the royal conversion, and set the stage for the linking together of the fortunes of the monarchy and the Society thereafter. The royal confessor became, in effect, the Jesuit at court who ‘responded’ for the rest of his confrères whenever they were accused of acts or opinions which contravened gallican ‘ways of proceeding’. But the confessor was much more than that: he also became, in principle, a figure of potentially enormous political influence, given his role as keeper of the king’s conscience, with ramifications extending to political choices and royal patronage within the French church. Less than a generation after 1603, senior gallican clergy were deploring the undue influence of a mere ‘regular’ in matters which should have been well beyond his reach. Meanwhile, the great expansion of the Jesuits’ presence in France was under way. The ‘royal’ college of La Flèche, founded in 1603 even before the Edict of Rouen had itself been reluctantly registered by the parlement of Paris, was spectacular evidence of the value of royal patronage.62 The fact that Henri IV’s heart was buried in its chapel in 1610 made the royal connection

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even more manifest. The massive growth of the Jesuits’ membership, houses and colleges in subsequent decades was made possible by the 1603 settlement and the bonds of mutual dependency between them and the monarchy that flowed from it. Gallican opposition notwithstanding, it would be mistaken to conclude that the Jesuits could rely only on the monarchy to sustain their activities in France. In reality, one of the most critical background issues of these and subsequent years was whether France’s elites should be educated in Jesuit schools or university colleges. This particular tussle, which went back to the 1560s, sharpened the edge of the ideological attacks on the Society by the traditional institutions and their supporters. The Jesuits proved by far the more successful educators and thus drew the elites ever closer to them, yet that success deepened the antagonism towards them within gallican circles, broadly defined. This was another reason why the Jesuits could never quite escape controversy, and their incapacity to avoid it helps to explain why the first black legend, that of political subversion, would be followed in due course by others, theological and especially moral-pastoral, that were no less damaging. The successive settlements and realignments discussed in this chapter did much to anchor the new Bourbon monarchy within the still unpredictable political and religious landscape of late sixteenth-century France. This is not to suggest that the two decades of Henri IV’s reign were defined by a shopping list of assignments designed to take the sting out of confessional conflicts. Yet the failure – or, in some cases, refusal – to honour certain promises elicited much less disappointment than would otherwise have been the case. The court and royal entourage included many high-ranking Huguenot nobles who, like Sully, refused the king’s efforts to convert them and who, as a result, were still capable of reassuring their fellow Protestants that their interests would not be forgotten.63 And Henri IV’s own marriage, with yet another papal dispensation, to the impeccably Catholic Marie de Medici in 1600 laid the foundations for the future of the Bourbon dynasty.

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CHAPTER THREE

Gallican Stirs

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rance entered the new century as the one country in Europe where the familiar maxim of cuius regio, eius religio was officially disregarded. One of the decisions that turned it on its head was Henri IV’s own conversion, since it was the prince who had to adopt the religion of his subjects – or at least of the vast majority of them. The ensuing politico-religious situation was not built on a broad consensus, as we have seen; within both the Catholic and Protestant communities, it was still considered unnatural, even scandalous. The frequent emphasis on the provisional, temporary character of such confessional coexistence may well have diminished its effect over time, but it would be misguided to ignore the counter-message that such repetition conveyed before and after 1598. It is striking that Henri IV, despite his own chequered religious history, was deeply reluctant, both before and after his final conversion, to adopt yet another edict endorsing religious coexistence. Some of his most stalwart and best-known supporters on the Catholic side were as hostile as ever to the idea of permanent religious toleration, and were highly critical in due course of the Edict of Nantes itself.1 If that could be the case, then it is hard to see any far-sighted coalition of groups or tendencies at work on a forward-looking, modern secular politics, and at a time when the vast majority of French people remained firmly wedded to the idea of vivre catholiquement.2 This state of affairs accompanied and justified continuing debates on the nature of royal power and its authority in relation to the church and religious questions. They laid the foundations for much of the thinking that would become dominant in the next century. I As already noted, the hope of finding a solution to France’s religious divisions within a gallican framework was frequently expressed before and after the

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edict of 1598. The spectre of a gallican church led by an independent patriarch briefly surfaced around the time of Henri IV’s conversion, as it did in the later 1630s during Richelieu’s ministry; in both cases, it seems to have been a political tactic aimed against Rome, yet its use did generate considerable apprehension about French intentions.3 In reality, of course, the accumulated religious divisions made such a ‘go it alone’ gallican solution more rather than less difficult to achieve, as the fractures in the gallican tent had seriously diminished its previous cohesiveness. During the decades after 1560, the French church – or perhaps more accurately its leadership, as evidenced by the assemblies of clergy or the Estates-General – moved in a much more Romefriendly direction, seeing in the post-Trent papacy an institution committed to both the reform and the defence of Catholicism, especially as they felt that the monarchy was not doing enough to support the same cause within France.4 With the advent of the second Catholic League in 1585 and the assassination of the Guises this shift continued, generating – or at least revealing – similar ultramontane sentiments among elements of the lower clergy and the wider population. Thereafter, the gradual decline of the League during the early to mid-1590s rendered overt demonstrations of pro-Roman leanings out of season. But that could not hide the fact that the French Catholic church had, partly out of sheer necessity, become more independently minded and assertive in its relations with the crown, or that it now benefited considerably from having regular assemblies as a platform from which to voice, for example, demands for a return to episcopal elections and the official reception of the decrees of Trent.5 With bishops increasingly anxious to exert their (gallican) authority within their dioceses, especially in pursuit of religious reforms of tridentine inspiration, the scope for conflict with both secular magistrates and influential sections of the clergy, notably the religious orders and cathedral chapters, which were defending either their papal privileges (the orders) or their gallican liberties (the chapters), was considerable in early Bourbon France.6 The universities emerged from the prolonged religious crisis in a less confident condition. Unfortunately, relatively little is known about them on a national scale for this period, and it may well be misleading to generalise from the example of Paris.7 However, the Paris theology faculty’s eminence within France ensured that it would continue to intervene on both doctrinal and political questions after 1560. The monarchy continued to see the potential value of its support on delicate issues. Charles IX had consulted its members on the actual celebration of his sister Marguerite’s planned marriage to Henri of Navarre in 1572, but the majority responded negatively to the whole idea.8 Partly in response to pressure from the Jesuits’ teaching in the college of Clermont, across the street from the university, the Paris faculty instinctively

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sprang to the defence of the gallican ecclesiological traditions that it had been so instrumental in developing; its habitual ally in such conflicts was the parlement, whose hearty dislike of the Concordat of Bologna it also shared. Yet counter-pressures were just as powerful. Having willingly embraced the Holy Union with Henri III in mid-1588, the faculty responded in January 1589 to the Guise murders by declaring the king’s subjects released from their obligation to obey ‘Henri de Valois’. In the years that followed, the faculty’s internal divisions deepened further, especially in the wake of its identification with the radical League which dominated Paris until 1594; some of its best-known members, such as Jean Boucher, were among the most vocal ideologists of the League’s cause. Despite the latter’s subsequent collapse, the faculty made no real effort to make its peace with the new Bourbon monarchy, all of which left it vulnerable when a royal commission set about reforming the broader university, or bringing it to heel, in the late 1590s.9 In the shadow of the surveillance which the parlement would increasingly try to impose on it, the faculty resumed its normal activities in 1594–95, among which the presentation and public defence of ‘theses’ – sets of brief propositions or questions rather than extended written dissertations – on ecclesiological matters in particular, were always liable to generate controversy with wider ramifications for both church and state. Thanks to the long-standing practice of academic disputations, the faculty regularly revisited and debated the teachings of its most esteemed doctors such as Jacques Almain and John Mair who, a century earlier, had seen nothing wrong in defending a people’s right to resist tyrannical rule.10 But the continued observance of such academic conventions could, needless to say, spell real trouble in Bourbon France, where recent political experiences rendered public discussion of certain maxims highly sensitive.11 At the same time, the early seventeenth-century faculty saw the emergence of a new generation of highly combative theologians, symbolised on the gallican side by Edmond Richer, and the pro-Roman side by André Duval, who would ensure that such confrontations would continue.12 The magistrates and royal officials – a much broader spectrum of the educated lay elite than we might imagine – emerged from the religious wars as the most vocal defenders of gallican traditions, ecclesiastical as well as political.13 The fact that they too had experienced often serious internal divisions, especially over whether to support the Catholic League against Henri III and his successor, made them all the more keen to purge their record of such faux pas. It was from within their ranks that, as early as 1564, the decrees of Trent were denounced as unacceptable to French traditions; they forcefully opposed what seemed to them the threat from the post-Trent papacy and its perceived appetite for extending its authority across the Catholic church as a whole. Along the way, a succession of developments confirmed their conviction that

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the autonomy of the French crown itself was under serious threat. The papal bull of 1585 excluding Henri of Navarre from the succession to the throne on account of his ‘manifest heresy’, and the papal excommunication of Henri III for the murder of the Guises in December 1588, were two of the most egregious of such actions that they deplored. The Catholic League, with its propapal and pro-Spanish affinities but also its association with disorder and revolt, increased the pressure on the magistrates to defend the rights of the monarchy. One effect of this, it has been argued, was a closer identification than previously of the gallican liberties with the laws, institutions and practices of the French state in its relations with the church.14 Yet we should be careful not to regard these gallicans as always united or unconditional eulogists of the monarchy. Major gallican figures of these years, such as Jacques de Thou and Pasquier, were as emphatic as were Leaguers like Guillaume du Vair and Bodin in welcoming Henri III’s expulsion from Paris by the insurrection of May 1588, seeing in it a justified riposte against royal excess and failure to respect the normal forms of royal government.15 Du Vair has been described as a politique, a royalist and a ligueur, but no one label is adequate to cover his behaviour and attitudes during the years when he remained in the Paris parlement under the rule of the Paris League.16 During the early years of Henri IV’s reign parlements like Paris and Toulouse experienced their own internal schisms, with rival royalist courts being established at Tours, Châlons and Castres respectively. Although the parlement of Paris issued its decree on the catholicity of the crown in June 1593, when du Vair made one of his most famous ‘politique’ speeches, it would still not recognise Henri IV as legitimate king until his formal conversion only a few weeks later.17 Intellectual engagement was far from immune to the impact of actual events, and individual reactions to them were not always predictable. II It is understandable that the new Bourbon dynasty, while anxious to utilise every possible means to establish its right to rule France, was less keen to encourage long-standing disputes, especially over religious and political authority, which were more likely to perpetuate division than produce consensus.18 Keeping controversy under wraps was easier said than done since, as we have already noted, there were so many moments when polemic could and did erupt – over the king’s absolution, the Edict of Nantes, the return of the Jesuits, the question of Trent’s decrees, to mention just a few. If anything, it became more difficult during the early 1600s, given the Europe-wide reverberations of the Venetian Interdict of 1606 and of James I’s simultaneous imposition of an oath of allegiance on England’s Catholics after the 1605 Gunpowder

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Plot. These dramatic conflicts attracted immediate attention in France, whose gallicans instinctively identified with the position of Venice, ‘a sister church’ with which they had a strong, albeit recent, affinity, and England, whose ‘separated’ state-church they had not previously held in much esteem.19 Although the conflicts differed in their specifics, both involved the rights of states over their subjects where the church and religious convictions were concerned. Rarely did France’s debates over religion and politics take place on such a broad international stage where, for once, France was more the spectator than the prime mover.20 The subsequent assassination of Henri IV himself in 1610 suddenly rendered these debates much less ‘academic’ within France; it led to major attempts to draw the sting, once and for all, of theories of limited royal power, tyrannicide, and the Pope’s temporal and spiritual powers (and their ramifications for both church and state). With so many dramatis personae involved – from jurists and theologians to law courts, universities and church assemblies – the confrontations proved heated and complex, despite Henri IV’s efforts before 1610 to keep gallican publicists on a tight leash.21 While each of the affairs just mentioned gave rise to treatises, memoirs and other declarations spelling out their authors’ positions, it is significant that the earliest attempts – three of them in quick succession – to produce a comprehensive compendium or explanation of the gallican liberties were made during the 1590s. By then, there was no possibility for the clergy, the parlementaires and royalists of simply returning to the status quo ante 1560; the wars of religion had splintered much of their earlier cohesiveness and had obliged them all to adjust their thinking. The need for a restatement of their positions that would incorporate ideas which royalist and politique thinkers had developed was increasingly felt as the conflicts drew to a close. Of the three attempts at synthesis made in the 1590s, the one that was to have the most enduring impact was Pierre Pithou’s Les libertez de l’église gallicane, a short pamphlet which appeared in 1594. The most radical single contribution to the debates, Edmond Richer’s brief, provocative treatise De ecclesiastica et politica potestate (‘Of ecclesiastical and political power’) came somewhat later, appearing in 1611. Together these two works illustrate the differences between, and the peculiarities of the different strands of, gallican thinking. For his part, Pithou belonged, as did Antoine Arnauld, Jacques de Thou, Étienne Pasquier, Jacques Leschassier and others, to the circles of learned and historically minded gallican lawyers affiliated to the Paris parlement, so Pithou’s appeal was primarily to similar groups throughout France; the influence of his presentation of the liberties was reinforced by the historical texts that he had collected and begun publishing before his death in 1596, but which were not fully available until the late 1630s when the Dupuy brothers, who carried the same gallican torch into mid-century, finally published them.22

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Writing in the 1590s, Pithou was familiar with the heated arguments over royal power and its status in the recent conflicts; his work reflected the hardening of gallican views of royal authority by the end of the wars. He identified no fewer than eighty-three gallican liberties, more than had been previously asserted in any such compilation; the right of régale that would provoke such conflict under Louis XIV was one, France’s exemption from penalties contained in the increasingly intimidating papal bull In Coena Domini was another.23 Pithou’s work was a major exercise in circumscribing papal power more precisely than hitherto, in line with the strenuous efforts of the parlementaire gallicans of recent generations. It was, thus, the political content and function of those liberties that concerned him most. Like other gallicans, Pithou began by insisting that the papacy had no temporal power over the kings or kingdom of France, and that if the Pope did interfere in its temporal affairs, the clergy were as much obliged as the laity not to obey him; they were subjects of the king like everyone else in France in this regard. Moreover, although Pithou acknowledged that the Pope was ‘suzerain’ in spiritual matters, within France his spiritual power was not absolute, but was limited by the canons of the ancient councils recognised in the kingdom. There was no place, clearly, for papal sovereignty, or rather the old-fashioned ‘plenitude of power’, in Pithou’s thinking. While restricting papal authority and itemising the many bridles on its deployment within France, Pithou (and other gallicans) insisted that the gallican liberties were not concessions or privileges granted in the past by a generous papacy; quite the opposite, they were ‘natural’ to France. Simultaneously, the gallicans were engaged in reinforcing the king’s already extensive powers over the material ordering and the ‘external’ discipline of the church. Much of the latter was, not surprisingly, of major concern to the parlements which, after centuries of chipping away at autonomous ecclesiastical jurisdiction, saw themselves as the natural guardians of the accumulated liberties.24 In sharp contrast with Pithou, Edmond Richer (1559–1630) played a key role in the affairs of the Paris theology faculty during the generation after the Catholic League.25 A former Leaguer himself, he went on to embrace the gallican cause with characteristic vigour, serving alongside leading parlementaires on the university reform commission of the late 1590s. A decade later, in 1606, he signalled his aim to codify the faculty’s gallican traditions by publishing, in four volumes, the major works of Jean Gerson and other French conciliarists (Almain and Mair included) in conscious opposition to what he saw as the growing power – or claims to power – of the papacy in the shape of Paul V’s interdict against Venice of that same year. This was only one of his many efforts to promote a more coherent version – in parallel to Pithou’s efforts – of what he considered ‘the doctrine of Paris’. From 1608 onwards, his position as the faculty’s key officer, the syndic, enabled him to do so more

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actively than ever. But in his mission to defend the legacy of Gerson and to impose a gallican, conciliarist conception of the church on the Paris faculty, he met with increasing resistance, having to battle against a younger generation of doctors, led by André Duval, who took a more overtly pro-papal position. Richer’s Libellus of 1611 on ecclesiastical and political power certainly compensated in its combative sharpness for what it lacked in volume – it was only thirty pages long. He agreed with the parlementaire gallicans that kings, especially of France, ruled by divine right, and that they neither owed their authority, nor were accountable to, any human agency; rights of resistance and revolt were consequently out of the question. But Richer, not surprisingly for a theologian, was more concerned than Pithou was with the internal ‘constitution’ of the church, which he viewed, in classical Aristotelian terms, as a mixed one: its form was monarchical, but its governance was ‘aristocratic’, i.e. shared between the Pope and the bishops. As Christ was its true and only head, the Pope could simply not be an absolute monarch, only a primus inter pares. Authority and jurisdiction had been conferred by Christ on the church as a whole, and not exclusively on the Pope as Peter’s successor, hence only a general council could enjoy ultimate decision-making authority. Likewise, papal authority over local churches was severely limited, since they were effectively governed by their bishops as the successors of the apostles, a fundamental tenet of gallican ecclesiology. Furthermore, since the church was a spiritual institution without coercive powers, the Pope’s authority was also purely spiritual, with no possible claim to temporal superiority over secular rulers; he was by definition incapable of intervening in the temporal affairs of a monarchy like France. Like some secular gallicans, Richer allowed that the Pope could excommunicate a ruler but – and this was the critical distinction – he could not depose him; such an action was simply an unacceptable confusion of spiritual and temporal powers. Richer’s treatise caused uproar, which was no doubt fanned by the welcome it received from James I, so that both Richer and his book were soon targeted for hostile attack. He was removed as syndic of the theology faculty (the only such removal in its history), and his book was censured by a specially convened provincial council in Paris in 1612. If his potential allies in the parlement failed to come to his rescue, it was probably because Richer, like some other defenders of the gallican cause, still defended propositions that appeared out of season and elicited disapproval rather than support. His major opponent, Cardinal du Perron, nailed him by pointing out that Richer’s ‘aristocratic’ characterisation of the church could also be extended to the monarchy, a prospect that, in the political context of the early 1610s, was wholly unpalatable.26 Likewise, Richer made it clear that the church’s aristocratic governance ideally required bishops to be elected, in accordance with the 1438 Pragmatic

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Sanction, an argument that did not appeal to political gallicans who had been defending royal prerogatives since the Concordat of 1516. For such reasons, Richer’s version of gallicanism was received with significant reservations. Much later, especially in the next century, the term ‘Richerism’ was identified with something even less palatable, namely clerical democracy: if bishops were, as Richer had argued, the heirs of Christ’s apostles in governing the church in conjunction with the Pope, then parish priests, who were heirs of his disciples, had the corresponding right to co-govern local churches within dioceses and alongside the bishops. Episcopal power was much weaker in the 1610s than a century later, but France’s church leaders had no stomach for such ideas, either in 1611 or subsequently.27 Finally, if Richer lost his position in the Paris theology faculty, it was also because he was opposed by a new generation of theologians who took a more positive view of the papacy and its role in the church, and who were equally determined to resist the stridency with which Richer was attempting to present his own gallican vision of the world as the established teaching of the faculty and, beyond it, of the French church. It would, of course, be misleading to suggest that even a brief summary of the theses proposed by Pithou and Richer could give a complete picture of the range of arguments developed and recycled during the extensive and often furious exchanges of the early seventeenth century.28 Nuances and differences in emphasis from one publication to another were quickly picked up by contradictors, and the inferences drawn from certain arguments made their readers and critics wonder – and worry – where they might lead. Yet the passions aroused by such exchanges ought not to lead us to overestimate them. Viewed from outside France, even Richer’s ideas did not always seem particularly radical. For example, Paolo Sarpi, who welcomed the support of France’s gallicans for Venice after 1606, gave Richer’s Libellus a decidedly unenthusiastic reception: ‘I do not really approve his doctrine, which appears to me inconsistent and, in a word, tepid’.29 Venice, of course, was then under a papal interdict, which radicalised Sarpi’s anti-papalism, while English Catholics found themselves exposed to persecution if they failed to take James I’s postGunpowder Plot oath of allegiance. By comparison, France seemed much more securely defended by its established liberties, although the memory of recent papal excommunications or deprivations of Henri III and Henri IV had certainly not been forgotten. A major reason for the sheer acrimony of these exchanges was not just the perception of the recent growth of papal power on the back of the Council of Trent, but the advent of a new defence of that power which seemed to underpin the aggressive behaviour of a pope like Paul V in his relations with both Venice and England. This development was closely associated with the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine’s controversial attempt – even in Rome itself, where it was long

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contested – to jettison the medieval thesis of the Pope’s direct temporal power and replace it with one based on the notion of his indirect power.30 In Bellarmine’s reformulation, the Pope’s supreme spiritual authority was such that it permitted him in certain circumstances to intervene in temporal affairs, in order to prevent the actions of a secular ruler from endangering his subjects’ salvation (as the term ratione salutis suggests). As he put it, ‘the pontiff as pontiff does not have any temporal authority directly and immediately, but only a spiritual authority; however, in virtue of this spiritual authority, he does have a certain indirect authority, and that a supreme one, in temporal matters’.31 In Bellarmine’s version, the spiritual and the temporal realms were distinct and autonomous, but the spiritual enjoyed such evident superiority, precisely because of its elevated supernatural ‘ends’, that it had the ultimate right to correct the faults or mistakes of the ‘merely’ political – which might involve deposing secular princes. The Pope’s authority, like Christ’s, was not political, and even when he intervened in political matters it did not mean that he acquired or possessed temporal, political authority, as traditionally accepted. Thus, his position as ruler of the Papal State was a contingent historical accident with no bearing on his fundamental status. This and other elements of Bellarmine’s thinking, especially on the tickly question of whether clerical privileges and immunities were based on divine law or custom (Bellarmine tended towards the latter), were closely attuned to contemporary concerns.32 Originally published in three volumes between 1586 and 1589, Bellarmine’s theses became a major target for those who, in France and elsewhere, were convinced that the Jesuits themselves were the driving force behind, as well as the main beneficiaries of, the papacy’s expanding power.33 After all, the principal supporters of his theses were fellow Jesuits, like Suarez, Lessius and Becan, scattered across Europe. Their activity and the publications that arose from it did not go unnoticed, and ensured that gallicans, in particular, continued to suspect the Jesuits of undermining the authority of rulers; it was no mitigation that they did so in arcane academic debates conducted in Latin rather than in sermons or pamphlets capable of reaching a wider audience. Recasting the foundations of papal power as spiritual did not make that power any less threatening in the eyes of their adversaries; it lessened the authority of rulers by tightly confining both it and them within the earthbound temporal sphere, allowing no room for a ‘supreme head’ of the (Anglican) church or even for a ‘most Christian king’ with extensive claims to special powers over the church within his realm. The Bellarminian distinction reserved human consciences (and everything that concerned them) to the ‘empire of souls’ that belonged to the Pope, leaving secular rulers to govern a correspondingly diminished ‘empire of bodies’ with this-worldly methods and objectives.34 The

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novelty of his construction ensured that Bellarmine spent much of the last thirty years of his life defending, and only reluctantly adjusting, the core principles of his ecclesiological system against challenges from Catholics and Protestants alike.35 Above all, as a cardinal who was also a member of the powerful Roman Congregation of the Holy Office, he seemed to personify the transformation of the post-tridentine papacy in its relations with Europe’s princes; as the most high-ranking and influential Jesuit in the church after 1600, he and his ideas were bound to attract the attention of the Society’s critics and enemies from Venice to London. III It is impossible to say where these confrontations would have led had they not been rudely interrupted by historical events, to which Richer’s work, among many others, was itself a response. Well before his Libellus appeared in print, France was convulsed by the traumatic experience of the second regicide in a generation – that of Henri IV in May 1610. Although there had been several attempts on his life since Jean Châtel’s in 1594, that of 1610 seemed to prove that the passions of the religious wars had not been exorcised after all, but merely lurked under the surface.36 Henri’s deranged assassin, François Ravaillac, was certain that the king’s conversion had been faked and that he was still the enemy of the church. The magistrates who interrogated him were equally convinced, but failed to prove, that a wider conspiracy was at work; they would probably have found it easier to deal with a conspiracy than with the murderous delusions of lone regicides under the influence of inflammatory tracts or sermons. Debates which had subsided within France since the 1590s were swiftly rekindled in mid-1610; they overlapped, not surprisingly, with several themes seen so far in this chapter, while raising others – especially on the nature of royal authority and the scope of obedience by subjects to princes.37 It is worth repeating that during the last few years of his life, Henri IV had restrained the most vocal gallicans from dragging France unnecessarily into the English and Venetian conflicts. Having reluctantly agreed to act as mediator between the papacy and Venice, he was keen to have his hands as free as possible in that role, but equally to deflect accusations that he was encouraging anti-papal sentiments in France which might stir more rumours about his own religious commitment. However, the fallout from these conflicts, and especially the censure by Rome in 1609 of several gallican or associated works (among them the Paris parlement’s decree against the would-be regicide Châtel of 1594), had an inflammatory effect, which made it increasingly difficult to muzzle the gallicans and prevent at least some French involvement in wider European polemics.38

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In mid-1610, with the king dead, a four-year minority in prospect, and a politically inexperienced Marie de Medici installed as regent for the young Louis XIII, the new regime faced enough ‘ordinary’ political problems. Yet regicide could not just be accepted as part and parcel of political life. It was the parlement which took up the cudgels in defence of the monarchy, even when the latter would have preferred diplomacy and prudence to the court’s at times excessive zeal; for some of its most committed gallicans, like Antoine Arnauld or Louis Servin, there was unfinished business, and above all the need finally to exorcise anti-gallican maxims, political and ecclesiological. Over the next few years, the parlement’s principal (albeit not sole) targets were those works, old as well as new, defending the legitimacy of killing rulers considered to be tyrants. Shortly after the king’s murder, the magistrates had the theology faculty renew its oldest such censure – against Jean Petit’s notorious defence of tyrannicide as long ago as 1413.39 The parlement itself quickly condemned the Spanish Jesuit Mariana’s 1599 book on kingship, which it had not previously noticed, to be burned, precisely because it had discussed the basis of the doctrine of tyrannicide.40 In November 1610 it widened the net even further to ban Bellarmine’s recent treatise on the Pope’s power (a restatement of his views on papacy and kingship in reply to James I), despite the fact that Bellarmine studiously avoided any mention of tyranny and tyrannicide in his book.41 ‘Ordinary’ politics played a part, too, at this juncture. Two months after Henri IV’s death the Jesuits obtained royal letters-patent authorising them to resume teaching in their college of Clermont in Paris, but until that permission had been registered by the parlement they could proceed no further.42 Predictably, the university launched a lawsuit (as in 1564 and 1594) in the parlement to stop the Jesuits’ plans. The case was delayed initially until November 1610 and then a further year until late 1611. It was during this intervening period, rather than immediately after Henri IV’s murder, that attacks within France, especially in the form of pamphlets such as the AntiCoton accusing the Jesuits of being ultimately responsibile for the king’s death, grew in number and ferocity.43 The Jesuit Pierre Coton’s own attempt, in July 1610, to declare that France’s Jesuits accepted French condemnations of tyrannicide and to distance them from their Spanish confrère Mariana was only partly successful. Critics, such as the author of the Anti-Coton, rushed into print to denounce what they saw as the equivocations and silences in his statement.44 During the subsequent lawsuit before the parlement, the Jesuits were up against the normally implacable gallican avocat-général Louis Servin who, contrary to expectations, did not oppose the registration by the parlement of the 1610 letters-patent permitting the Jesuits to resume teaching in the college

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of Clermont. Instead, he demanded that they adhere to certain binding preconditions before resuming teaching in Paris: to disavow regicide and publish refutations of those (even fellow Jesuits) who supported it; to profess that temporal power came from God alone, and that no other power could intervene to depose princes; to accept the absolute subordination of clerics as subject to the civil courts; and to defend the gallican liberties. The parlement adopted Servin’s proposition, which would mean that France’s Jesuits would teach ‘the doctrine of Paris’ and conform to the ‘maxims of the kingdom’, in at least one of which – that subjecting clerical jurisdiction to the civil courts – the parlement had an obvious vested interest of its own.45 This was undoubtedly a major tactical switch from 1594: the expulsion of the Jesuits was not now being overtly proposed, but since the lawsuit had gone particularly badly for the Jesuits, they had to consider the possible consequences of rejecting Servin’s offer; in the political circumstances of the moment, expulsion, still fresh in their memories, was surely one such possibility. Although under intense pressure from Rome (by both the papacy and the Jesuit superior-general) not to yield and, if necessary, to leave France altogether rather than succumb to such demands, France’s senior Jesuits decided to dig in, while realising that they were in serious jeopardy unless they made some concessions to the parlement. In January 1612, after further negotiations, they formally accepted a considerably watered-down version of Servin’s four conditions, agreeing to ‘conform to the doctrine of the school of the Sorbonne, including that which concerns the preservation of the sacred person of kings and of their royal authority, and the gallican liberties which have been long kept and observed in this kingdom across the ages’.46 Although far less drastic than Servin’s articles, this was a significant departure for the French Jesuits; they parted company with their confrères in Rome and elsewhere in Europe, albeit far less comprehensively than had they accepted Servin’s original demands. The content of the Sorbonne’s ‘doctrine’ was not precisely spelt out and, as the furore around Richer’s Libellus of 1611 showed, there were simply too many differences for the faculty’s theologians to agree on a precise definition of its doctrine. Arguably, what mattered most was that the Jesuits, who had not been judicially implicated in the assassination of Henri IV, had nevertheless been publicly humbled; this compromise was another step in the process of ‘domesticating’ them to French ways. There was, of course, a major difference between 1611 and 1594: this time there was no serious move, even within the parlement, to expel them; in avoiding such a fate and in negotiating less stringent conditions with the parlement, the Jesuits demonstrated that they now had much greater support.47 By the time the Jesuits-versus-university lawsuit ended in late November 1611, Richer’s Libellus was about to be published, triggering another furious round of denunciation, censure and, in Richer’s own case, expulsion from his

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position as syndic of the theology faculty in September 1612. Well before the latter date, the Libellus was translated into French and reached a far wider audience than its first Latin edition. Such a pattern is typical of the years between Henri IV’s assassination and the Estates-General of 1614, which is far from being a series of neatly sequenced events or coherent, distinctive debates. New or revised theological works appeared in rapid succession, leapfrogging each other in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to resolve disputes already in progress. The fact that the regency government was ‘constitutionally’ weak – though not always as much as is usually imagined – enabled the parlement to seize the initiative on several occasions, but the court’s own ability to enforce its decrees or silence opponents was itself limited, not least because the papacy, church leaders and even the Jesuits were able to bring pressure to bear on Marie de Medici and her ministers behind the scenes. In the case of the Jesuits, they were in some respects their own worst enemies. From at least 1610, their superior-general had repeatedly warned them against writing on sensitive topics – or at least against publishing works lacking pre-publication authorisation from the top. But the more he insisted, the more it seemed that Europe’s Jesuits were assailed by the rage d’écrire. This placed France’s Jesuits, who were, quite naturally, the least inclined to say or write anything on such dangerous topics, in a highly vulnerable position, as they were helpless to prevent such untimely and, from their point of view, tactless outpourings. But several internal attempts, from Rome and France, to convey this message to Jesuits in other parts of Europe achieved little.48 Although France’s Jesuits were roundly criticised by Jesuits elsewhere, especially in the German lands, when they agreed to submit to the parlement’s gallican conditions in late 1611 and early 1612, it made sound sense for them to try to insure themselves as best they could in the circumstances. The tactic was not infallible, especially when a major controversial work from a Jesuit pen appeared unannounced, but it did at least mean that France’s Jesuits were not themselves willing contributors to the pyrotechnics of these years; not having a major French theologian in their ranks at this point may not have disadvantaged them. It should also be obvious that the actual behaviour of the Jesuits during these years hardly corresponds to the widespread notion, inside and outside France, a monolithic juggernaut aiming to dominate Catholic Europe. There were other reasons why the Jesuits were less isolated in the early 1610s than a generation earlier. The Paris theology faculty may well have shared some of the wider university’s resistance to them as academic rivals, but as we have seen, it also housed a new generation of Rome-friendly theologians who were willing to challenge Richer’s efforts at re-gallicanising the faculty, and who also enjoyed support in the upper ranks of the clergy. This was one

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of the longer-term outcomes of the religious wars and especially the crisis of the Catholic League. It did not make natural bedfellows of the Jesuits and the theologians of the Sorbonne who retained their historic suspicions of the religious orders. It would also be naïve to imagine that either André Duval or Cardinal du Perron, the most prominent figures in this very loose ultramontane ‘alliance’, was likely to adopt positions identical to those of Rome under Paul V. When du Perron’s provincial council of Sens (Paris was still an ‘ordinary’ diocese belonging to the province of Sens, of which du Perron was archbishop) condemned Richer’s Libellus in March 1612, it was astute enough to realise that it needed to add something to deflect criticisms that it might be undermining ‘the maxims of France’. After some debate, the council declared that it censured Richer ‘while safeguarding the rights and immunities of the gallican church’ – a formula which had the advantage of enabling the content of the censure of Richer to remain rather vague while taking a ‘politically correct’ position. As the case of the Jesuits showed, the need to avoid definitional precision when dealing with gallican positions was acute by this point, since France’s ultramontanes were swimming against a strong tide. It is just possible that du Perron’s initiative was designed to pre-empt a formal papal condemnation of Richer, which would probably have infuriated a much broader constituency of opinion within France than the committed gallicans; as it was, Pope Paul V did not welcome the Sens council’s ‘safeguarding’ clause, but was powerless to do much about it.49 Duval’s own major work, On the supreme power of the Roman pontiff, appeared in early 1614, and was the most considered and extensive statement of the papalist position by a major French theologian. Yet the exchanges between Duval and Bellarmine that followed its appearance show how far short Duval fell of what Rome regarded as a satisfactory ultramontane position. Indeed, had Duval’s services and reputation not been so firmly established, Rome would probably have censured his book too, and it came close to doing so anyway. Ironically, it was Bellarmine who was entrusted with examining the book in Rome, which made him Duval’s potential censor. In their ensuing correspondence, he repeatedly quizzed Duval over the logic and language of his formulation of key statements. But however much Bellarmine pressed him, it was clear that Duval inhabited a quite different theologicopolitical universe: he believed, for example, that the authority of the king of France came directly from God, while other aspects of his thinking betrayed similarly subtle but unmistakable gallican influences. This most pro-papal of French theologians was perfectly willing in principle to alter his formulations to suit Roman exigencies, yet the more he reworked or defended his terms in correspondence, the more incorrigibly different – even gallican – he and his allies in Paris must have appeared to the Roman curia.50

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IV These almost tit-for-tat exchanges of the early 1610s might have been consigned to obscurity had they not become entangled with the wider politics of Marie de Medici’s regency. Both she and the leading aristocratic figures who were the real pillars of the regime after 1610 were anxious to maintain good relations with Rome.51 As early as January 1612, agreement in principle to two dynastic marriages (and a mutual defence treaty) with the Spanish Habsburgs was completed, a move that would elicit stiff opposition from the Huguenots and disgruntled grandees during the following years. And when that opposition spilled over into civil war in early 1614, one of the concessions made to the rebels led by the prince of Condé, the first prince of the blood, was the convening of an Estates-General before Louis XIII came of age in September 1614. The monarchy’s success in both delaying the assembly until after the royal minority and preventing the election of deputies sympathetic to the rebels did not mean that the Estates-General would be docile or harmless; past experience taught that such assemblies could be awkward to deal with, which in turn could depend in part on the kind of doléances (grievances or demands) for whose implementation or redress the electors mandated their deputies. Each deputy from each estate came to an Estates-General with the doléances of his constituents, and one of the Estates-General’s main tasks was to debate and compile them into an agreed general cahier, which might remain separate for each estate or might become a single one for the united estates. The latter was always likely to have the greatest political weight and be the most difficult for the crown to deflect, hence its habitual use of ‘divide and rule’ tactics to keep the estates and their individual doléances apart.52 But whatever the actual outcome of an Estates-General, it often provides the best available snapshot of the political, but also religious, concerns of its politically active population.53 By far the most famous statement produced by the 1614 Estates-General was the so-called ‘first of the third’ – the first article in the general cahier des doléances of the third estate. It stood out sharply from every other doléance, since the intention of its supporters was to make it one of France’s tiny list of ‘fundamental laws’. Two of the three existing fundamental laws were, as we saw, only finally ‘codified’ and established during the recent wars of religion: the Salic law governing the royal succession and the Catholicity of the French monarchy. Because of their nature and composition, previous Estates-General had been used, albeit not always successfully, to establish such laws.54 But that proposed in 1614 was designed to articulate the ideological foundations of the monarchy in a way not attempted hitherto. It also promised to be the most detailed of all the fundamental laws, several times longer than the others put together. It is worth quoting in full here, not least because its structure and

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arguments make it the best single statement of what political gallicanism, under the influence of the disputes of the preceding years, now affirmed. That, to arrest the course of the pernicious doctrine which was introduced several years ago by seditious spirits against kings and sovereign powers established by God and which troubles and subverts them: the King shall be asked to declare in the assembly of his Estates as a Fundamental Law of the Kingdom, which shall be inviolable and known to all: that since he is known to be sovereign in his state, holding his crown from God alone, there is no power on earth whatever, spiritual or temporal, which has any authority over his kingdom, to take away the sacred nature of our kings, to dispense [or absolve] their subjects of the fidelity and obedience which they owe them for any reason or pretext whatsoever. That all subjects, of whatever quality or condition they might be, shall hold this Law to be holy and true as conforming to the word of God, without distinction, equivocation or any limitation. This shall be sworn to and signed by all the deputies of the Estates and in the future by all those who hold [church] benefices and all officers of the kingdom before they take possession of their benefices or receive their offices. All tutors, regents, doctors, and preachers shall be required to teach and publish this. That the contrary opinion – that it is lawful to kill and depose our kings, to rise up and rebel against them, to shake off the yoke of their obedience, for whatever reason – is impious, detestable, against truth, and against the establishment of the State of France, which is responsible only to God. All books which teach such a false and perverse opinion shall be held to be seditious and damnable. All foreigners who shall write and publish such are sworn enemies of the crown. All subjects of His Majesty who hold to this, of whatever quality or condition they might be, shall be rebels and violators of the fundamental laws of the kingdom and guilty of treason in the first degree. And if any book or discourse is found which contains a proposition directly or indirectly contrary to this law written by (a) foreigner, cleric or not, the clerics of the same order established in France will be obliged to respond to it, impugning and contradicting it incessantly without deference, ambiguity or equivocation, under pain of receiving the same punishment as above, as abettors of the enemies of this state. And that this first article shall be read each year in the Sovereign Courts and in the courts of the bailliages and sénéchaussées of the said kingdom at the opening of the sessions so that it will be guarded and observed with all severity and rigour.55

Before examining its content and rationale, this almost-famous document’s genesis needs to be explained. It originated in the electoral process for the

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third estate deputies to represent the ‘government’ of Paris. The deputies elected for the third estate across France in 1614 were overwhelmingly drawn from the ranks of royal officialdom: most of them were magistrates of one kind or another, some in quite senior positions in the parlements.56 More specifically, it is possible that Antoine Arnauld drafted at least part of the original version of this document; to that extent the parlement of Paris could be seen as ‘using’ the electoral process to forward its gallican agenda, but that inference is neither necessary nor secure.57 In any case, a draft of the article was also circulated to other parts of France in mid-1614, so that a version of it was inserted into the cahiers of deputies from several provinces.58 As it worked its way towards – and then through – the Estates-General via the debates of the third estate’s chamber, it was rewritten and, in certain places, watered down with a view to gaining the support of those who might have been alienated by some of its earlier assertions; in the process, it became more abstract in language and scope, dropping some of its initial references to the Jesuits, the question of rebellion against kings, and so on. One result was that instead of attacking the nobility for challenging royal authority in the recent revolt, the amended text put centre-stage the papacy’s claim to power over temporal rulers. While the references may have become more indirect and allusive, contemporaries would have had no difficulty in identifying their intended targets. The ‘first of the third’ might have had a more successful career had its authors and champions been willing to remove – or to moderate – the attack on papal power and its ramifications for royal authority and secular jurisdiction in church affairs, but its supporters were too heavily influenced by the recent controversies to take that option.59 The most obvious thing about the proposed fundamental law is not just its length but its precision and detail – even after much detail had been removed during its successive revisions. The first half of this synthesis of political gallicanism sets out what all subjects of the king of France must, without distinction, believe: the king’s authority comes directly from God, to whom he is exclusively responsible for his actions; no power on earth – neither pope nor emperor – can ‘mediate’ between ruler and subjects, nor claim the power to depose him on any pretext whatever. The emphasis here is less on the unlimited character of royal power than on the absoluteness of the obedience owed by subjects, great as well as small, to their king; subjects could simply not be released from the bonds of fidelity and obedience by any human power; there is no sign whatsoever of either a right or a duty to revolt here, something that contemporary readers could not have missed. And the passage is capped off with the assertion that the doctrine it puts forth is no human invention, but the unadulterated word of God, which places it beyond contradiction.

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However, the deputies clearly felt that merely asserting this doctrine would not of itself suffice to ensure its kingdom-wide application. Thus, while every subject was required to accept it, royal officials and holders of church benefices would be required to set an example when entering office by taking a French oath of allegiance that was a clear echo of that of James I, with the significant difference that the English oath was directed at a religious minority. Interestingly, the original formulation of the article went even further, insisting that royal officials could require individuals to take the oath at any time, as was the case in England. Finally, the insistence that all preachers and academics (‘tutors, regents and doctors’) teach the doctrine of absolute obedience to the king closed off another important loophole: the first casualty of this proposal would have been the theology faculties and their insistence on retaining ‘the liberty to teach’ (the libertas docendi) freely on as yet undecided doctrinal questions. Most declarations of this kind would probably have ended there, once the ‘credal’ statement was complete. It is testimony to the impact of events since May 1610 and the determination of the gallican ‘electors’ in 1614 that they believed their objective would not be achieved without also specifying what was not acceptable in France. Thus, the second half of the proposed law (from the words ‘that the contrary opinion . . .’ onwards) explained to the seventeenth century’s equivalent of ‘slow learners’ what was excluded and punishable – regicide, rebellion and disobedience – because they were ‘impious, detestable, against truth, and against the establishment of the state of France’. Here too, no distinction is allowed between clerics and laypeople, or the great and the small. The Jesuits (and to a lesser extent the Dominicans) are nowhere mentioned, but they are the obvious target when it comes to the need – and the duty – actively to refute, rather than merely to disagree with, the ‘impious’ statements of foreign members of religious orders who undermine the ‘maxims of France’. This last requirement would have been instantly recognisable since it figured, in almost the same formulation and with explicit mention of the Jesuits, in the parlement’s most recent decree (June 1614) ordering the burning of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez’s major work, The defence of the Catholic faith, with its extensive discussion of the gradations of tyranny and tyrannicide.60 The proposed fundamental law (and the oath of allegiance to be based on it) was intended, as far as we can judge, less as the opening of a new campaign than as a synthesis of recent developments that would settle recent conflicts. Despite its focus on royal authority, it contained too many challenges to the wider relationship between the church, monarchy and religion to produce a gallican consensus in 1614. The French clergy’s deputies did not see the full text of the article until late December 1614 – over two months after the Estates-General had begun – and were clearly alarmed by it; rumours had circulated, but the clergy may not have known that it had already made many

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of the third estate deputies nervous. Some of the leading clerical deputies, like cardinals du Perron, Joyeuse and La Rochefoucauld, had been closely involved, in both France and Rome, in the post-1610 disputes, and they evidently hoped that enough had been done by the church in both places by 1614 to keep such issues off the political or legislative agenda.61 The clergy’s dilemma was not easily dealt with – namely, how to bury the article without appearing to be disloyal subjects rejecting patriotic efforts to protect the king’s life and authority. They responded with a strategy which du Perron himself had already used against Richer: to disqualify the article on ‘formal’ rather than on substantive grounds, and to do so without having to articulate an alternative position on the propositions it contained. He had little difficulty persuading the clergy of the hazards of such a declaration, which the parlement in particular would have pounced upon to damaging effect. They were prepared to provide further evidence of their goodwill – for example, by renewing the censure of Jean Petit’s theses on tyrannicide or endorsing the papacy’s recent censure (1613) of the German Jesuit Martin Becan’s book on papal power.62 In addition, du Perron argued strongly on behalf of the clergy that the contents of the third estate’s article were still considered ‘undecided’ and ‘open’ by theologians. Crucially, he insisted that lay deputies could not claim that their assertions were in conformity with God’s word: that was to usurp an authority that laypeople simply did not possess. Besides, du Perron added, the third estate seemed to have forgotten that France belonged to a wider Christian universe which shared certain common views deserving of both respect and preservation; the proposed article ignored all this, as its origins lay in a schismatic country, England.63 Such arguments were certainly powerful, but it was through effective lobbying rather than oratory alone that the clergy secured the support of the nobility and outmanoeuvred the third estate. Despite having the support of the Paris parlement, which renewed its recent decrees against Bellarmine, Mariana and others at this juncture, the third estate was finally compelled by the regency government to drop the offending article from its cahier in January 1615. It would be all too easy to see the crown’s decision to drop the article as a case of looking a gift-horse in the mouth. In one sense, it had been too successful in securing the election of deputies supportive of the crown: as a result, the third estate proved uncomfortably ‘plus royaliste que le roi’ in the wider political context of 1614.64 The crown’s dilemma was not wholly dissimilar to the clergy’s – how to decline a proposal that would institutionalise gallican principles for ever in French fundamental law and political culture. Obviously, its reasons could not be those of the clergy, but they were related to the clergy’s political position of the moment. Having been kept relatively remote from the levers of power by Henri IV since his conversion, they were

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doing everything possible to regain what they saw as their lost voice in the king’s council. This desire was most famously articulated by the young bishop of Luçon, Richelieu, in the closing speech of the Estates-General in February 1615, but because it was made by Richelieu, it has too often been taken as a personal declaration of political ambition by its author. True as that may well be, what he said was exactly what the clergy wished him to say, and its broad outlines had been approved before delivery by the second estate’s chamber.65 By 1615, the effective work of persuading the crown of the value of the clergy’s loyalty and service had been done by more senior figures than Richelieu, and their efforts would bear fruit relatively soon after they had been made.66 In such a context, the regency government rejected the proposed fundamental law in a political calculation that favoured the first estate over the third. This well-documented confrontation has traditionally overshadowed virtually all other aspects of the Estates-General’s discussions on politico-religious questions. The clergy had its own agenda, with its own cahier to negotiate and draft.67 It included questions such as the status of the Protestants and their activities across France. A large number of clerical deputies had been mandated to protest against the usurpation of ecclesiastical jurisdiction; as so often in such assemblies, it was local abuses of power by secular magistrates that incensed and galvanised the deputies. The most substantial section of the clergy’s cahier in 1614 dealt with these ‘abuses’ which, seen through the prism of the exercise of jurisdiction, in fact traversed the entire intractable terrain of church–society–monarchy relations. The anger and frustration that lay behind many of these demands to redress the balance fed into the clergy’s other major demand, namely the full ‘reception’ of the Council of Trent’s decrees as a way of solving some of the problems at issue.68 The greatest support for the reception came, as it had since the 1560s, from the episcopate, whose members felt strongly the lack of adequate authority to govern their dioceses in the face of privileges and liberties (gallican or not) claimed by other sections of the clergy, and not merely secular jurisdiction. Although the other two estates accepted the doctrinal decrees of Trent as binding, there was substantial disagreement over its nondoctrinal decrees: the clergy held that they were still essentially ‘religious’ in focus, whereas their opponents viewed them as ‘disciplinary’ and ‘external’, which meant that they fell within the purview of the civil authorities. Henri IV had taken with him to the grave his 1595 promise to receive Trent’s decrees, and the regency government, which may not have felt bound by that promise, showed little enthusiasm for the idea, either before or during the EstatesGeneral.69 But the clergy’s success over the third estate’s article, which owed much to behind-the-scenes lobbying, was not to be repeated in the case of Trent: despite it being the first article of their cahier, they failed to mobilise the

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same degree of support for it outside their own ranks. The nobility did express support, but the third estate refused, declaring that it would never sacrifice ‘the particular customs of France’; and it was widely known that many elements of the second-rank clergy (cathedral chapters, universities and so on) were not enamoured of the Council’s decrees.70 It was thus left to the regular ‘major’ assembly of the clergy, meeting only three months after the Estates-General closed, to deal with this item of unfinished business and, in the face of continuing government stonewalling, to vote unilaterally to receive the Council’s decrees. The assembly’s decision carried far less weight than a resolution of an Estates-General, which would itself have meant relatively little without subsequent royal approval. Yet the clergy’s persistence over Trent at this juncture certainly shows their leaders’ commitment to the wider church and to the task of reforming the French church. At the Estates-General, the clergy had included, with a view to obtaining the support of the other estates, a clause safeguarding the gallican liberties at the end of its article on Trent’s reception; when the assembly of clergy’s turn came to adopt the Council’s decrees, no mention was made of the liberties. The clergy in assembly declared ‘themselves obliged by duty and conscience to receive the Council . . . and promise to observe it so far as their functions and spiritual and pastoral authority enabled them’. They urged the holding of provincial councils and diocesan synods across France to fit the general reception to local circumstances.71 The assembly’s decision to ‘go it alone’ on Trent in 1615 used to be interpreted as a gesture of independence by France’s clergy, coming after its reserves of patience and political skill had been exhausted. Even the papacy initially overestimated the decision’s significance until it realised that the reception’s scope was purely voluntary, affecting only the clergy in the absence of the royal approval which was what the clergy had for so long hoped for. The French clergy knew perfectly well that they would continue to need – and to depend on – royal support and protection in too many essential spheres of activity to be beguiled by the siren call of independence. The frenzy of polemic, debate and censure of opinions that characterised the early 1610s crystallised many of the differences of attitude and principle on politico-religious issues that had divided contemporaries since the end of the religious wars, and especially in the wake of Henri IV’s assassination. The debates of the Estates-General of 1614 were a key moment in this process, although the wider political context prevented clear-cut resolutions from emerging from them. The monarchy was indeed weak, despite Louis XIII’s minority being officially terminated before the Estates-General commenced, but the deep divisions between the three estates meant that they exercised far less pressure on the crown than might otherwise have been the case. Not for the first time, the outcome was that a weak crown ended up holding the ring,

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arbitrating between the quarrelling estates, accepting, rejecting or deferring their demands as its immediate interests dictated. If this has been seen as a key moment on the road to royal absolutism, it was only so by default, and it would be some time before such a prospect seriously hove into view.72 Contrary perhaps to what might have been expected in mid-1614, the French church emerged the strongest and certainly the most determined of the three estates, as its declaration receiving the Council of Trent showed. Its representatives may not have obtained much satisfaction over their own agenda, but having the detailed gallican proposals of the third estate removed from the record was itself a significant achievement, given how delicate a dilemma it was. That said, the ‘first of the third’ had not been rejected outright by the monarchy; it had only been set aside because it was inopportune. For that reason, it would lurk in the background for several years after 1614, and a nagging fear of the article’s resurrection was one major reason why the clergy’s leaders kept a close eye on political developments generally after 1614.73 But the French clergy had also opened the door to something more substantial – a return to government and high politics for its senior figures: few contemporaries could have anticipated that around 1614. Richelieu, as we saw, voiced the clergy’s claim to high office by presenting its members as more reliable and valuable to the crown than the two rival estates. In due course, Richelieu himself would be the beneficiary of that effort, but it is often forgotten that it was not he who inaugurated the age of the cardinal-ministers or that it did not begin in 1624.74 The gallican stirs of the years around 1610 may have subsided during the decade after the Estates-General, but the unresolved conflicts of these years could not be consigned to oblivion, as they were capable of resurfacing at the most unexpected moments.

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Dévot Impulse

A

t the close of the wars of religion, the royal insistence on oubliance needed to extend well beyond the acts of violence or persecution committed by Catholics and Protestants against each other if it was to be successful. Paradoxically, this was a consequence of the clemency with which Henri IV dealt with those forces that had opposed him, a policy that excluded purges, lawsuits, or punishment for all but a tiny handful of extremists.1 The vast majority of office-holding Leaguers and their families were not subsequently disturbed or disadvantaged by their recent political affiliations, especially as the local settlements negotiated with Henri IV ensured that they would not become social or political outcasts.2 Meanwhile, it is clear that the injunction to practise oubliance extended well beyond what was specified in royal edicts. Widespread efforts were made after the collapse of the Catholic League to erase the evidence, if not always the memory, of much of what had happened wherever the League had exercised municipal or judicial power. Thus, courts and municipal councils purged their records, sometimes ripping out pages from their registers, for these years; there were public bonfires of objects, which included books, associated with the League in cities like Paris and Lyon. Thus both the committed and the wider population of Leaguers drew a discreet veil over their recent past, made their peace with the new monarchy, and in many cases continued to exercise their offices, whether municipal or royal. But such voluntary amnesia could never be wholly definitive; rather than evaporating into thin air, the religious commitment of the later sixteenth century could survive political defeat and find other forms of expression. Catholics had, after all, been incessantly urged to abandon their sinful ways and turn to a godly life by the preachers and pamphleteers of the age. As we have seen, many ex-Leaguers did not feel shame over what they had done to preserve the Catholicism of France, which included that of its monarchy. That

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same logic enabled them to believe that they should remain vigilant in relation to the new king’s behaviour in religious affairs. Historians have generally accepted the thesis that the defeat of the Catholic League enabled its followers to switch their energies to the religious sphere, and to act as the principal vehicles of the efforts at religious reform and spiritual renewal that characterise the subsequent decades. Denis Richet based his argument primarily on the experience of Paris, where the antagonisms between Leaguers and royalists/politiques were long-standing and sharp, with the result that in the aftermath of the League, the two ‘camps’ kept well apart, even to the extent of supporting different religious orders and favouring different religious devotions.3 Michel Cassan found a comparable mutual diffidence in Limoges, even to the extent that royalists and Leaguers were encouraged to give their children different first names in subsequent decades.4 Such sharp antagonisms were probably not characteristic of French towns as a whole, especially wherever affiliation to the League was either delayed (after the Guise murders of December 1588) or relatively short in duration; in such cases, the local Catholic elites were far less divided in subsequent years. Thus the identification of ligueurs with dévots is at best partial, since former Catholic royalists threw themselves into dévot reform projects with equal energy under Henri IV and Louis XIII. Pierre de Bérulle, descended on both sides of his family from high-ranking royal officials, was probably the single most influential dévot of the years from the early 1600s until his death in 1629.5 The early history of the famous Capuchin, Père Joseph, shows how tortuous individual routes to religious commitment could be, especially for a younger generation, either side of 1600, when the certitudes of the war years no longer appeared so decisive or firm. Although he could hardly be viewed as ‘typical’ in any age, Père Joseph, whose paternal family were Paris magistrates of a humanist-gallican mindset – and thus not unlike the Bérulles and Séguiers – accepted the new Bourbon monarchy and the religious settlements of the 1590s with, it seems, few qualms; but he searched restlessly for other means to restore the lost Christian unity which became the leitmotif of his life thereafter. Giving up his title and the headship of his family, as well as choosing to join the recently arrived and combative Capuchins (rather than the Carthusians or the Franciscan Récollets), were early steps in a long itinerary that would end in the service of Richelieu. The sheer variety of his successive activities and projects testifies as much to the uncertainties as to the opportunities of dévot action in the generation after 1600.6 For her part, Barbe Acarie, arguably the arch-dévote of her time, looked back on the League as an ‘age of gold’, the spirit of which needed recapturing or preserving in a changed setting; by making her Parisian residence the

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gathering-place of preference for those seeking ways of promoting personal spiritual development and a wider Catholic reform, she helped to translate into a French idiom the many Spanish and Italian influences hitherto hampered by the religious wars. Her wide-ranging circle included bishops, magistrates, royal officials, emerging religious figures and spiritual writers; it was at least as much a command post as a ‘talking shop’ for those who frequented it.7 Paris may not be a universal model, but it was imitated by many provincial cities where similar groupings coalesced, sometimes around a dominant personality.8 With the arrival of new religious orders and especially of confraternities more explicitly devotional than in the past, as well as the rapid expansion of the Jesuits’ activities, the opportunities for the formation of a new generation of dévots grew almost exponentially across the country as a whole. Their scale was such that, in France as in other parts of Europe, ‘the seventeenth century was the century of the dévots. They were everywhere’.9 The French term dévot, which can be both an adjective and a noun, encapsulates a far greater array of meanings than the impoverished English adjective ‘devout’, which merely characterises people who engage in fervent religious actions. Its French counterpart takes such fervour for granted, and only becomes historically interesting when it moves beyond matters of ‘mere’ religious devotion. Molière’s famous caricature (Tartuffe, 1664) of the dévot as the archetypal hypocrite was a deliberate narrowing of the lens in response to the dévots’ hostility to the theatre, and to his comedies in particular. Yet Molière’s critique is itself suggestive of the range and variation of dévot activities, although he could only sense the modus operandi of his opponents. The dévots may indeed have been ‘everywhere’ in seventeenth-century France, but their very ubiquity makes them difficult to pin down or categorise.10 No single figure, not even the hugely influential Pierre de Bérulle, attempted or managed to devise a single religious credo for the social and political as well as religious commitments that they took on after 1600, but the ‘hard’ works that they undertook were based on their confidence that God’s grace was active in the world they inhabited. This did not, however, mean that they had no common lines of thought or forms of action, which commonly included a resolute hostility to the Protestants, a desire to restore the lost unity of Christendom, and a resolve to attempt a broadly based reform of society in accordance with the precepts of Christian morality. Even if most dévots were far removed from the highest political circles, their objectives frequently needed political support if they were to succeed. A substantial number of dévots were to be found in the town councils and law courts that formed the armature of local administration. Such variation and fluidity also meant that from one decade to another, relations between the dévots and the political establishment were bound to fluctuate.

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I During the final decade and a half of his reign Henri IV had more to fear from aristocratic conspiracies than from the activities of ex-Leaguers, some of whose leading figures, like the ducs de Mercoeur and Nevers, chose to leave France and join the anti-Turkish ‘crusade’ in Hungary in the late 1590s and early 1600s.11 Royal support for numerous religious initiatives during these years probably owed something to the realisation that they displaced political activity.12 It was in the years following Henri’s death that the new political dimensions of such Catholic reformism began to congeal and bubble to the surface. The ideological clashes studied in the previous chapter would not have occurred had there not been by then a solid strand of pro-Roman sentiment within France, signalling attachment to the wider world of European Catholicism in its struggle with the heirs of Wittenberg and Geneva; these clashes were also part of the rising confessional tensions evident across Europe in the early 1600s, from which French Catholicism was far from immune.13 The traditional historiography has viewed the arrival of Marie de Medici as regent for Louis XIII in 1610 as inaugurating a period of two decades during which the dévots became politically prominent, not merely in the nebulous sense of ‘being everywhere’, but more specifically by gaining leading positions in government and developing a distinctive agenda for domestic and foreign politics. The scale of their actual influence remains to be debated, but such a chronology seems misleading, making it all too easy to over-state the dévots’ actual political influence. It was not until the late 1620s that the presence of a parti des dévots was perceived within governing and court circles, but the temptation to assume that it had been there for much longer has been a siren call to historians searching for its origins. This tendency relies heavily on the inference that since Marie de Medici was regarded in the late 1620s as the titular head of such a parti, she must somehow have behaved consistently as their champion since her regency during the early to mid-1610s. Finally, as a Florentine with Habsburg blood in her veins, it was easy to deduce that she was by nature and instincts pro-Roman and pro-Spanish, both religiously and politically. For good measure, it was claimed more than once that Roberto Ubaldini, the highly active papal nuncio in France (1607–15), attended sessions of the council of state during the regency, so influential were pro-Roman attitudes assumed to be in those years.14 These symptoms of Marie de Medici’s dévot and ultramontane inclinations – and what they imply for her approach to politico-religious issues generally – only sound plausible when viewed in isolation from each other. In particular, they blithely ignore the different virages politiques of the queen mother in her successive efforts to remain a major political figure until the early 1630s.15 We

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have already seen that in the years immediately after Henri IV’s assassination the crown tried to contain the polemical ardour of both gallicans and ultramontanes. While the gallicans would have wished for more forthright support from the crown, the latter feared that their zeal would do more harm than good if it were openly encouraged. However, the papacy and its supporters soon found that the new regime continued most of Henri IV’s policies.16 Among them was that of sustaining a strong French ‘interest’ in Rome in order to counter Spanish influence there; it certainly did not envisage subservience to the papacy, au contraire. In 1614–15, the regent showed very little support for the reception of the decrees of the Council of Trent.17 Contrary to what is often imagined, another element of such continuity with pre-1610 policies was that of dynastic marriage with the Spanish Habsburgs, which Henri IV himself had seriously envisaged before it was temporarily sidelined rather than buried by the Franco-Habsburg conflict of 1609–10.18 Despite being one of the most rarefied elements of ‘high politics’, the subject of dynastic marriage is a surprisingly useful test of the extent to which confessional pressures had grown by the early seventeenth century. Historically, dynastic intermarriage was one of the most hard-nosed and interest-driven components of political decision-making, but the religious changes of the sixteenth century invaded even such ‘reserved’ terrain, enabling religious pressure groups – most famously England’s Puritans and France’s dévots – to insist that such marriages be of a same-faith kind, in order to prevent them from endangering the religious ‘settlement’ of the countries concerned. As France sought to conclude dynastic marriages (and thus alliances) in both the 1610s and 1620s, it was, surprisingly perhaps, those with Catholic Spain rather than with Anglican England that elicited the strongest criticism. It is difficult to imagine, a priori, a Spanish match for Louis XIII and his sister having religious repercussions within France. But things were not so simple, as both historical memory and political calculation were at work in the commotion that accompanied the marriages in the years leading up to their final accomplishment in 1615.19 From the monarchy’s point of view, royal minorities were invariably periods of real political danger, and any threat of external intervention had to be minimised by every possible means.20 The memory of Spanish intervention in French affairs during the religious wars had not been forgotten, and gallican propagandists repeatedly refreshed it before and after 1610. The regency government understood how limited the long-term value of dynastic alliances could be, but reckoned that there was a real chance that such marriages would deter the Spaniards from interfering in French affairs before and (at least for a time) after their completion. That meant that the marriages would also deny rebel grandees the kind of external support that had made them particularly

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dangerous in the recent past. And, last but not least in importance, they would bolster the still uncertain legitimacy of the Bourbon dynasty itself. As it happened, these calculations were entirely correct: their results proved politically invaluable during the rebellions of the 1610s, especially as French diplomacy ran rings around the Spaniards by stringing out the negotiations for as long as possible. However, those opposing the Spanish marriages – the Huguenots, the gallicans and aristocratic malcontents – viewed them in quite different terms. The marriages, it was objected, would signal France’s new status as a dependant of Spain, whose political influence over it would grow unchecked, thus enabling it to supersede France in its historic role as the premier kingdom of Christendom; the prestige of the most Christian king would be diminished.21 Equally, France would be exposed to the kind of alien tridentine Catholicism that characterised Spain in the Huguenot, but especially in the gallican, imaginaire discussed in the previous chapter. In the ensuing polemics, which would continue well into the Richelieu ministry, the comparisons that were frequently made between France and Spain ranged widely, and even drew attention to the different types of religious piety to be found in each country. One such comparison during the 1630s was designed to provide ‘a justification of French foreign policies in the superior quality of French piety’.22 Meanwhile, such criticisms of things Spanish did not remain on paper, but objections to the marriages themselves became part of the rationale for revolt in the mid-1610s, to the extent that Louis XIII and his sister needed a royal army in 1615 to escort them to the Spanish border, where the marriages were finally celebrated, during which time they experienced continual harassment from a rebel army.23 II If there is evidence of dévot preferences for confessional solidarity in the Spanish marriages, they were not of decisive importance in these years. Ten years later, in 1625, when the Franco-English marriage was being negotiated, the dévots had become far more prominent political players, which is not to say that they had things their own way. What had happened in the intervening years to enable them to exercise such influence in a delicate dynastic two-step, surely the most conventional arena of ‘high’ politics? The pace of religious change in French Catholicism accelerated substantially during the 1610s and beyond; this applied especially to new initiatives ‘from below’, even though many of them were sustained by dévots, male and female, drawn from the higher ranks of French society. The crown itself was closely involved with many of the new foundations, its patronage of particular orders or reforms of existing institutions attracting ever more pleas for its

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support.24 Such developments enabled prominent ‘leader’ figures, female as well as male, to emerge, many of whom did not owe their authority to conventional or institutionalised roles in the church’s hierarchy, though a number of such figures also made their mark. More unexpectedly, they enjoyed access to and influence within the highest spheres of both church and monarchy. For the next two generations French Catholicism owed its dynamism more to the activities of figures like Mme Acarie, Louise de Marillac, Pierre de Bérulle, the abbé Saint-Cyran or Vincent de Paul than to the ‘official’ leaders of the French church. This novel but short-lived factor in turn helped to reshape the politics of French Catholicism during these decades. These shifts in the internal balance within French Catholicism were contemporary with the efforts being made by the French clergy to regain lost influence at court and in government.25 As we saw in the previous chapter, these efforts had an important defensive origin and purpose, especially in the wake of the Estates-General, owing to fears of a reappearance of the gallican ‘offensive’ of the early 1610s. Whenever the alarm sounded during these years, the senior clergy were quick to respond. For example, when the specially convened assembly of notables in 1617 seemed ready to support the gallican article of 1614 and have it included in a new set of royal ordinances, Cardinals du Perron and La Rochefoucauld insisted on presiding over the deliberations so as to prevent any such outcome.26 But that was only one of several factors at work, as a brief comparison with Spain will suggest. In the latter monarchy, clerical politicians were heavily and routinely involved in government business via its numerous councils, of which the Inquisition was only one. Such involvement was also due to the need for the formal ‘opinions’ of theologians on many aspects of government policy, especially over foreign alliances. Spain’s adoption of the Council of Trent’s decrees (even with the safeguard clauses concerning regalian rights relating to the church) was another reason for the regular entanglement of theology and politics there, requiring the continuing presence of clerics in the royal councils.27 Finally, the royal confessor was routinely consulted on political affairs, foreign and domestic. The traditions of the French monarchy were far less institutionalised, and it is highly unlikely that those demanding political office for the clergy in the 1610s were seeking to import the Spanish model. They looked back, more likely, to golden ages, recent or remote, when, from Abbot Suger to the Cardinal of Lorraine, senior clerical figures had guided the monarchy in the right direction; it is no accident that they would later figure prominently among the historical predecessors whose portraits Richelieu commissioned for his galerie des hommes illustres.28 The gradual re-emergence of clerical political figures was not universally welcomed in France after Henri IV, less because of any putative anti-clerical

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sentiment than because it coincided with a period in which two successive court favourites, Concini and Luynes, dominated government and chose ministers who would do their bidding. Thus when Henri IV’s old ministers were pushed aside by Concini in October 1616, Richelieu, still bishop of Luçon, was one of the beneficiaries of the reshuffle, becoming a secretary of state with foreign affairs and war as his portfolio. But he lasted only as long as the Concini regime itself – six months. The future cardinal’s first portfolio met with the biting criticism that it was ‘against the laws and the constitutions of canon law’ to hand such a governmental post to a bishop.29 Louis XIII’s own favourite, Luynes, lasted rather longer (April 1617–November 1621) than Concini; it was he who installed the first Cardinal de Retz as president of the council in 1618, a position he held until his death in 1622, when he was in turn succeeded by a fellow cardinal, La Rochefoucauld.30 With the entry of La Rochefoucauld – former Leaguer, ultramontane, and champion of the Jesuits – into the royal council, it seemed that the clergy had finally consolidated their case for high political office, since he did not owe his advancement to a favourite.31 By now the red hat had become much more politically significant than in the recent past. It scarcely mattered, from this point of view, that La Rochefoucauld’s reputation was primarily that of a religious reformer; his entry into the royal council in 1622 coincided with a papal and royal commission to undertake the reform of the old religious orders of France (Benedictines, Cistercians and Augustinian canons), to which he devoted the rest of his life.32 Neither he nor Retz was a significant political figure capable of or expected to play the kind of key role in government that Richelieu and Mazarin would subsequently do.33 Just as significantly, by the time La Rochefoucauld joined the council, Marie de Medici had returned to court after several years of internal exile and revolt, and she too had a newly minted cardinal, Richelieu, as her chief political adviser and superintendent of her household. Richelieu, who as an energetic bishop of the younger generation had moved in dévot circles, was already (before becoming a cardinal in 1622) building up what would in due course become an extensive network that included major dévot figures like Bérulle, Saint-Cyran and Père Joseph. And each one of these individuals had his own extended coterie of disciples and connections, lay and clerical, male and female. It should not be imagined that, at this juncture, these – or other – dévots somehow belonged exclusively in Richelieu’s circle; the networks in question were far too fluid and open for that to be so.34 Marie de Medici’s determination to remain active in the governing of France after 1620 proved a major structuring factor in the crystallisation of political alliances during the decade. In 1619–20, her protective mantle had enabled many grandees to rebel against the Luynes regime who would not

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otherwise have shown their hand. Without her capacity to serve as a tutelary deity thereafter it is hard to see how Richelieu could have returned to court or attracted the interest of lay as well as clerical political figures active in government circles there. This role was more crucial than any specific objective that Marie either pursued or achieved, as her subsequent alliance with the dévots was largely dictated by political circumstances. In retrospect, it is easy to imagine that her dévot ‘turn’ was the crucial development here, enabling her to bring together a far wider political constituency in the 1620s than at any time since the early years of her regency. But it seems clear that her political alliance with them was both partial and delayed.35 It was during these years, however, that several politico-religious events whose significance extended well beyond that of dynastic marriages began to change – and complicate – the political landscape. First of all, France’s final wars of religion began with the restoration, manu militari, of Catholicism in Béarn (1620) and the Protestant revolts that it provoked in subsequent years, despite the monarchy’s strenuous efforts to keep religious considerations out of the picture and to portray its actions purely as confronting rebellion by disobedient subjects (see Chapter 7). Almost simultaneously, the Thirty Years War began as a rebellion within Germany and drew a sympathetic initial response from Louis XIII towards a fellow monarch (Emperor Ferdinand II) defending his legitimate authority. But its extension beyond its original starting-point, geographical and ideological, soon altered this initial union of princely standpoints, and opened up increasingly sharp differences between the dévots (also called the bons catholiques) and the bons français on how to respond to it by the mid to late 1620s. Like many others, Père Joseph was elated at the Habsburgs’ early successes against Bohemian ‘heretics’, yet within a few years he became utterly convinced that the Habsburgs were incapable of leading a revived pan-European Catholicism; in his view, that role could only be assumed by the king of France.36 The bons français and the bons catholiques, labels which went back to the 1580s and 1590s, represented by the 1620s two perspectives rather than two fixed parties, since the rapidly changing circumstances of these years triggered unexpected shifts of position by those involved; the constant interaction between foreign and domestic politics, especially when they involved religious issues, was a major factor in fragmenting existing alignments or associations. Despite that, it is too easily forgotten that there were as many issues on which bons français and bons catholiques agreed as disagreed; only their disagreements have received much attention from historians. For example, the bons français could see the English match of 1625 as helping to keep England out of French politics at a time when the threat of Protestant revolts was never far away; the bons catholiques took that for granted, but saw the match

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primarily as a means of supporting and reviving English Catholicism. Similarly, both sides agreed during the 1620s on the need to demolish the military and political power of the Huguenots, and only parted company at the moment of ultimate success in 1629. Before 1629, both could sail under the same flag, and did not need to lift the lid on the question of how to treat the Huguenots – toleration, forced conversion or exile? – once they had been defeated; after 1629 that dilemma could no longer be avoided and, partly because of the impact of foreign challenges, the two sides went their separate ways on it. III These examples present the dévots as concerned with the defence of Catholicism on a European rather than a purely French stage. The finer points of the diplomacy involving the France–England–Spain triangle in the 1620s are not of primary concern here, though it is worth noting that religious partisanship on foreign issues was not peculiar to France during these years; it was closely mirrored by the anti-Catholicism of England’s Puritans. The Anglo-French match between the future Charles I and Louis XIII’s sister, Henriette-Marie, only became feasible after a failed attempt at an Anglo-Spanish one in 1623, for which the Spaniards may have deliberately set religious conditions that were too stiff for the English to swallow.37 By contrast, the English hoped that the French would press them less hard on the issue of religious toleration in England. Coming hot on the heels of a recently negotiated alliance with the Dutch, the English marriage talks in early to mid-1624 sparked severe doubts over the potentially anti-Catholic direction of French policy. Consequently, the English match was only acceptable to the dévots if James I formally agreed to grant full toleration to English Catholics. This thorny problem was one of Richelieu’s first challenges when he returned to ministerial office in April 1624. He was as well placed as anyone to deal with such problems, given his close ties to the incoming English Catholic bishop, Richard Smith, who was then living in Paris and who had taught him the rudiments of ‘controversial’ theology a decade earlier. But Richelieu almost immediately found himself in a career-threatening position, belonging as he did to dévot circles, even though the realist in him understood that pressing James I too hard on religious toleration might backfire and thus revive religious persecution in England.38 This dilemma enabled Bérulle, a very different kind of political figure to Richelieu, to make much of the running, negotiating the conditions of a papal dispensation for the marriage, and then moving to London to head the new queen’s large French Catholic household, in the expectation that it would become the rallying-point for English Catholicism’s recovery. However, the dévots’ great expectations on this point were quickly

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dashed: the promise of religious toleration, even in the diluted form that the French had obtained, proved impossible for Charles I to honour.39 Within a year of the marriage Henriette-Marie’s French entourage was expelled and, in July 1627, an English naval expedition to the île de Ré, off La Rochelle, effectively triggered yet another Huguenot revolt. It would be difficult to find a better example of the inextricable character of the foreign and the domestic, of religion and politics, during these years, and of the difficulty of choosing a course of action that had a chance of success.40 The final phase of the Huguenot wars (1627–29) mobilised France’s dévots as never before, even though that mobilisation was progressive and had a prehistory. The two earlier wars of the 1620s were terminated when more urgent political priorities, especially foreign, demanded it, frustrating those seeking the final showdown with France’s Protestants.41 But the year-long siege of La Rochelle (September 1627–October 1628) gradually took on the appearance of the ultimate combat between good and evil, truth and heresy. As Satan’s capital in France, La Rochelle provided an ideal focus for everything that zealous Catholics detested most in Protestantism.42 Whether Richelieu included the destruction of the Huguenots as one of his priorities on returning to office in 1624 (which is doubtful) is less important than the fact that such an objective was close to the heart of every dévot. For Père Joseph, whose career had been largely that of a crusader and missionary until then, the siege of La Rochelle was a moment of truth, and he vigorously mobilised his fellow Capuchins and his wider networks to contribute to its ultimate success. The fall of the city was welcomed as an extraordinary event, producing an explosion of preaching, prophecies and images across the country; its success was widely celebrated as a sign of God’s benevolence towards France, and evidence that its roi-soleil had embarked upon his historic mission to slay the hydra of heresy.43 The ensuing campaigns to mop up the surviving Protestant strongholds in the Midi during 1629 maintained that momentum; they were portrayed as a triumphal progress which sustained the expectation that France’s long-lost religious unity was on the verge of restoration. Such stunning successes confirmed Père Joseph, and no doubt many other dévots, in their belief that it was for the king of France to restore Christendom to its previous state of union. However, when Louis XIII, on the basis of Richelieu’s famous avis (‘now that La Rochelle is taken . . .’) of early 1629, issued the Edict of Nîmes six months later, in July 1629, after the last Protestant towns had fallen or capitulated, this expectation was shattered for many dévots.44 The edict stopped well short of the widely expected next phase, the elimination of France’s Protestants by one means or another; having finally lost their military and political power, they were at their weakest in living memory, yet their religious

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and civic privileges were left intact. Had the French monarchy been converted from granting concessions to heretics under duress to a principled position in favour of religious toleration per se? Richelieu’s statement that on this occasion the king had, without prior negotiations, freely given concessions to his subjects was intended to underline both royal magnanimity and unconstrained sovereignty, but it did little to reassure most of the dévots. The reason for the change of tack was highly familiar by 1629 – the urgent need to counteract recent Habsburg gains that seemed to threaten France.45 Along with French intervention in northern Italy in 1629, the Edict of Nîmes and its reverberations sparked a slow-burning power struggle within the royal council over policy priorities that it would take nearly another eighteen months to resolve in the crisis of November 1630 – and indeed beyond that point. That struggle, it should be noted, was heavily influenced by increasingly sharp personal rivalries in the royal council, and the breakdown, gradual but definitive, of the partnership between Richelieu and his erstwhile patron, Marie de Medici; such personal animosities played as much a part as policy-related principles in polarising the governing elite, since Richelieu aimed primarily at having a free hand to act rather than committing France to any specific policy. It became apparent by 1629 that the primary aim of Louis XIII and the cardinal was to free themselves of the Huguenot incubus that had constrained them so much – and so often – whenever they engaged in foreign conflicts (Valtelline, Mantua) throughout the 1620s; now they had the chance of opposing Habsburg, and especially Spanish, aggrandisement, which in their view had grown alarmingly thanks to France’s weakness and inactivity. Even if they were by no means seeking imminent war with their Catholic rivals, they were convinced of the need to be ready to stand up to them, consistently replying to critics, dévots among them, that the Spanish Habsburgs simply ‘used’ Catholicism as a cloak for self-aggrandisement; it was a bluff that had to be called before it was too late for France. Such arguments were certainly not new in 1629–30, but had been deployed for much of the previous decade, when French attention was focused primarily on Italy and not yet on the much more troublesome, because confessionally more divided, Holy Roman Empire.46 This anti-Habsburg policy, along with its rhetoric, was undoubtedly objectionable to many dévots, but it would be mistaken to think that all of them were unconditional Hispanophiles. Some of them, like Jean de Thoulouse, prior of Saint-Victor in Paris, heartily disliked Spanish policies, but detested Richelieu just as much.47 Even if it is impossible to quantify the different combinations of outlook among the dévots, it is clear that they were not the monolith they are often imagined to be. Where contemporaries were quick to identify a parti at work, historians are more likely to sense a rather loose

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constellation of groups gravitating around prominent individuals. It would be mistaken to set Richelieu apart from them, given how many dévot supporters he had before returning to political office in 1624. Thereafter, as we shall see in the next chapter, he consolidated and extended his support base, attracting far more dévots than he lost, although the latter have attracted most attention because of their subsequent attacks upon him. That he succeeded in this effort was due in part to the sheer fractiousness of the dévot milieux themselves during this period. A multitude of disputes over particular religious reforms or questions of spirituality, as well as rivalries between religious orders, made adversaries out of many of the leading figures among the dévots, some at least of whom were closely connected to major aristocratic court families with their own political alignments. Even Bérulle, the most charismatic of these dévots and the apostle of unity, found himself and the Oratory that he had created under attack, especially from the Jesuits, who judged it wise to throw in their lot with Richelieu by 1626–27.48 It is not necessary to argue that such squabbles always made mortal enemies of those involved, and it is by no means certain that Bérulle, had he lived until the crisis of 1630, would have joined the anti-Richelieu camp at that point.49 Nevertheless, these squabbles certainly made it much easier for Richelieu to cherry-pick particular groups or individuals and draw them into his ever-widening net. By the time the confrontation of 1630 with Marie de Medici and her allies in the court and council erupted, Richelieu had gathered a substantial dévot clientele around him, one that was prepared to trust his conception of France’s political and religious priorities. The attractiveness for a wide spectrum of dévots of the prospect of working in tandem with, rather than against, the monarchy should not be underestimated.50 For those dévots who remained at loggerheads with Richelieu, the real disappointment of the late 1620s was, as Richelieu himself would soon admit to Louis XIII, that his political priorities required the abandonment of the commitment to reform within France until conditions – or rather divine providence – permitted its resumption. This incompatibility of foreign engagement and domestic reform also took time to sink in. Richelieu himself was still thinking of reforms in early 1629, although they appear to have been conceived in terms of being better able to wage war.51 The awareness of France’s internal weaknesses and thus the need for more fundamental reforms were most keenly felt by the dévots, especially by those in high office like Michel de Marillac who, as keeper of the seals, was the key figure within dévot circles around Marie de Medici after Bérulle’s death in October 1629. Unlike Louis XIII and Richelieu, Marillac and his supporters were keen to pursue the reform agenda inherited as unfinished business from the recent past; success against the Huguenots only fortified their hopes of achieving such reforms

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within a realm that was finally pacified. And the reforms they had in mind were far too comprehensive to be designed merely to make war easier to wage. The weakness and corruption of government (especially the legal and fiscal system), the poverty and exploitation of the population by officials, the rebelliousness and disorder of French society broadly speaking were what worried them most, and such a wide-ranging conception of the challenge facing them was unlikely to be satisfied by ad hoc, partial measures. As Georges Pagès argued many years ago, the collision between Marie de Medici and Marillac and Richelieu was not just a clash of personalities vying for royal favour and power; it was not even over which foreign policy to pursue, but over whether foreign affairs should take priority over domestic ones tout court.52 At a time when the Thirty Years War was still spreading geographically, it was somewhat quixotic to think that the king of France should simply turn his back on questions of foreign policy. In this context of rising tension Marillac’s long career in royal service reached its culmination with the huge ordinance of January 1629, the most comprehensive of its kind for half a century. The ‘Code Michau’, as it was nicknamed, belonged in the company of the great royal ordinances published since 1560. It was explicitly presented as the definitive response to the successive debates of 1614–15, 1617 and 1626, and, no doubt, to other dévot reform proposals dating from the early years of Richelieu’s ministry. Its ambition was to effect an extensive remise en ordre of French society, a project that was as much concerned with moral as with administrative problems. Marillac saw a strong, even authoritarian monarchy as essential and as the only mechanism capable of curbing the wilful misbehaviour of the elites, governmental and social, which in his view was at the root of France’s problems. He also believed that this task required the personal commitment of the king himself, and strongly disapproved of the emergence of a chief minister of the kind that Richelieu represented. In this latter stance, he would not have been alone, and his objections to the cardinal’s defence of the legitimacy of a premier minister would have been shared by many dévots and bons français alike.53 Marillac’s efforts to bolster the monarchy’s authority for domestic purposes has led more than one historian to consider him to be as much of a committed absolutist as Richelieu, if indeed not more so.54 As several of his contemporaries remarked, Marillac was a willing legislator, with a firm belief in the value and necessity of regulating the major spheres of human action.55 In keeping with previous practice, he had no hesitation in including religious reforms within the monarchy’s remit, as is evident from the contents of the Code Michau itself. The first forty of its 461 articles dealt with religious matters, and were the best crafted and most specific in the entire document.56 By contrast, as Robin Briggs noted, many of the other reforms proposed for reviving France relied too heavily at

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crucial points on hackneyed nautical or medical metaphors; the major political and related changes experienced by France from the 1630s onwards owed little to such reforming impulses and almost everything to the hard-edged imperatives of war-making.57 Marillac was not to know that, in the face of resistance from Richelieu and the Paris parlement, his legislative efforts would be quickly forgotten after publication; nor that major reform ordinances generally would resurface, albeit in a more limited format – as in Colbert’s various ‘codes’ – under Louis XIV. IV In purging the leading dévots from government, the grand orage of November 1630 enabled Richelieu to gain the kind of control over the council and the royal entourage that made opposition or revolt from inside ruling circles far more difficult than in the 1620s. Yet it did not immediately end political opposition to the newly consolidated Richelieu ministériat, as the long list of conspiracies and rebellions, before and after France joined the Thirty Years War in 1635, attest. The 1630s also witnessed the unprecedented exile abroad of members of the royal family and, equally surprisingly, of members of the great aristocracy. In her final exile of 1631, Marie de Medici was followed by a number of former Richelieu clients, not all of whom could be described as dévots, but whose already well-sharpened pens would henceforth be turned against their erstwhile patron. This small group was, like the earlier generation of Leaguer exiles, based mainly in the Spanish Netherlands, from where they incessantly denounced France’s betrayal of Christendom, its diabolic alliances with a succession of Protestant powers, and the corresponding tyranny of a domineering favourite within France itself. Their portrait of post-1630 France was one of a country languishing under despotism, suffering from fiscal exactions and arbitrary rule. Such criticism was not always couched in dévot language, and it was pitched to a wider audience.58 The most famous of these numerous attacks bore the self-explanatory title of Mars gallicus (‘the French god of war’). Commissioned (and partly co-written) by the president of the privy council of the Spanish Netherlands, it was published anonymously in Latin in 1635. It was primarily the work of Cornelius Jansen, a Dutch Catholic exile whose origins and career made him especially sensitive to the religious implications of political alignments; like his closest French friend, the abbé de Saint-Cyran, Bérulle’s successor as the leading spiritual figure among the dévots, Jansen was hostile to the Jesuits, and especially their theology and its pastoral consequences. This acquaintance would spell trouble for Saint-Cyran by the late 1630s. Like Saint-Cyran and many others, Jansen had, as he admitted later, once praised Richelieu effusively, but by the

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1630s he was convinced that the cardinal’s policies were a scandal within Christendom.59 The Mars gallicus was Jansen’s reply to a treatise – one of many, and not one of great intellectual distinction – defending against attack, from inside and outside France, the justice of French arms and the alliances with Protestant powers.60 Jansen savaged the arguments of his opponent, Besian Arroy, that the king of France’s wars were just because of his superior sovereignty (by comparison with other rulers), his special ‘consecrated’ status (being a priest as much as a prince), his miraculous capacity to cure the ‘king’s evil’ (scrofula), his title of most Christian king, and so on. For Arroy, such attributes were proof that ‘Louis XIII’s intentions must be just’.61 Jansen had no time for such a blatant confusion of registers or for the mystique of the French monarchy being wheeled out in defence of policies that were anything but religiously legitimate. As for the French choice of allies, he argued that even if the king did not actively seek to aid and abet heresy when making alliances with states whose own anti-Catholic ambitions were no secret, he was harming Catholicism, at least indirectly. For Jansen, that, too, was clearly sinful in the context of what were, in his eyes, wars of religion.62 In their responses to the Mars gallicus, even the best of Richelieu’s propagandists kept clear of Jansen’s chosen terrain; they continued to exalt the religious character of the French monarchy in order to show how much more Christendom owed to France than to the Habsburgs, whose record was attacked as insignificant and contrived. For these reasons, they argued, Louis XIII’s intentions in seeking to defend his kingdom were self-evidently just and religious, and his choice of allies served that necessarily higher good.63 The enduring reputation of the Mars gallicus, which appeared in French translation in 1637, is based on its radical dissociation of religious and political priorities, and its proclamation of the superiority of the former over the latter. Despite not being wholly typical of the kinds of argument deployed by antiRichelieu critics, dévots or not, during the 1630s, it shows how vulnerable the Richelieu regime was to such radical attack. In this case it was because Jansen’s treatise was steeped in the kind of political Augustinianism which was so foreign to Richelieu and his defenders, and which assumed that politics was required to serve the higher cause of salvation. For Richelieu and his supporters, no such subordination was posited, and the connection between the two spheres was far looser, ultimately enabling the ‘ends’ of politics to be more easily considered as this-worldly. The Mars gallicus was a first taste of the uncompromising rigour that would be associated with Jansen and his name ever since. It is, thus, not surprising that in the years to come it was those dévots with Augustinian leanings – some of them future Jansenists – who were most likely to contest the cardinal’s version of the relationship of religion and politics at the highest level.64

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Knowing full well that such libelles would find readers within and beyond dévot circles, and understanding the damage they would do if they circulated within France, Richelieu tightened existing controls over printers and booksellers, making it extremely difficult for domestic opponents of the post1630 regime to voice their discontent; anyone caught printing, circulating or possessing works critical of it faced severe punishment.65 Perhaps because of its translation into French in 1637, the Mars gallicus remained banned and unavailable in France forty years after its publication.66 Despite such precautions, suspicions of collusion between French exiles and dévots still living in France, such as Saint-Cyran and his disciples, rose after 1635. Saint-Cyran’s defence of Gaston d’Orléans’s clandestine marriage of 1632 against Richelieu’s raison d’état arguments for seeking its annulment was one of several incidents – a ‘dynastic case of conscience’, as it has been called – during these years which hinted at continuing political antagonism.67 The French publication of the Mars gallicus brought Saint-Cyran’s final arrest and imprisonment, in 1638, a good step closer.68 Before that, in 1637, the much-vaunted religiosity of Louis XIII himself nearly brought political disaster for Richelieu. A new confessor, handpicked by the cardinal, decided that it was time to challenge the king’s conscience, which in the event proved highly susceptible to such pressure. Nicolas Caussin was already celebrated for his best-selling Cour sainte, first published in 1624 and subsequently augmented, whose title signalled its purpose of transforming the courtiers into a Christianised and spiritually disciplined elite. On becoming confessor, Caussin ignored Richelieu’s advice to keep clear of political questions, and began to focus his discussions with Louis XIII on what may be called ‘political’ rather than ‘private’ sins. The most prominent of such potential political sins was the damage that France’s policies were inflicting on Christendom, from which other political sins, such as unjust taxes, stemmed. Furthermore, there were the questions of his obligation to govern in his own name and with good counsel, his strained relations with his wife, Anne of Austria, and his alienation from his mother, Marie de Medici. This was a formidable mix of thorny problems, and Caussin insisted that in raising them he was distinguishing the properly ‘political’ from the ‘factional’, which was none of his business. His urging that Louis XIII needed to clear his conscience on these matters slowly escalated during 1637, and ended dramatically with the disgrace and exile of Caussin imposed by Richelieu, who flatly refused to accept the legitimacy of the confessor’s distinctions or that political sins were part of his confessorial duty. It was the last time that a French royal confessor would attempt such an audacious undertaking, and one that in subsequent editions of the Cour sainte Caussin would interpret in prophetic, biblical terms.69 Henceforth, the king would be his own director of conscience where

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royal sins were concerned. Yet the shock administered by the shortest royal confessorship in French history – barely nine months – was enough to prompt the Jesuit authorities to help Richelieu in his efforts to eliminate all traces of it.70 It may seem paradoxical that these events were followed only a few months later by the ultimate climax of the earlier efforts to exalt the monarchy in the religious sphere. As we saw in an earlier chapter, Bérulle had played a key part in those efforts, enveloping in his characteristically mystical language his portrait of the Christ-king figure of Louis XIII. Other dévots did much the same before and after 1630, building up a religious aura around Louis XIII that his recent predecessors had not enjoyed. The match was perfect, as it had long been apparent that France had a highly devout king who was scrupulous in discharging his religious duties. Louis the Just, after all, was a worthy successor of his saintly ancestor, Louis IX, the giver of justice to his subjects, all of which enabled endless comparisons to be made between the two kings. Other parts of Europe, such as Bavaria and Habsburg Austria, were also linking their dynasties to the Virgin at this time, so it is probable that France borrowed some of their themes.71 The king’s public dedication of the kingdom to the Virgin Mary in early 1638 was just as much the consequence of a search for divine protection of France itself, a search that seems to have begun in earnest a few years earlier when Spanish armies threatened to invade the country. The long-delayed birth of an heir, Louis ‘the God-given’, later in 1638 was also greeted as a miracle that confirmed God’s blessing and protection of the French monarchy. For those who might be dubious about France’s political choices during these years, the image of the dévot king protected by the Virgin Mary was a powerful countervailing factor. And with the no less dévot Anne of Austria installed as regent for the infant Louis XIV in 1643 that pattern seemed set to continue. Although she did not, as the dévots hoped, reverse France’s policies or alliances, she was nevertheless surrounded by dévots at court and patronised a wide range of their causes.72 The dilemmas facing a convinced dévot who remained in government service were famously analysed by Michel de Certeau in his study of René d’Argenson, a very busy provincial intendant and then French ambassador in Venice in the late 1640s, who reconciled his duties to God and to his prince in a way which revealed the gulf between the two. A cousin of Bérulle, whose spirituality he had evidently absorbed, he was also an active member of the new Company of the Holy Sacrament, and both factors impelled him to reflect on the problem of reconciling action and conviction. While a prisoner of the Spaniards in Milan in 1640 he translated the Imitation of Christ and wrote a treatise on Christian wisdom, thus perpetuating a lay dévot tradition. Argenson could no longer see the city of God and the city of men as identical; the king’s

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will was to be obeyed, but it was not to be confused with God’s will. He simultaneously inhabited two realms whose principles were not the same; his spiritual values were internal, shaping his personal responses and behaviour, but they played no part in determining the world of political action that he also inhabited.73 This is only a small sample of the possible responses of France’s dévots to political discomfiture. It is impossible to know how many other dévots shared the mystical or existential experiences of Argenson, but it would be unwise to regard such intense introspection as typical; his dualistic vision was reserved mainly for those involved in the higher reaches of the political order. Some of Richelieu’s most redoubtable opponents continued to be aristocrats with very close ties to well-known dévot figures. The Gondi-Retz family were the patrons of Vincent de Paul and his enterprises, and were also heavily involved with Bérulle’s Oratory. The disgraced Gondis and the Oratory remained under suspicion throughout the 1630s, but de Paul prospered, gaining Richelieu’s confidence in part because he abstained from political engagements. The great majority of the dévots resembled de Paul in that they were not caught up in high politics and thus did not find it unduly difficult to accept the outcome of the political conflicts and make their peace with the regime of the day; the number of those prepared for the ultimate sacrifice of exile was even smaller than among the Leaguers in the 1590s.74 V In fact, the political crisis of 1630 was not the end of dévot politics. Indeed, it made possible a new and unlikely chapter in its history, one whose political dimensions were long hidden behind a combination of secrecy and social and religious activities. As already suggested, relatively few dévots were caught up in the politics of the 1630 crisis itself or were sidelined as a consequence of it; then and later, the regime’s biggest threats came from disaffected members of the royal family (Marie de Medici, Gaston d’Orléans, Anne of Austria) or the great aristocracy, whose objectives would only occasionally or marginally overlap with those of the dévots. Just one of the seven major attempts made to get rid of Richelieu between 1630 and 1642 involved dévots, and that was led by the king’s own confessor in 1637. Some of the dévot criticisms of Richelieu’s policies were inevitably borrowed by other opponents of the cardinal, but that did not make them a single or identifiable political force; if anything, it was Stoic or ‘libertine’ ideas which dominated those aristocratic oppositional circles.75 The great majority of the dévots did not have to change tack after 1630; they were content to leave the sphere of the arcana imperii to the king and his ministers, and to maintain at least a respectful silence on the rectitude of

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their policies. They continued to pursue their religious and related social ‘works’ even more than before, not least because the decades of war and the miserable economic conditions that would follow until 1659 made their activities more necessary than ever. The monarchy progressively surrendered to the harsh domestic imperatives of war-making, which inevitably exacerbated many of the problems the dévots were most keen to deal with – poverty, vagrancy, disorder. Neither the Richelieu nor, until the very end, the Mazarin ministry tried to hinder the activities or objectives of the dévots, provided they renounced explicit political ambitions. That did not prevent one historian from concluding that ‘during the critical middle decades of the century, the Company (of the Holy Sacrament) was the only organisation with any political effectiveness in the country, yet the twin questions of how and why it escaped control by the royal government have never received the attention that they merit’.76 The creation and subsequent history of the most famous – or notorious – dévot association illustrates better than anything else the paradoxes of dévot politics either side of 1630, and also how a body that began with spiritualreformist ambitions came to represent an indefinable but serious political threat within a generation. The Company of the Holy Sacrament was definitively founded in 1630, but that datable ‘event’ has to be placed in context.77 It seems that an initial attempt at something similar had already been made several years earlier, soon after Richelieu’s return to the royal council. At that date (1624 or 1625), the point of contact was the cardinal’s cousin, Bochart de Champigny, then one of a triumvirate administering the kingdom’s finances. According to the Jesuit historian René Rapin (1621–87), the proposal was made to Champigny by a magistrate and future provincial intendant, Jean de Lauzon, and a canon of Notre-Dame, Bergier. But as Rapin was particularly hostile to dévots like Bérulle, Marillac and Saint-Cyran, his verdict on the project was predictable: a secret society of new-style devotion that would aim ‘to combat vice and establish virtue’ amounted to a ‘cabale of dévots’. Nothing more is known of the proposal made to Champigny, but it appeared sufficiently daring for him to declare it ‘dangerous’.78 Such a reply would suggest that no further action was taken then. Some two years later, in 1627, the Company would be formally launched by a dévot trio consisting of a peer of the realm, a future bishop, and a Capuchin friar. But here, too, the initial act could not be immediately followed up, since the founding peer, the duc de Ventadour, was serving in the royal army fighting Protestant rebels during the years from 1627 to 1629. As a result of his unavailability, the foundation of the Company had to be repeated in 1630, only months before the political crisis of that year.79 Whatever the ultimate reasons for this stop–go chronology, it seems that they included continuing uncertainty over the founders’ objectives and, above all, their proposed modus operandi. They initially sought formal royal and

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papal approval, which would have made the Company’s existence public knowledge, and they appear not to have renounced that objective until the early 1630s, by which time informal royal approval had been obtained.80 Secondly, they evidently did not wish to establish something either resembling or duplicating existing groups, but that negative proviso offered no clear blueprint. What emerged after 1630 was an organisation which was centred in Paris yet was keen to develop provincial offshoots; which was not another devotional confraternity but which encouraged every effort to sanctify its members; and which practised secrecy almost for its own sake while promoting all sorts of ‘works’ that required support from numerous ‘public’ institutions and individuals. Not surprisingly, the resulting tensions between means and ends were often difficult to negotiate; the emphasis placed on the practice of secrecy as an imitation of Christ’s own early life was one means of sublimating – and thus coping with – this insoluble problem.81 Ironically, while Louis XIII and Richelieu both knew and approved of the Company from the outset, Richelieu’s own brother, the archbishop of Lyon, refused to license it within his diocese; so did Archbishop Gondi of Paris, despite a pressing request from Louis XIII himself.82 Neither archbishop gave specific reasons for his refusal, but royal support enabled the Company to ignore their vetoes and operate in both of their dioceses notwithstanding. By 1660, it is known to have had ‘chapters’ in sixty-four towns and cities across France, with a mixed lay and clerical membership which over a thirty-year period exceeded – but by exactly how much we do not know – 4,000 individuals in all, ranging from high-ranking aristocrats and bishops to artisans and local officials. Its geographical expansion seems to have been haphazard rather than systematic, and to have depended considerably on personal ties when it came to establishing local chapters without provoking suspicion.83 The history of a secret society cannot, by definition, be fully uncovered, but the surviving evidence shows that the scope of its ambitions and activities grew substantially, in keeping with its motto ‘to do all good and to prevent all evil’. This was crusading of another kind, one that turned the swords of the post-League generation into ploughshares for the moral and religious reformation of French society. Were they to prove successful, a disciplined and regulated Catholic society would be the outcome of such efforts, but such a totalising, elusive goal was bound to have political repercussions sooner or later. It is not necessary here to enter into the detail of the Company’s works, which have been extensively examined by historians, but only to suggest, using a few pertinent examples, how such repercussions did ultimately arise.84 In the great majority of its activities, the Company of the Holy Sacrament was like a fish in water. Its efforts to alleviate popular distress during the

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difficult middle years of the century could plug into, and co-ordinate, the existing dévot networks in localities and parishes; new religious orders or congregations engaged in similar activities and were, in some cases, led by major dévot figures like Vincent de Paul, Louise de Marillac or Gaston de Renty. But the Company’s ‘hard’ works were more ambitious. For example, the creation of an hôpital-général involved not merely raising large sums of money, but negotiating with royal officials, magistrates and urban authorities, only some of whom might themselves belong to the Company. Over the years, the Company’s careful and strategic co-option of members from among the local elites enabled it to remain hidden behind the scenes when engaging in such transactions. Thus, when lambasting the dévots in Tartuffe in the early 1660s, Molière had only a vague idea of the organisation that he was facing, while ‘ordinary’ dévots may themselves have known even less about it.85 The wider the Company’s ambitions became, the greater the potential dangers associated with them. In certain cases the Company inspired the creation of related but not necessarily subordinate or secret ‘societies’, although the precise relations between them are not especially clear. The example of two such societies should suffice to make the point. The first relates to Protestantism, the major target of the Company’s efforts in the wake of Louis XIII and Richelieu’s refusal to outlaw it after 1629. As early as 1632, the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith – not to be confused with the papal ‘congregation’ of the same name – was founded by another Capuchin, Hyacinthe Kerver, secretary to Père Joseph, but it was not until 1635 that it received papal approval as a confraternity.86 Within France, its origins were more contested and the project came in for heavy criticism by the bishops attending the assembly of clergy of 1635, who were worried that yet another new body was emerging that would operate autonomously across diocesan boundaries; they were worried even more by the new congregation’s readiness to permit its lay members to engage in theological controversy with the Protestants. For that reason, the Propagation’s early growth was slow and patchy, and the links between its various branches, which appear not to have exceeded ten at its height, were much less regulated or centralised than those of the Company of the Holy Sacrament. In the years following the latter’s suppression in the early 1660s, the local branches of the Propagation increasingly came under episcopal control. This development, which reassured the church leadership as to their activities, seems to have given them a new lease of life. Apart from the Paris chapter, which never rivalled its Holy Sacrament counterpart as the leading group, the Propagation’s branches were located essentially near areas of significant Protestant settlement; laypeople outnumbered clerics in them, and women members, where they existed (e.g. Grenoble), managed to carve out an important role for themselves. From the 1660s onwards, they and the

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surviving chapters of the Holy Sacrament participated actively in local activities, such as the creation of convents and boarding schools, that were focused on the reception, education and, not infrequently, the virtual imprisonment of Protestant converts, many of them women and children.87 Like the Holy Sacrament chapters, they appear to have had little difficulty in raising the financial resources needed to mount such campaigns against local Protestants. The two companies probably had some overlapping membership, but their relationship seems to have been one of co-operation rather than subordination in the growing assault on Protestantism either side of 1660.88 The political implications of attempts to reform, in moral and religious terms, France’s unruly nobility were equally clear. An explosion in duelling, which was bleeding the nobility, was the target of these efforts. But this ‘plague’, as the dévots called it, posed a ticklish problem: how to intervene in ways that would complement rather than ‘trespass’ on the crown’s widely flouted measures against it and, especially, without raising undue suspicion about the dévots’ own motives. When duelling became rife during the Fronde members of the Company’s Paris chapter founded a special confraternity, named after the Passion of Christ, to attract noblemen and persuade them to renounce duelling. One of the new confraternity’s most active members, Antoine de Salignac-Fénelon (uncle of the archbishop of Cambrai under Louis XIV), set about introducing it to those provinces where noble duelling flourished.89 The challenge was a major one, since defences of duelling could be found in contemporary moral theology as well as in noble ideology. But for the confraternity, the suppression of duelling involved a full-scale Christianisation of the French nobility.90 However, given that the confraternity was itself secret, it is virtually impossible to know how successful it was. Both its timing and methods made it suspect to outsiders, especially within the Mazarin regime, throughout the 1650s. Recruiting duelling nobles into secret organisations during and after the Fronde was equivalent to playing with fire, with no guarantee of how such groups might evolve in due course. Moreover, the mid to late 1650s were characterised by considerable agitation among the middling and lower provincial nobility, whose own secret assemblies worried the Mazarin government.91 In such a context, dévot efforts to eradicate duelling could easily be construed as constituting a possible political danger in their own right. VI It may be an exaggeration to describe the Company as ‘the only institution with political effectiveness’ in France in the middle decades of the century, but there is no doubting the scale of its expansion after 1643, with an

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understandable dip during the chaotic years of the Fronde. This in turn may have been a consequence of the failure of the new Mazarin government to make peace with the Habsburgs. It was most probably during these years that the Company found itself not simply redoubling its efforts to relieve popular distress but also confirmed in its belief in the urgent need for wider religious and moral reform. Its geographical expansion was complemented by a deepening of its ambitions during the 1650s, which is precisely when its ‘hard’ works, such as the reform of prisons and the creation of hôpitaux-généraux, become most visible.92 The fact that prominent ex-frondeurs, such as the prince of Conti, joined its ranks in the mid-1650s suggests something of the Company’s ambiguous status: it was attractive to former opponents of the Mazarin regime who wished to embrace religious or moral causes but without necessarily renouncing all forms of political activity. Conti had made his peace with Mazarin by marrying one of his nieces, but he remained a prince of the blood and a major provincial governor (Languedoc), so there was little prospect that he would renounce political engagement. Without formally joining the Company, Gaston d’Orléans ‘was of it’, while his principal officials joined the chapter of Blois, where he normally resided; with his knowledge and approval, the Company seems to have been active in the Orléanais generally in the late 1650s.93 Several other former aristocratic rebels imitated such examples and became members during the 1650s.94 It was this continuing expansion, along with a certain number of gaffes committed by Company members, that increasingly brought the Company to the attention of the Mazarin regime, which was far less master of the realm than is usually imagined after the Fronde. For all its apparent unconcern with ‘normal’ politics, the Company had become, willy-nilly, something of a power in the land, with structures and connections that criss-crossed provinces and social groups, all of which might prove dangerous in the wrong circumstances. It is difficult to say how much Mazarin knew about the Company until the post-Fronde years, as the information he received about it appears to have come incrementally. When he finally moved to dissolve the Company in the later 1650s, he argued that no self-respecting state should tolerate such an autonomous body, even though he admitted that it had done nothing wrong. An uncomprehending Anne of Austria reproached him not just for attacking people who performed good works – which was shocking enough – but for ignoring the fact that many of them were trusted friends of hers, and thus beyond suspicion; she also emphasised that many of them had loyally served the king and defended Mazarin’s own interests during the Fronde.95 The chasm separating the cardinal’s raison d’état from the perspective of a politically experienced royal dévote like Anne of Austria could not have been deeper; each standpoint was crystal clear, but there was no reconciling them. The dévot elite

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who had joined the Company and directed its activities may well have seemed capable to Mazarin of undoing the course taken by the monarchy since 1630. But it is worth noting that raison d’église played its part alongside Mazarin’s raison d’état in its dissolution: he was egged on by senior church figures who had their own worries about such a self-governing operation within their dioceses, especially as it gave far more initiative to laypeople than they thought appropriate.96 Mazarin finally engineered a decree of the parlement of Paris in December 1660 as a low-key means of dissolving the Company, but his death only a few months later cast doubt on the finality of the decision. As a result, the Company resumed its activities for a few years until Louis XIV, probably acting on advice from Colbert, who was deeply hostile to the dévots generally, confirmed the initial suppression in 1666. Indeed, Colbert’s political future depended on overcoming the dévots who had rallied to defend his rival Nicolas Foucquet, Mazarin’s fallen finance minister who, in turn, had been closely connected to them.97 The Paris Company quickly disbanded after its dissolution, because it was simply too vulnerable; some provincial chapters remained largely unhindered and active for a generation or more but may have concentrated their efforts on potentially less contentious activities.98 The fact that the crown promptly adopted some of the Company’s objectives, such as the general hospitals, was at least a partial vindication; its refusal to finance them ensured that local dévots would continue to have a significant role to play in realising goals which in the government’s perspective at least were increasingly utilitarian rather than religious in their inspiration and objectives. VII The legacy of this half-century of dévot activities and ambitions is by no means easy to summarise, as the sharply contrasting judgements of historians over the past century suggest. Its first historian, the Protestant Raoul Allier, labelled it a ‘cabale’ that developed an overweening ambition to police minds as well as bodies, as exemplified in its notorious efforts to ban Molière’s comedy (Tartuffe) attacking religious hypocrisy. René Taveneaux viewed it as an attempt to reconstitute, albeit obliquely, the parti des dévots of the 1620s, by focusing systematically on Christianising French society. More recently, Alain Tallon underlined the limitations – even contradictions – of its seeking to reform and spiritualise individuals within a society whose structures it had neither the power nor the blueprint to change. ‘A society consisting of reformed Christian individuals rather than a Christian society’ based on new principles was, in this view, the implication of the Company’s approach.99 More recently again, Jean-Pierre Gutton located the Company within a wider

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and longer framework of Christian social justice, in which the dévots sought to ‘construct heaven on earth’.100 Mutatis mutandis, broadly similar verdicts could be delivered on the role of the dévots generally. As we have seen, relations between them and royal power before and during the age of the cardinal-ministers varied considerably. Their native instinct was to seek to work with rather than against the monarchy, and that was strong enough to persuade a large majority to support Richelieu and Mazarin. For its part, the monarchy knew of and accepted their activities, because they filled a range of social and material needs that the monarchy itself was simply unable or unwilling to deal with. Yet Anne of Austria’s confrontation with Mazarin over his fears of what the dévots might attempt if circumstances permitted illustrates the continuing tensions. The aversion of the young Louis XIV to the dévots or the idea of a cour sainte is beyond doubt, but suppressing the Company of the Holy Sacrament was not a declaration of war on the dévots in general. As a format for dévot action, the different companies and confraternities that throve during the ministériat were no longer acceptable, but they did not evaporate without leaving a residue. The dévots had learned to band together, to blend into the wider horizon, and to co-ordinate disparate activities in order to achieve certain objectives. Thus, under Louis XIV, in many towns and cities of provincial France not under close royal surveillance, several of those earlier organisations and their ‘works’ continued, sometimes for several decades. They may have lost their vitality over the years for want of external impulses, but in cities like Grenoble or Toulouse they were still important religious and political actors around 1700.101 More generally, there were still common objectives that could revive their ideal of working in harmony with the monarchy. The construction and management of the hôpitaux-généraux was one such project that was still not complete when the reign ended in 1715.102 As we shall see later, an equally obvious terrain for co-operation under Louis XIV was the campaign directed against Protestantism, the dévots’ greatest bête noire. Since the 1630s, acting either as individuals or as members of local organisations, dévots played an unglamorous but important role in devising and promoting schemes to undermine the conditions of toleration under which Protestants lived. The Mazarin ministry proved largely unreceptive to such action, but under the anti-dévot Louis XIV they were to find far greater opportunities to deploy the arsenal of legal and other forms of harassment they had so methodically assembled.103

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Richelieu Effect

F

or as long as the dramatic reversals of political fortune associated with the Day of the Dupes of November 1630 captured the imagination of posterity, they were remembered as the moment when the dévots failed to impose their view that the French monarchy should determine its relations with other European powers in accordance with religious principles. Such a challenge had only gradually emerged in the world of the post-Reformation and the Thirty Years War, when confessional differences hardened and sharpened divisions over alliances, dynastic marriages and relations with neighbouring states generally. In this regard, France’s predicament was far from unique. James I was just as keen to keep England out of such wars as Michel de Marillac was to keep out France. For all his broadsides against Catholicism and the papacy, James rejected confession-based alliances and obligations, seeking to maintain good relations with the two major Catholic powers, Spain and France, as is evident from his efforts to marry his heir, Charles I, to a Spanish and then a French princess. The Habsburgs themselves struggled hard, despite regularly reinforcing their historic bonds of dynasty by intermarriage, to find a consistent raison d’état that would sustain their common dynastic union and interests. Spain’s obsession with ‘reputation’, which eventually trumped the considerations of ‘reformation’ that dominated the early years of the Olivares ministry, is an apt reminder that France was not alone with its dilemmas during the 1620s.1 And the Habsburgs’ principal religious advisers, especially the Dominicans, Capuchins and Jesuits, were as likely to disagree among themselves as with their lay counterparts when they served on the ad hoc commissions (juntas) of theologians that were regularly asked to deliver formal opinions on the religious implications of policy options, at home and abroad. The system had its weaknesses, and chief ministers like Olivares were past masters in securing the opinions they needed, which meant that such

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opinions were rarely the decisive interventions in the decision-making process.2 The French monarchy, within which Richelieu and then Mazarin asserted themselves as chief ministers from 1624 to 1661, was not tied to such a modus operandi. This did not mean that similar discussions did not occur in France: they may well have found their way more easily into print and public debate than in Spain because decision-making did not formally incorporate Spanishstyle consultas presented by theologians. As we shall see, during the polemics of the mid-1620s there was a vigorous attempt to disqualify theologians as competent to advise on action within the political sphere. To some extent, this attempt was also directed against the Jesuits, whose position in France remained insecure, despite the fact that the royal confessors of Louis XIII were all Jesuits. While the Spanish royal confessor could be a fully fledged minister with a place in the council of state, his French counterpart enjoyed a much more tenuous position, despite the Jesuits’ efforts to extend the confessor’s influence in line with their order’s policy for princely confessors hammered out some decades earlier.3 It should be no surprise that French susceptibilities in relation to the Jesuits inhibited their enjoying the kind of influence they had at several other European courts.4 In addition, the emergence of chief ministers in the form of cardinalministers, among whom we should include Richelieu’s two predecessors, Retz and La Rochefoucauld, was almost uniquely French. It was also bound to have major consequences for the role of confessors – regardless of whether they were Jesuits or not – as guardians of the royal conscience, especially in those areas where political choices could cut across religious principles. No cardinalminister anxious to direct royal policy was likely to welcome competition from a royal confessor – or any other intimate of the king – since his political survival was bound to be affected by it. Because Retz and La Rochefoucauld were nominal presidents of the royal council, and the latter was overtly proJesuit, there were no immediate repercussions. With the arrival of Richelieu in 1624 things began to change, though it would be misleading to assume that conflict was inevitable or that he was fundamentally hostile to the Jesuits.5 The king’s confessors had themselves been affected by the instability of French politics since Marie de Medici’s first disgrace in 1617, and the disgrace of three successive confessors in 1617, 1621 and 1626 certainly highlighted the vulnerability of their position. Such disgraces were just as likely to arise over relations within the royal family or decisions concerning the use of royal church patronage, especially for senior positions within the French church, as over politico-religious questions. When questions of church patronage proved the downfall in 1626 of the confessor Gaspar Ségueran, an unusual succession ensued which was an attempt to

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maintain political unity at the highest level: the new royal confessor, Jean Suffren, was already confessor to Marie de Medici, and it was agreed that he would retain that office; he also accepted that he would follow Richelieu’s guidance in performing both roles. Although there are few signs that he participated substantially in the debates leading up to the crisis of 1630, when the moment of rupture arrived his position became impossible, but he was allowed to accompany the queen mother into exile. In the early 1620s, the Jesuit superior-general since 1615, Mutio Vitelleschi, decided, as we shall see, to put all his faith in Richelieu as the protector of France’s Jesuits, to the extent of refusing to defend or protect any of his confrères who fell foul of the cardinal.6 Where Spanish royal confessors were capable of toppling privados, there was far less prospect, the example of Caussin notwithstanding, of their counterparts wielding such influence within France.7 I On returning to the council in April 1624, Richelieu, as we have seen, quickly found himself faced with career-threatening challenges such as the English marriage. He had the advantage over his recent red-hatted predecessors of having some direct experience of relations with other states during his brief spell as secretary of state in 1616–17 and more recently as Marie de Medici’s principal adviser. His main political rival in 1624, La Vieuville, had already set the wheels of discord in motion. By then France was embroiled with the papacy, in particular, over the strategic Valtelline passes, while a Franco-Dutch alliance concluded in mid-1624 envisaged that France would subsidise, for three years, Dutch military operations against the Spaniards. Despite La Vieuville’s rapid disgrace, in August 1624, Richelieu maintained that alliance, while the ensuing negotiations for an English marriage alliance worried many of those who preferred same-confession policies; the prospect that it might help English Catholicism was too weak to convince every critic.8 In any event, it did not take long for such an assortment of policy choices to generate controversy, and in a way that reopened unfinished debates from the 1610s. After almost a decade remarkably free of such confrontations, it brought back into play a familiar collection of dramatis personae, including the Jesuits; but in a political environment subtly different from the early 1610s it produced significantly dissimilar results. It overlapped in time and sometimes in content with other important disputes of the mid-1620s. These years proved to be a moment when, to paraphrase the historian Pierre Blet, the ‘confines’ between the ‘two powers’ shifted. The ideological ball was set rolling again during 1625 by two hostile pamphlets; both were produced outside France but were soon translated into

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French. Their author was Adam Contzen, the new Jesuit confessor of the duke of Bavaria, at whose request they were written.9 The first, entitled Mysteria politica, reflected the duke’s fear that France’s pro-Protestant policy in Germany might force Bavaria to restore the Protestant Palatinate which it had obtained only a few years earlier for its support of the Austrian Habsburgs. Attacking France’s policies as anti-Catholic and short-sighted, the Mysteria claimed that its Protestant allies would abandon it as soon as they had contrived the fullscale war between France and the Habsburgs which was their deepest wish. More ominously, it openly claimed that such policies justified rebellion by the nobility against the crown.10 Appearing in mid-1625, the more hard-hitting and heavyweight Admonitio ad regem, whose author claimed to be French by addressing Louis XIII in French fashion as ‘Sire’, argued from basic religious principles about the (in)-justice of wars: if religion was violated and Catholicism damaged by a war, then it could not possibly be considered just. Louis XIII ‘the Just’ would not deserve his title if he persisted in such wars; and he should certainly get rid of the evil counsellors who jeopardised his salvation as well as his reputation. The reduction of policy to a set of ‘reason of state’ calculations was declared unacceptable, and would discredit the king who supported it. The Admonitio narrowed the terms of the legitimacy of war quite sharply, and even suggested that the Pope might be obliged ‘by his duty to defend the sheepfold’ to intervene and release subjects from their obedience: ‘when a prince bears arms against religion, his subjects are obliged not to obey him, but to resist him’.11 Much as the government might have preferred to suppress such outpourings – which it would try hard to do, then and later – it knew perfectly well, and Richelieu best of all, that this would never suffice. So both pamphlets were, in the classic manner, deferred to the Paris theology faculty and, more unexpectedly, to a ‘major’ assembly of clergy meeting during 1625, for censure and condemnation. Both bodies were happy to oblige the cardinal, but did so in their different ways. The theology faculty – in which Richelieu, as provisor of the Sorbonne since 1622, was himself a powerful figure – confined itself to condemning the Admonitio in very general terms in December 1625; it noted and censured such works for inciting subjects to disobey their rulers, yet even that rider annoyed the papacy by conceding more than Rome felt it should have done. The assembly of clergy’s reaction was more expansive, mainly because Richelieu himself requested that it should be so. In fact, what happened far exceeded anything that the assembly could have expected in responding to Richelieu’s invitation; more through accident than design, it produced a real uproar that proved exceptionally difficult to control. The assembly delegated the

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task of drafting its response to the Admonitio to Léonor d’Étampes, bishop of Chartres and a client of Richelieu’s, no doubt on the grounds that Étampes would understand – and deliver – what the cardinal desired.12 There was nothing devious or contrived about such a decision, but in the event Étampes produced the most comprehensive statement to date by a member of the French clergy in defence of full-blown monarchical absolutism; he also justified alliances with Protestant states ‘because the king wished it’. Apart from considering kings to be ‘as gods’ – an extravagance which was apparently borrowed from Bérulle, who had something different in mind – Étampes affirmed that even when they behaved as tyrants no form of resistance by subjects was permitted, as God alone, and not their subjects, was their judge.13 Such sentiments were not unfamiliar in France by the 1620s, but they had not previously been proclaimed in the name of the French church. Most unexpected of all, however, was the fact that a busy assembly formally nodded through the censure before either hearing or reading the text in full. When Étampes published it shortly afterwards, in December 1625, the deputies were aghast at their mistake; as they desperately tried to backtrack and rescind the original censure, they found themselves caught up in a political scramble of exceptional complexity that lasted for several months (late 1625 to late March 1626).14 For the parlement of Paris, and the wider gallican community, such a full and uncompromising statement from a ‘major’ assembly of clergy was, not surprisingly, manna from heaven. Thus, when the assembly tried to repudiate the Étampes declaration and replace it with an alternative one, the parlement vehemently insisted that it could not revoke it; it would have to stand, whether the clergy liked it or not, as the official version of the French church’s theologico-political thinking. But the assembly persisted in its determination formally to disavow Étampes. The deputies proceeded to draft their alternative resolution, despite the parlement’s repeated attempts, in early 1626, to intimidate them; they were in no mood to allow the parlement to exercise jurisdiction over them or determine what they could discuss or when they could meet. The upshot was that, not for the first time, the rival camps besieged the king and his ministers to gain support for their cause. By this point, in March 1626, the assembly of clergy had formally disbanded, but the deputies still in Paris continued to assemble privately, something the parlement also tried to ban. In the end, thanks in part to Richelieu, the clergy secured royal support, as they had during the Estates-General of 1614, but this time it came at a rather higher price.15 In the explosive atmosphere of early 1626, it would have been virtually impossible to obtain royal support against the parlement had the clergy not provided an alternative censure of the hostile pamphlets that was more explicit than they had initially intended before Étampes’s effort; this time it was not a matter, as in 1615, of getting away with obtaining the deletion of an offending

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proposition. Thus the French church’s posture of maintaining a determined silence on the substance of theologico-political questions was undermined in a very public, self-inflicted manner. The whole episode also illustrated the difficulty of controlling debates within an assembly which had powerful rivals, essentially the parlement, ready to pounce on its mistakes. When, a few months later, Cardinal La Rochefoucauld, who had hosted the unofficial assemblies of clergy in March 1626, published an account of this fractious affair, he prefaced it with an attack on ‘the schismatics of our times’ – a thinly veiled reference to the dreaded gallican article of 1614 and James I’s oath of allegiance. Yet in the account that followed, he seemed anxious to keep the lid on the issues involved and to exonerate the major actors in the recent crisis – Bishop Étampes, the assembly, even the parlement – of any ill intent; what had happened was a mysterious aberration that should not be allowed to alter the fragile status quo.16 In fact, the final act of the drama was a decree of council inspired by Richelieu which ‘evoked’ (i.e. reserved) the subject for resolution to the king’s council, which in the meantime imposed silence and banned any discussion or attack on the clergy’s censure. The problem with this injunction was that nobody knew for certain to which of the two censures the decree referred.17 II By the time this imposition of silence was decreed, another event of familiar vintage had supervened, making matters even more complicated to manage, while badly weakening the position of pro-papal Catholics within France. The first volume of Jesuit Antonio Santarelli’s Treatise on heresy appeared in France in February 1626, with the fulsome praise and approval of the Jesuits’ Roman censors; replete with chapter-and-verse references to Bellarmine and many other writers, it summarised and reaffirmed their theses on papal claims to indirect temporal power and specifically, as its full title advertised, the Pope’s right to punish heretical rulers.18 Not surprisingly, the Paris parlement quickly intervened to condemn the book, ordering it to be publicly burned and summoning senior Jesuits in Paris to appear before the magistrates for interrogation. In a move which recalled the lawsuit of 1611–12, the Jesuits were again pressed to accept a series of propositions reaffirming the ‘maxims of France’ on the nature of royal power, which came from God alone, and which denied any power, direct or indirect, of the Pope’s to intervene in France’s affairs on any pretext whatever, or to release subjects from their duty to obey their king. The Jesuits stood firm, replying that they held the same opinions and taught the same views as the French clergy, universities and other religious orders on these questions.

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The theology faculty needed little prompting to complement the parlement’s initiative against Santarelli with its own censure – the first of two. To that it added a requirement that all future theology graduates sign a declaration condemning Santarelli’s theses. Richelieu himself intervened over Santarelli, obliging the Jesuits to promise, under the threat of possible eviction from France by the parlement, that they would sign and observe whatever censure the parlement or the theology faculty would deliver against Santarelli. But in seeing this as an opportunity to impose much tougher conditions on the Jesuits, the parlement overplayed its hand: fearing that the worst – expulsion – was now imminent, the Jesuits appealed directly to Louis XIII for his protection, which he granted them while insisting that they disavowed the Santarelli– Bellarminian theses on the Pope’s indirect power and adopted a view of royal sovereignty that corresponded to the kind of catholicisme d’état that was then emerging in France.19 However, this was not the conclusion that the Jesuits had hoped for, since the theology faculty produced, in April 1626, a second, more detailed censure of Santarelli’s theses about royal and papal power with a view to defending the French monarchy.20 An agitated papal nuncio saw the beginnings of schism in this move, especially as the faculty had not been dragooned into such an expression of zeal; but once it had voted it, he was convinced that the parlement would back it to the hilt. This triggered a new round of confrontations over the following months. The Santarelli affair was only terminated in January 1627, when Louis XIII and Richelieu finally imposed silence on the parlement. Richelieu’s speech on that occasion was a minor rhetorical masterpiece: it would take a very bad theologian not to realise that the king owes his crown and the temporalities of his kingdom to God alone, as it would not to know that the king cannot himself establish or proclaim – either through the authority he has conferred on his parlements, or that which he has reserved to himself, or that which the Sorbonne has received from the Holy See – an article of faith before it has been decided as such by the church in its ecumenical councils. No learned theologian, no good subject, or no honest man could regard Santarelli’s propositions as anything but evil and abominable . . . they disturb the peace of states and create jealousy towards the Holy See.21

With such an overture, which clearly implied that bad theologians and the like were all too common, Richelieu began to prick the bubble of recent controversy by acerbically ridiculing the positions of some of its participants. He discouraged unwelcome speculation on questions too sensitive for mere polemic, while suggesting that some of the answers on the most hotly disputed

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positions were, as the passage just quoted indicates, self-evident. Richelieu’s words may not have transformed attitudes, but they closed the last act of the Santarelli affair. He might well have had a harder time doing so if, as happened a decade earlier, there had been an uncontrolled outpouring of opinion in print on the subject in 1626; it is remarkable how few pamphlets for, and especially against, the Jesuits were published while the furore over Santarelli lasted.22 The Jesuits continued to suffer from self-inflicted wounds in large part because of their inability or unwillingness to respect their own internal rules about not publishing on sensitive theologico-political subjects – all of which is quite at odds with the reputation they possessed then and later as a highly disciplined (papal) ‘militia’.23 The Santarelli affair of 1625–26 was the latest in the line, but it was not triggered by the writings of the French Jesuits, as the parlement had to accept. The timing of the Santarelli affair was not ideal for the French Jesuits, as it became part of a broader polemic in which the Parisian Jesuits found themselves exposed to attack on a wider front than the familiar ecclesiological one. By the mid-1620s, ecclesiological topics were increasingly off-limits, and the Jesuits sought to reposition themselves by focusing their efforts on Christian apologetics and related literary activities. This shift was best exemplified by the work of the prolific François Garasse, whose sarcastic, invective-laden ‘controversies’ attacking gallicans, libertines, ‘atheists’ and sceptics created increasing commotion by the mid-1620s. Garasse’s efforts thus generated a heated, parallel debate in which he was often accused of diffusing the very ideas he attacked by revealing them in excessive detail.24 His most substantial work, the Somme théologique of 1626, was comprehensively shredded not by a libertine or an esprit fort, but by a still relatively unknown figure whom the Jesuits would encounter again in subsequent years, the abbé de Saint-Cyran.25 In the short term, the censure and condemnation of Garasse’s work by the Paris theology faculty was probably the biggest single setback – because the most public and official – for the Jesuits as apologists of Christian principles.26 What nobody could quite see was that future challenges were already beginning to take shape on yet another terrain – that of moral and pastoral theology – which in due course would become as susceptible to political ramifications as any of those seen so far. III The overlapping of these initially separate developments in 1625–27 made for a highly confusing sequence of political manoeuvres, which almost defy coherent narration. It may be noted in passing that the 1625 assembly of clergy infuriated the papacy in other ways, notably through the sense of

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independence manifested in its efforts to defend and define episcopal authority in the face of papal intervention in the French church, and to regulate the eternally vexed question of relations between regular and secular clergy. Almost any one of these issues was capable on its own of triggering dormant debates over wider questions of royal and ecclesiastical power. At the same time, the assembly’s combativeness had been sharpened, as usual, by some of the other grievances that were aired during its session. Taken together, the confrontations of these years stretched Richelieu’s political skills to the limit, despite the distinct advantages that his status as a cardinal and a theologian gave him in dealing with some of the parties concerned. They arose when he was absorbed by more immediately threatening political events – notably the Chalais conspiracy of mid-1626 – but he realised the need for a substantive rather than merely tactical response to these challenges. From the moment, in mid-1625, that the first two pamphlets – the Mysteria politica and the Admonitio – appeared, he mobilised his own stable of writers to counter them with defences of the monarchy’s policies. One of his most formidable and experienced polemicists, Fancan, argued for the need to keep politics and religion entirely separate, claiming that those wielding religious principles in the political sphere were dangerous; they were ‘using’ religion and only confusing things that should be kept quite distinct. But such a stark divorce between politics and religion was too provocative in this context, and Fancan’s gospel was quickly rejected by the cardinal, who packed him off to the Bastille shortly afterwards. Another Richelieu stalwart of these years, Matthieu de Morgues, replied in his Thélogien sans passion to the authors of these attacks on France by accusing them of being ultimately motivated not by religion at all, but by political considerations. As for assisting heresy, Morgues argued that no ruler of his age had done more than Louis XIII to defeat heresy within his realm.27 One striking feature of these, and other, responses is how quickly an initial skirmish over France’s foreign alliances could mutate into a full-blown controversy over ecclesiological questions. The latter were hardly to be taken lightly, as we have just seen, but they were perhaps less immediately dangerous for the monarchy and its ministers than public discussions of royal policies. The writers employed by Richelieu were certainly aware of this and, no doubt in response to prompting from him, were ready to shift their initial ground of argument. IV Of all the responses of these years to France’s foreign critics, the most significant was the Catholique d’estat, the work of a convert from Protestantism, Jérémie Ferrier, with assistance from major figures like Bérulle and Père

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Joseph.28 This intellectually ambitious tract, also published in 1625, came closer than any other of its time to being an official, programmatic effort. It brought together a number of previously separate arguments, though without achieving the kind of coherence that would have made it a classic text of enduring reference; its short-term impact partly compensated for that. Beginning with a virtually obligatory and fulsome eulogy of kings as the most glorious instruments of divine providence in the government of the world, it insisted that all Catholics should be ‘Catholics of state’ and ‘politicks’ and that ‘whoever is not, is a traitor to his country . . . a hypocrite and atheist who does not believe in the word of God’. God and the prince were equally sacred to Christians, ‘who know that the power of states comes from heaven . . . and who leave the outcome to God’.29 It was not possible to be a good Catholic without loving and obeying one’s prince. Political rule was thus founded on religion – and that was so by divine ordination – which meant that rulers were God’s helpmates in realising his designs for mankind. With such a full-throttle opening endorsement, it was clear that royal power based on divine right left no room whatever for rebellion, or even remonstrance, by subjects whose duty to obey was absolute, with prayers and tears their only option if rulers became oppressive. For all its harsh words for dévots, ligueurs and other unpatriotic Catholics, the Catholique d’estat did not embrace the strong gallican dislike of the papacy and its curia. It accepted that the Pope possessed the highest spiritual authority in the church, an authority which was firmly set within the framework of gallican tradition as far as France was concerned; the king of France, as God’s anointed, ruled his kingdom without external intervention of any kind or on any grounds. Quite obviously, the Catholique d’estat had no time for any notion of papal power in temporal matters, direct or indirect. The two powers of church and state were co-ordinate; with each one superior in its respective domain, there was no fundamental reason or scope for conflict between them. A visceral detestation of theologians judging political matters runs throughout the text: the Catholique d’estat uncompromisingly disqualified them and their ‘maximes de l’école’ from all forms of political competence. This was an argument that could easily make it seem as if political decision-making became a ‘science’ of its own, divorced from religious input or judgement. But such a starkly ‘secular’ conclusion was not adopted by Ferrier and his co-authors, and would certainly not have represented Richelieu’s own position. They regretted that the general principles of Christian politics could no longer be applied to, or by, all states, but asserted that a divinely anointed and devout monarch such as Louis XIII was himself a guarantee that God’s will was being adhered to; this came close to saying that Christian politics were what a Christian prince practised rather than an autonomous set of principles.

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As the title of Catholique d’estat itself suggests, it was an attempt to conceptualise a different type of political Catholic by combining previously distinct sensibilities in a theologico-political stance which would occupy the middle ground between the two extremes of radical gallicanism and pro-papalism. It was also hoped that by dropping aggressively gallican anti-papalism, Catholics who had hitherto been pro-papal and pro-Spanish would rally to the cause of a strong French monarchy and accept its absolutist pretensions; they could become bons français in the knowledge that that would not make them mauvais catholiques.30 In bringing these highly ramified controversies to a close, Richelieu and his allies, who at this point included major dévot figures such as Bérulle who would turn against him a few years later, managed to marginalise the stridently anti-Roman views of the gallicans and the parlement of Paris, but also to isolate the defenders of Bellarmine’s ideas on papal power within the French church, the Jesuits and some elements of the Paris theology faculty included. The degree to which Richelieu’s own views emerged into the light during all this was rather limited, as it was political tactics rather than ecclesiological ideas that seem to have dictated his behaviour at this juncture. What he needed most at this fragile moment in his ministerial career was to broaden support for his policies at home and abroad; for that purpose, a middle ground such as that of the catholiques d’estat, who were neither old-fashioned papalists nor anti-Roman gallicans but who supported the king of France’s divine right to govern and to choose his allies as he judged fit, seemed the best bet. The catholique d’estat was someone who would respect the Pope as the true spiritual head of the church deserving to be venerated as such. There was, as already noted, a great deal of confusion and deliberate ambiguity in what was said – and, indeed, in what was not said – during the controversies of the mid-1620s, but it largely ended for another generation the discussions that had been so prominent since the wars of religion about royal and papal power.31 The Jesuits of France were forced to renounce even more emphatically their attachment to their order’s proclaimed unity of doctrine; anticipating Pascal’s later sally, they accepted that, for Jesuits, certain theologicopolitical truths could be different in Paris to what they were in Rome or Madrid.32 The pro-papal theologians led by André Duval were also nudged into formally forsaking their doctrines about (indirect) papal temporal power, if only because of how dangerous they had become when aired in public.33 It is hard to know whether the silence that subsequently fell on the discussion of such ideas owed more to the realignment devised by Richelieu in the mid1620s or to a certain exhaustion of the debates in question. The second may, of course, have facilitated the first, enabling Richelieu’s tactic to work more effectively. It is quite likely, however, that many of those affected by these

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controversies were not quite clear about where exactly they stood for some years to come. It is equally likely that the disputes encouraged many participants and their readers to adopt views that enabled them to move towards the Richelieu camp during the late 1620s. It would be an exaggeration to say that the confrontations, ideological as well as political, of the mid-1620s finally resolved the issues under debate then. Not for the first time, the king found himself being pressed to arbitrate, and Louis XIII certainly took advantage of such situations. Yet the most common outcome was, as we have seen, not a clear resolution, but a ban on further discussion of the most delicate questions. Discussions were muzzled rather than resolved. The crown’s behaviour does not differ much from that of contemporary popes when faced with resolving the tricky theological questions which would give rise later to Jansenism: they repeatedly banned theologians from publishing on or discussing the subject in public.34 If the moment of ‘controversial extenuation’ had arrived, it was also a moment when political intervention could determine the outcome of confrontations. It had become undeniably more difficult to defend certain positions, especially those which could be labelled ‘ultramontane’ or ‘gallican-conciliarist’. In another sense, ‘closure’ on the controversies that had lasted a full generation after the end of the wars of religion was achieved not by any particular argument, publication or decree of the mid-1620s. Instead, it was signalled, symbolically at least, by the ultimate fate of Edmond Richer. Since his eviction from the post of syndic of the theology faculty in 1612 he had lost much of his earlier capacity to trigger controversy, though not his pugnacity.35 Thus he strongly defended his positions when, as happened in 1619 and 1623, he attempted to negotiate a reconciliation with his bishop in Paris; on each occasion he rejected the terms offered him, which were that he renounce the views that had been censured in both France and Rome in 1612. When challenged to do so, he replied that he was ready to prove the orthodoxy of the censured opinions, a posture that only promised further controversy, not resolution.36 The rebuttal that he published in 1628 of Cardinal La Rochefoucauld’s account of the clergy’s disavowal of Bishop Étampes’s gallican manifesto may not have attracted much notice, but it was a sharp reminder that his opinions had not changed.37 It was in late 1629, when the recent theologico-political controversies had died down considerably, that Richer was finally cornered by Richelieu himself, and in a manner and with results that symbolise the changes that had occurred since the early 1610s. Carefully denying Richer all chance of mobilising wider support, the cardinal invited him to agree on a formula that would retract his offending opinions; after preliminary discussions with Richelieu’s ‘persuasive’ factotum, Père Joseph, he signed a statement in December 1629 recognising the authority and

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infallibility of the Roman church and of the Pope on matters of religious truth, which concluded with Richer ‘stating that I freely and voluntarily make this declaration in order to make clear to everyone my obedience to the Holy and Apostolic See’.38 Yet even here there were certain conventions to be respected: the wording of the key statement was designed to convey the idea that Richer had not – any more than any other gallican – deliberately attacked the Pope’s authority. It was not the last time that diplomacy and grammar would lend each other a helping hand. Richelieu, however, was taking no chances with Richer: he swiftly nipped in the bud any possibility of Richer repudiating this retraction by obliging him to authenticate it before a notary; this final detail, which left no wriggle-room to a slippery operator, completed yet another imposition of silence.39 Richer died two years later, and when he was resurrected over a century later, it was in a quite different guise, as the champion of clerical democracy. It is clear that Richelieu, and by extension the wider church leadership that gravitated towards him since his return to ministerial office in 1624, had little or no common ground with Richer or the kind of gallican thinking that he had done so much to impose on the Paris theology faculty just when the faculty was attracting more students than ever. In particular, they had no time for the conciliarist views expressed by Richer, who was favourable to ‘mixed’ monarchy within and beyond the church, with all its possible ramifications for the authority of the ‘princes’ in question. This determination to nail down contemporary ecclesiological thinking by purging it of such ‘subversive’ features is a strong reminder of how far political thinking was still in thrall to a long tradition of debate on the nature of the church. The popes of the post-tridentine age were just as keen as the kings of France to bury any suggestion that the Pope’s authority over the church was limited by internal obstacles. Speaking the same language within their respective contexts, pope and king were both keen to squeeze out older forms of ‘constitutionalist’ or contractarian thinking.40 But such ambitions did not make them easy bedfellows. V By the time Edmond Richer died in December 1631, the Richelieu ministériat was embroiled in more familiar conflicts sparked by high-level aristocratic opposition, which was soon to take the form of armed revolt.41 It would be premature to conclude that the major disputes over temporal and religious power had been definitively settled by the later 1620s. But at the same time, it is evident that these confrontations had clarified and extended the scope of royal claims to authority in relation to the church, whether gallican or universal. An increasingly authoritarian regime whose dominant figure was a

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cardinal was much better placed to deal with the issues under debate, especially when the cardinal in question was both quick to grasp their implications and not squeamish about using sharp methods to get his way. It would be misleading, however, to suggest that that sufficed to restore peace. In the previous chapter, it was noted that Richelieu’s powers of patronage were far more developed within the church than elsewhere by the mid to late 1620s.42 Without overestimating their range, they included the episcopate, the faculties of theology (and that of Paris in particular), and the major religious orders. The connections between the first two were becoming increasingly important, since Richelieu would use his influence as minister to bring more theology graduates into the episcopate than ever before.43 That in turn made the orthodoxy of their theological positions, especially on the perennial church– state–papacy triangle, but also on questions of grace and salvation, no less crucial, as would become all too evident in the Jansenist conflicts of later decades. Richelieu’s position as provisor of the Sorbonne college since 1622 made him ideally placed to influence the teaching of the theology faculty, not least by prompting the choice of its professors and chief officer (the syndic). Well before the final confrontation with Richer, the cardinal had pulled the teeth of the pro-Richer gallican party by ensuring that the major professorships were filled by moderates who were closer to André Duval than to Richer.44 From Nicolas Ysambert to Jacques Lescot, Richelieu’s last confessor, these long-serving figures rebalanced the internal rapport des forces within the faculty, where they proved themselves capable of defending and promoting papal authority in a manner that would have been barely imaginable a generation earlier. Such a ‘normalisation’ may be one reason why the return of gallican controversies during Richelieu’s final years did not emerge from within the Paris faculty, which played a limited, walk-on role in them. As we have already seen, the Richelieu ministry faced the criticism, from as early as 1625 and from inside and outside France, that its policies harmed the interests of Catholicism. This accusation commonly alleged that the policies in question were based on political calculations that were themselves grounded in reason of state. Such accusations would become more frequent during the final decade or more of his ministry, and have long been responsible for the habit of regarding Richelieu as a practitioner of a form of Machiavellian statecraft that subverted Christian morality for political ends. The ensuing historiography of this complex topic has generated a veritable library of contradictory analyses, only a few facets of which need to be discussed here.45 It is worth recalling that Richelieu did not cease to think and write as a theologian after his ministerial elevation of 1624, and that his political thought continued to be shaped by the tradition in which he was formed. As expressed

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in his Political testament and elsewhere, his conception of mankind was one of beings who were rational by nature, so that religion and revelation were an enhancement and not a contradiction of their natural condition. Human reason was naturally sublimated by faith and divine grace, which did not eradicate mankind’s liberty of action. Such a position radically separated him from the Augustinian vision of post-lapsarian mankind, in which reason was all but extinguished by human sinfulness. This insistence on reason as a natural human attribute makes it easier to understand why Richelieu should have wished to see it applied to the political sphere, and thus that there was nothing intrinsically ominous about his use of the term ‘reason of state’. As a cleric and a theologian familiar with abstract ecclesiological concepts, he probably found it easier than most contemporaries to think in terms of states and their ‘reasons’ rather than merely of princes and their interests, however entwined the two sets might be in practice. He accepted that states had their own here-and-now ‘rationality’, which in particular circumstances imposed types of action that did not always coincide with the moral code that applied to Christians as individuals. He did not go as far as to systematically oppose the two codes of action, and he was evidently more comfortable when the two ‘reasons’ coincided, as they did, for example, during the anti-Protestant wars of the 1620s.46 He also shared with the most eminent political writers of his age the view that prudence was the most critical attribute of rulers and political figures, since without it nobody could correctly identify the interests of a state. Reason of state is generally discussed within the framework of inter-state relations and the applicability of Christian morality to those relations. As we saw in the previous chapter, it was on them, and particularly Richelieu’s alliances with Protestant princes, that in their criticisms of his ministry dévots primarily focused in the 1630s, arguing that these alliances were destructive of Christian politics. The riposte came principally in two forms – that France’s Habsburg enemies actively practised reason of state politics behind a façade of religious rhetoric, of which France’s history since the wars of religion provided ample evidence. Why, then, should France jeopardise its security when faced with such duplicity, and particularly in a conflict that was not a war of religion but a war between states? The other response was based on the king of France’s status as the most Christian king and on his personal sanctity, which were a guarantee that his wars were intrinsically just. This was, of course, a wholly circular argument, through which Jansen’s Mars gallicus cut with devastating effectiveness, but it was continuously reiterated. As the history of the 1620s and 1630s shows, there were just as many internal political problems – for example, to keep one’s word to the Protestants or to engage in pre-emptive action in the case of conspiracy where the

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evidence was uncertain – which involved the same moral dilemmas. From Richelieu’s perspective as Louis XIII’s principal minister, the restoration of royal authority was the overriding objective. It could not be based on the older foundations, such as the bonum commune tradition or the tempered ‘Renaissance’ monarchy of the likes of Claude de Seyssel, both of which the wars of religion and noble revolts had since wrecked. Precisely because the reason of state tradition emphasised the power of states, internally as well as externally, it was attractive to a defender of absolute monarchy like Richelieu. Over the years, the cardinal had recourse to several writers in his service to defend such policies, internal and external, but it would be mistaken to conclude that their efforts necessarily reflected the cardinal’s own views, let alone a fixed official standpoint. Richelieu’s own position, as far as it can be defined from his attitude towards those writing at his instigation, was, if not a minimalist, at least a conservative one, with a strong and repeated emphasis on the notion of ‘necessity’ where recourse to reason of state was involved. By definition, such circumscribed recourse was reserved to princes on behalf of the states they ruled, and was not available to subjects of any rank. Under these conditions, the task of the state was not to create the city of God, which was beyond its capacities, but to provide the kind of order – social and political – which would enable its Christian subjects to strive for their individual salvation.47 From Fancan to Guez de Balzac and beyond, some of the cardinal’s hired pens did go further, excluding religious considerations from statesmanship (Fancan), allowing rulers exceptional emergency powers such as that of executing subjects on the basis of suspicion or even dreams (Balzac) or reducing political action to Machiavellian calculation generally. Richelieu firmly disapproved of such crude deductions, to the point of disgracing their authors. Fancan died in the Bastille, while the disgruntled Balzac turned against Richelieu, denouncing as tyrannical after the Cardinal’s death the political style that he, Balzac, had originally glorified to excess in his widely read Le Prince of 1631.48 Indeed, three of the four main champions of reason of state during the cardinal’s ministry renounced their views after 1642; the one who did not, Daniel Priézac, was the one who took the most conciliatory view of the relation between reason of state and Christian monarchy.49 But post-Richelieu, it seems as if the theme of reason of state, with all its ambiguities, largely disappeared from debate and reflection; Richelieu’s attempts to promote awareness of what was perceived as an alien, impersonal state did not quite fit the very different political conditions of the Mazarin ministry. Mazarin himself famously failed to imitate Richelieu’s patronage of writers, despite the fact that Gabriel Naudé, himself a strong advocate of reason of state, warned him of the dangers of neglecting writers.50

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VI During the final years of Richelieu’s ministry it became clear that the embers of certain earlier controversies were not quite extinguished. In late 1638, Pierre Dupuy published a substantial two-volume work on the rights and liberties of the gallican church. The first volume began with Pierre Pithou’s famous treatise of 1594, but it included several others, especially those of the period of the Catholic League, which were among the fiercest attacks on papal authority; this anthology was bolstered by a second, imposing volume of ‘proofs’, many of which were relatively recent decrees from the royal law courts, which gave the gallican liberties that Dupuy proposed to his readers a strongly parlementaire stamp.51 It was by far the most extensive arsenal of the gallican persuasion compiled so far, built on a large body of historical material.52 It was also the work of professionals, since its workshop of origin was the ‘cabinet Dupuy’, a private academy hosted by the brothers Pierre and Jacques Dupuy, which had for years been busy in Richelieu’s and Chancellor Séguier’s service, tracking and compiling the rights of the French monarchy to disputed territories on its eastern frontiers – and much further afield.53 Despite such elevated patronage, which must have raised questions of why such a broadside should appear at this time, the Dupuy opus was attacked and censured soon after publication by a substantial ad hoc assembly of bishops meeting informally under the protection of the elderly Cardinal La Rochefoucauld in February 1639; the faculty of theology would add its censure shortly afterwards, but it was hardly noticed. The Sainte-Geneviève assembly (so named because it met at the abbey of that name in Paris) itemised the offending propositions of the book itself and despatched an unprecedented circular letter to warn the French clergy against Dupuy’s errors.54 La Rochefoucauld himself pressed for a provincial council of Paris that would condemn the book, rather as du Perron’s Sens council had done with Richer’s Libellus in 1612, but it seems that Richelieu dissuaded Archbishop Gondi from acting on this advice.55 However, as this suggests, Richelieu’s role in this affair is far from clear, since it is unlikely that the Dupuy treatise was published without his knowledge or approval, however indirectly it may have been communicated. It would seem that the French clergy’s energetic response to Dupuy’s work made Richelieu think again, leaving (not for the first time) the offending author to take his punishment with little protection.56 The cardinal allowed the censures to stand and prevented the parlement from taking action against the clergy who had censured Dupuy. However, as the papal nuncio complained, the censure did not make the book disappear from circulation. Despite the subsequent attacks on the censure as the work of a ‘private’ assembly acting ultra vires, the 1651 assembly of clergy adopted it as its formal position and inserted the text in its official records.

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Richelieu’s response to the Dupuy condemnation was devised, it seems, to ensure that a controversy that might be difficult to contain did not break out. But that was always a risky calculation, even at this point in his career, and in early 1640 there appeared a blistering pamphlet, known as the Optatus gallus, which claimed that Richelieu’s real ambition was to establish a separate gallican patriarchate; the Dupuy volumes were manifestly the first step in that direction, and a controversial recent royal edict on abduction and marriage seemed to be another. The author of the Optatus, Charles Hersent, a discontented Oratorian, praised the Sainte-Geneviève censors for defending papal supremacy and acting to prevent a schism that would separate France from Rome.57 If such accusations were credible, it was because they were aired at a moment when France’s relations with the papacy were deteriorating badly, albeit for more conventional reasons; not for the first time, the suspension of normal diplomatic exchanges encouraged rumour and hasty assumptions about each side’s – and especially France’s – wider intentions.58 And it seems likely that Richelieu was not averse to using the rumours about a French patriarchate to prod the papacy into making the concessions he was seeking from it.59 In response, a special, ad hoc ‘congregation of France’ met regularly in Rome during 1639–40 to discuss the issues at stake, paying little or no attention to the disputes over gallican questions.60 Almost simultaneously, under the intense financial pressure caused by the war against the Habsburgs, the cardinal’s relations with the French church were also deteriorating; this led him to ratchet up the financial demands on the clergy while dealing sharply, as we shall see in the next chapter, with their assemblies. Within France, the appearance in early 1640 of the Optatus gallus forced Richelieu’s hand in the opposite direction to the previous year, opening the way for the parlement of Paris to condemn the pamphlet in March, and almost simultaneously to quash the 1639 circular letter from the episcopal assembly that had censured Dupuy.61 A spate of refutations energetically defending Richelieu soon appeared in print, among them that of a Jesuit, Rabardeau, whose argument that a French patriarchate would not be schismatic and did not need any permission from Rome to be established, discredited rather than helped the cause he was defending. The most balanced of the responses commissioned by the cardinal was by Isaac Habert, then canon-theologian of NotreDame, who would take a more aggressive stance, via his Lenten sermons of 1642 commissioned by Richelieu, against Jansen’s recently published Augustinus and its supporters. Habert’s On the consensus of hierarchy and monarchy was a restatement of the classic themes of the ‘union’ (the consensus of the title) of the ecclesia and the imperium, each of which had been assigned its specific authority by God; that dispensation was itself the foundation of the gallican liberties, and thus made all speculation about a French schism baseless.62

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It may well be the defects of these hastily written pamphlets, Habert’s included, that made Richelieu sense the need for another, more systematic via media account which would resolve the major disputes and bring the rage d’écrire under some semblance of control. In commissioning Pierre de Marca (1594–1662) he turned not to a theologian but to a jurist-cum-historian and a former president of the parlement of Navarre who, now that he was widowed, was seeking to make a second career in the French church.63 The first volume of his aptly entitled De concordia sacerdotium et imperii (‘the concord of church and empire’) was in format complementary to Dupuy’s two previously published works. Marca assembled a massive array of historical arguments and canon law precedents designed to demonstrate the perfect autonomy of church and state within their respective spheres of authority. In his readiness to accept the Pope’s control of church councils and even his doctrinal infallibility, he was parting with classic gallicanism since the Council of Constance on a key point, but this concession was part of a wider effort to show that the gallican liberties were a perfectly normal component of the church’s history, approved at various historical moments by the papacy itself. In Marca’s presentation, the church was not a tyrannical monolith but a capacious mansion in which specific developments such as the gallican liberties were perfectly acceptable.64 As Chancellor Séguier, Marca’s long-standing patron, wrote to Richelieu while Marca was still writing the Concordia, the objective was to show that there was nothing schismatic involved in asserting and defending those liberties and maxims.65 In the event, this massive and learned enterprise did not achieve the results Richelieu expected of it. Although Marca wrote the second volume, it was never published in his lifetime. His efforts to appease Rome over the scope of papal authority might have been more successful in calmer times, except that works like the Concordia were only written or commissioned during moments of confrontation. Above all, Marca was himself the prisoner of contemporary circumstances and his own career aspirations. Nominated a bishop at Richelieu’s suggestion in 1642, he needed papal approval in order to take up office but, with his book formally placed on the Papal Index, there was little prospect of such approval in the years that followed unless he retracted some of the propositions of the Concordia. This was a long and painful process, but without it his career in the church was completely stalled.66 And Richelieu’s death in late 1642 removed his most powerful patron at his moment of greatest need. Although that patronage was taken over by Mazarin, he was much less politically dominant during the pre-Fronde years than later. More generally, the authority of the post-Richelieu ministériat during a royal minority was itself uncertain, and that would have sufficed to consign these elements of Richelieu’s agenda to the archives.

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Nevertheless, something of Richelieu’s legacy lived on in Marca’s subsequent career under the Mazarin ministry, which saw Marca become successively archbishop of Toulouse and then of Paris, in the last few days of his life in 1662. Although Mazarin had no interest in seeing the Concordia completed or published in full, he came to rely heavily on its author’s forensic abilities and legal-historical erudition, especially during the Jansenist crisis of the 1650s.67 As we shall see in a later chapter, at critical moments in the disputes that Jansenism produced after the Fronde, gallican positions became inextricably tied up with the ecclesiological and theological arguments. Marca’s well-developed political instincts made him a trimmer, which suited Mazarin’s various purposes eminently. His appointment in 1658 as a ministre d’état confirmed that he was, after Mazarin, the most influential churchman in France until his death in mid-1662.68 Despite the successive confrontations examined in this chapter, it is unexpectedly difficult to discern Richelieu’s own convictions. His ecclesiology was one which readily accepted the Pope’s spiritual authority over the church but resolutely rejected the Bellarminian position that this authority enabled him to intervene in the political sphere for reasons of salvation (ratione salutis); the gallican church’s liberties were thus firmly beyond Rome’s reach. Discreetly expressed, Richelieu’s views do not seem to have changed substantially during his years in office.69 His protection of the Jesuits and the Capuchins was not what might be expected of a strict gallican, though it certainly did not prevent him from berating the Jesuits for their pretensions and misjudgements. His relations with the papacy were not radically different – respectful acceptance of its spiritual authority, but firm resistance to any papal claim or intervention in French affairs that seemed unfounded. Despite the more strident notes struck during the semi-rupture of relations with Rome in 1639–40, his behaviour was subsequently deplored by some of his more gallican contemporaries. When the parlement of Paris was seeking to exclude cardinals from the royal council in 1651, Omer Talon, one of its most austere gallicans, would openly rebuke Richelieu in his speech to Louis XIV, complaining that his ‘complaisances in his dealings with Rome were prejudicial to the state’.70 The collapse of the Fronde put paid to such projects and by the end of the Mazarin regime the gallican conflicts of Richelieu’s ministry seemed well buried, or at least subsumed into the Jansenist dispute. However, neither the Dupuy book nor the problems it raised were altogether forgotten. During the official assembly of clergy of 1660, there were bitter exchanges over Richelieu’s legacy, launched by a deputy, Bishop Doni d’Attichy of Autun, who was a relative of Richelieu’s principal victims during the 1630 crisis – Michel de Marillac and his brother, Louis, commander of the French army in Italy. D’Attichy’s animosity, however, was not simply personal: he extended the attack by demanding that a new

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reply to the Dupuy book be commissioned in the name of the French clergy, as the one contracted many years previously seemed unfinished or unpublishable.71 But in the final days of the Mazarin regime, now at peace with both its neighbours and its subjects, the memory of old battles was not enough on its own to reignite them; as in the past, only a new set of circumstances could have such an effect. The continuing resentment of ‘le grand cardinal’ had other sources, some of which the next chapter will reveal.

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CHAPTER SIX

The Fiscal Nexus and its Ramifications

T

he controversies considered so far over the proper relations between church and monarchy – in which conceptions about the papacy and its authority were often a critical mediating element – were not confined to university disputations, lawsuits or printed treatises. Even when they initially arose in such ways, the ensuing debates could mobilise the attention and intervention of royal ministers, church leaders, theologians and high-ranking magistrates at critical moments. The same was true of another participant encountered briefly in the preceding chapters: the assemblies of clergy. In view, however, of the increasingly important role it played in mediating and defining the practical relations between church and state, and between the French church and the papacy, it is essential to grasp how and why this novel and unexpected player, for which there is scarcely any counterpart elsewhere in early modern Europe, came to assume the role it did in France’s church–state politics. There was nothing long term or predetermined about the assemblies’ emergence, and they differed significantly from the kind of ad hoc assemblies of court-based clergy that monarchies, the French included, used to convene during earlier centuries, sometimes during conflicts with the papacy.1 Not surprisingly, financial questions already played a significant part in these relations; it was they which enabled the early modern French assemblies of clergy gradually to build up a new and permanent fiscal and administrative superstructure that was country-wide and that was still evolving during the early to middle decades of the seventeenth century. Described by one historian as ‘the most consistently influential representative institution of the French old regime . . . [which] met with a regularity and autonomy which few other European representative bodies could match’, the assemblies are in many ways an ideal complementary vantage point from which to observe the give-andtake of the politics of religion in these centuries.2 For that reason, it is

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necessary to trace their origins and development during their first century approximately, while also attempting to show how their range of competence gradually – and in the face of much opposition and scepticism – expanded well beyond the initial financial framework. The following pages move backwards and forwards in attempting to treat the key stages in this process. I When an ad hoc assembly of clergy met in 1561 to offer financial assistance to a desperate monarchy, nobody was intending to establish something that would last over two centuries. Past experience in this field was not a sure pointer to the future. Since the later thirteenth century, a period of acute conflict between the French monarchy and the papacy, church assemblies had been convened in a highly improvised fashion, usually in order to strengthen the monarch’s position against the pope by showing that the leading figures in the French church were on the king’s, and not the pope’s, side; such assemblies were also used to raise clerical subsidies for the crown, especially during the Hundred Years War. The Great Schism (1378–1418) took matters a step further: the assemblies that met whenever the French monarchy ‘withdrew’ its allegiance from the ‘Roman’ pope during these years declared that they represented ‘the church of the kingdom’, according to ‘the common law of the church’. This kind of language, and the ecclesiological self-understanding underpinning it, can be situated alongside some of the early public assertions of gallican and conciliarist ideas by Jean Gerson and other French clerics at the Council of Constance. These assemblies did not see themselves as autonomous bodies. Describing themselves ‘as meeting at the request and in the presence of the king’, they were more an extension of the royal council broadly conceived than a distinct assembly of clergy; they were concerned as much with the wider governance of the kingdom as with the affairs of the church itself. With the subsequent recovery of the monarchy after the Hundred Years War, such assemblies became rarer – because less useful to the crown – than previously.3 The idea that the general assemblies would make a full comeback on a much grander scale a full century later would thus have seemed improbable. Retrieved from oblivion by the pressing nature of the crown’s financial troubles, they might just as well have vanished again had those financial problems been promptly solved. The Estates-General would meet frequently between 1560 and 1614, but that did not guarantee their survival; the crown’s general attitude towards, and experience of, representative bodies makes it clear that it had no plans to encourage other assemblies, least of all ones meeting at regular intervals.4 But its inability to clear its debts thereafter was the decisive factor in

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ensuring that what began as a stopgap improvisation became a permanent fixture – with wide-ranging institutional, political and religious ramifications.5 At the risk of anticipating later discussion, it may be noted here that as the ancien régime assemblies of clergy took root, they no longer viewed themselves as extensions of the royal council, with all that that might imply for them as agents of royal governance. Instead they emerged as the administrators of a sophisticated ecclesiastical fiscal system, defenders of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and, not least, as claiming to exercise a certain undefined authority within the spheres of religious reform and doctrine.6 These differences were mainly the consequence of a radically different context of royal financial collapse, confessional division and incipient civil war, which placed the monarchy in a far weaker position than during the previous century, leaving the French church to assume increased responsibility for the preservation and reform of Catholicism in a more hostile environment.7 Despite firmly maintaining the classic theory of clerical immunity from the normal forms of taxation, the French church had paid subsidies to the crown for centuries before 1560. Known generally as décimes, they had increasingly been levied by royal decree, especially under François I and Henri II, when they became a frequent and progressively heavier burden on the clergy; other occasional church taxes to support war against Charles V were also ‘voted’ by court-based prelates, without seeking papal consent, as had earlier been the norm.8 But during the political crisis of 1560–61, such arrangements suddenly seemed wholly inadequate. Deputies from the second and third estates to the 1560 and 1561 Estates-Generals proposed no less than a total sell-off of church property (of the kind that finally happened in 1789) in order, inter alia, to clear the crown’s debt mountain. The leading figures of the French church suddenly realised how exposed their position was, with both Catholic and Huguenot deputies apparently seeking to plunder the church. Indeed, they were fearful of any move that might require a comprehensive inventory of the church’s fabled wealth: such a dangerous ‘innovation’ had to be avoided at all costs. With such a threat hanging over them, Catherine de Medici seized the opportunity to demand 15 million livres of the clergy, to be raised by a sale of church property. They countered with an offer of 9.6 million livres over six years to recover previously ‘alienated’ royal domain, as well as 13 million over ten years to redeem rentes (government bonds sold to private individuals on the crown’s behalf by the Paris hôtel de ville) and thus reduce royal debt levels. The overall sums involved seem huge – the royal revenues were thought to be about 14 million livres a year – but viewed on a per-annum basis, they were apparently not much greater than the décimes already payable during Henri II’s reign.9 The clergy’s offer was accepted, and a full-blown contract – known ever after as ‘the contract of Poissy’ – for the payment of the monies during the

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six/ten years in question was drawn up and formally signed before a notary by the two parties in September 1561.10 But if the French clergy thought they had thereby banished the nightmare of a sell-off of church property, they were mistaken. The crown’s financial problems were so great – and still rising during the 1560s – that a partial rather than total sell-off was being discussed again as early as 1563. The crown left the church little room for manoeuvre when it obtained formal papal approval for such an aliénation (as such sell-offs were called) on the grounds that the funds were needed to defend the Catholic religion against heresy; it repeated this ‘coup’ no fewer than four more times between 1568 and 1587. And since the money raised from each aliénation was used to borrow more funds via new rentes rather than liquidate existing debt, the prospect of a new round was never far away.11 The impact of the successive aliénations on the church’s wealth is now judged to have been less catastrophic than previously imagined, when it figured among the worst ‘scourges of the church’ during the religious wars.12 That the aliénations, especially the first of them, were disruptive and badly managed in many places is indisputable, but it seems that, broadly speaking, this spurred on the clergy to gain some control over the subsequent sales, which enabled them to sell off their most ‘marginal’ assets and even to borrow money rather than sell their more valuable properties. And under Henri IV, the 1596 and 1606 assemblies of clergy proved their worth by obtaining royal authorisation to repurchase properties previously sold off for the nominal prices (often well below their real value) originally paid for them. As church revenues recovered after 1600, the capacity to repurchase alienated properties grew accordingly. Historians disagree on how significant the church’s overall contribution to the crown’s ‘budget’ was during the religious wars – one estimate has it somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent, but it may well have been less than half of that figure.13 It is even more difficult to gauge the affordability of the clergy’s payments at this time, as there are no reliable figures for contemporary church revenues against which to measure them or to explain the reasons for the often substantial arrears or non-payment by the beneficeholders. There is no need to pursue that particular issue here, but it is worth noting that, thanks to the enhanced bargaining power of a church now benefiting from its own representative assembly, its financial contributions to the monarchy fell proportionately further during the seventeenth century.14 II The financially driven decisions of the early 1560s set in train a series of effects which would crystallise over the coming generations into enduring elements of France’s politico-ecclesiastical landscape.15 While the detail of the measures

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are important for an accurate understanding of later developments, the enduring memory of these years, and especially of the successive aliénations, was based less on the financial damage they did to the French church than on the manner in which they had been brought about: the crown and the papacy cut bilateral deals, each of which became a fait accompli about which the French church could do nothing. The announcement of each aliénation confirmed the belief that the church needed to be able to defend itself against such ‘arbitrary’ measures. From this perspective, the Estates-General offered little hope: quite the contrary, it was just as likely, as we have seen for 1560–61 and 1614, to be a source of unpleasant surprises as of support. As for assemblies of clergy themselves, at least in the format that was familiar to contemporaries around 1560, they seemed scarcely more promising at the outset, and more likely to be improvised meetings of court-based clergy manipulated by the king and his ministers than doughty defenders of church privileges. Yet it was the developments of the early 1560s and their sequels that led to an unplanned and unforeseen growth of assemblies that duly mutated into something much less familiar. The French church could hardly insist that the monarchy defend Catholicism while refusing to contribute towards its costs on the grounds of clerical tax immunity. In the short term, as noted above, the crown’s debt burden increased rather than fell after 1560, leading the crown to use the clergy’s décimes to raise more money and service these and older debts rather than to amortise existing ones. The end of the first six-year contract in 1567 was a critical moment. The clergy were unwilling to prolong indefinitely this originally temporary arrangement but, taking advantage of the crown’s continuing weakness, they successfully insisted on a new assembly of elected deputies, who duly renewed the ‘contract of Poissy’ for another six years. They also obtained royal recognition that the sums they paid the crown were a don gratuit (a free gift) and not taxation, and that same declaration accompanied each subsequent contract. Such distinctions may seem merely symbolic, but they were far from meaningless to those concerned. By 1580 the clergy and monarchy were becoming locked in a relationship in which the clergy could no longer expect the ‘contract of Poissy’ to lapse, while the crown accepted that its renewal would have to be approved by an assembly. Other enduring items of the new dispensation had appeared before then. By 1567, a receiver-general had been appointed to handle the clerical subsidies, while two syndics généraux (later renamed agents généraux) were also elected by the clergy to handle its affairs and especially to keep an eye on financial questions during the period between the assembly meetings. The 1567 assembly, no doubt sensing that further difficulties lay ahead, also declared that assemblies should be held every five years henceforth. Nothing is known

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of the following 1573 assembly, apart from the fact that it was presided over by the Cardinal of Lorraine and renewed the décimes contract for a further six years. However, its status as a genuine assembly entitled to act on behalf of the French clergy was evidently so dubious that the next assembly, meeting in 1579, protested energetically that only assemblies composed of deputies properly elected by the two ‘orders’ of the clergy were entitled to represent the French clergy and make commitments in its name. This robust defence of the clergy’s autonomy and right to self-representation, coming at a time when their confidence in the monarchy was reaching its nadir, led the 1579 assembly to be regarded by subsequent generations as the first of the new-style assemblies of clergy.16 Linked to this assertiveness, of course, was the need for a workable electoral procedure, and it was gradually put together and then refined in subsequent decades. The electoral process began within dioceses and then moved to the provincial level, where the actual election of deputies to the assembly occurred.17 Each church province would elect a bishop and a member of the ‘second-order’ clergy to a minor assembly; those quotas would be doubled for a major assembly. The French church was thus ‘represented’ by its own provinces, whose geography coincided with that of neither the Estates-General nor the royal administration. Equally decisive for the emergence and survival of the assemblies of clergy was the combination of clerical deputies elected by the ‘high’ and ‘low’ (or, in contemporary terminology, first-order and second-order) secular clergy; even the second-order deputies elected to the assemblies were frequently ambitious or well-connected clerics who aspired to, and often did, become bishops in their turn. This formula was crucial to ensuring that the clergy would be regularly represented by many of its highest-placed figures, present and to come, all of whom had had a vested interest in embracing and defending their order’s positions. An assembly from which the bishops regularly absented themselves would, as happened in Castile by the 1540s, almost certainly have lacked real substance and staying power.18 The virtually complete absence of genuinely lower clergy from the French assemblies was criticised at the time less for its lack of ‘democracy’ than for the unfairly heavy taxation allegedly offloaded on to the lower clergy by the assemblies. For all its weaknesses, this electoral system, the basic elements of which were in place by the 1580s, had the advantage of striking down roots in the dioceses and provinces of the French church and committing its most influential figures to its preservation. III On their own, fine-tuned electoral arrangements might not have ensured the survival of the assemblies, especially in the critical early generation. The

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mechanism by which the clergy raised the money voted to the crown was more vital to that survival than is usually realised. Once the first six-year contract was signed, the clergy were anxious to exercise control of the system for raising the sums to be paid to the crown and, above all, to keep the prying eyes of royal officialdom out of its financial affairs. This in turn required creating, alongside the electoral mechanisms just mentioned, administrative infrastructures – assemblies and bureaux – within dioceses and provinces, firstly to apportion ‘taxes’ to individual benefice-holders, and then to deal with appeals and supervise the collection of funds. Within a relatively short time, an extensive network of receivers and comptrollers was established across France, mirroring at least partially the monarchy’s own fiscal administration. This is most evident in the extent to which the assemblies authorised the practice of vénalité, allowing virtually all the officials involved to purchase their offices; thereafter they continued to borrow ideas from the well-stocked royal bag of fiscal tricks in order to raise further funds by related techniques. Within less than a generation, therefore, the French clergy spawned their own web of financial officialdom.19 Any attempt by the crown to undo this emerging politico-fiscal web, including the assemblies that sat at its very centre, would have involved a very costly redemption of the offices in question. The normal state of the royal finances precluded such action, even had such a systematic deconstruction not been alien to the political mores of ancien régime society.20 Moreover, the clergy consistently refused to allow its major financier, the receiver-general of the clergy, as he was called, to purchase his position: it remained a commission from which its holder could be dismissed. They were equally anxious to ensure that their agents-généraux did not become royal proxies, insisting on electing them during the regular assemblies and retaining ultimate oversight of their operations in the intervals between assemblies.21 Most of all, the clergy’s own ‘corporate’ credit emerged as stronger and more reliable than that of the crown – or of many other related institutions – which ensured that the autonomy it enjoyed was firmly underpinned by what historians once called a ‘social base’. It was not the 1567 resolution to hold assemblies every five years that perpetuated them thereafter, but the recurring need to negotiate a new décimes contract with the crown which was timed to lapse automatically after a term of years. There was to be no return to the age of François I and Henri II; the clergy’s historic immunity against taxation without their consent was again entrenched in principle, one that not even Louis XIV would try to set aside. As we have seen, the first thirty years or more of the assemblies of clergy were a period of improvisation, with both crown and clergy stumbling from one contract and one assembly to the next.22 Thus, it was only gradually that basic structures were cobbled together – how many deputies to elect, what precise

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powers they should be given, how votes and decisions should be taken, and so on. In fact, the last major effort to codify these procedures was made at the 1625 assembly, which was by far the busiest and most significant up to then. By this time, the ‘major’ assemblies were scheduled to meet once a decade in the years ending in ‘5’, and the ‘minor’ ones in the ‘0’ years, although occasionally they met at other times. As this categorisation suggests, the major assemblies were intended to deal with issues such as renewing the financial contract with the crown, while the minor ones, also known as ‘assemblies of accounts’, were supposed to limit themselves to overseeing the receivers and their accounts. In fact, this ‘way of proceeding’ was not always adhered to, as unexpected major issues could land in the lap of the ‘minor’ assemblies and produce unanticipated but important decisions, ranging from financial needs to doctrinal imbroglios. As we saw, the major assembly of 1615 was seriously overshadowed by the Estates-General which had met immediately beforehand, but it nevertheless voted to ‘receive’ the decrees of the Council of Trent. In 1621, it was the turn of a minor assembly to vote the first major don gratuit of the century. An unscheduled assembly met in 1628 to vote a new don, which allowed the clergy to drop the ‘minor’ assembly scheduled for 1630.23 Other departures from the formal schedule and hierarchy of assemblies would follow, but the principle of regular assembly was never infringed. But were permanence and periodicity any guarantee of the assemblies’ wider politico-religious significance? The clergy’s claims that the assemblies’ sphere of action and responsibility should include matters of jurisdiction, doctrine and religious reform were not to everyone’s taste. More than once, the parlement of Paris tried to roll back their remit to its original and narrowest scope: raising money for the crown. It also insisted that the clergy could not hold any meetings unless summoned explicitly by the king; the target here was the clergy’s claim that they had a right to assemble, even unofficially, to discuss urgent church affairs without such prior permission. Perhaps more surprisingly, some seventeenth-century bishops would object, as happened during the Jansenist conflict, to the assemblies’ claims to act on behalf of the French church; they did so on the grounds that each bishop was the ultimate judge of such matters of faith within his diocese and that the assemblies had no mandate to usurp that right.24 But such stances were based on different considerations, and never really joined forces to prevent the assemblies from gradually widening the scope of their competence. There was one simple reason why that competence might tend to expand, regardless of whether the assemblies consciously sought to increase it or not. As with an Estates-General, each elected deputy brought with him to the assembly a cahier des doléances compiled by the electors; likewise, one of the assembly’s main tasks was to synthesise these cahiers into a general cahier of grievances

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and demands in order to petition the crown at the end of the session. But before that point was reached, individual complaints – often prompted by alleged abuses of ecclesiastical privileges and jurisdiction of secular courts – could well provide the material for indignation and heated debate during the assembly itself. The scope for such complaints and discussions was almost limitless, and the assemblies were ready, like their counterparts everywhere, to use whatever financial leverage they had to persuade the king and his ministers to help them defend ecclesiastical rights against secular encroachment. To say that this made the crown the arbiter of the conflicts of jurisdiction is a truism, one that had already been visible for several centuries before 1600, but almost a century later the 1695 royal edict on ecclesiastical jurisdiction proved how effective the assemblies had been on this question in their dealings with the crown.25 IV In an age of bitter religious division, it was most unlikely that assemblies of clergy would simply confine themselves to financial matters once they began their discussions. Their very first assembly at Poissy is a prime example of this, since it folded into the famous colloquy of Poissy that was designed to bring about France’s confessional reunification. Subsequent assemblies consistently opposed, as we might expect, all forms of religious coexistence and the attendant privileges granted to the Huguenots. None of this ended with the Edict of Nantes, and each subsequent assembly after 1600 set up a special commission to deal with Protestant affairs. The assemblies could not claim the credit for the ultimate revocation of the edict – in fact the assemblies formally avoided making such a request – but, as we shall see, their contribution to the final outcome was no less crucial for all that. Another familiar cause attracted the assemblies’ attention from an early date: the defence of ecclesiastical jurisdiction against attacks on it from royal magistrates epitomised by the Paris parlement. The ensuing antagonism between the two bodies contributed to the increasingly hostile polemics over the much broader question of whether the church was ‘in the republic’, or vice versa. The assemblies of the immediate aftermath of the religious wars were particularly keen to challenge the parlementaire thesis that the church was ‘in the republic’, which made its jurisdiction subject to that of the parlement. The assemblies enjoyed the support of the papacy, whose nuncios were regularly instructed to pressurise the king and his ministers on this point. Such papal support emboldened the 1596 and especially 1605 assembly energetically to defend ecclesiastical jurisdiction.26 These skirmishes in turn make it easier to understand the nature of the confrontation between the clergy and the third estate (dominated by magistrates) at the 1614 Estates-General.

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The defence of ecclesiastical jurisdiction also became entwined with another source of conflict with the parlements, namely the assemblies’ support for the formal reception of the Council of Trent’s decrees into French law by the crown. First proposed at an assembly of notables in 1564, it figured on the agenda of subsequent assemblies of clergy down to 1615, each of which pressed the crown to fall into line with the other Catholic states of Europe.27 Such a stance was provocative, primarily to the Huguenots but almost as much so to the gallicans in the parlements and beyond, for whom Trent – and specifically its disciplinary rather than doctrinal decisions – became a bête noire that personified the kind of papal power-hunger that gallican France considered it its duty to oppose. The assemblies’ commitment also symbolised the extent to which the French church moved to a pro-Roman stance during the religious wars and beyond, a shift which played a significant part in the gallican-versuspapalist ideological ‘wars’ of the early seventeenth century. But the nearer the assemblies came to obtaining the crown’s agreement to ‘receive’ Trent, the more the parlementaire obstruction hardened, as when the magistrates successfully defied Henri IV in 1599–1601.28 Internal differences of view within the French church itself over the Council also emerged at such moments: the episcopate was far more enthusiastic about full reception than were the cathedral chapters and the wider clergy. The 1615 assembly only managed to unite in receiving Trent in the name of the French church by adding that it should not be to the detriment of the gallican liberties and traditions.29 This decision to go it alone, without the long-sought-after royal reception of Trent, was both a defeat and a victory. Failure to bring the crown on board meant that the decrees would not formally become law in France which, had it happened, would probably have consolidated ecclesiastical jurisdiction within France. The 1615 reception was a more intangible victory, yet it was real enough. Such a reception would not have been conceivable without the assemblies in the first place, and it was in many respects the apogee of their development up to then. They might not literally be making doctrinal and disciplinary decisions of their own, but they were asserting that the French church should not be subordinated to the crown in its specific spheres of action. One major irony of this protracted saga was that in the decades before 1615, and especially during Henri III’s reign, many of Trent’s decrees had been individually incorporated into French royal law, but without formal acknowledgement of their provenance and certainly without any intention of allowing Roman institutions to act as judges or interpreters of their application, which was the major reason for the opposition to a formal ‘reception’ of Trent in France. Not only that, but the assemblies played a major role in enabling such incorporation to occur, as is most evident in the way in which the 1579 assembly contributed to the religious clauses of the major ordinance of Blois,

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published a year later.30 The same assembly, for example, undertook an investigation of the condition of the contemporary French episcopate and drew up a list of bishops who had been irregularly appointed, as well as a list of dioceses no less irregularly dominated by powerful figures, clerical as well as lay. But the investigation was primarily an indictment of the crown’s use of its patronage under the Concordat of Bologna. For over a generation after 1560, the assemblies regularly demanded a return to pre-Bologna episcopal elections – a lost cause if ever there was one. That demand was only finally dropped by the 1605 assembly, but its regular repetition over the years seems only partly prompted by the ‘abuses’ that had arisen from the concordat itself.31 These and a myriad other issues were not difficult to package into the standard format of the doléances that characterised all French ‘representative’ assemblies. By definition, it presumed that the final decisions on religious or ecclesiastical questions would still be taken by the crown, however its hand might be steered along the way. It is clear, as Mark Greengrass has shown, that the notion that church reform could and should be undertaken by the prince was far from dead in post-tridentine France. Nor was the prince’s role confined to legislating for reform, however important that might still be: he could take matters a step further and instruct royal commissioners or parlementaire assizes (grands jours) in the provinces to turn their attention to religious matters; the magistrates involved were by no means averse to such intervention, convinced as they were that the church was the business as much of the king as of its own authorities.32 Needless to say, the problems of pacifying localities during the wars of religion left little scope for such efforts, but they were to return in several guises in the seventeenth century, by which time the French church had become more ambivalent towards them. One could easily extend this shopping list of issues adopted and made their own by successive assemblies of clergy and which, as we have seen, could also be abandoned when the prospects of success had clearly passed. As successive assemblies convened, they would have had recurrent or permanent issues of greater or less urgency on their agenda, which might be confided to commissions to report on. However, financial negotiations with the monarchy were never dealt with by such methods; they were deemed too important and thus concerned the assembly as a whole. Unexpected items of business were obviously less predictable, but few assemblies seemed to have escaped them. Taken alongside the assembled clergy’s own readiness to intervene in issues that were doctrinal, religious and ecclesiastical in nature, the result may be considered, in Henry Phillips’s terminology, as an expanding ‘space of discussion’ which excluded few questions of mutual interest to the French church and the monarchy.33 This is because behind the growth of the assemblies lay a deeper uncertainty about their status, one that was never finally resolved because it

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was never put to the ultimate test. As we saw, the parlements took a radically minimalist view of their raison d’être, the voting of subsidies to the crown. But at the opposite end stood less an articulated position than an assumption: namely that the assembly of clergy was – or was capable of becoming – the national council of the gallican church. The moments when this prospect seemed realistic were to come later in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with the Jansenist problem, but it had also been mooted during the 1590s as a means of dealing with Henri IV and his conversion, at a time when the French monarchy had broken off official relations with Rome.34 In the intervening years the assemblies were drawn into major disputes, and Richelieu was only following the logic of such a development when, as we have seen, he pushed the 1625–26 assembly into adopting a role which it had not previously assumed and which should not be underestimated – that of censuring hostile politico-religious publications. Such prominence would grow apace once the Estates-General and, to a lesser extent, the assemblies of notables had disappeared from French politics after 1626–27, thus leaving the assembly of clergy as the only nationwide assembly entitled to meet at regular intervals. V These developments did not render the clergy’s financial relations with the crown any less important. On the contrary, a significant new chapter was opened during the early 1620s, one that would dominate those relations until 1789.35 The original ‘contract of Poissy’ formula had long since become a renewable arrangement that contributed only marginally to the crown’s finances, while demonstrating the soundness of the clergy’s credit. By 1620, the sums raised in décimes on the clergy had become relatively static, and would continue to decline in real value in subsequent years. In fact, the seventeenth century was about to become that of the don gratuit, which was first voted by the minor assembly of 1621. The practice of voting lump sums to the crown for specific uses was not unknown before then, as the sixteenth-century assemblies had voted a number of them to Charles IX and Henri III. They continued under Henri IV and Louis XIII, but were few in number and purely symbolic in monetary value. The 1621 don gratuit was a quantitative leap in the opposite direction. The reason for the change is also noteworthy: instead of relatively modest (in financial terms) marriage ‘presents’ to members of the royal family, as happened in previous years, the 1621 don arose from the crown’s need for funds to help pay for the military operations following the restoration of Catholicism in Béarn. Previous assemblies of clergy had strongly urged the crown to implement the terms of the Edict of Fontainebleau of 1599 on such a

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restoration; now the crown turned to the clergy to contribute towards the costs of one of their major desiderata. Despite some initial resistance, the 1621 assembly was too committed to the logic of repressing heresy to refuse its support without seeming two-faced. It could pay the newly minted and elegantly named don gratuit into the king’s coffers in the knowledge that it had a patent religious justification. It opened its purse far more generously in 1621 than previously, to the tune of 3 million livres, and probably expected the don to be a once-only grant.36 But the Huguenot wars of the 1620s which the Béarn expedition triggered would effectively dash any such hopes, and by the end of the 1620s two further dons gratuits had been voted – again after initial resistance – firstly by the major assembly of 1625 and secondly by a specially convened assembly in 1628 which, pressed by a strong exhortation from the papacy to act generously, voted the ‘3 millions for La Rochelle’ for the final round of the Huguenot wars.37 If the clergy thought that the successful outcome of these wars would see the dons gratuits disappear from sight, they were in a for a rude shock. In 1635 France overtly entered the Thirty Years War against the Habsburgs, and the monarchy was seeking funds from all available sources.38 Richelieu successfully obtained 3.75 million livres from the major assembly of 1635, the first time a don gratuit was voted to the crown without a specifically religious justification attached to it. The clergy’s evident reluctance to grant it was camouflaged by the effusive declaration they made thanking Louis XIII for his previous accomplishments on behalf of Catholicism; it did not prevent the 1635 don from being resented by many as financing war against the cause of Catholicism in Europe. Worse, however, was to come in 1641, by which time royal financial needs were even more acute and military successes limited. Richelieu had originally hoped to raise substantial sums from the clergy without any assembly by resorting to the kind of special taxes familiar from previous centuries and for which a papal authorisation would be sufficient licence to proceed. But the clergy were not about to abandon their conviction that the ‘contract of Poissy’ had formally exonerated them from all such measures without their explicit consent. Obliged to retreat and to allow an assembly to convene in 1641, Richelieu exacted his revenge by compelling it to grant 5.5 million livres, by far the largest don gratuit to date. This result was only obtained after acrimonious exchanges with an assembly that Richelieu had done his utmost to pack with yes-men.39 The 1641 assembly was undoubtedly the grand orage of the assembly of clergy’s relations with the seventeenth-century monarchy. Few assemblies were so roughly handled by the crown, as distinct from the sporadic efforts of the parlement of Paris to intimidate them on other occasions. Above all, the memory of the mistreatment and expulsion by royal lettres de cachet of six of

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the first-order deputies, including two acting presidents, was all the more painful as that had been done by one of their own, Richelieu; it also left some of France’s clergy with an ambivalent memory of the cardinal for at least a generation.40 If there was another ‘victim’ of Richelieu’s strong-arm tactics in 1641, it was his successor, Mazarin, whose weak regency administration was even more desperate for money than the Richelieu regime had been. But each of the four assemblies of clergy held between 1645 and 1661 proved in its own way to be inflexibly tight-fisted – while that of 1645 was highly critical of the use made of the funds its predecessors had voted. Mazarin did obtain 4 million livres in 1645, but only 600,000 in mid-Fronde in 1651, while recovering somewhat to 2.7 million in 1655 and 2.4 million in 1661. By the latter date, France’s needs were less great because it was again at peace, making this the first don gratuit to be voted when France was not at war: like the contract of Poissy before it, the don gratuit was now effectively institutionalised and separated from its original raison d’être. Under Louis XIV, it would remain for many years at similarly low figures, until the great European wars of the 1690s and 1700s would produce the same hikes as under Richelieu and Mazarin.41 The invention of the don gratuit in 1621 placed a major new item on the assemblies’ agenda, relegating the décimes and earlier financial issues to a purely secondary position. As already noted, minor assemblies were as much involved in these negotiations as the major ones, blurring the differences between them even further. After 1621, the financial burden on France’s benefice-holders suddenly grew substantially again, and with it the search for effective means of raising the sums voted. The manipulation of office sales and related ‘augmentations’ were incapable of raising more than limited funds compared to the classic method of taxing the benefice-holders. In 1636, the assembly decided to pay its don gratuit by borrowing money via rentes issued in its own name, but that practice, while a considerable success, was temporarily abandoned in 1641.42 At several junctures during the 1620s and 1630s, there was also talk of new aliénations, which involved prior discussions with the papacy. But on each occasion, the Richelieu ministry drew back from such an option – partly because of the clergy’s strong objections, based on recent historical experience, to aliénations as such, and partly because the very idea that the crown might need prior papal approval had itself become a sensitive issue since the religious wars. Thus, when the much-delayed 1641 assembly finally met, it faced the prospect of a swingeing retrospective tax on properties acquired by the church (and thus fallen into mortmain) since 1520, but it was denied the option of borrowing some or all of the funds necessary to pay that tax.43 Not surprisingly, its relations with the Richelieu ministry deteriorated badly, leading to the expulsion of the most hostile deputies.

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VI The increasing fractiousness of the assemblies of clergy during the Richelieu ministry did not derive purely from dissension over money and its uses. The financial debates and negotiations were not always the most acrimonious, despite the clergy’s slowness before Louis XIV’s rule in responding to royal demands for money. The crown’s almost constant neediness was, it might be said, the clergy’s opportunity, with the result that the assemblies became a forum for an ever-wider range of issues. The 1625 assembly is perhaps the best example of the scale of the issues an assembly could address. Some of its interventions are familiar from previous chapters, but an assembly’s debates were not always dominated by the ‘great’ theologico-political issues. Their debates often arose initially from more mundane clerical concerns, prompted by their cahiers de doléances, but their capacity to escalate or connect to wider issues is striking. For example, one of the first challenges for the 1625 assembly was how to deal with a conflict in which a member of the second-order clergy, acting as a papal delegate within France, placed an interdict on a bishop and his diocese on account of his behaviour over a dispute among the reformed Carmelite nuns.44 This apparently minor, local squabble ballooned into an increasingly vexed and almost inextricable confrontation, which involved so many interests that there could be no winner without some angry losers. It immediately evoked disputes between secular and regular clergy, the conditions for the exercise of papal jurisdiction within France, and the defence of gallican conceptions of episcopal status. By the time that Richelieu himself intervened to impose a resolution in December 1625, it had dominated the assembly’s deliberations for a full six months; along the way, it had involved the papacy, which was determined to defend its jurisdictional rights in France, even when the dispute pitted a mere cathedral canon (its judge-delegate) against a French bishop. At one tense point there was talk in the assembly of the need for a national council to resist potential papal intervention.45 It was in response to such challenges, for example, that Richelieu’s client, Bishop Étampes of Chartres, drafted a substantial ‘règlement’ defining the place of the religious orders in the French church, which he followed up with a far longer ‘advice’ to France’s bishops on how to perform their duties in the tradition of Carlo Borromeo. But even here awkward formulas soon raised problems. In one article, Étampes lauded the infallibility of the Pope, calling him ‘the bishop of bishops’, but the assembly seems to have got cold feet about having to defend such a statement, with the result that the entire document was suppressed.46 Yet that faux pas did not prevent Étampes, as we have seen, from being called upon shortly afterwards to draft the assembly’s response to the anti-Richelieu pamphlets. The

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assembly’s own debates influenced the format of Étampes’s declaration, but also the clergy’s appalled reaction to its absolutist tenets when they saw what he had composed. Subsequent assemblies were far less troubled by the gallican–ultramontane clashes of the early decades of the century. This did not mean that they subsided into dealing with routine business. As previously suggested, individual ‘incidents’ or ‘cases’ came within their purview, and their support was increasingly solicited on certain major matters, as the experience of the 1635 assembly illustrates to good effect. The first questions facing the assembly were anything but trivial, but the deputies found themselves tightly constrained in their freedom to handle them. Both cases belonged to the fallout from the political crisis of 1630. Gaston d’Orléans, heir to Louis XIII until 1638 and already notoriously hostile to Richelieu, had fled to Lorraine in 1631 and secretly married Marguerite de Lorraine; when he returned at the head of an army in 1632, he provoked revolt, especially in Languedoc, which ended in failure. In the repression that followed, a number of southern bishops were suspected of aiding and abetting the rebel cause. In all, four bishops were arraigned: two were acquitted, one resigned, and one was deprived of his office. A separate but similar case involved the bishop of Saint-Pol-de-Léon in Brittany, accused of helping Marie de Medici to flee from France in 1631; the verdict against him was also deprivation of office. The 1635 assembly opened just as these proceedings were ending, but the deputies were either unable or unwilling to influence them, because Richelieu ensured that the trials were held under papal commission by a panel of fellow bishops acting as judgedelegates within France. However, the deposition of bishops of the gallican church was always likely to hit a raw nerve, since the papacy had attempted to try several of them for heresy in the early 1560s. For the time being, the bishops who dominated the 1635 assembly were far too much on the back foot to mount an effective defence of their colleagues, who would have to wait for another decade. In any event, the 1635 assembly soon had to focus its attention on the equally thorny question of the validity of the Gaston d’Orléans–Marguerite de Lorraine marriage, whose political ramifications amounted to a ‘dynastic crisis of conscience’, as was clear to contemporaries.47 Louis XIII and Richelieu had already set in train a series of moves to quash the marriage as invalid and against the laws of France which, it was claimed, forbade members of the royal family from marrying without the consent of the king, who stood in loco parentis to them. The parlement of Paris was persuaded to declare that Gaston had effectively been abducted, thus making him a victim of the crime of rapt, which in French civil law rendered a marriage unlawful. The next stage was definitive annulment by an ecclesiastical tribunal, which might be

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that of Rome itself. But Gaston swiftly appealed to the papacy, which firmly declared that the matter was not primarily political, but should be considered in the light of post-tridentine canon-law principles. And for good measure, the Louvain theology faculty had already declared Gaston’s marriage valid. Politics and theology could hardly have been more entangled, especially as the Council of Trent’s decrees had accentuated the sacramental rather than the civil aspects of marriage. Church law could thus find no place for the ‘utility’ or ‘interest’ (especially if it was political) of a third party in a marriage, even if the third party was the king of France; nor did it accept that there was a law in France (as distinct from an alleged custom) formally forbidding members of the royal family from marrying without the king’s consent. Nevertheless, Louis XIII and Richelieu were hoping that Rome would accept the case, albeit only on condition that, in accordance with the terms of the concordat, the Pope then appointed French judge-delegates to handle the matter ‘sovereignly’ (i.e. with no right of appeal) within France itself. They were, needless to say, confident that the judge-delegates would take the crown’s side in the case, but there were many potential hazards in such a course of action, especially as Gaston and his wife continued to defend their marriage as free and consensual. Seeking as much support as he could muster for his efforts to have the marriage overturned, Richelieu saw the advantage of turning to the 1635 assembly. The latter was well placed to strengthen – and rebalance – the crown’s case by lending it church backing. Richelieu doubtless hoped that its opinion would help to break the deadlock by convincing Gaston d’Orléans to abandon the marriage. But there was no agreement on what, if anything, the assembly was entitled to do in this case: it was manifestly not an ecclesiastical tribunal capable of delivering a legal judgment, so what would be the value, or status, of any opinion it uttered? The papacy adamantly opposed any claim on its part to play a formal role. In the event, it was asked for its opinion (avis) on the political and civil-law question of whether members of the royal family in line to succeed to the throne could marry without the king’s permission. The deputies accepted the request, but also decided to consult the Paris theology faculty, thereby extending the debate in the direction of a formal consultation.48 The assembly itself soon rallied to the official position by voting to adopt the opinion (which was not deemed to be a formal ‘judgment’) which accepted that, in certain circumstances, the laws and customs of France could constitute insurmountable impediments to a valid marriage – in other words, they delivered a political rather than theological justification of the regime’s policy. We need not follow here the tortuous manoeuvres that would subsequently lead Gaston d’Orléans himself to renounce his marriage. One detail, however,

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is illuminating: the despatch to Rome of the principal defender of the ‘official’ position in the assembly, Bishop Fenouillet of Montpellier, as an extraordinary envoy of both the crown and the assembly in order to present the latter’s contribution to the case for the annulment. Fenouillet encountered no success in Rome, which simply refused to budge over the validity of Gaston’s marriage. But the assembly’s involvement in the marriage debate and Fenouillet’s ‘embassy’ were both clear evidence that, even when it was manifestly being manipulated by Richelieu and his allies, it had still extended the range of its potential competence. Ironically, nearly a year after the assembly had disbanded, Louis XIII formally allowed Gaston to marry Marguerite, but only under the ‘laws and customs of France’, a formula to whose acceptability the ‘clergy of France’ had contributed in no small degree. The contrast between the assemblies of 1635–36 and 1641 could hardly seem greater, for which there were good reasons. Both faced serious financial demands, but the assembly of 1635, while it may not have liked the idea of renewing the don gratuit to pay for a foreign war, could feel reasonably satisfied with the consequences of its other contributions and deliberations. In contrast, many of the 1641 deputies probably went home browbeaten and angry from an assembly that from the very outset was caught in the grip of the ministry’s implacable financial demands. In normal assemblies, other items of business, as we have seen, would lubricate the relations between the deputies and the court in numerous ways. But that of 1641 had only one substantive item, the don gratuit, on its agenda, so there was little distraction, and even less opportunity to engage in the give-and-take politics that would normally make the financial negotiations less fractious. It was the unprecedented expulsion of the six bishops, two of them senior archbishops and presidents of the assembly, which poisoned matters, leaving often bitter memories of an assembly that was the victim of the ‘tyranny’ of Cardinal Richelieu. If, as we have already seen, later assemblies exacted some retrospective revenge by reducing dons gratuits quite substantially, that of 1645 was dominated by the need to repair the other kinds of damage inflicted by Richelieu on them and on France’s bishops more broadly. The early years of Louis XIV’s minority witnessed attempts by many of Richelieu’s victims to recover their offices and other positions, but it often proved impossible to satisfy them without alienating those who had replaced them and who were in no way disposed to step aside for them. The 1645 assembly found itself dealing with just such cases. An agent-général of the clergy that the cardinal had foisted on the 1641 assembly in the place of a regularly elected one was only finally expelled from this post after years of litigation and pressure in mid-1646. Far more important was the rehabilitation of the deputies expelled from the 1641 assembly, a process that was initiated

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by a long and bitter speech by one of their number, Archbishop Montchal of Toulouse, the only expellee to be elected to the 1645 assembly. Montchal did not mince his words about the ‘sufferings’ of the assemblies between 1635 and 1641, especially concerning the ignominious charge of being ‘ill-intentioned against the king’s service’ that was laid against him and others on being ejected from the latter assembly. Not only were the expellees welcomed back and congratulated in 1645 for their courage in defending the honour of the French clergy, but the assembly also quashed retrospectively all decisions (apart from the don gratuit itself) made after the day they were expelled in 1641.49 The 1645 and 1651 assemblies also found themselves engaged in another attempt to overturn other past wrongs – that of the bishops punished for rebellion in the 1630s. Of the two deposed bishops, René de Rieux, bishop of SaintPol-de-Léon, was rehabilitated in 1645 and restored to his diocese, from which his successor had to be discreetly transferred. This was achieved not by a declaration of the assembly itself, but by replicating the original legal process of 1633–34 with newly nominated papal judge-delegates. But the former bishop of Albi, Alphonse d’Elbène, who was far more compromised in the 1632 revolt, failed to obtain such a vindication, largely because, unlike Rieux, he alienated the assembly by taking his case to the Paris parlement, whose competence in church matters like this the clergy always bitterly rejected.50 Elbène’s case resurfaced at the 1651 assembly, by which time he had died. It was clear that the assembly’s primary concern was less with individual cases – it was doubly ambivalent over Elbène, whose role in the 1632 rebellion was undeniable – than with the manner of putting bishops on trial in France, especially if, as in 1633, the trials were conducted by a small panel of fellow bishops appointed by a papal brief enabling them to act as judges-delegate with powers to make a final judgment against which there could be no appeal. This was a door that the 1651 assembly was determined to see firmly shut. With little difficulty, the deputies agreed to petition the Pope to ensure that papal briefs similar to that of 1632 would not be issued in the future, so that the tradition whereby French bishops could only be judged by the bishops of their province could be restored. More provocatively, the 1651 assembly formally protested against the 1632 brief itself and included the text of their protest in the published version of its deliberations.51 In other circumstances, such an act might have led to angry exchanges, but the political conditions of 1651 favoured such a gesture. The next major assembly of 1655–57 successfully scuppered Mazarin’s plans to have the diocese of Paris governed by handpicked vicars-general while its archbishop, the ex-frondeur Cardinal de Retz, was in exile abroad.52 A similar determination would effectively frustrate Louis XIV’s efforts to deal with recalcitrant bishops during the Jansenist crisis in the 1660s.

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VII The extension of the assemblies of clergy’s scope and authority was gradual and empirical, and did not follow any historical pattern or precedent. The wider political and ideological context of their first century of existence provided a whole gamut of challenges that they could scarcely ignore; for the same reason, appeals for their intervention could come thick and fast, both from the royal government and from the wider French church. In addition to the issues discussed so far, there are a number of indicators which help to show how and why the assemblies came increasingly to matter by the midseventeenth century. The most basic sign of the assemblies’ evolution lies in the gradual formalisation of the conventions for both elections and deliberations. Despite this, the clergy always left themselves the right to invite additional non-elected members to join them once they began their deliberations. Those invited were usually cardinals who were seen as particularly useful in the kinds of interaction with the king and the French court where personal status could make a significant difference. It was not unknown for these unelected cardinals to act as assembly presidents, which enabled them to exercise yet more influence on their deliberations. For that reason, Richelieu and Mazarin were regularly invited to join the assemblies, but each declined the presidency for obvious reasons. It is highly unlikely that Richelieu would have dared to expel the presidents of the 1641 assembly had they been cardinals. The 1645 assembly did not simply welcome the expelled deputies of 1641 but invited them to participate in its deliberations.53 Moreover, for several decades from the 1610s to the early 1640s, numerous informal gatherings of senior clergy met at the residence of Cardinal La Rochefoucauld in his Parisian abbey of Sainte-Geneviève to discuss particular problems as they arose.54 The list of issues with which they dealt is a long one, but we need only recall their role in 1626–27 in opposing the parlement over Bishop Étampes’s gallican declaration and their censuring of Dupuy’s volumes on the gallican liberties in 1639, in order to realise the kind of latitude they enjoyed as ‘virtual’ assemblies of clergy. In both 1630 and 1639, Richelieu seems to have been tempted to use the Sainte-Geneviève assemblies to raise the money that the crown so badly needed, thus dispensing altogether with the more troublesome formal assemblies. A decade earlier, in 1630, the response he received was that papal approval would be needed for any alienation of church property.55 When he returned to the attack in 1639, a SainteGeneviève assembly of twenty-two bishops effectively declared themselves incompetent and insisted that only a formal assembly enjoyed such authority.56 One key sign of the importance of any assembly, lay or ecclesiastical, is how and when the crown began to realise the advantages of trying to influence

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elections to it. It is well known that it succeeded in ensuring that loyal deputies would be elected to the Estates-General of 1614, but how far it tried – or needed – to apply these efforts to the clerical elections of that, or previous, years remains unknown. The same may be said of the assemblies of clergy up to the 1620s. Richelieu certainly grasped the value of such efforts, but how soon he put that into practice cannot be said for certain. Pierre Blet could find no evidence for either the 1628 or the 1635 assembly, except for the province of Narbonne, some of whose bishops’ record during the 1632 revolt seemed wobbly to Richelieu.57 However, there is no denying that he did so quite systematically for the 1641 assembly. In addressing the 1645 assembly, Archbishop Montchal assumed that it was common knowledge by asserting that his audience had no need to hear of it again. In fact, Richelieu’s own correspondence makes it clear that he wrote explicit letters to certain archbishops who, as presidents of the provincial electoral assemblies, played a major role in the final electoral decisions in 1641; the papal nuncio had no difficulty in obtaining the list of the ‘Richelieu candidates’, which he duly despatched to Rome. But even Richelieu could be caught out: the two archbishop-presidents of 1641 (Toulouse and Sens) were either elected before Richelieu could intervene or his efforts were simply ignored by the electors. This is credible when it is realised that Richelieu’s own brother, Alphonse (known as the Cardinal of Lyon), was little inclined to follow orders from court.58 For his first assembly in 1645, Mazarin wrote similar letters to France’s archbishops indicating his preferred candidates. But in some cases neither he nor his correspondents were able to control the elections, with the result that deadlocked votes had, as usual, to be finally decided by the assembly itself when it met, and its decisions were not always favourable to Mazarin’s candidates.59 It seems that it was during Mazarin’s ministry that such techniques for influencing elections to assemblies were complemented with an inducement mechanism for deputies once the assemblies were in session. The tactic adopted was to suspend the granting of vacant church benefices, especially bishoprics and abbeys in commendam, until the closure of an assembly. It is hard to imagine that it never occurred to Richelieu, but from the early Mazarin years the practice is not merely obvious in the evidence of how benefices were subsequently granted, but it actually figures in Mazarin’s own carnets. We can eavesdrop on him as he ruminates in 1645 about whether to inform the assembly that the king wished to grant the vacant bishoprics of Tréguier and Bazas to two deputies from their ranks. Nor can such musings have been private, as a senior diplomat was informed by a correspondent from Paris that ‘the distribution of vacant benefices, which include fourteen abbeys and two dioceses, will not happen, as it is believed, while the assembly is in session; it is a bouquet whose fragrance they wish the deputies to smell first’.60 The tactic

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worked sufficiently well to become permanent, and it was common practice under Louis XIV only to announce appointments to major benefices immediately after the conclusion of the assemblies.61 By mid-century, election to an assembly had, for a younger generation of clerics in a hurry to reach the heights within the French church, or for existing bishops anxious to obtain a better diocese, become an attractive prospect. By the same token, it was further evidence of the assembly’s emergence as a ‘normal’ institution within the politico-ecclesiastical landscape, and one that was capable of showcasing the political abilities of new generations of senior church figures. Archbishop Harlay of Rouen and later of Paris, who dominated church politics from the 1660s to his death in 1695, first emerged in the limelight as a masterly president of the assemblies of clergy.62 Similar considerations apply to the two agents-généraux that each assembly elected for a five-year term to manage the clergy’s affairs in the interim. These posts were of key importance in maintaining continuity: the agents had access to the royal council and they corresponded regularly with the leading clerical figures of the kingdom. Their existence and numerous activities led to the creation of a bureau and an archive which became the working memory of the French church’s main dealings with the monarchy. Because of their importance, it is no surprise that the election of agents gave rise to ministerial pressure to elect particular candidates or to pre-empt the decision of the assemblies. Richelieu’s intrusion of his own candidate as an agent-général in 1641 is the best-known instance of this, but it met with widespread disapproval, leading to the agent’s eviction from the post in 1645; if similar pressure was exercised during subsequent decades, it was far more subtle. But perhaps the most revealing development is that by Louis XIV’s reign an increasing number of the agents-généraux went on – and firmly expected – to become bishops almost immediately on completing their term in office. This perspective almost certainly made them relatively ‘biddable’ in dealing with royal ministers, but there is little evidence that they seriously failed to defend the interests, financial or otherwise, of the French church during their mandate. The election of both deputies and agents-généraux was bound to attract the attention of ministers, but by comparison with similar processes for political assemblies, in France or elsewhere in early modern Europe, it seems that the ‘clergy of France’ maintained a high degree of control over its own affairs.63 A final pointer to the growth of the assemblies’ stature is their capacity to worry the Roman curia. The latter’s general unease at the gallican maxims ran deep, making it perennially sensitive to slights or challenges to its authority. That sensitivity did not relate only to the parlements, with their known dislike of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and of pro-papal tendencies, especially in the theology faculties. The assemblies, too, fitted into this picture of uncertainty,

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doubt and suspicion. As the third party to the crown–church relationship in France, Rome was probably even less keen on assemblies than the monarchy, with which it generally preferred to deal directly. It was perennially nervous that they might allow themselves to be carried away over particular issues (as happened in 1625) on which their sensitivities were equal to those of Rome itself. It would probably be going too far to assert that Rome was in trepidation at the onset of each assembly, but its nuncios in Paris regarded themselves as fortunate if their term there did not coincide with an assembly. To a nuncio seeking ways of avoiding an assembly in 1628, the papal secretary of state replied that although it was difficult to prevent such an assembly, he should not give up trying.64 Perhaps because, rather than in spite of their strictly limited powers within France, as compared with other Catholic countries like Spain, papal nuncios there were always carefully instructed to follow the assemblies’ deliberations closely, to use all available means to head off unpleasant surprises, and to keep the curia itself fully informed, especially of unwelcome developments. That the nuncios usually did so quite effectively is one reason why it is possible to write a comprehensive history of those assemblies. From the assemblies’ perspective, unjustified papal intervention in the affairs of the French church was a major concern, but the frontier between justified and unjustified intervention was itself in constant motion. Their fear, as we have seen, that the papacy might devolve, over their heads, ‘sovereign’ powers to judge French bishops for rebellion, as it did in the early 1630s, was powerful enough to resurface – and successfully – at different moments during the Jansenist conflict under Louis XIV. Their more long-term fear of the alienation of church property or the raising of special subsidies for the crown on the basis of papal consent was even more ‘existential’ for the assemblies, as they would quickly become redundant as a consequence. As we have seen, their reactions to these and other sources of disagreement could be heated, provoking fears in Rome that the assemblies might mutate into national councils of the gallican church, the papacy’s worst nightmare where France was concerned. Papal nuncios, who were not always experienced diplomats, were often the first to make such predictions and transmit them to the curia. But it would take more fundamental problems than those examined so far – how to handle the Jansenist question or the fallout from the régale affair, for example – for such a prospect to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, the elaborate political theatre of the assemblies, with their audiences, sermons, and closing speeches to the king, was geared towards building a sense of common purpose and mutual understanding between church and monarchy whose effectiveness in a face-to-face society cannot be underestimated.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Obedient Rebels? The Protestants from Nantes to Nîmes

I

t would be all too easy to imagine that France’s Protestant churches and population of the early seventeenth century were distant spectators to the controversies or conflicts discussed in the three preceding chapters. However, their presence – and the challenges that it posed – was never far from the minds of those who engaged in such exchanges. In addition, some of the leading Protestant intellectuals were vigorous critics of Bellarminian ideas, and keen supporters of their fellow Protestant king, James I, especially in connection with the oath of allegiance he imposed on English Catholics.1 Participation in these controversies could not but inflect their own views on political power in relation to religion. It should also be noted that by the early 1600s, France’s Protestants had their own internal theological and political discords; they, in turn, became part of the pan-European confrontations at the Calvinist Synod of Dort, held in the Netherlands in 1618–19, whose hard-line resolutions over questions of grace and predestination were eagerly adopted in 1620 by the French churches.2 Indeed, it has been said of the Protestant churches during the decades after Henry IV’s accession to the throne that ‘the more secure they felt, the more contentious were the actions they took’. In particular, they continued to amplify and fine-tune their own confession of faith – the Confession of La Rochelle – and at the ‘fateful synod’ of Gap in 1603 they went further than any anti-papalist writer encountered so far in these pages by declaring the Pope to be Antichrist, explicitly condemning his ambitions to wield temporal as much as spiritual power.3 In the ‘controversies’ between Catholic and Protestant propagandists of the seventeenth century, this inflammatory assertion positively invited attack, proving to be a major weakness for the Protestants in a kingdom that increasingly advertised its Catholic identity. And once it had been incorporated into the Confession of La Rochelle, it enjoyed formal protection under the Edict of Nantes, which as time passed only reminded Catholics of how much they disliked the edict itself.4

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I By 1600, the Huguenot population had been approximately halved from its high point of about 2 million adherents in 1562, but its overall geography remained largely the same.5 The sheer distance separating the ‘Huguenot crescent’ in the Midi and the west from the monarchy’s nerve centre ensured the southern majority a degree of autonomy which their northern brethren lacked; that, in turn, would perpetuate significant differences in Protestant attitudes and behaviour in subsequent decades. The network of churches had, however, become somewhat less dense, declining in numbers during the wars; but that drop was probably concealed for the time being by the disproportionately high number of Protestants living in towns and cities. That particular characteristic would later become a problem, given the inability of urban populations during the early modern period to sustain their numbers without immigration from the countryside. The most significant exception was Béarn, where around three-fifths of the population reverted to Catholicism almost as soon as sixty years of princely cuius regio, eius religio was abruptly terminated in 1620.6 The overall fall in numbers owed hardly anything to the Catholic missions organised to try to persuade Protestants to change their religion, which did not really begin until the 1620s and which, even in their heyday, had limited impact on Huguenot numbers, especially in their core, southern regions.7 Far more significant were the conversions of Protestant grandees, which in some cases began soon after Henri IV’s own change of religion. In these cases, the consequences, which were not merely political, were out of all proportion to the number of individuals involved, as defections by major political and military figures could trigger real shifts in the confessional balance of power within whole provinces. At the same time, the quasi-federal institutions devised by France’s Protestants, beginning with the local church and consistory and moving, via colloquies and provincial synods, to the national assembly and national synod, continued to function relatively normally. The Edict of Nantes banned outright the national assemblies which had been proved such an irritant to Henri IV during the 1590s, but in fact they were quietly reinstated, with some restrictions, as early as 1601.8 Thereafter they met at some highly sensitive political moments until the last, unauthorised assembly convened in La Rochelle in 1620–22. But it was no secret that the regular national synods could fill the political void in the absence of political assemblies. For that reason, Richelieu tried to curtail the synods, too, after 1626, but they at least continued to meet, albeit at increasingly longer intervals and under ever closer royal surveillance, until 1659.9 The internal balance of power and influence within the Protestant community was unevenly shared between the nobility, the urban notables and the

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pastors, but the first and the last were themselves often deeply divided, especially over their political options. Despite his conversion, Henri IV insisted on continuing to act as protector of the Protestant churches, especially in the face of the temptation of some of their grandees to look elsewhere – even abroad – for such a key figure.10 But as king of France he could no longer really remain the chef de parti that he had been before 1589. Thereafter his relations with the Protestant nobility had to follow a different logic, one that was conceived in terms of loyal subjects serving a benevolent monarch and that was, consequently, at least partially ‘confession-blind’. Such a relationship also tended to fragment the Huguenot leadership into many personal interests, and may well be the reason why the Protestants generally fought so hard after 1598 to reinstate their political assemblies as a forum that would, as Henri IV’s former confidant, Duplessis-Mornay, put it, defend the bien des églises.11 Despite his long-standing antipathy towards them, Henri IV eventually bowed to the pressure to allow the assemblies to resume after 1601. After his death in 1610, the royal protectorship continued under Louis XIII, but it became far more nebulous and distant, opening up the prospect of greater independence of action for the churches and their leadership. But it would be wrong to infer that the Protestants were champing at the bit for political and military adventure; on the contrary, everything suggests that the vast majority were keen to make the best of the conditions of peace that had reigned since the late 1590s. It helped that those most capable of dragging their co-religionists into renewed conflict, the Protestant military aristocracy, were probably more mistrustful and divided among themselves around 1610 than at any time in the sixteenth century.12 II In the early seventeenth century, France’s Protestants also had to cope with the framework – and the restrictions – imposed on them by the successive settlements of the 1590s, of which their own, the Edict of Nantes, was only one. Much has been made of Henri IV’s celebrated berating of the Paris parlement for obstructing the registration of the edict, but it is less well known that the magistrates did successfully circumvent the royal will on several points and found their own ways of reinforcing the edict’s stated objective of restoring Catholicism across France. To take just one example: the magistrates substantially reduced the number of towns in which Protestant worship could be permitted by inserting a stipulation that it was not to be allowed in ‘episcopal’ towns, of which there were more than 110 throughout France, especially in the south where the Protestants and such towns were both most numerous.13 The devil was in the parlementaire detail of this and other

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modifications of the articles rather than in the royal rhetoric, since it was the registered version of the edict that, despite successive efforts to have it amended, enjoyed the force of law thereafter. Given the widespread dislike of the edict within Protestant communities, it is hardly surprising that the authorities of La Rochelle, among others, were virtually mutinous when they discovered the existence of these last-minute sleights of hand.14 Much later, in the age of Louis XIV, Catholics seeking to overturn the Nantes settlement found in these alterations, not an improbable glorification of the parlement, but another useful argument for considering the edict to be open to further revision.15 The point here is not to claim that the subsequent history of France’s Protestants turned on such putatively decisive moments, but to underline just how resilient and determined opposition to religious coexistence remained among the higher ranks of the political elites, Protestant as well as Catholic, after so many years of strife.16 The following pages will examine how the first post-Nantes generation dealt with coexistence, renewed civil war and a revived Catholic church. Like its predecessors, the pacification and religious coexistence envisaged by the edict needed implementation and oversight, initially by ad hoc royal commissioners and subsequently by the bipartisan tribunals (the chambres mi-parties), as outlined in the edict itself.17 The commissioners despatched to the provinces had first to secure registration of the edict by the provincial parlements, from which they faced different degrees of opposition but, with one exception (that of Rouen), that process was completed by August 1600.18 Once that was done, their task was to secure compliance with the edict within the localities – a much more formidable challenge. Nothing is more revealing of the difference in status between the Catholic and the Protestant churches post-1598 than the manner in which the commissioners went about their task. The ubiquity of Catholicism across France was a principle which brooked no exemption in law, whereas a Protestant place of worship was a concessionary privilege granted to a corporate body in specific places, and not to individuals in their own right. As such, it had to be assessed case by case in accordance with a series of criteria; it also needed extensive proof, since it might be challenged at any time in law. However straightforward securing the full restoration of Catholicism in areas long dominated by Protestantism might seem in principle, it too was a massive challenge, since it entailed not merely restoring religious services, but the return of the Catholic clergy, as well as of the church properties which had been confiscated and which were usually by now in private hands.19 In the short time available, the early commissioners could only undertake the initial steps of this process; the latter would overlap in due course, and especially in the larger towns, with the arrival of a new wave of religious orders, male and female, whose presence,

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while often opposed tooth and nail, would gradually change the face of towns that had hitherto ignored them.20 Within many towns, confessional settlement patterns solidified, leading to varying degrees of territorial segregation; that evolution could in turn be closely related to the presence of the respective churches and cemeteries, whose location – should Protestant ones be inside or outside the city walls? – was so often the subject of prolonged and sometimes fierce disputes.21 In areas dominated by one confession, the installation or restoration of their adversary was frequently a protracted affair, which could include violence and litigation; in others, where truces and peace pacts had earlier been entered into on local initiative, there was already a promising basis for legislated coexistence to work. The ‘hardness’ index of confessional identities would determine how much peaceful interaction was possible at local level, though we should not assume that the hardening process was close to finished around 1600–20; in many parts of France it still had a long way to go.22 Whereas the royal commissioners were short-term negotiators and troubleshooters, it was the chambres mi-parties which were expected to control and defuse local inter-confessional conflicts by finding judicial solutions for them. But as they faced real difficulties from the outset and their predecessors had not worked well, this was not as straightforward as it might appear. Some provinces wanted the new courts, others strongly opposed them, but neither always got their preferred choice.23 Only three of the chambres (Grenoble, Toulouse and Bordeaux) were fully mi-partie, with equal confessional membership; they were all in southern France, where nothing less would have been acceptable. Both the Paris and the Rouen parlements successfully avoided such an outcome, despite their very extensive territorial jurisdiction. With only one Protestant member at a time (who had to face fifteen Catholic counterparts in Paris) their chambres were considered simply as chambres de l’édit. Aix, Dijon and Rennes had no such chambres at all, with the result that their Protestants had to appeal to the nearest parlement which did have one. More seriously, the parlements involved tended to hold these ad hoc chambers in disregard, and did much to marginalise them. Toulouse relegated its chambre to Castres, a Protestant stronghold, while Bordeaux banished its chambre to Nérac. The parlements generally considered them to be inferior to their own chambers and members and, in the case of Bordeaux, as a separate institution of lower standing. Such a status deficit increased uncertainty about the permanence of the chambres, which in turn did not bode well for their wider effectiveness. Their remit was a complicated and daunting one – to enforce royal justice, which included the oubliance clauses of the edict; to reassure the Huguenots while not themselves becoming partisans of the Protestant ‘cause’; and to adjudicate

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on a multitude of day-to-day issues such as marriage, on which Catholics and Protestants held diametrically opposed convictions. And in a country whose civil laws did not reflect or correspond to Protestant religious principles, the activities of these chambres were always capable of raising serious problems for the Protestant churches. Firstly, the Protestant magistrates sitting in the chambres were more than likely to be members of a local church consistory whose tasks included imposing religious discipline on their own congregations. Wearing these two hats simultaneously created conflicts of interest for magistrates, but the very existence of a special royal jurisdiction created wider problems for consistories in the exercise of discipline over their congregations. Indeed, disgruntled Protestants unwilling to accept their consistory’s decisions could appeal to the chambre, whose jurisprudence held that many religious misdeeds were not crimes deserving punishment. Here, as elsewhere, secular law courts did not welcome religious bodies taking it upon themselves to punish sins that were crimes, as they believed that no such jurisdiction belonged to church bodies.24 With the chambres obliged to implement royal law (e.g. on marriage and parental consent), there was an inbuilt tension that, even without other contributory factors, could make for strained relations between the key organs of ecclesiastical and secular rule – the ‘courts’, broadly speaking. In the short run, however, the post-1598 chambres performed better than the earlier attempts, with the volume of lawsuits providing a crude index of their pacifying effect on inter- and intra-confessional relations. Only two such chambres, Paris and Castres, have been closely studied by historians. The Paris chambre made a genuine effort to distinguish cases of private interpersonal violence from those committed under wartime conditions that were covered by the oubliance clause of the edict.25 Such a capacity for relatively evenhanded justice in relation to past or recent events appears to have gradually reassured the Protestants. If we can judge from the records of the Castres chambre in Languedoc, it seems that it fulfilled expectations in an especially volatile province up to – and well beyond – 1630, and that the vast majority of the cases brought before it related to current, ongoing conflicts.26 That kind of success only reminded the Catholic majority how much it disliked enforced religious coexistence per se and the institutions that personified it. The capacity for such chambres and other special commissions to function effectively obviously depended on the wider political context. So long as the principal artisan of confessional coexistence lived, the benefits of peace became increasingly evident, as post-1600 France recovered from its wounds. Henri IV’s own readiness to turn a blind eye to breaches of the strict letter of the 1590s settlements and to tolerate anomalous situations so long as they consolidated peaceful coexistence certainly helped; the price for that

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laissez-faire would be paid later in more rigorous times. The ability to prevent the respective grandees, Catholic and Protestant, from returning to their previous habits was also crucial; evidence of conspiracy by some Protestant aristocrats previously close to the king did surface, in 1602 and 1606 for example, but such moves were firmly dealt with.27 The Protestants’ success in having their political assemblies reinstated de facto after 1601 also helped to keep the grandees within the political fold; thereafter, the assemblies convened every three years to elect (and after 1608 to present a short list from which the king would choose) two standing ‘general deputies’ who would be based at court as quasi-ambassadors, to represent Protestant interests. These arrangements partially mimicked those of the Catholic assemblies of clergy and their two ‘general agents’. Like other representative bodies, the assemblies, which only took permanent shape in 1579–80 (at precisely the same time as the Catholic assemblies), regularly presented the king with their doléances, which drew his attention, often sharply, to the numerous violations of the royal edicts protecting the religious minority; royal interventions in response to such complaints played a useful role in defusing local passions, while reassuring the Protestants that redress from on high was still available to them.28 Maintaining a significant Protestant presence at court and in government was another source of reassurance; too successful a conversion campaign or too exclusively ‘Catholic’ a court or ministry would have had a negative effect, especially among the higher nobility still susceptible to suggestions that Henri IV had done little to reward their loyalty.29 The royal reluctance to receive the decrees of the Council of Trent and the cultivation of Protestant alliances abroad, in addition to occasional suggestions of a new general council to reunite the churches, gave those who worried about Henri IV’s politico-religious evolution reasons to feel assured.30 Such benefits probably offset, from a Huguenot perspective, failures elsewhere – such as the partial or erratic payment of the royal subsidies for pastors and security town garrisons. They could never satisfy those who continued to lament the failure to establish a Protestant monarchy after 1589, but Henri IV’s assassination was a sharp reminder that conditions might well become much more difficult in the future. III In the short run, Marie de Medici’s regency government quickly reassured the Protestants by promptly renewing the Edict of Nantes, a gesture it repeated in 1612, 1614 and twice in 1615 alone. That of 1610 was followed by a somewhat reluctant authorisation to convene a political assembly at Saumur in 1611.31 The mutual rivalry of its leading grandees weakened the influence of the

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Protestant ‘party’ within the assembly itself. Steering the Huguenots away from rebellious causes during the early 1610s won them political dividends with the new regime, and accelerated the Protestant ‘accommodationist’ trend visible during the previous reign. A number of leading Protestant polemicists contributed to the debates over tyrannicide, the nature of royal power, and the relation of church and prince in these turbulent years. With the Pope now regarded by Protestants as Antichrist, the scope for controversy was seriously extended.32 Duplessis-Mornay’s contribution, The mystery of iniquity (1611), was a history of the papacy which charted its sinister evolution, while Pierre du Moulin’s Anti-Coton was the most stinging of all the attacks upon the Jesuits after Henri IV’s assassination.33 Their Catholic gallican counterparts could obviously not go quite as far in their anti-papal polemics, but rarely did the Protestants belong so effortlessly to the gallican cause. Yet these were not years of simply one-directional movement. In real-life politics the national assembly which met at Saumur in 1611–12 quickly exposed the kinds of internal differences among the Protestant leadership that would hamstring their cause over the next two decades.34 To understand this, a brief account of one the key mechanisms of Huguenot politics – and its wider context – is indispensable. In an assembly of seventy deputies, the thirty nobles were the single biggest contingent; the pastors and the ‘third estate’ had twenty each. The numerical strength of the nobility was further enhanced by their higher status, social and political. And in 1611, as on other occasions, several non-elected grandees attended the assembly on invitation, adding little, it seems, to the assembly’s political coherence. The internal tensions of the Protestant camp made them unable to agree on a common list of grievances (cahier des doléances) to the regent, Marie de Medici. The nobility’s dominance was such that the assembly found itself dividing into two groups, soon labelled the ‘resolute’ and the ‘cautious’ by the old hard-line warrior, Agrippa d’Aubigné; the names themselves suggest the differences between them as to how they should deal with the regency government. The two stances became quasifactions in Huguenot politics over the next decade, but the grandees regularly shuffled from one to the other depending on personal or family interests, and essentially on the need to gain, or preserve, influence at court. Similar forms of political behaviour had existed during the religious wars, but by the 1610s it gradually bred a widespread distrust within the wider Protestant community of its ‘natural’ leaders and the objectives that they pursued. In such circumstances, the defence of the ‘bien des églises’ as a general cause proved increasingly difficult to articulate.35 In 1611 and subsequently, a small handful of leading aristocrats – Sully, Duplessis-Mornay, Bouillon, Lesdiguières – tended to dominate the assemblies’ debates and restrained their demands of the crown, but as early as 1612 the ambitious young Henri de Rohan appeared as

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a possible alternative leader, prepared to lead the ‘resolute’ of the ‘party’ and pressurise the crown more energetically, if necessary by hinting at recourse to the use of force.36 The general political instability of France during the 1610s enabled the ‘resolute’ to position themselves as the committed defenders of the Protestant cause. In 1627 the quasi-official Mercure François would single out the 1611 Saumur assembly for opening the Pandora’s box of assemblies, conseils politiques and leagues (serments) that would later attempt to ‘build a state within the state’.37 Marie de Medici’s government may have been more obviously Catholic than Henri IV’s, but its desire to avoid a new wave of wars, religiously inspired or not, is clearly evident in the alacrity with which it renewed previous concessions (including those concerning the garrison towns) to the Huguenots. It went further than that by sending commissioners ‘of the edict’ to areas where religious tensions ran high in order to resolve local disputes; allowing the Saumur assembly to meet was also part of that effort to defuse the temptation towards rebellion.38 The civil wars of the 1610s (1614, 1615, 1616–17, 1619 and 1620) were all triggered and dominated by the French aristocracy, albeit in differing combinations and in shifting political contexts but always protesting at their lack of influence within the royal government. As such they were invitations to raise the stakes, although the parties involved denied that religious considerations had anything to do with their actions. Significantly the one partial exception was that of the Spanish marriages of 1615, to which the Huguenots were naturally opposed, fearing that they signalled a religious as well as a political rapprochement with Spain. It was that problem which led their peripatetic political assembly of 1615 to vote, after long debates and by a tiny margin, to back the ‘resolute’ faction in support of the prince of Condé’s second rebellion of that year, because it included opposition to the marriages.39 If it was virtually unavoidable that at least some Huguenot grandees would become involved in such revolts, blurring their aristocratic, political and religious positions, the assembly’s decision to respond to Condé’s overtures was deeply ironic: son and grandson of protectors of the Protestant cause, he seemed a plausible enough successor to them around 1615, only for his outand-out hostility to Protestantism to become notorious and enduring within a few years.40 Meanwhile the Protestants gained very little for their efforts, apart from the successive renewals by the crown of their privileges, which were not under real threat in any case. The majority of the grandees, as well as numerous cities and towns, refused categorically, despite the decision of their assembly, to support the 1615 revolt. This rejection revealed internal divisions that would not disappear, even in the more dire circumstances of the 1620s. If there is a conclusion to be drawn from this, it is that the great majority of the Huguenot population, their political and religious leaders included, had

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little stomach for rebellion, all the less as they realised that they might well become a pawn in power games whose stakes were not of major concern to them. In view of the continuous political fragility of these years, such an unwillingness augured well for the continuation of ‘ordinary’ peaceful coexistence, but that prospect was shattered by unfinished business from the previous century which, from a distance, might not seem capable of triggering full-scale revolt and almost a decade of civil war after 1620. IV There were several reasons why the confessional problems of Béarn – remote and small though it was – appeared too peripheral to have such an effect. In 1564, when the French monarchy was being forced into granting an early version of religious coexistence, Henri IV’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret, was moving in the opposite direction, exercising her right, qua prince, to Calvinise Béarn, suppressing Catholic services, exiling the clergy, and confiscating church property there.41 This was possible because Béarn was still a distinct principality belonging to the Bourbon–Albret dynasty, which Henri IV on becoming king of France continued to hold separately; this meant that it was in no way affected by French laws on confessional coexistence. But, pressed by the two Béarn bishops, the Catholic assemblies of clergy took up the cause of the Catholics there in the 1590s and repeatedly included it in their cahiers de doléances thereafter.42 And, as we saw, Clement VIII listed it among the obligations that Henri IV was required to fulfil in return for his absolution in 1595. Henri IV in turn understood that it was unlikely to disappear from the Catholic agenda, and in a balancing act less than a year after the Edict of Nantes, he issued a separate Edict of Fontainebleau designed as the Catholic population’s equivalent of Nantes within the principality.43 Implementing the Edict of Fontainebleau proved both far less easy and less urgent than that of Nantes. The fact that it was also far more skeletal and unspecific in its contents gave its supporters little to work with. Above all, the local Protestant elite, led by the Protestant royal governor, La Force, showed no inclination to give ground, proving themselves just as intransigent as Catholics when the positions were reversed. There were attempts at a union of the Béarnais Protestant churches with those of France in the early 1610s, with promises of mutual support in the case of conflict with the crown. Although the union was never formally consummated, that made little difference in practice, not least because the Béarnais also sent delegates to the political assemblies of those years. But such moves were potentially a two-edged sword, playing into the hands of those in the opposite camp, such as the young Pierre de Marca, who argued that a political union of France and Béarn would break

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the continuing religious logjam and secure the same privileges for the Catholic majority in Béarn as for the Protestant minority in France.44 When the young Louis XIII, only two months into his ‘real’ political majority, issued, in mid-June 1617, an edict for the restitution to the Catholic church of all church property seized in Béarn since 1569, it was an attempt to assert royal authority in the face of persistent local obstruction, but also a response to recent Huguenot involvement in rebellion within France itself. As before, however, the local tactic in Béarn was to prevaricate until the monarchy became distracted by more urgent problems.45 Three years later, in mid-1620, they were caught wholly unprepared. Having repressed with unexpected ease another aristocratic rebellion led by his mother, Marie de Medici, Louis XIII triumphantly marched his army into Béarn. He quickly forced the local authorities to comply with his edicts, sending powerful shock waves across Protestant France. The simultaneous royal decision to incorporate Béarn into France may seem like a piece of overdue political housekeeping that Henri IV had continually deferred, but as a demonstration of the perceived closeness of the crown’s political and religious agendas it confirmed the worst fears of Protestants across France that it would be their turn next.46 How much they knew – or cared – about the massive popular return to Catholicism in Béarn shortly after 1620 is more difficult to gauge, but it is unlikely that their response would have been defeatist rather than defiant, as the series of civil wars from 1620 to 1629 amply show.47 These wars, known for the rest of the century as the ‘wars of Monsieur de Rohan’, did not quite map on to the conflicts of the previous century, and neither side is likely to have anticipated a return to full-scale military confrontation after Louis XIII’s unopposed promenade militaire to the south-west in 1620. Yet the rapidity with which the last ever Protestant political assembly, convened in defiance of royal refusals at La Rochelle at Christmas 1620 and went about raising money and troops, as well as the scale of the subsequent mobilisation, demonstrated that decisions taken as long ago as 1612 by the Saumur assembly to subdivide France for political and military purposes had indeed been followed up, with the result that they could be promptly put into operation in 1620–21.48 Thus, each territorial ‘circle’ was placed under a Protestant grandee, whose willingness to confront the crown under arms and live with royal accusations of high treason was far from obvious to the 1620 assembly’s delegates themselves. In the event, most of the grandees remained inactive, which left it to the determined Rohan brothers, based in the western and southern provinces, to prove the driving force behind the three Huguenot wars of the 1620s (1621–22, 1625–26, 1627–29). It is unnecessary to engage in a detailed account of those wars, but a few observations are in order here.49 During 1621 and 1622 the Huguenots

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managed to stymie the crown’s efforts to regain complete military domination of France because their larger fortified towns (such as La Rochelle, Montauban and Montpellier) remained capable of resisting royal attack. But it comes as a surprise that the so-called ‘security towns’ were commonly the first to surrender when the royal army appeared before them; most of them did so without firing a single shot, possibly because they were often too small to defend themselves. Nevertheless, it is likely that they found their status as security towns more of a burden than an advantage, while their noble commanders or governors were ‘too closely linked to royal authority to be of any effective use to the wider Huguenot church’. By late 1622, the crown had recovered approximately half of those towns, thus seriously thinning out the landscape of fortified obstruction from one campaign to the next. By contrast, it was the southern towns that were not designated security towns that resisted the royal forces most fiercely and successfully after 1620.50 Louis XIII’s failure to take Montauban and then Montpellier was an obvious setback and a clear demonstration of the crown’s military limitations, but the terms of the resulting treaty of Montpellier (1622), which ended the first war, showed just how much the Huguenots had lost in a short time. The treaty also hinted that the Protestants were no longer invincible, and that they might be neither willing nor capable of defying the crown indefinitely.51 The brief second Huguenot revolt of 1625 and early 1626 obtained only patchy support in their main towns – support that was sometimes engineered by popular protests against the urban oligarchies – but the outcome did little more than confirm the status quo of 1622. However, by coming at a time when France was actively confronting the Habsburgs for control of the Alpine passes in the Swiss Valtelline, it was a painful reminder for the crown of the perils not just of fighting on two fronts at once, but of seeming to behave duplicitously in supporting Protestants abroad (the Swiss Grisons) while fighting them inside its own borders. These dilemmas were, as already noted in relation to the dévots, the subject of intense debate in governing circles for the rest of the 1620s. It was for such reasons that the 1625–26 revolt made a determined enemy of the Protestants out of Richelieu, who had only returned to ministerial office in mid-1624, and whose famous resolution to destroy their power derived more from this unsolicited and unwanted experience of revolt than from any maxims that he might have formulated in previous years.52 Yet, when an English naval expedition triggered the reluctant revolt of La Rochelle in mid-1627, there was no firm consensus within the governing elite around Louis XIII that the abscess of Protestant rebellion had to be pierced once and for all – nor that this was the ideal moment to attempt it. Despite the king’s own strong wish to impose obedience on his Protestant subjects, the political risks involved in pursuing the siege of a city regarded hitherto as impregnable

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were far more daunting than is usually realised; military failure was a real prospect and the resulting humiliation would almost certainly have ended Richelieu’s second ministerial career, not to mention compromising the chances of extending royal authority across provincial France. Success, when it did come in late 1628, was neither final nor complete, as it opened up other dilemmas that would lead in due course to the political crisis of 1630. V For all the determination of Louis XIII to suppress overt rebellion, some of the reasons for the diminished capacity of France’s Protestants to sustain revolt as they had during the wars of religion were, as we have just seen, internal to them; quite clearly, they were not faced by a royal military juggernaut like that of the age of Louis XIV. Their cause had always depended disproportionately on their aristocratic political and military leaders, but also on the local nobility’s privileges which enabled them to protect Protestant churches on their estates. As already noted, evidence of internal divisions within their ranks surfaced during the 1610s. The determined Rohan brothers, a generation younger than Sully and the grandees of Henri IV’s reign, consolidated their leadership of the increasingly assertive ‘resolute’ faction, and were prepared to look for assistance from abroad. Among their opponents, the desire to avoid conflict and serve the monarchy had become a habitus that extended far beyond the inner circle of those who were once – or still remained – close to the king. The population of that small circle was gradually reduced by the phenomenon of conversion among the higher nobility. Henri IV’s own conversion may initially have alienated some of his supporters, but in subsequent years the attraction of sharing the king’s religion was sufficient to persuade several major figures to follow his example. The prince of Condé, first prince of the blood, was brought up a Catholic despite his pedigree, but there were rumours in the early 1610s that he might convert to Protestantism in order to become its protector, which would have greatly enhanced his political authority. While important political Protestants like the dukes of Sully and Bouillon resisted royal blandishments to convert, there was a growing trickle of highranking conversions during the 1610s and 1620s, culminating in that of the oldest surviving political heavyweight, the duke of Lesdiguières, in 1622. The political significance of these conversions need hardly be stressed. In the case of Lesdiguières, who had dominated the heavily Protestant province of Dauphiné for decades, the widely expected outcome was that he would be made constable of France, and it was public knowledge that without a conversion this could not happen. Because its preconditions were so widely known, the Lesdiguières conversion set a pattern for the future. A protocol gradually

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evolved for high-ranking aristocratic converts, in which it was understood that the king would reward them with provincial governorships, military titles or high court office appropriate to their status and value as Catholics. The numerous pamphlets and ‘letters’ disseminated in print in order to explain – and exploit – the significance of these conversions were at pains to show that there was no greater expression of one’s fidelity to the king than to abandon one’s previous religion in order to adopt his. We should not dismiss such views as purely contrived, as they corresponded closely to Henri IV’s deliberate ‘personalisation’ of his relations with Protestant nobles. One pamphlet even asserted that Lesdiguières had renounced his Protestantism out of obedience to the king’s emphatic wish – if not command – that he become constable, in an attempt to overturn the common perception of his conversion as purely self-interested.53 For their part, some Protestant commentators feared that Lesdiguières’s conversion and elevation to the constableship would herald fullscale military mobilisation against them, while their Catholic counterparts welcomed the prospect of a France reunited under ‘one God, one king, one church’.54 The trajectory of Protestant aristocratic leaders like Lesdiguières was not one of a sudden embrace of royalism brought on by, and subsequent to, conversion. On the contrary, they were targets for conversion because over the years their political behaviour had been characterised by moderation within their own camp and, at the very least, of neutrality in moments of crisis, especially in the decade after Henri IV’s assassination. Such loyalism was a significant brake on Protestant militancy during this period, while without their neutrality in the wars of the early 1620s the crown’s military action would probably have been far more limited in scale. Finally, it was also expected – and this was one objective of the conversion narratives of the time – that the ‘great’ converts would themselves exert a cascading influence on their clients to follow their lead; even if the latter did not immediately take the ‘perilous leap’ with them, they could at least be relied upon to remain politically loyal to the crown during conflicts like those of the 1620s. When the smaller noble fry did convert, the Protestant churches on their estates lost their legal status, while the security towns of which they were often commanders or governors were effectively deleted from the list of such towns.55 Without such a pattern of behaviour, it would be impossible to explain why so many localities and security towns opened their gates with minimal or no resistance during the 1620s. VI It would be surprising if such developments were not reflected in the Protestants’ thinking on the political consequences of their religious position

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and convictions. Understanding their evolution requires taking a brief step backwards to the heyday of monarchomach ideas in the 1570s and early 1580s, as well as one forward towards the new intellectual map that the Protestants themselves created, for the most part during Henri IV’s reign. By the time the Bourbon succession became a reality, the monarchomach chapter of their intellectual history was largely over, even though several of their major champions, from Hotman to Duplessis-Mornay, continued to write on politicoreligious questions into the next century. Monarchomach thinking is all too often reduced to opposition to tyranny and justification of the killing of rulers viewed as tyrants. Such elements did belong to it, but its real substance lay in its affirmation of popular sovereignty, mixed forms of rule (prince and estates, for example), and the conditional character of both rule and obedience which was derived from – or expressed in terms of – a political contract between ruler and ruled. When Henri IV became heir to the throne in 1584, the Protestants formally abandoned such thinking, only for the Catholic League to appropriate and recalibrate it as part of its opposition to Henri IV. The League’s subsequent failure and the assassination of Henri IV discredited such ideas, impelling jurists and political thinkers to defend far more one-sided, ‘absolutist’ relations between kings and subjects.56 As a consequence, Protestant political thinking had henceforth to fit within a more conventional and narrower frame of reference, although changing circumstances did not always make such adjustments comfortable. This, as we shall see, did not prevent a partial revival of monarchomach ideas in the context of the 1610s and early 1620s. In the meantime, Protestant writers sought common ground with moderate Catholics and politiques against the Catholic League; and after 1600, they were only too happy to add fuel to the fire of the controversies within Catholicism over the relations of spiritual and temporal power, which enabled them to emphasise their own full acceptance of the independence and sovereignty of royal power, not least because it involved supporting a fellow Protestant monarch, James I, against his religious minority. It was far less clear, however, whether they supported the kind of Erastian royal supremacy over the church, let alone of episcopacy, that James himself personified at this juncture, since neither corresponded to their own tradition. In the wake of the 1610 regicide, the national synods of 1614 and 1617 formally condemned monarchomach doctrines and declared their adherence to the notion of divine right monarchy.57 This last decision reminds us that there were several forums for the definition and diffusion of Protestant thinking, both political and religious, which are more visible in the early seventeenth century than previously. They deserve attention here because of the way they map on to the geography of French Protestantism itself. The national synods were the ultimate source of religious

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authority and theological orthodoxy; from Gap in 1601 to Alès in 1620 (which adopted the Dort synod’s resolutions of 1619), they were particularly active.58 Nearly all of the eight Protestant academies in France (including Sedan, which only became part of France in 1642) were founded in a short burst between 1596 and 1604. Together with the local colleges and noble ‘académies d’exercice’, they became major educational centres, shaping the Protestant elites, especially their pastors and theologians but also important lay figures. By the early seventeenth century, it also was clear that there were significant intellectual differences between the northern and southern academies. The southern academies, primarily Nîmes, Orange and Montauban, were more self-confident owing to their location within the ‘Huguenot crescent’ and were also closer to Genevan orthodoxy. The more scattered minority of northerners had to make do with the two new academies of Saumur and Sedan, both of which were in touch with the world of German, Dutch and Scots Protestantism, and in particular their universities, whose influence made them more inclined to moderate the hard edges of Calvinist theologicopolitical orthodoxy. Surprisingly perhaps, Saumur and Sedan quickly emerged to dominate Protestant intellectual life in France, despite their geographical location and the theological differences between the two of them.59 Saumur came to flourish under the tutelage of the town’s celebrated governor-cumintellectual, Duplessis-Mornay, ‘the pope of the Huguenots’, while Sedan enjoyed the protection of the Huguenot grandee, Bouillon.60 Both academies hosted a long line of able and outspoken professors whose works were genuinely influential in shaping Protestant thinking, as is evident from the fact that the Montauban academy in the south-west gradually preferred to follow their lead rather than its less dynamic southern counterparts.61 Thus at Sedan, Daniel Tilenus (1565–1633), one of Bellarmine’s sternest Protestant critics and a champion of the Pope-as-Antichrist doctrine, endorsed the idea of the divinely ordained legitimacy of royal authority and the duty of subjects to obey without demur. He conceded, as did DuplessisMornay and some other contemporary Protestant divines, that if rulers interfered with the conscience or religion of subjects, resistance was justifiable, but he appears not to have pressed the argument beyond that point; ambiguity remained – perhaps deliberately – as to whether that resistance should be active or merely passive.62 Forced out of Sedan because of his moderate theological affiliations (Arminian) after the Synod of Dort, Tilenus published in 1622 an Avertissement, addressed to the La Rochelle assembly, which was a full-throttle condemnation of the Protestant revolt and the assembly that had authorised it.63 His successor at Sedan, the abrasive Pierre du Moulin (1568–1658), who frequently advised James I, insisted even more strongly on these key ‘absolutist’ features of the French monarchy, explicitly denying any

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right of resistance by subjects.64 In the 1620s, he wrote open letters summoning the Rohan brothers to lay down their arms and place their trust in God and the king. More provocatively still, he denied that even if the king were to withdraw the Edict of Nantes his Protestant subjects had the right to rebel because, as he wrote in 1622, ‘in his kingdom, the king of France is what the master is in his house’.65 A decade later he would assert that untrammelled royal power was a necessity so that the Huguenot population could be effectively protected from the hatred of Catholics.66 After a generation of supporting Henri IV and James I against the League, Bellarmine and the papacy, it is easier to understand how difficult it must have been to change gear and find arguments capable of legitimising the cause of revolt in the 1620s. The core elements of Protestant royalist political thinking were firmly in place by then and did not have to wait until after the revolts had ended in 1629. They had initially gained ground through their authors’ teaching, long before they appeared in their (mostly) theological treatises. In addition, the fact that Tilenus, du Moulin and perhaps others intervened directly in contemporary affairs, especially against the revolts themselves, ensured that their views became known to a much wider public. Thus by the time revolt reappeared in 1620–22, it was genuinely difficult to develop arguments to justify such disobedience. It is also perhaps no accident that it was lawyers rather than theologians who responded to the challenge, but that did not necessarily make the task any easier. However, the controversies of the late 1610s and early 1620s, especially over the problem of Béarn, did herald a partial return of monarchomach ideas, since the latter had survived longer there than in France. In mid-1611, Louis Turquet’s treatise, La monarchie aristo-démocratique, was published, although it had been written two decades earlier and was a product of an earlier political environment. Its title alone suggests how unwelcome it was in 1611, and it was even more so because of its denunciation of female rule.67 Another important defence of limited monarchy by Lambert Daneau, the Protestant reformer who was also a professor at the Orthez academy in Béarn, was apparently written in the mid-1580s but only appeared posthumously in 1596 as Christian politics. In it, Daneau tried to combine older ideas concerning Béarn’s ancient political privileges (the fors) with the notion of a mixed monarchy in which the prince’s oath is a mutually binding contract with his subjects; Daneau eschewed the earlier radicalism of Hotman and other monarchomachs in his search for a monarchy that would be moderate but also stable.68 If monarchomach ideas survived in Béarn, it was essentially because of their continuing relevance for local politics, which need not be discussed here.69 But as soon as Béarn’s politics began to agitate French Protestants generally, in 1616–17, such ideas were likely to percolate into France itself. Until his execution for treason and revolt

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in May 1622, the most forceful advocate of monarchomach thinking within France was Jean-Paul Lescun, himself a Béarnais who, in his capacity as the peripatetic representative of the Béarn churches in the late 1610s, tirelessly challenged those of southern and western France to make common cause with their fellow Protestants. His book, The calamity of Béarn (1620), provocatively evoked the oppression inflicted on the principality as a stark warning of what would happen to France’s Protestants. Like La Force, Lescun escaped just in time from Béarn to La Rochelle in 1620 where he presided over the illegal assembly during most of its last year and where, according to DuplessisMornay, he was one of two major ‘crackpots’ (folles têtes) in a gradually dwindling muster.70 At his subsequent trial for treason and rebellion, in mid-1622, the parlement of Bordeaux indicted him for, inter alia, publishing ‘the persecution of the reformed churches of Béarn’ (i.e. The calamity of Béarn) and plotting to found a republic while at La Rochelle.71 Indeed, during the early 1620s, it seems that most of the debates relating to the Protestants were responses to the La Rochelle assembly and its doings; they reveal the differences not just between Catholics and Protestants, but also among the latter themselves. We have already seen the ‘absolutist’ terms in which Tilenus, in his Avertissement of 1621, rejected the revolt, using language that was positively Bodinian in its emphasis on royal sovereignty: the latter had to be undivided and it was, of necessity, located above all ties based on mutual obligation as preached by monarchomachs.72 The La Rochelle assembly commissioned a reply to Tilenus from Theodore Brachet de la Milletière, who would later become a Richelieu client and convert to Catholicism. But in taking aim at Tilenus’s arguments and defending the Protestant revolt, Brachet did not return to Calvin’s or Beza’s writings about the rights of lower magistrates and other office-holders to resist unwarranted persecution by rulers. Instead he latched on to another argument previously used by Protestant writers which revolved around the mutual obligation of rulers and subjects. He defended the rights of ‘ancient and natural subjects’ of kings – rights which excluded slaves and which, he insisted, did not reduce the sovereign authority of rulers – as the basis of a ‘mutual obligation’ of the two parties. In the Protestants’ specific case, he argued, such an obligation had its basis in their fidelity to and support of Henri IV’s accession to the throne of France. That support formed the basis of a mutual obligation, of which the Edict of Nantes was a part, but which was now under threat. However, Brachet did not take this example from recent history so far as to make its terms – mutual obligation in the strict sense of the term – equally binding on rulers as on their subjects; he could not quite bring himself to brandish the older monarchomach idea of the ultimate power of the people over their princes when their contract was broken.73 This may suggest that Brachet and Tilenus were not worlds apart

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after all, but in his reply Tilenus removed all doubt by comparing Brachet to the sixteenth-century Anabaptist radicals, Thomas Müntzer and Jan of Leiden, adding that the principle of ‘cuius regio, eius religio’ was ‘one of the most beautiful features of sovereignty’.74 Given such intra-Protestant sensitivities, it is not surprising that although Agrippa d’Aubigné composed during these years a treatise on ‘the mutual duties of kings and their subjects’, which quoted the monarchomach writers of the 1570s against ‘absolute obedience’ and on the need to prevent kings from becoming tyrants, we do not know for certain if he was able to publish it by the time he fled to exile in Geneva in 1621.75 In fact, the main burden of Brachet’s argument was, as the title of his tract suggests (Discourse of the true reasons why those of the Religion can and should in good conscience resist under arms the open persecution which the enemies of their religion and of the state inflict on them), that the Protestants were faced with the necessity to defend themselves against a pan-European conspiracy involving the papal Antichrist, his minions (the Jesuits, Spain), and ‘fanatical Catholics’ generally. For this reason, a Protestant revolt against Louis XIII in 1622 was, he argued, really resistance not to the king but to the Pope, who had managed to dragoon the king into supporting him; in this perspective, a successful Protestant revolt would restore the independence of king and country.76 Brachet’s arguments were repeated by some other Huguenot writers of these years (for example, Lescun and Pierre Bérauld of Montauban), who also tried to claim that the misdeeds of evil counsellors and subordinate magistrates were a proper basis for resistance. However, it is significant that none of them, Brachet included, could find a way to articulate a clear, fullblown right of direct resistance to the monarchy.77 Instead, they went into print to uphold legitimate self-defence by Protestants rather than to define – or defy – royal authority per se; the idea of a religious persecution specifically directed against them was their main intellectual resource. It enabled Brachet, Lescun and many others to participate in the La Rochelle assembly. Bérauld, a pastor and professor at Montauban who wrote a treatise defending the right of pastors to carry arms if religion itself were under attack, would actively lead, les armes à la main, the city’s resistance to Louis XIII from 1621 to 1629.78 Though his work was condemned by a national synod once the wars had ended, it seems that Bérauld’s argument of the imminent danger to religion was sufficient warrant for many pastors to support rebellion and, no doubt, to preach the same message to their congregations.79 During that first revolt of 1621–22, which witnessed a far higher number of publications than the subsequent wars of the 1620s, the French monarchy strongly denied that it was engaged in a religious war, claiming that it was dealing with rebels who refused to obey its legitimate authority.80 Most of the criticisms levelled against the La Rochelle assembly focused on precisely that

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point, and the indignation level soared after the assembly’s formal order of May 1621 to mobilise military forces and raise funds on a regional, circle-bycircle basis. This was immediately singled out by defenders of the monarchy as an egregious usurpation of sovereign regalian rights. As one such attack put it, it was not just a matter of establishing a state within a state, which was evidently bad enough; it was intending to create a new form of state which could only exist outside the present one. Between them, the attacks that followed revived the image of La Rochelle itself as a lair for rebels and insoumis who spawned the anarchy that was the very opposite of what a well-ordered state aspired to be. Along with that came the accusation of promoting republicanism similar to that of the Dutch cities and Geneva, the two habitual bugbears of defenders of a French absolute monarchy; the fact that an assembly had replaced the nobility as the face of Huguenot militancy only seemed to confirm that odious connection.81 During these years, La Rochelle took on virtually all of the characteristics of a political world turned upside down, and emerged as the monarchy’s ‘Other’.82 Almost inevitably, Louis XIII’s insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, the connections between heresy and disobedience seemed too obvious and too dangerous for contemporary critics to ignore. None of the arguments deployed seem to have been especially original, but identifying heresy as the fons et origo of political disorder set the stage for the wars of the late 1620s.83 VII Many Protestants had viewed the Béarn affair of 1620 as the first step in a conscious plan to destroy their privileges and eliminate them from France as a whole. Such a response triggered further royal military action against them, thus setting a pattern of conflict based on increasing mutual suspicion for the rest of the decade. If the initial thrust against Béarn was largely opportunistic, and not the result of a systematic design on the part of the monarchy, it was certainly born of pent-up exasperation at the persistent insubordination of the Protestants there. Other forms of insubordination were hardly less widespread, but that of Béarn had a high political profile that was a serious source of mortification for a monarch as obsessed with being obeyed as Louis XIII. In the following years, he showed particular animosity to those – especially towns, but also military commanders and local political leaders – who defied royal authority; a growing number of them were punished for it by either collective massacre or individual execution. Louis XIII’s sobriquet ‘the Just’ indicates a severity of chastisement that stands in sharp contrast with the ‘clemency’ adopted by his father.84 It fell to a succession of favourites and ministers, from Luynes to Richelieu, to fashion an explicit political credo out of this

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visceral insistence on obedience. The royal ideology which they – and Richelieu in particular – developed owed a great deal to the core convictions of a monarch who saw himself as God’s anointed with a mission to govern accordingly. They did not always agree on how to approach the task that was theirs. Where Pierre de Bérulle called for royal justice to be tempered by the forgetting of offences and the reduction of punishments, Richelieu distinguished the Christian from the prince, whose duty it was to chastise offenders.85 In dealing with the Huguenot revolts of the 1620s, the king’s refrain of ‘I shall be obeyed’ was an apposite one, because it distinguished religion from politics.86 This is not to deny that Louis XIII could, and did, express his dislike of Protestants as ‘heretics’, but such religious aversion was not constant or consistently displayed by the king.87 It did not prevent him from appealing to the zeal of Catholics in many parts of southern France when he needed their support during the 1621 campaign and later; that kind of language appealed especially strongly to Catholic bastions like Toulouse.88 Some historians have argued that after Louis XIII’s coup d’état of 1617 his favourite, Luynes, gave a free hand to the dévots, but this assumes that there was a dévot party, as distinct from dévots, already in existence and waiting for its hour to come.89 Richelieu’s future confidant, the Capuchin Père Joseph, was one of the most hyper-active dévots hoping for a full-scale anti-Protestant crusade during the early 1620s, but his judgements at the time on the religious politics of the Luynes and postLuynes governments (1617–24) were scathing. His despairing letters asking for a redoubling of prayers and trust in God’s designs provide their own commentary upon the limitations, from his perspective at least, of the crown’s ambitions, even if they can hardly be taken as objective.90 The return of Marie de Medici to an influential role in politics by 1622 helped, as we have already seen, to reunite the political elites at court and enabled dévot figures, some of whom, like Richelieu, were her protégés, to assume ministerial office by the mid1620s. But the sheer difficulty of disentangling domestic from foreign priorities at this point was a potent recipe for caution, postponing indefinitely the kind of grand anti-Protestant crusade that Père Joseph and others hankered after. On the other hand, it did gradually strengthen the conviction that until Protestant revolt was no longer a serious threat, France would not have a free hand in dealing with its neighbours, Catholic or Protestant. During these same years, Bérulle, who would replace Richelieu as Marie de Medici’s chief adviser in 1628–29, was no less active than Père Joseph in urging Louis XIII and his circle to measure up to the divine expectations of the most Christian king. In the preface, addressed to Louis XIII, of his major work, Les grandeurs de Jésus (1623), Bérulle presented an elaborate Platonic-Dionysian vision of the French monarchy, based on the harmony of the earthly and heavenly hierarchies, in which there was no place for heresy, because heresy was fundamentally

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disorderly; if the king was the image of God, he was also his lieutenant and vassal, and therefore bound to do his will. The coupling of heresy and disorder here was not accidental. Because he insisted that the king was also the essential source of unity in the kingdom, Bérulle worked tirelessly to retrieve and proclaim a human model for French kings to follow. In opting for St Louis IX he could hardly have done better at this juncture: the ancestor of the Bourbon dynasty, who had long been neglected in favour of other patron saints such as St Denis or St Michel, he was above all a crusading monarch whom Bérulle described as ‘the great Saint Louis who made the Orient tremble with his arms and his name. Heresy knows no such kings or saints.’91 When the La Rochelle revolt began in mid-1627, the dévots were probably the most determined to make sure that it was also the last. They were especially eager to emulate the successes of the Catholic cause in the empire after the battle of the White Mountain (1620), which propagandists (and the Capuchins in particular) had made famous as a mystical encounter of God’s will and Catholic arms. The fall of La Rochelle, that nest of heretics, rebels and the ungodly, would finally heal the wounds inflicted by heresy on France.92 Not surprisingly, Père Joseph rapidly mobilised his Capuchins of the province of Poitou, arriving at La Rochelle even before Louis XIII and Richelieu; along with the Jesuits who had been despatched there, the Capuchins began to preach, confess and exhort the soldiers of the royal army to fight in what they presented as a full-blown crusade. Even the politically experienced Bérulle made a point of telling Richelieu that the walls of La Rochelle would fall thanks to prayers and God’s will, and not because of careful planning or other human calculations.93 It was in many ways symbolic of the dévot commitment that the founding of the future hammer of French Protestantism, the Company of the Holy Sacrament, was suspended between mid-1627 and early 1630 because its principal instigator, the duc de Ventadour, was too busy on military duty.94 The fall of La Rochelle offered unprecedented scope – particularly in the official Mercure François but even more so in the deluge of images to which its capture gave rise – for proclaiming God’s special protection of the monarchy, with numerous references to Louis XIII as a roi-soleil and the worthy successor of the crusading Louis IX.95 The hyperbolic language of the congratulations, especially from the Pope, that were received by Louis XIII hailed him as a saviour prefigured in the Old Testament and anointed by God.96 Similar crusading imagery accompanied the final anti-Huguenot campaigns of 1629. Once again, the Capuchins and others followed the royal armies into the remaining southern Protestant strongholds, and began preaching missions to revitalise Catholicism there. Père Joseph’s own particular gift for organising surveillance and information-gathering also proved so valuable in helping

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to contain local Huguenot resentments after 1629 that the monarchy decided to fund Capuchin preaching missions in their former bastions of the Midi.97 VIII The actual passage from war to peace within France in 1629 has received relatively little attention from historians.98 In particular, it is almost universally assumed that the fall of La Rochelle meant that the military campaign against the surviving Huguenot bastions in 1629 was a kind of military promenade similar to that of Béarn in 1620. On closer inspection, this assumption appears facile, though it can be explained by the way in which the peace-making process of 1629 was ‘doctored’ by Richelieu for his immediate political purposes.99 La Rochelle’s surrender in October 1628 was not the end of the Huguenot wars. That was due to the fact that in the same year the resourceful Rohan, who had retreated southward into Languedoc, persuaded the province’s previously neutral Protestants, who were by now exasperated by Condé’s scorched-earth tactics in the province, to enter the war only a few months before the fall of La Rochelle.100 Rohan then galvanised local resistance to royal power and managed to fortify some of the major towns, so that when the royal armies in Savoy were diverted back into southern France in May 1629 to mop up the rebellion there, they found the opposition much tougher than anticipated, especially in the Cévennes, where Richelieu himself privately admitted that he had no desire to campaign.101 And, as in the early 1620s, it was the capacity of the principal fortified towns like Nîmes, Sauve and Anduze to defend themselves that threatened to wreck the crown’s tight military timetable, which was by now focused overwhelmingly on operations in northern Italy. Furthermore, Rohan’s subsequent political success in persuading the Huguenot political assembly of lower Languedoc, then in session, not to allow individual towns to break away to cut their own deals with the crown, as the government evidently assumed they would, was crucial; it significantly strengthened his hand, both militarily and diplomatically. As a result, both sides were ready – and, indeed, needed – to parley by midsummer 1629. The outcome was a general settlement that came in two stages, the Peace of Alès and then, some weeks later, the Edict of Nîmes. The first, a set of articles for a general pacification negotiated by Rohan, dealt with the conditions under which the war should be concluded and was quite favourable in its language and its terms to the rebels, possibly because the duke had persuaded the larger, unconquered towns to accept the end of the military conflict; its second article, coming immediately after the amnesty for the rebels themselves, explicitly preserved the Edict of Nantes.

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By contrast, the format and rhetoric of the Edict of Nîmes issued a few weeks later are quite different from the outset. Its extensive preamble presents a one-sided, potted history of events since La Rochelle; it refers exclusively to royal ‘graces and concessions’, giving no hint of any negotiation or grant other than what the king wished. In particular, the articles that are common to the peace and the edict were moved around so that the edict loudly proclaimed a Catholic victory, albeit one that needed to be completed. This is patent in the first three articles of the edict, where there is no mention whatever of the Edict of Nantes; two of the three articles did not figure in the text of the Peace of Alès at all. The first article (which had been the last in the Peace of Alès) orders the full restoration of Catholicism wherever it has been suppressed; the second, which expresses the desire for a permanent union among the king’s subjects, is a forcefully worded exhortation to Protestants to ‘lay aside every passion so as to be able to receive the light of heaven and return to the bosom of the church’. Then, as if the edict was initially conceived as some kind of reform ordinance, the next article demands that curés who are ‘bons, suffisans et capables’ be appointed throughout France. That unexpected train of thought ends abruptly there, and from the fourth article onwards the edict reverts to more familiar issues. In contrast to the emphasis placed on the setting aside of passion and hatred – the ‘real’ roots of rebellion – and the return to full obedience to the king, the amnesty for Rohan and his supporters, as well as the reaffirmation of the Protestants’ religious liberty (arts 5 onwards), slipped down among the list of relatively ‘ordinary’ items.102 These differences in emphasis and content can be partly explained by the specific purposes of the two settlements. The Peace of Alès was dictated by the urgent need to extricate crown forces from a civil war that threatened to drag on for too long, while the Edict of Nîmes was directed towards the future, now that the security towns, political assemblies and other features of the Huguenot presence over more than a half-century were being consigned to history. No reader of the edict could mistake its call for the religious reunion of France, whose consequence would be a powerful union of subjects and king capable of eradicating the sources of political disobedience. Nevertheless, it dashed the hopes of most Catholics that the Edict of Nantes itself – and not just the brevets that accompanied it – should be withdrawn and religious coexistence buried for good. The hand of Richelieu is visible in this rapid repackaging of the end of the Huguenot wars, which for immediate political reasons needed to be presented as an undiluted triumph of clear thinking and strategy, with no traces of short-term necessity. By presenting the crown’s desire for religious reunion in its best light, and inviting the ‘forces vives’ of France to engage in the task, he was attempting to square the political circle which religious coexistence with the Protestants had come to represent; but he was also trying to

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fend off those critics who claimed that he had betrayed the cause of ‘one law, one faith, one king’ at a decisive moment. Richelieu had enjoyed considerable luck over La Rochelle, as failure to take it in 1627–28 would, as already noted, almost certainly have ended his political career; success proved a massive boost to his political capital, above all in the enigmatic Louis XIII’s support for him, without which he could hardly have survived the opposition of the dévots and other political enemies after 1629. As for France’s Protestants, the 1629 settlement left them to find their way in a society in which they no longer possessed the special privileges that had defined them hitherto, a subject to which we shall turn in a later chapter.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Jansenist Dilemmas

B

y the late 1630s, it probably seemed that the embers of the different politico-religious conflicts examined so far had virtually burned out. Under a determined and vigilant cardinal-minister, Richelieu, who had got his hands on the levers of the power of both church and state to an unprecedented degree, an undeniable mastery of events was restored by comparison with the previous decades, when such crises tended to brew up unexpectedly, often escalated, and then defied orderly resolution. Thus, as we saw, the publication in 1639 of Pierre Dupuy’s comprehensive treatise on the gallican liberties elicited relatively few responses – apart from those of the papacy and the SainteGeneviève assembly of clergy, whose censure of the work did not really affect its subsequent history or availability. However, while Richelieu’s defeat of the dévots in 1630 enabled France to engage in the European war with limited public opposition from within France itself, he knew well enough that opposition to the regime and its policies was widespread. He kept tabs on individuals who still seemed capable of trouble-making, imprisoning several of them without trial in the later 1630s. Such pre-emptive efficiency, in which Père Joseph appears to have been the principal ‘sentinel’, may well have made the other sources of friction on the theological-political front seem like relatively insignificant pinpricks.1 It would have been hard to imagine that the publication, in 1640, of a dense 1,300-page Latin tome, entitled simply Augustinus, would prove to be a harbinger of trouble that would endure for well over a century and produce even more unexpected twists and turns than any observed so far. That it did so was due to its own prehistory and, thereafter, to its capacity to combine differing strands of thought and argument, some of which, it might be assumed, were quiescent if not redundant by the 1640s. In strict logic, Jansenism could only take shape after the appearance of Jansen’s posthumously published treatise in 1640, but this was anything but a virgin birth. Its genesis was long and conflict-ridden, as if its core notions had

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somehow to wait for the optimal moment to congeal. Given the duration and outcome of those earlier disputes over the status and authority of St Augustine within Catholicism, an important question is not merely why matters came to a head when they did, in and after 1640, but also why they subsequently defied effective resolution.2 One reason is that while the ultimate sources of Jansenism – to give it a modern ‘-ism’ that is itself problematic – were theological, and while its ultimate goal was, in the eyes of its champions, to restore a purified Augustinian theology to its rightful place as the canonical teaching of the Catholic church, it accreted over time many other strands of thought – gallican, conciliarist, Richerist, to mention but a few. But the intellectual dimension of the problem is not its only important feature: its appeal to different groups within French society and the church has also exercised historians dissatisfied with attempts to discover its intellectual essence or coherence; by associating it with particular groups, social or professional, the historians in question have evaluated it in terms of its social or political function rather than its supposed content. Its mutability may frustrate historians, but it bred an elusiveness that was critical to its survival, which in turn produced unexpected realignments in the relations between the monarchy, the papacy and the church within France itself. It is unlikely that Jansenism would have become so entrenched and defiant of authority – spiritual or political – within France had it not been for those prior or contemporary developments in political and ecclesiological thinking. Its evolution was also influenced by much older and perennial antagonisms – secular clergy against regulars, universities against the Jesuits, and so on. The image most commonly used at the time in relation to Jansenism was that of a hydra, whose many heads seemed to go on multiplying. One of the most unexpected of those heads was the famously austere convent of Port-Royal, a diehard minority of whose nuns defied Louis XIV and the Paris church authorities for decades. Alongside the treatment of the Protestants, especially during Louis XIV’s reign, the Jansenist affair (and especially the destruction of Port-Royal) was one of the most egregious instances of the monarchy believing that its relation with the church demanded the pursuit of doctrinal orthodoxy and the elimination of religious dissent, with the result that persecution drew far more attention to, and even support for, such dissent than it would have otherwise attracted.3 I The Council of Trent had been more circumspect than is usually realised in seeking to resolve the most theologically sensitive question of the day – salvation (or justification) and its determinants (divine predestination or the

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capacity of human beings to contribute to their own salvation). There was thus ample scope for continuing discussion of such fundamentals in the decades after its closure. The Protestant use of St Augustine’s theology, built upon his pessimistic view of fallen mankind which almost inevitably entailed a version of predestination, divided Catholic thinkers into those who would distance Catholicism from such thinking and those seeking to challenge Protestant ‘misuse’ of Augustine and restore Augustinianism as central to Catholicism.4 Given the increasing interest at this time in the Church Fathers and the ‘golden age’ of Christianity which they embodied, the scope for disagreement within Catholicism on religious questions, both theological and pastoral, was arguably expanding rather than contracting.5 The post-Trent debates also created an opportunity for the papacy to increase its powers as the guardian of Catholic orthodoxy, but such a process was gradual, especially in those parts of Europe which, like France, were protected by gallican or similar regalist traditions. Those early debates occurred mostly in Spain and the Spanish Netherlands, where Augustine continued to be regarded as the established ‘master’ on matters of grace and salvation. Here, as elsewhere, the main adversaries of these neo-Augustinians were the Jesuits, since their theology, often referred to as Molinism after 1600, took a far more positive view of human nature, free will and the encounter of divine grace and human effort in the process of salvation.6 It is not difficult to imagine how such confrontations could piggyback on, as well as exacerbate existing sources of friction between religious orders, universities and the Jesuits. Finally, it may be added that, though this is perhaps less evident in the French case, Augustinian thinking had political implications that appealed to a new ‘audience’ in the post-Reformation period.7 For Catholics in those parts of Europe such as the Netherlands and the British Isles whose sovereigns were Protestant, the question of how to obey a Protestant ruler without compromising one’s religious convictions or chances of salvation had existed since the Reformation. The initial loyalism of Catholic elites, which had enabled them to separate their politics from their religion during the previous generations, was coming under increased ‘confessionalising’ pressures. James I’s oath of allegiance for English Catholics, and the furious debates about it, provide perhaps the most acute instance of such a shift, and it was met head-on by the papacy’s insistence that such political loyalism was no longer acceptable. Such pressures generated contrasting responses among those subjected to them. As a Dutch émigré, Jansen was a good example of this shifting landscape, as he retained many of the inherited sensibilities and priorities of the northern European exiles who frequented the same institutions as he did during his long academic career at Louvain. Moreover, his – and their – mobility ensured a considerable movement of ideas and influences

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which fed into the emerging theologico-political controversies of the early decades of the century.8 In that context, Jansen’s long-term co-operation with the abbé Saint-Cyran loses much of the mystery which often seems to surround it, and which led chroniclers and some historians at different times to see it as part of a plot to subvert the orthodoxy of French Catholicism.9 It remains true, however, that the post-Trent, pre-Jansen debates on grace and justification which flared up so soon after the council’s closure spread outwards from epicentres like Louvain and Salamanca, not from Paris or Toulouse. The increasing involvement of the Jesuits as the energetic defenders of a modernised version of a theology that many of their critics decried as Pelagian first brought things to a head in 1598, when Clement VIII convened a Roman ‘congregation’, known by the name of De auxiliis, to deal with the debates and reach a conclusion; this move pre-empted an examination by the Spanish Inquisition of the work of the Jesuit Luis de Molina, which would not have favoured the Jesuits.10 Cardinals, theologians and ‘consultors’ from around Catholic Europe participated in these set-piece Roman confrontations. But after almost a decade of debate, in which the papacy seemed likely to censure – or at least not to endorse – the Jesuits’ arguments, Paul V wound up the sessions in 1609, without a substantive resolution. Declaring that it was premature to make any doctrinal decision, as there had not been sufficient discussion of the issues at stake, he counter-intuitively slapped a church-wide ban on publishing on the subject thereafter without special permission. Despite this fudged outcome, the whole exercise was an early assertion of papal authority as the new guardian of theological orthodoxy, and the history of Jansenism would provide numerous opportunities to expand that authority. For the Jesuits, the outcome was also a victory, albeit in ‘church-political’ rather than in theological terms, whereas a censure would have been a major setback for them. And that was enough, as we have seen in previous chapters, to embolden them to expand their activities at a critical moment in their history; the canonisation of their founders over a decade later, in 1622, clearly signalled continuing papal support for them.11 Only during the second half of the century would it become clear that the papacy was much less enamoured of Jesuit moral-pastoral theology, which had by then become the source of so many divisions within Catholicism elsewhere in Europe. Only two French theologians, neither of great distinction, participated in the Roman consultations De auxiliis either side of 1600, which hardly suggests that the problems under discussion there were of burning interest in France at that point.12 Yet despite their primary focus on questions of ecclesiology and, therefore, church–state relations generally, French theologians of the early seventeenth century, both regulars and seculars, continued to lecture and write on other theological issues in their universities and houses of study. It also

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seems that neither royal reforms of the university under Henri IV nor their pro-Roman leanings prevented the leading Parisian theologians of the generation of André Duval (d. 1638) from holding moderate Augustinian views on grace and justification, and such views did not vanish thereafter.13 In the late 1630s, when Antoine Arnauld was preparing for his doctorate, one of his professors objected to what seemed to him to be Arnauld’s excessive dependence on Augustinian ideas, a complaint which delayed its completion.14 French interest in Augustinian thinking also developed through channels that were not primarily academic, and such influences, often external, would later contribute to the emergence of Jansenism. For example, debates over whether Holland, England and Ireland were established ‘episcopal-hierarchical’ or simply ‘mission’ churches may not seem to have much in common with French church politics, but they mobilised gallicans and Augustinians against Jesuits and other regulars for much of the late 1620s and mid-1630s. It was SaintCyran’s intervention, under the pseudonym of Petrus Aurelius, on behalf of the episcopal-hierarchical thesis that confirmed his reputation as the ‘oracle of the clergy of France’ and won him the effusive gratitude of the 1635 assembly of clergy.15 By that point, too, Saint-Cyran’s efforts, as director of conscience to the nuns of Port-Royal, to develop a rigorous regime for the sacrament of confession, based on his understanding of early-church practice, were beginning to provoke unease – less among the nuns themselves than among the dévotclerical milieu to which both he and they belonged. What he was preaching – the delay of absolution for sin in order to enable better practice of inner renewal so that the sacrament could be taken with greater respect and benefit – was directly opposed to Jesuit practices, which emphasised the accumulating benefits of frequent confession. The Jesuit regime of frequent confession only encouraged, so it seemed to its critics, the growth of moral laxity and casuistry as the unavoidable corollary of such a deplorably casual attitude to the sacraments.16 In the highly febrile atmosphere of these years, in which mutual tit-for-tat denunciation was commonplace among the dévots, the Jansenist affair would exacerbate the fractures within French Catholicism; but it did not create them. Finally, it was no secret that Saint-Cyran and other figures in this milieu were dévots who remained hostile to the policies of the Richelieu ministry, which they could only express indirectly or against perceived proxies such as the Jesuits, whose growing embattlement made them rely more heavily than ever on the cardinal and other ministers to defend them.17 II It is not the intention here to discuss the theological content of Jansen’s work, let alone that of Jansenism as a whole – to which entire libraries have been

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devoted. Its political ramifications and consequences were no less important, but possibly because they often seem so indirect and elusive, they have not always had the kind of exposition that they warrant. This seems particularly so for the years immediately after the appearance of the Augustinus itself when broader political changes, following the successive deaths of Richelieu and Louis XIII and the commencement of a long royal minority in mid-1643, created a different setting in which, as during the regency of Marie de Medici, religious controversy was more difficult to contain within its habitual environment. The Augustinus itself was not published in France until 1641, but its reputation had preceded it during the previous year. In Louvain, the book was primarily a theological and patristic statement directed against scholastic theology, but in France it offered theological justification for a wide-ranging pastoral programme with a potentially wider political impact.18 It positively invited a Jesuit response, since it concluded with a highly provocative Parallelon (i.e. comparison) between a number of Jesuit theologians and the classic errors of St Augustine’s adversaries, the Pelagians.19 In retrospect, it may seem that Richelieu’s customary vigilance over trouble-bearing theological works was deficient this time. But with Saint-Cyran and other Augustinians like the Oratorian Séguenot behind bars, he probably felt that those most capable of exploiting the opportunity were safely under lock and key. It may also explain why, when he did decide that a response to Jansen was required, it took the form of sermons preached at Notre-Dame during Advent 1641, which fanned rather than dampened the flames of controversy; the preacher, Isaac Habert, clearly targeted Saint-Cyran and unnamed French ‘heretics’ associated with him.20 It is more difficult to say whether Richelieu’s decision not to solicit a papal censure in order to quell the dispute was one of principle rather than of simple tactics, given how fraught his relations with Rome were after 1639.21 The papacy’s own initial response to the Augustinus was equally low-key, taking the form of a decree of the Inquisition (August 1641) which had no jurisdiction in France. When it did follow this up in March 1642 with a bull, In Eminenti, it only condemned Jansen for repeating the errors of Michael Baius, the ‘father’ of Louvain Augustinianism originally censured as long ago as 1567; and, in a show of even-handedness, it simultaneously condemned the Louvain Jesuits’ Antitheses directed against the Augustinus.22 Despite such limited ambition – to close down further discussion of sensitive topics – the bull’s publication was delayed until May 1643, but even then doubts persisted, and were shared by the papal nuncio in Paris, as to whether the text of the bull had been tampered with.23 By the time the Paris theology faculty voted to defer ‘receiving’ the bull in January 1644, the controversy around its target had widened and deepened.24 French readers of the Augustinus were – and remained – few; even Saint-Cyran

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showed little interest in it when he finally encountered it shortly before his death in October 1643. But its appearance served to give traction to a wider debate and, above all, it stimulated a broader spectrum of publications that corresponded more closely to contemporary French pastoral and sacramental concerns than the Augustinus itself ever could. During the early 1640s, a whole raft of older and shorter Augustinian works, many emanating from Louvain, were published in France for the first time. They were mostly in Latin, but in some cases translations into French for a wider audience quickly followed. Antoine Arnauld, then emerging as Saint-Cyran’s successor, either personally translated or commissioned translations of some of these works.25 In that sense, the controversies of the early 1640s came closest to resembling those of the early 1610s, for although their content and implications were markedly different, the unresolved conflict between the Jesuits and the University of Paris provided, as always, some of the incentive for renewed polemic.26 It was in this context of a substantially enlarged field of controversy that Arnauld’s own On frequent communion finally appeared (August 1643). The most influential devotional book since François de Sales’s Introduction to the devout life of 1608, according to Sainte-Beuve, it had been commissioned by Saint-Cyran while in prison as a response to a Jesuit attack on his penitential directives, and was actually completed by 1641. But neither author nor mentor judged it prudent to publish it while Richelieu lived, given his known closeness to Jesuit theology, at least where the sacrament of penance – the real focus of Arnauld’s book – was concerned.27 Temperamentally and theologically, Richelieu strongly opposed any penitential discipline which placed too many burdens on the conscience of individuals, since it would, he felt, drive most people to despair and damnation rather than to devotion and salvation; his sharp political antennae also sensed that it encouraged individuals to turn their back on society and public activity in favour of retreat.28 Yet the fact that Arnauld’s Frequent communion was approved for publication by sixteen bishops and twenty-two Parisian doctors of theology meant that it was no pièce de circonstance that could be simply ignored or, more crucially, easily attacked when it finally appeared in August 1643.29 When it was rumoured that the papacy was planning to censure the work in 1645, Rome was reminded of the extensive support, especially episcopal, that it had obtained, and the idea was quietly dropped.30 The indefatigable Arnauld, probably the ablest polemicist of the entire century, focused most of his attention on the moral theology of the Jesuits, as one of his principal tracts of the mid-1640s was entitled, thus paving the way for the great clashes of the 1650s. But in the process, he also made numerous enemies within the Paris theology faculty, leading a number of former ‘Augustinian’ supporters and collaborators to change sides during the 1640s and 1650s. Above all, as controversy gathered

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pace it was the Augustinus that – for all its dedication to Urban VIII – proved to be the weak link in the defence, and thus an obvious target for critics. In both of his ‘defences of Jansen’ of 1644–45, Arnauld, instead of putting clear blue water between the French pastoral-sacramental endeavour and the question of the orthodoxy of the Augustinus, actually contributed to the conflation of the two, both then and in subsequent years. He and his supporters thus handed a major advantage to the opponents of ‘the disciples of St Augustine’, as France’s Jansenists preferred to describe themselves; thanks to this, it was evident, then and subsequently, that Jansenism was as much the work of antiJansenists as of Jansenists. Arnauld could only protest vehemently when in 1649 the anti-Jansenist syndic of the Paris theology faculty, Nicolas Cornet, proposed for censure a number of propositions which he claimed were taken from student theses but which were widely suspected to be cover for an attack on Jansen’s work.31 Until that point was reached, the emergence of Jansenism à la française can be considered a relatively ‘organic’ product of the intellectual and spiritual impulses active within French Catholicism, with relatively little external political constraint or manipulation at work in it. Its Augustinianism derived more from Bérulle and Saint-Cyran than from Jansen, and its concern with moral-sacramental questions rather than speculative theology was a reaction to the teaching of the Jesuits, in Paris and elsewhere. But the regency government of Anne of Austria and Cardinal Mazarin, Richelieu’s successor as chief minister, had far too many other daunting problems to pay much attention to it. Unlike Richelieu, Mazarin was no theologian, while his religious sentiments seem to have been relatively conventional. He was largely unfamiliar with the politico-religious subtleties of the gallican church–monarchy relationship, or the kinds of conflict that it was wont to generate. Perhaps for that reason, he was also less capable than his predecessor of sniffing out incipient threats to nip them in the bud; above all, he was politically too weak to behave as severely as Richelieu had towards his opponents, most of whom were released or rehabilitated after 1642. But Mazarin’s political antennae would become sharper with experience. However, the first real effort to censure Jansenist ideas in France came at an acutely difficult political moment during the civil war nicknamed the Fronde (1648–53), when the Mazarin government was in deep trouble. In mid-1649, seven propositions (subsequently reduced to five) allegedly taken from student theses were presented to the Paris theology faculty for debate and censure. But despite such an age-old procedure, there was so much suspicion of, and therefore opposition to, this move and its real, unspoken target – the Augustinus – that no resolution was forthcoming, although a clear majority of the faculty, bolstered by the presence of doctors belonging to the religious

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orders, did favour a censure. As frequently happened in heated faculty disputes, those resisting a censure appealed to the Paris parlement, which placed a ban on discussion of the theses until further notice.32 This intervention did not mean that the magistrates were seeking to take sides or were even closely interested in the subject under discussion; they had more pressing concerns at this point in the Fronde, and their response was designed more to prevent than to prolong an unwelcome dispute (August 1649).33 For its own political reasons, the crown was keen to prevent an open conflict within the Sorbonne, not least because it might easily spill over into current political clashes; Rome was equally opposed to the faculty exercising its historic magisterium because it increasingly insisted, as we have noted earlier, on its own doctrinal primacy. Faced with a problem that was far less ‘political’ in content than those of the 1610s and 1620s, the Paris theology faculty proved unable to reach a verdict that reflected its traditions or preserved its libertas docendi.34 The Paris parlement’s response only redirected the efforts of those seeking a censure of Jansen. There was a ‘minor’ assembly of clergy due to convene in mid-1650, but the censure-seekers appear to have judged it too risky to petition it formally to deliver a condemnation whose status would be uncertain at best, and might only lead to further ructions, at worst. Instead, it was decided to solicit France’s bishops, not for a collective judgement that they could hardly make without a full-scale assembly or council, but individually to support an appeal to the Pope for a formal papal censure. By the time this ‘campaign’ ended in early 1651, some eighty-five bishops (approximately three-quarters of the episcopate of the time) had signed a letter requesting the Pope to act as proposed.35 Despite allegations that undue pressure had been used to obtain such support, there can be no doubt that this was an impressive feat in itself. It is also the strongest evidence of the extent to which the overwhelming majority of France’s bishops remained well disposed to Rome by mid-century.36 However, fourteen bishops vigorously opposed the move, informing Rome of their protest against the petition and attacking the underhand methods used to obtain it.37 But these numbers do not quite constitute an exact snapshot of the ecclesiological or theological options of the French episcopate of the midcentury. Their significance lay elsewhere. Time and again, the Jansenist problem would demonstrate that a tiny handful of determined bishops could withstand even a broad consensus to the contrary, and in the process expose the contradictions in gallican thinking. III This was not yet evident around 1650. It was the despatch of petition and counter-petition to Rome that was unprecedented. Historians usually

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underline the effectiveness of French diplomacy in obtaining the papal condemnation of 1653 – as that of 1713 – but the evidence suggests that it was not especially arduous to persuade the papacy to engage in demonstrating its doctrinal authority; the main problem lay in how best to formulate and present the decision taken. Far more significant was the initial appeal itself, and the readiness with which the opposed groups of theologians accepted the logic of such a move around 1650.38 That the most independently minded church in Europe and the one historically least impressed by papal claims to exercise ultimate doctrinal authority within Catholicism should now seek its judgement was an unexpected boost for Rome, coming as it did shortly after the papacy had been so painfully excluded from a role in the Westphalian peace settlement.39 The appeal was thus doubly welcome, and it advanced the papacy’s continuing efforts to assert its authority within the church. That in turn did much to overcome reservations in Rome about the dangers that might lie in wait thereafter. It convened an ad hoc congregation to deal with the Jansenist question, before which both supporters and opponents – most of them French – of a censure duly appeared to plead their case. By the 1650s, however, Rome had no intention of repeating the earlier De auxiliis experiment. In the intervening years, it had come much closer to the Jesuit-Molinist theological – but not moral or pastoral – position. Equally importantly, it preferred to make its decisions behind closed doors rather than in open debate.40 Timing was vital, too, since it was the French government that had formally requested the papal judgement. For that reason the ensuing bull, Cum Occasione, condemning the five propositions, was delayed until May 1653, when it was clear that the Mazarin regime was back in control and the Fronde was over. The Pope had assured the Jansenist delegation to Rome that there was no intention to attack Jansen, let alone St Augustine’s teachings, but that illusion – if such it was – would be brutally exposed in the coming years.41 The papacy evidently expected that publication of Cum Occasione would take effect across Catholic Europe with a minimum of controversy, and that the ‘local’ authorities, civil and ecclesiastical, would impose its decree in the normal manner. For the most part, that is what happened, even in the Spanish Netherlands, the historic cradle of Jansenism. Once the obstacles to the publication of the earlier bull, In Eminenti (1643), had been cleared there, the local authorities co-operated quickly to turn the screws on Jansen’s disciples and defenders, who proved to be no pushover. In 1648, the governor-general himself intervened, imposing an anti-Jansenist oath to flush out supporters of Jansen, which meant that they were already in full retreat well before the Cum Occasione appeared in 1653. After that point, even the most hard-line ‘Belgian’ Jansenists formally ceased their opposition, accepted the new papal bull in a

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way that they had not done a decade earlier, and turned towards an Arnauldlike focus on pastoral-sacramental questions.42 France, however, would prove an altogether more difficult nut to crack, despite the unprecedented co-operation between papacy and crown throughout the following decades – a co-operation that was remarkably unaffected by moments of crisis elsewhere in their relationship. This was just as well, as both sides seriously underestimated the problems that dealing with Jansenist opposition would occasion. Welcomed as the definitive solution to a problem, the papal condemnation proved to be little more than the beginning of a tortuous process, which spread initially over four years (1653–57) of extraordinarily intense activity, replete with delegations, commissions, reports, diplomatic missions and assemblies (informal and official) of the French clergy. And this is to leave aside the unprecedented public controversies that accompanied – and sometimes influenced – efforts to find a solution during these early years. Only the main outlines will be considered here, with a view to revealing the complexities of the triangular relationship of monarchy, church and papacy at mid-century where religious dissent was concerned. In mid-1653, the Mazarin government set about ensuring that Cum Occasione met the fewest objections possible within France, convening ad hoc assemblies of bishops then present in Paris in order to clear the way forward.43 Having only recently returned from political exile, Mazarin’s methods were, not surprisingly, far less authoritarian and more ‘inclusive’ than those of Richelieu. In the ensuing deliberations, he relied heavily on the expansive learning and forensic agility of Pierre de Marca, whose gallican opinions on church–state relations had, as we saw, landed him in hot water with Rome in the 1640s. Now archbishop of Toulouse, he was keen to demonstrate his goodwill towards the papacy, but in his efforts to deal with the Jansenist challenge he came closer than any major figure in the French church to suggesting that its assemblies could act as national councils of the gallican church.44 A major papal pronouncement like Cum Occasione, even if solicited in Louis XIV’s name, bred several possible complications. From the outset, there was much anxiety about how the parlement of Paris, which had been so prominently anti-Mazarinist during the Fronde, would behave if given the opportunity to exploit any alleged papal infringement of the gallican maxims.45 As a result, it was decided that the bull would not be sent to the parlement for registration, on the grounds that it was primarily for France’s bishops to publish and implement it. On the other hand, it was registered by an intimidated and isolated Paris theology faculty, where the whole affair had started in 1649.46 But it was precisely where it was least expected and most difficult to deal with that trouble first emerged – among the bishops. As they were entrusted with publishing and implementing the bull within their dioceses, they issued

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their own pastoral instructions (mandements) alongside it. Four such episcopal instructions more or less flatly contradicted the main terms of the bull, restating Augustinian principles as being the established teaching of the church; and the mandement drafted by one well-known bishop, Antoine Godeau, never even mentioned Jansen by name.47 Another instruction, that of Archbishop Gondrin of Sens, went further, insisting that the Pope’s judgement should have been preceded by one delivered in a national council by French bishops, who ‘according to the canons’ were the ‘natural and legitimate judges in the first instance of all major causes and on questions of faith’ in France. Gondrin also launched a pre-emptive appeal to the parlement for protection against possible retaliation by Mazarin and Innocent X.48 He had raised precisely the kind of arch-gallican objection that would not go away and that subsequent discussion would amplify – the claim of France’s bishops to be co-authors with the Pope in the process of doctrinal definition and the question of whether or not that required some kind of national council of the gallican church. In 1654, Gondrin’s assertion was an annoyingly sharp reminder that such gallican concerns remained alive, despite the original appeal to Rome; in 1682, the four gallican articles would posthumously vindicate his stance. Moreover, the earlier suspicions about the ‘real’ source of the five propositions – student theses or Jansen’s book? – probably made the French more than usually sensitive to the precise terms of the 1653 bull. It did not take long for the first readers of Cum Occasione to spot that its wording seemed evasive. If the Pope declared that it was ‘on the occasion of the publication of the Augustinus’ that he decided to condemn five specific, but otherwise unattributed, propositions as heretical, did that mean they were in Jansen’s book and that he had taken them from there? Or was the connection between book, author and the condemned propositions merely incidental? If the propositions were in the Augustinus, did they have an orthodox rather than a heretical meaning (that ascribed to Jansen) which could still be tenable? Such questions occurred as much to supporters as to opponents of Cum Occasione. The initial line of defence used by Jansen’s supporters was to admit that the propositions were in the Augustinus, but to claim that they all had a perfectly orthodox meaning, which was their correct meaning and the one that they maintained; as to their heterodox meaning, they condemned it, as did the Pope. But in the heat of battle within France following the papal bull of 1653, that initial position was abandoned, soon to be replaced by a far more contentious one. This was Arnauld’s devastating distinction of early 1655 between the droit (the Pope’s right to decide what religious truth was) and the fait (the question of whether the propositions actually were in the Augustinus). By denying that the propositions could be found literally in Jansen’s book, Arnauld’s distinction threatened to wreck the entire anti-Jansenist exercise.49

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In the short term, it was Rome that responded the most energetically to those bishops, especially Gondrin of Sens, who had contested the 1653 bull, by issuing commissions to initiate legal proceedings against them by designated fellow French bishops.50 Such a move was certainly neither expected nor appreciated by the Mazarin government or the French church, as it reminded those most concerned of the trials and depositions of the ‘rebel’ bishops during Richelieu’s ministry, the epilogue to which was still fresh in their minds; with a major assembly of clergy due in 1655, there was no stomach for a repeat of such painful events or their sequels. Instead, extensive efforts were now undertaken under Mazarin’s overall direction to seek a face-saving compromise that would avoid the need for judicial action and its potentially dangerous ramifications. In the extensive deliberations that followed, the unofficial assemblies of bishops concluded that the five propositions were indeed in the Augustinus and did represent Jansen’s teaching.51 But Gondrin tenaciously held his ground and argued that they were simply not in the book, as the Pope seemed to say. Over the next decade and a half, the threat of legal proceedings initiated by Rome against Gondrin and several other bishops formed an almost permanent backdrop to the efforts to find solutions to the Jansenist problem. The crown’s reluctance to be party to legal action against bishops and their determination to prevent the repeat of earlier sanctions proved more decisive in prolonging this phase of the Jansenist problem than questions of a purely theological nature.52 As these debates continued, it became increasingly clear that Cum Occasione was an inadequate and ambiguous effort, and that the only way forward was to obtain further papal clarification in accordance with the Paris consultations. This, too, could have been problematic, since Rome was not in the habit of issuing such explanations.53 However, Innocent X readily agreed to French requests, publishing a new papal brief (Ex litteris) in September 1654.54 But it, too, was almost immediately overtaken by further, overlapping events within France. The outcome was that, in 1656, after the fait-versus-droit controversy, the expulsion of Arnauld and his supporters from the Paris theology faculty, Pascal’s Provincial letters, and further intense activity within the assembly of clergy, yet another papal decree was requested. This was partly to nail objections that the Pope had been sidelined since 1654, and to counter suggestions that because the measures being proposed to deal with the remaining challenges were French in origin, they lacked genuine authority. Thus in October 1656, the new Pope, Alexander VII (1655–67), validated, via the new bull Ad Sacram, all the earlier decisions taken in Rome and France.55 In its last sessions, the longest assembly of clergy of the century prepared the way for the bull’s reception by the French church. Significantly, it was only after these preliminaries were complete that the Mazarin regime finally felt confident

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enough to confront the Paris parlement on the Jansenist question. Faced with strong criticism from Arnauld that the successive papal decisions were undermining gallican liberties, Mazarin was determined to close down the discussion.56 In a lit de justice held at the parlement in December 1657 and in the presence of ‘the great and the good’ of court and kingdom, Louis XIV had Ad Sacram registered without discussion, accompanied by a royal edict requiring the publication and acceptance of the condemnation of Jansenism. But in order to achieve this outcome, Mazarin had to make concessions to the parlement, namely to defer the actual enforcement of the condemnation of the propositions and to preserve the parlement’s right to accept appeals against abuses of ecclesiastical power (the appel comme d’abus).57 Four years of intense activity ensured that, by late 1657, only one hurdle seemed to be left before Jansenism was killed off – that of obtaining compliance throughout France with the papal and royal decisions. The commotion created in a handful of dioceses in 1653 by the publication of Cum Occasione had made it clear that leaving things purely to individual episcopal initiative ought be avoided this time. But how could that be done without intruding on episcopal autonomy? And what format should the compliance itself take, if the published papal and royal decrees did not suffice? Both questions were extensively debated in the mid-1650s, especially by the assemblies of clergy. An early version of a formula of adherence to the 1653 condemnation of Jansen was drafted under Marca’s direction in 1654, but it was dropped because some of its assertions seemed too problematic.58 It was replaced by a second text, known henceforth as the formulary and prepared by the official assembly of clergy in early 1657. But this exercise begged a far more fundamental question. What authority, if any, did an assembly of clergy, even an official one, have to deal with matters of doctrine and obedience, especially in such a manner? At several stages during their discussions, Marca had argued that the official assemblies were descended from the ancient councils held under the Frankish and Carolingian monarchs, and were thus entitled to act as national councils in circumstances like those of the 1650s. Marca was particularly insistent on the point during the 1655–57 assembly, which he viewed as embodying gallican thinking on how papal decisions became definitive once they had been assented to by the ‘local’ church and its bishops.59 Although there were dissenters from Marca’s position inside as well as outside the assembly, this language crept into the assembly’s formulary of 1657, which was intended for use across France to enforce, in a uniform manner, the condemnation of Jansen.60 But as a mechanism for eradicating support for Jansen, the formulary ran into real difficulty. It was here that Marca’s theory of a national council legislating for the French church broke down. Even the Mazarin government did

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not accept it in practice, despite becoming increasingly determined to enforce the formulary during its last year or so. Once again, the authority of the assembly in religious matters was disputed and contradicted from several quarters. Both French bishops and the Roman Holy Office – an uncommon alliance – were hostile to any strengthening of that authority.61 During the assembly of 1660–61, Antoine Arnauld launched a damaging attack on the Marca thesis, astutely querying its logic from the standpoint of a bishop having to deal with the assembly’s claims.62 As a result, when it came, in the last months of the Mazarin ministry, to piloting the 1657 formulary into operation, there was more opposition to such a top-down, ‘national’ approach than was officially recognised at the time.63 The principal lacuna in the procedure adopted in 1661 was the omission of any mention of what would happen if individual bishops were to refuse to sign, or to have the formulary signed, within their dioceses. Such an ‘oversight’ would occur again more than once, and it can only be explained by the reluctance of the monarchy, rather than of the papacy, to confront the bishops after the success with which the 1655 assembly had outmanoeuvred Mazarin and managed to protect Cardinal Retz’s right – despite his imprisonment and subsequent exile – to continue governing the diocese of Paris via vicars-general of his choice.64 This hot potato became a real-life problem only a few months later when Retz’s vicars-general proceeded to impose the formulary in Paris as required. But in a manner reminiscent of the publication of Cum Occasione nearly a decade earlier, their accompanying instruction declared that the clergy obliged to sign the document were entitled to maintain ‘a full and sincere silence’ as to the provenance of the five propositions. This formulation, allegedly written by either Pascal or Arnauld, drove a horse and carriage through the most carefully crafted schemes of Mazarin, Marca and the papacy over the previous years. Although it was soon rescinded under intense pressure from Pope and king and replaced by a more restrictive, ‘orthodox’ instruction, the damage had been done; nobody knew if – or how many – other dioceses might try their own variant of such instructions, making matters worse rather than better.65 Thus from the outset the experiment with a single French formulary was in serious trouble, for lack of consensus and of a unified authority capable of imposing it. Though full recognition of this took some time to sink in, there was only one way out of such a conundrum, and Louis XIV’s government had few qualms in taking it – to approach Rome for a papal version of the formulary. The precise wording and format of that document were worked out and revised several times, with the active involvement of French diplomats, before the bull, entitled Regiminis Apostolici, was finally issued in February 1665. It would be misleading to conclude from the busy-bee character of such

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diplomacy that the papacy had become a French poodle at this point. On the contrary, the eagerness of Louis XIV’s government to obtain papal support in dealing with Jansenism bolstered both papal authority and ambitions. It encouraged Rome to continue pursuing individual French recalcitrants with a vigour that dismayed even some of its allies in France.66 In summary, by the time the formal process of clarifying the initial condemnation of Jansen in 1653 was completed by 1657, and that of enforcing it by 1665, it had produced two additional papal ‘explanatory’ decrees, which represented an incremental shift from a relatively minimalist to a more exposed, maximalist position (i.e. the five propositions were both in Jansen’s book and heretical in Jansen’s understanding of them); and a novel mechanism, the formulary, invented by an assembly of clergy for use within France, but whose shortcomings had led it, too, to be superseded by one issued by the papacy. Protests by gallicans against the sudden growth in papal involvement in French religious affairs were far weaker than might have been expected by comparison with the virulence of those made earlier in the century. It seems that they were muted in part by the manner in which the decisions made during these years involved the active co-operation of French assemblies of clergy. The assemblies were themselves aware enough of the potential for protest and took pains to make explicit references to the very gallican idea of the ‘consent of the universal church’ in their circular letters explaining what they had done and why.67 And both the Mazarin and postMazarin regimes, despite periods of distraction when little concrete action was taken, remained fully committed to using papal authority in order to ensure compliance. But the new-found harmony of monarchy and papacy, which enabled these decisions to be made with remarkably little friction, proved to be no guarantee of the success ‘on the ground’ which both parties aimed for. As already noted, both the wording and the authority of the formulary were – rather like the condemnation of the five propositions themselves – contested after publication. The papal version of 1665 was designed precisely to resolve such problems: it permitted much less wriggle-room by dropping a problematic phrase present in the earlier French texts to the effect that ‘this doctrine [of Jansen] is not that of Saint Augustine, whom Jansen wrongly explained, in a way that was contrary to the saint’s understanding’.68 But the superior authority of the papal formulary – which, unlike its French predecessor, included no mention of the participation of the bishops in the decision – made it no more invincible than the latter. In a virtual re-run of the drama of the early 1660s, the papal formulary itself encountered the same problems and opponents – the bishops. In addition to the opposition already noted, there had already been a significant intervention in mid-1664 by a bishop whom we shall encounter

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again, Nicolas Pavillon of Alet, who had hitherto accepted the anti-Jansenist decisions with little difficulty. He had not objected to the 1657 formulary, although he declined to enforce it when requested in 1661.69 However, in 1664, mainly in response to the harsh treatment of the nuns of Port-Royal by the archbishop of Paris, Pavillon took direct aim at Louis XIV’s edict of April 1664 to enforce the French formulary, criticising him for usurping a religious authority that simply did not belong to him, especially on matters on which no definitive decisions had been made; the French assemblies of clergy had no authority to produce binding directives on bishops within their dioceses; and the formulary was destroying the ‘discipline’ that the church so badly needed.70 The royal response to this ‘letter’ was simple – sign the formulary or be deprived of the revenues of your diocese. But Pavillon did not blink at such a threat, while other bishops soon began to express their unease and to support him, thus checkmating the royal strategy.71 That response was one of the main reasons why a papal version of the formulary was sought only a few months later, in early 1665. The four years between the papal formulary (1665) and the ‘Peace of the Church’ (early 1669), as it is known, were ones of continuing stalemate, during which Pavillon and a trio of other bishops held their ground.72 The fact that they, and Pavillon in particular, were resident, ascetic and model Catholic Reformation bishops made them all the more untouchable, as the authorities themselves well understood. Bereft of ideas on how to proceed further, Louis XIV asked for a papal commission of French judges-delegate to deal with the ‘rebel’ bishops. But such a move only evoked a more substantial reaction than previously, with nineteen bishops expressing their support for the four under threat.73 The election of a new pope, Clement IX (1667–69), made it easier to envisage some kind of negotiated exit from this new stalemate. The peace concluded in late 1668 and made official in January 1669 resulted from ultrasecret negotiations, conducted almost single-handedly by Hugues de Lionne, the wily French foreign minister (who was familiar with most of the major figures in Rome), and by an inexperienced papal nuncio, Bargellini, who ignored his explicit brief from the Holy Office to ‘completely extinguish the remnants of Jansenism’.74 The degree of dissimulation and concealment involved in this entire affair – the leading French church figures were kept in the dark about it – makes it one of the mysterious moments in Franco-papal relations of the century; it has divided historians as much as it perplexed those contemporaries who tried to understand how, or on what terms, the settlement was reached. Rome accepted an ‘honourable’ submission that avoided any form of humiliation or climb-down by the four bishops, agreeing not to enquire too closely into what precisely they had done in relation to the formulary within

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their dioceses; in the interests of restoring internal peace, it closed the lid on possible deceptions committed along the way. In accepting such an exit from the impasse, the papacy also seems to have understood the limits to which its authority in France could extend, at least for the moment; pressing on in the face of widening episcopal opposition might prove counter-productive, and even trigger a gallican backlash or schism. The position of ‘respectful silence’ about whether the five propositions were in Jansen, which had hitherto been considered an act of open defiance, could henceforth be construed as one of respect and obedience to authority. The ‘Clementine peace’ may have been obtained by dubious means, but for the generation that followed it offered release from a conflict that threatened to turn into trench warfare, thus enabling it to direct its energies towards other issues.75 IV One of the many reasons why the Jansenist question produced such uproar between the 1640s and the 1660s was that it spread beyond the academic and clerical circles, high and low, in which it had originally emerged. A similar trajectory has been outlined for the closely related disputes of these years over laxism and rigorism in moral theology, a dispute which was electrified – and reached a wide public – by Pascal’s celebrated Provincial letters of 1656–57.76 After 1657, the formulary added yet another unfamiliar element, as it was the first time a religious oath – apart from that of Catholic orthodoxy in general imposed by the Council of Trent on clergy receiving orders or appointed to church benefices – had to be taken in early modern France. Such novelty, almost regardless of its content, was unsettling in itself, requiring individuals to confront ideas that might otherwise have passed them by. But if the oath was devised by church authorities, its imposition could hardly be conceived without the support of the ‘secular arm’; the consequences of the oath for public order fell within the ambit of the royal ‘police’. On such grounds, Louis XIV’s regime was more than prepared to use its authority to imprison or impose internal exile on resisters. The most famous target of the regime’s ire were the nuns of Port-Royal, whose travails – like those of the Arnauld family who were its dominant personalities – shed further light, as we shall see presently, on the political dimensions of early French Jansenism. If the 1650s and 1660s witnessed unprecedented co-operation between papacy and monarchy over the Jansenist question, it was, in part at least, because they took a broadly similar view of the problem they faced, although the methods they envisaged for its resolution were not always identical. Jansenists of every hue were, in such a view, rebellious, stubborn defiers of established authority. Rome had been informed from an early date by its

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diplomats and other observers in France that Jansenists were cut from the same cloth as Richer and his supporters, and were thus equally dangerous.77 These impressions seemed conclusively confirmed in 1651–53 when several French defenders of Jansen went to plead their cause in Rome. Their behaviour there was regarded by influential Roman figures, like the future Cardinal Albizzi of the Inquisition, as arrogant and condescending because they seemed so convinced of their superior knowledge. Above all, they lacked the deference due to papal authority that their anti-Jansenist rivals displayed in Rome during these years. Such beliefs were reinforced by contemporary rumours and allegations spread by opponents within France that Jansenists played a key role in the Fronde; particular emphasis was placed upon their taste for conspiracy.78 All of this proved enduringly influential in Rome, and when defenders of Jansen subsequently resisted papal decisions in France, the Roman response to them was almost instinctive – not to negotiate, but to launch either sanctions or legal proceedings that would bring such rebels to heel.79 The French monarchy’s reaction was not fundamentally different to the papacy’s, but it was in a much more difficult position when it came to dealing with the Jansenist problem. The pre-Fronde Mazarin government paid relatively little attention to it, having far more serious problems to face, and the anti-Richelieu sentiments evinced by the 1645 and 1650 assemblies of clergy did not encourage energetic action on its part.80 But, as already intimated, the Fronde years were critical in confirming its aversion to Jansenists as rebels, an accusation that their opponents were only too happy to embellish. Antoine Arnauld would himself write in the mid-1650s that the Fronde had transformed ‘theology into politics’.81 Whether it came to writing anti-Mazarin pamphlets, raising troops to oppose the cardinal during the 1649 siege of Paris, turning influential aristocratic figures against the regime, or using Port-Royal as a base for operations, military and conspiratorial, the Jansenists’ presence as troublemakers seemed pervasive. They certainly became a convenient target. Given that France’s Protestants remained almost unanimously ultra-loyal during the Fronde, it was all the easier to transfer the labels hitherto attached to them – republicans, conspirators, seditious and so on – to the Jansenists; during these years, the most obvious parallel for such behaviour, and where it might lead, was that of the regicide Puritans.82 In 1654, one hostile pen described Jansenists as a ‘secte d’estat’, rather than a religious group, whose behaviour resembled that of the Calvinists of old.83 The fact that the Jansenist crisis become more acute after 1653 than before only seemed to confirm such suspicions: whereas order had been restored everywhere else, the Jansenists continued to defy authority, attacking everything from papal bulls to Jesuit moral theology. As an expression of what the term Jansenist meant in the highest political circles by the late 1650s, Anne of

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Austria’s response to a letter claiming that Jansenism was a malicious chimera could hardly be improved on: You are in the midst of Jansenists and instigators of heresy . . . You have asked me to enlighten you as to what a Jansenist is. I will give you the same response that I gave to a bishop who asked me the same question. A Jansenist is one who refuses to submit in all humility and without any reservation whatsoever to the decision of the Holy See, which has since been followed by the universal consent of the entire church. A Jansenist obstinately insists that Jansen’s doctrine has not been condemned by the bull.84

Such contemporary comments or perceptions of Jansenist political activities have led some historians to argue that there was also a third, ‘ecclesiastical’ Fronde, which was made possible in part by its parlementaire or aristocratic predecessors, but which endured much longer because it instrumentalised the condemnation of Jansenism and the uproar it generated during the 1650s.85 But this is a problematic approach, which can all too easily amalgamate different causes and attitudes under a single flag.86 The first historian of PortRoyal, Jean Racine, who had been educated in its petites écoles, conceded that although absolute obedience to rulers was always its creed, it had been indiscreet in its associations during the Fronde.87 The aristocratic Fronde involved so many high-ranking figures at one point or another that it would have been quite impossible for Port-Royal, which enjoyed the patronage of prominent aristocrats, male and female, to escape some form of guilt by association in the early 1650s; few institutions had not done the same as the abbey during these years. The Paris parlement, often regarded as a bastion of Jansenism after its failure against the Mazarin regime during the Fronde, only had a handful of members who were overtly Jansenist in their sympathies. The common factor that could unite all but a minority of the parlementaires was, not surprisingly, the defence of the gallican liberties against what seemed like sustained papal intrusion into France’s affairs.88 Finally, there were the core protagonists of the ‘ecclesiastical’ Fronde – the lower, parish-based clergy. On closer analysis, they too emerge as diverse in motivation and objectives. Among the parish clergy of Paris, for example, there was a minority of ‘doctrinal’ Jansenists, while others were primarily opposed to the Jesuits and laxist moral theology. Many were parish reformers who subscribed, consciously or instinctively, to Richer’s notion that curés were the successors of Christ’s disciples and had a major role to play in church governance. Above all, however, the great majority supported the coadjutorarchbishop of Paris, the second Cardinal Retz, against Mazarin. Retz’s own

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ambitions during the Fronde may have been cynically political – to replace Mazarin as chief minister – but his hold over the city clergy was not based merely on personal charisma. He came from one of the most dedicated and widely connected of aristocratic dévot families who had fallen foul of both cardinal-ministers, and that guaranteed Retz far wider support than his behaviour during the Fronde would have warranted. That support, especially among the city clergy, continued after his arrest and flight into exile in 1654, when they were essentially defending his authority as the rightful archbishop to continue to govern his diocese. In this case, it is clear that they were not Jansenists, but ‘Retzians’; and, equally, that only a minority of Retzians were Jansenists. The void created in the capital by the exile of its archbishop from 1654 onwards made it far more difficult to control or suppress such agitation, which included noisy controversies with the Jesuits in the late 1650s. This is only one situation in which a coalition of concerns overlapped, but without Jansenism becoming the common denominator that best describes them all. If there is one ‘entity’ that straddles these different worlds in mid-century, it is the extended Arnauld family – embracing parlementaires, courtiers, clergy (female as much as male), solitaires – who often seemed to treat the reformed abbey of Port-Royal as a family fiefdom. Anti-Mazarin pamphlets written by Robert Arnauld d’Andilly, the elder brother of Antoine, in 1649 and 1652 have been used as evidence of active frondeur sympathies in the Port-Royal– Jansenist milieux. But sufficient doubts have been raised about the attribution and purpose of these writings to prompt one historian to conclude that the Arnauld family were not ‘frondeurs in any sense of the term’. The one pamphlet that seems clearly attributable to Arnauld d’Andilly, La vérité toute nue (‘The plain truth’) of 1652, was only incidentally anti-Mazarin in content: while it did argue that Mazarin had to be removed from office, its real point was that only a massive reform of France’s government would achieve anything; the pamphlet was almost too radical to be viewed as a specific political intervention.89 In any event, although the activities of the ‘godly’ after Mazarin’s return in 1653 did not subsequently pose a serious challenge to his ministry, their behaviour nevertheless sufficed to confirm the perception of them as inveterate dissidents opposed to both pope and king.90 Louis XIV’s political education during the 1650s, under Mazarin’s close direction, included a heavy dose of suspicion and dislike of ‘Jansenists’, which he never cast off.91 V No individual or group better illustrates these problems of obedience within church and state in the mid-century than Port-Royal, the only religious ‘lieu de mémoire’ of the seventeenth century to have entered that select pantheon.92

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Its history, for long heavily dependent on retrospective accounts written by nuns and solitaires themselves, many of them members of the extended Arnauld family, presents a heroic narrative in which a determined few rejected ‘worldly’ compromise and, by sheer force of will, drove forward the just cause at each moment of crisis between the abbey’s initial reform of 1609 and the confrontations of the 1660s; in an age of corruption and decline, Port-Royal’s destiny was to revive and preserve the lost purity of the early church and its practices. Its reputation really began to grow from the mid-1620s when the original community of Port-Royal-des-Champs moved into Paris itself, where its reformed observance proved a magnet for dévots in a city that did not lack for new-style religious houses. It was only from the mid-1630s onwards, when Angélique Arnauld teamed up with Saint-Cyran to relaunch the drive for a more intensive reform at Port-Royal, that it became a target of controversy and attack, much of it from previous supporters and benefactors among the increasingly fractious dévots.93 Almost simultaneously, the phenomenon of the solitaires – male dévots retiring from the world to pray, work, write and teach – began to develop at the original but now largely abandoned Port-Royal-des-Champs outside the city. Richelieu’s instinctive suspicion of where such rejection of the ‘world’ might lead, which was aroused by the retreat of the brilliant young lawyer, Antoine Le Maître, in 1637, did not prevent others from joining Le Maître in subsequent years and forming a counter-community of an unusual kind. For Richelieu, such free agents, devoid of ambition and disconnected from fixed positions in their society, were unsettling and unwelcome. Antoine Arnauld himself, having resigned his church benefices in the early 1640s, became an associate rather than a full solitaire and, like several others, he often took refuge with the solitaires when on the run from the authorities in subsequent years.94 Thus, by the mid to late 1640s, the most prominent French defenders of Jansen were associated in one way or another with Port-Royal, which in turn facilitated the lumping together of Jansen’s ideas, Saint-Cyran’s disciples and, in the broadest sense, ‘Port-Royal’ itself.95 During the Fronde, rumours about both the solitaires and the convent – and particularly about plotting and clandestine meetings there – were, as we have seen, widespread; the continuing dominance of the extended Arnauld clan within both communities compounded the problem when it was known that some of them clearly disapproved of the Mazarin regime.96 The relentless and unscrupulous Jesuit Jean Brisacier accused the ever-growing Port-Royal community of nuns of being ‘crazy virgins’ (vierges folles) who went without the sacraments and were out of control; by dredging up past associations and placing them alongside accusations of ‘heresy on the prowl’, he and others helped to make Port-Royal a real-life personification of Jansenism.97 In fact,

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the abbey community attracted record numbers of new recruits – many from other convents – in the post-Fronde years, and it was probably the largest single community of nuns in France by 1660.98 Its outer rings of directors, confessors and solitaires made it a much larger galaxy that reached into the highest ranks of French society. But the real confrontation was still to come in the early 1660s, following Mazarin’s death in 1661, Retz’s resignation from Paris in 1662 and, especially, the arrival of Hardouin de Péréfixe, Louis XIV’s former tutor, as the new archbishop in 1664. After a ten-year power vacuum in the diocese which, from the authorities’ point of view, had enabled controversy and contestation to flourish unchecked, it was inevitable that a new archbishop would attempt to regain control of his clergy and, within limits, of those religious houses which, like Port-Royal, were directly subject to his authority; Péréfixe’s closeness to Louis XIV was a signal that he would have royal support for his efforts.99 He did not underestimate the difficulty of the task he faced, so when he began imposing the signature of the formulary he allowed those who distinguished between the droit and the fait to sign it out of ‘a human and ecclesiastical faith’ (i.e. out of respect for the church’s authority) in relation to the fait. With the solitaires dispersed and the abbey’s petites écoles already closed down, Péréfixe could fix his attention on its nuns in 1664. What appeared a relatively moderate option to Péréfixe proved, in the eyes of a determined dozen nuns who led the resistance to the formulary, to be a diabolical trap that endangered the truth. Péréfixe came in person to Port-Royal and tried to persuade the nuns individually – and even to show them where the five propositions were in Jansen.100 He also asserted that he had the highest regard for the moral-pastoral principles of the anti-Jesuit rigorists, and specifically for the works of Arnauld, once his colleague in the theology faculty; it was Jansen’s treatment of the question of grace that he was unable to accept.101 But the minority steadfastly refused to sign the formulary under the terms on offer, infuriating Péréfixe during his visitation there with their stubbornness, but also with their skill in turning to their advantage the supposed incapacity of ‘mere women’ either to grasp, or to be judged on, theological questions.102 As a result, they were expelled and dispersed to convents around Paris; a year later, in 1665, they were packed off to Port-Royal-des-Champs, which was henceforth wholly distinct from the Port-Royal abbey in Paris itself, whose nuns had already submitted and signed the formulary.103 The sight of an archbishop entering a convent accompanied by armed guards was not unknown in early modern France, but it usually occurred when reform was being fiercely resisted from within, and not with a view to expelling a group of cloistered women of undisputed spiritual accomplishment. This was one of the most striking paradoxes about Port-Royal, and it

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triggered Bishop Pavillon’s stern ‘letter’ to Louis XIV deploring the damage being done to ‘church discipline’ by their persecution. In the course of the intense debates within the Port-Royal circles during the 1660s, only a frequently shifting minority of nuns maintained a hard-line position, treating the Jansenist fait and ‘human faith’ as questions of conscience on which they would not compromise at any price. For the majority of its members and supporters, including Antoine Arnauld and his brother Henri, the Jansenist bishop of Angers, such a ‘no surrender’ mentality was misguided, and they urged the nuns in question to rethink; the minority, in turn, took such views as evidence that those holding them had been corrupted by the evil of the world.104 VI Jansenism would resurface in a somewhat different guise and historical context by the early 1700s. With the Peace of the Church, a compromise which the PortRoyal nuns finally, albeit reluctantly, accepted, the first generation of French Jansenists seemed to disperse and dissolve. The combination of papal and royal authority may have cowed most Jansenists or their close affiliates by the mid to late 1660s, but their resistance had itself forced the authorities to moderate the terms on which the affirmation of orthodoxy could be made in good conscience. By the time the nuns of Port-Royal were facing reprisals in 1664, Antoine Arnauld and the other major figures had taken the offer of compromise that resulted from this stance, and could no longer see the point of all-out resistance. But in explaining this broader evolution, it may well be another decision, which had no coercive force at all behind it, that made the greatest difference during the 1660s and beyond. The 1655–57 assembly of clergy, which tried hard to eliminate Jansenism via the first formulary in 1657, simultaneously adopted and encouraged the use of Carlo Borromeo’s Instructions to confessors. This manual for administering the sacrament of penance was relatively unknown in France until the 1640s, when Arnauld’s Frequent communion generated so much controversy on the subject. But in subsequent years, Arnauld was hardly an acceptable flagship-name to use in promoting the moral rigorism that Archbishop Péréfixe – and increasingly many others – claimed to subscribe to. In recommending Borromeo’s Instructions the 1657 assembly sought to cut the Gordian knot, signalling its public support for a moral rigorism that was untainted by more recent theological deviation.105 Had such an initiative occurred a few years earlier, it might well have prevented the Jansenist problem from escalating as it did to the point of no return. The 1657 assembly’s message may not have been received overnight, but as controversy over the formula erupted in the 1660s it offered a perfectly orthodox ‘place’ to many of those who might otherwise have been tempted to

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support the Jansenist cause for reasons that had little to do with the Augustinus or the content of its propositions. A heresy had been detected, defined and proscribed during these years, to which nobody openly claimed to belong, unless the refusal to sign the certificate of orthodoxy amounted to such a stance. Moreover, it had begun as part of a movement of return to the true sources of Christian teaching, and specifically that of St Augustine, by people who were convinced that the corrupt age they lived in could be saved from itself only by reconnecting with the golden age of the Fathers of the Church. They protested vehemently – especially in their wills, which were hardly a place for equivocation or dissimulation – that they remained faithful members of the only true church, from which they would not be separated.106 The abusive terms, such as ‘sect’, used to describe them naturally suggest that things were otherwise. When Antoine Arnauld and his supporters had their backs to the wall in 1654, and again in 1665, he refused to take the option of appealing against the Pope’s decisions to a future council of the church. Recourse to it would almost certainly have been seized upon by their adversaries as proof that they were indeed heretics, but it was not a route that Arnauld was prepared to take.107 A mere thirty years later, in the 1680s, another conflict with Rome would lead Louis XIV to resurrect the appeal from oblivion.

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CHAPTER NINE

A New Gallican Age?

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hen Nicolas Pavillon, bishop of Alet, wrote his ‘open’ letter to Louis XIV in August 1664 to protest against the persecution of Port-Royal’s nuns, he began, as we saw, by criticising him for overstepping the boundaries of royal authority. Claiming that Jansenism was a phantom that did not exist, Pavillon declared that it was the Augustinians’ commitment to defending the independence of the church that had attracted his support. The choice of such an initial point of criticism is significant, and it did not go unheeded at the time. When Pavillon’s letter was referred by the king to the parlement of Paris for examination, its terms became the subject of a major frontal attack – which was also an extended defence of royal authority – by the court’s avocat général, Denis Talon. Nearly a year later, the printed version of Talon’s speech was in turn heavily criticised during the assembly of clergy of 1665–66. And, in a concatenation typical of the period, this particular clash coincided with several other ‘incidents’, none of which was especially significant if taken in isolation. Two years earlier, in 1663, the Paris theology faculty had been pressured into adopting a set of six gallican articles which purported to represent its teaching and which would resurface later, in the famous crisis of 1682. But this initial declaration (and two further censures by the faculty in 1664) drew an angry response from Rome, which in 1665 disowned a Paris theological censure for the first time in history. Around the same time the manner in which parlementaire magistrates handled religious matters during its assizes in the Auvergne in 1665 touched a raw clerical nerve and reignited another perennial ‘border’ dispute.1 Even if these incidents had relatively few immediate consequences, the fact that they could arise suddenly and with little warning suggests that the relations of politics and religion, royal and ecclesiastical authority, had still not quite settled into a fixed cast. That this was not just a hiccup would be demonstrated by the much better-known controversies that led to the gallican crisis of the

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1680s to be discussed later in this chapter. Latent tensions and unfinished business resurfaced in the age of Louis XIV in ways that would probably not have seemed likely a few years earlier. The evolution of the Jansenist question between the 1640s and the 1660s – from theology to politics, in Arnauld’s phrase – displaced the ‘normal’ forms of gallican controversy for a time; the fact that papacy and monarchy were working in such close co-operation was largely responsible for this shift. Yet the early 1660s were also characterised by repeated ‘incidents’ between the monarchy and the papacy, during which Louis XIV’s government humiliated Alexander VII and allowed the parlement to criticise papal ambitions and church jurisdiction more vehemently than in previous decades. In little more than a decade after the peace of the church of 1669, a new gallican crisis was brewing, one in which some of the actors played what might seem uncharacteristic roles. For these reasons, it is essential to follow the thread – zigzag as it may in places – of those earlier confrontations which, although they should not be over-interpreted, may shed some light on the shape of gallican thinking in the mid-century. The changed political environment after 1661 is not irrelevant to such a panorama. I With the death of Mazarin in March 1661, just as the Jansenist problem was about to enter a new phase with the enforcement of the first formulary, the long ministériat of the cardinal-ministers ended. Even if Louis XIV had not been so determined to rule – and to be seen to rule – in his own name, the ways in which religious politics were conducted by his government would have had to change considerably, now that cardinals and their clients, many of them clerical, were no longer key political players.2 Mazarin had heartily disliked the conseil de conscience established in 1643 but he eventually decided to preserve it once he gained control of it after the Fronde. It was retained and reshuffled again in 1661, with the royal confessor and the archbishop of Paris as its two major – and sometimes its only – members for most of the next fifty years. But, as before, its main concern was the management of royal ecclesiastical patronage, and there is little evidence that it became the indispensable forum where religious matters of political relevance were discussed or decisions concerning them were taken. That did not prevent the king from discussing particular religious issues with these two conseillers, either together or separately, but both of them would have been aware that on many issues they were not his only interlocutors. Ever since the Caussin debacle in the 1630s, the role of the French royal confessor was to deal with the conscience of the king as a private person, and emphatically not to meddle uninvited in questions of policy and the ‘royal’ sins that they might entail. In any case, Louis XIV was

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especially wary of ecclesiastical politicians, be they cardinals who might still hanker after the role of cardinal-minister, or younger clerics, especially of aristocratic background, with high ambitions.3 The combined effect of all this was to ensure that the politics of religion did not become in any way ‘specialised’ or railed off during the half-century after 1661. Lay royal ministers like Colbert and Le Tellier were just as likely to take up and pursue individual issues in ways that often sidelined the senior clergy. For example, Chancellor Séguier was a determined defender of the Jesuits, while Le Tellier and Colbert inclined, in differing degrees, towards their Augustinian opponents. As we have seen, another minister, Hugues de Lionne, negotiated the peace of the church in the greatest secrecy, so that neither the royal confessor nor the archbishop of Paris knew what was happening. Other significant moments in the politico-religious history of the reign, such as the 1682 gallican crisis or the revocation of the Edict of Nantes of 1685, resulted in greater or lesser degree from such ministerial initiatives. All of this introduces one of the most widely perceived problems about Louis XIV – that he was religiously ignorant.4 Such a criticism is rarely made of other princes of the early modern period, not least because there is no agreement on what religious ignorance among ruling princes might mean. In Louis XIV’s case, the charge would probably never have been made were it not for the consequences of his policies on individual religious questions, with particular attention to the methods used to achieve his aims. That is the nearest we have to a proxy for princely religious ignorance or knowledge. That Louis XIV was a libertine in his middle decades – from the 1650s to the early 1680s – is undisputed, though it is hardly proof that he received a poor – or no – religious education. In fact, the subject is one about which very little is known. The chaotic years of the Fronde have often been considered responsible for such a ‘failure’. But with a mother as dévote as Anne of Austria, and preceptors as dedicated as Péréfixe, it is unlikely that his religious education was neglected and more likely that the results fell short of expectations. What can be said, on the other hand, is that from Mazarin, his godfather and political tutor, Louis XIV acquired during the 1650s an abiding sense of the broader dangers of religious dissent, and beyond that an intolerance of those – whether Huguenots or Jansenists – whose independence, real or imagined, had no place in the royal credo. For a monarch who prided himself on restoring France to primacy in Europe and on reimposing royal authority on rebellious groups within France, the persistence of religious dissent constituted both an irritant and a challenge that was not easy to resist. In this context, it does not seem that his respect for social hierarchy and efforts to consolidate the place of France’s power elites within the government, which have been emphasised by historians for over a generation, have much relevance. His readiness, evident from the early 1660s, to

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take firm, even punitive measures to deal with religious dissent hardly escaped the notice of the political elites of court, council and church, and at particular junctures it played into the hands of ambitious individuals or groups, whether ministers or not, who were prepared to anticipate and ‘run with’ those royal desires. The principal ecclesiastical politician of the reign, Archbishop Harlay of Rouen (1653–71), and then of Paris (1671–95), proved to be a past master of such political manoeuvring, positioning himself as both the gatekeeper of access to the king and the messenger conveying royal commands that he had often inspired in the first place. However, as Robin Briggs has argued, so long as the unprincipled and opportunistic, but extremely assiduous, Harlay remained the dominant church politician, ‘conviction politics’ would be kept at bay, while Louis XIV was only too happy to allow other church figures like Bossuet or Archbishop Le Tellier of Reims to prevent Harlay from exercising complete control over church affairs.5 Yet the resulting system of checks and balances was far from infallible, and led as often to miscalculation and over-reach as to measured responses to problems. II The celebrated four gallican articles of 1682 were, as already noted, the offspring of an earlier controversy within the Paris theology faculty in the 1660s, although the circumstances were substantially different.6 The faculty had lost much of its freedom of action since Richelieu’s ministry. Until then, it was mainly the parlement which tried to force its wishes on the doctors. The advent of the cardinal-ministers was a mixed blessing for the faculty: they could usually defend it against the royal magistrates, but they could also, depending on their own interests, intervene more directly in its affairs than lay ministers ever could; and once that loss of autonomy had occurred, there was no easy return to the status quo ante. Under Louis XIV, it was the archbishops of Paris, especially Harlay (1671–95), who kept it on a tight leash. The papacy had, of course, its own specific reasons for wishing to make the faculty’s historical magisterium a thing of the past, and it increasingly refused to acknowledge its claim to exercise authority in theological questions broadly defined. The faculty’s own indecision over the Jansenist five propositions and the subsequent Arnauld affair (with the accompanying expulsion of dozens of doctors) of 1656 were a serious blow to its reputation, its search for internal equilibrium, and its desire to keep its libertas docendi intact. In the late 1660s and early 1670s Colbert and the papal nuncio almost simultaneously gathered detailed information on individual doctors and their ‘ideological’ preferences, suggesting that both monarchy and papacy felt that cataloguing the doctors in this way would facilitate their respective efforts at manipulating

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the faculty. The headings under which the doctors were classified were themselves revealing of current positions. They were not confined to ‘gallicans’ and ‘Romans’, but each category was subdivided under headings such as ‘intransigent’, ‘simple’ or even ‘politiques’ – thereby suggesting the possibilities of shifts of position or ‘party’ by those so labelled. In 1673, Colbert’s informer assigned Bossuet and the future philo-Jansenist Cardinal Le Camus to those ‘independent’ gallicans who seemed un-biddable.7 Yet despite the decline in its autonomy, what the faculty taught, adopted or censured continued to matter, albeit perhaps in a different way, since the numbers of its students were in constant expansion during the century. This was because bishops, vicarsgeneral and other important office-holders within dioceses were increasingly theology rather than law graduates, as was more common in previous generations.8 Three of the four post-Fronde archbishops of Paris (Retz, Péréfixe and Noailles, but not Harlay) were themselves doctors of the faculty.9 One not insignificant consequence of this development has been seen at work in the previous chapter – that France’s bishops who, as doctors of theology themselves, claimed to be the rightful guardians of religious orthodoxy in their dioceses. This unforeseen development played a part in undermining, or at least limiting, the efforts of Mazarin and Pierre de Marca to present the assemblies of clergy as national councils of the gallican church; and it would do exactly the same down to the last year of Louis XIV’s reign. If it was ‘Jansenist’ propositions that attracted the attention of the authorities of the Paris faculty in the 1640s, it was overtly ultramontane ones that did so by the early 1660s.10 They did have one feature in common, in that initially they had scarcely any impact on the wider public. The ultramontane ‘revival’ evident in the faculty by the early 1660s might have been less problematic had some of its champions not engaged in an increasingly overt defence of papal infallibility, something which had not hitherto been attempted in Paris and which was unlikely to remain unnoticed there for long. No doubt, it was easier to take such liberties at a time when papal authority was being regularly solicited by the French church and monarchy in relation to Jansenism. The first gallican backlash only materialised when the Paris Jesuits became involved in promoting similar ideas and, above all, when a fracas in Rome led to a major diplomatic row (August 1662–February 1664) in which Louis XIV successfully orchestrated the humiliation of the papacy.11 The bad blood which resulted from these tiffs did not seriously interfere with the anti-Jansenist campaign within France, but by the time the dispute with Rome was settled in 1664, the Paris faculty had been cornered into providing Louis XIV with a set of six articles designed to exculpate it of the suspicion that it favoured ultramontane at the expense of gallican ideas, especially at a time when monarchy and papacy were in conflict.12 The articles repeated the familiar gallican ideas of

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absolute royal independence in temporal affairs, the non-existence of a papal deposing power, the superiority of a general council over the Pope, and so on. Despite being put together hastily and under powerful external pressure from both the parlement and the war minister, Le Tellier, the articles were relatively opaque and equivocal in their formulation (some began with the words ‘it is not the doctrine of the Faculty that . . .’). The first three are familiar from the conflicts of the 1610s and 1620s, while the remainder were somewhat more untested and ambiguous. In particular, the doctrine of papal infallibility was described as ‘not that of the Faculty, unless the consent of the church takes place’ – a formula which stops well short of a ringing condemnation of the proposition in question. More surprisingly, it was the first time that an explicit mention of the expression, ‘the gallican liberties’, was written into the faculty’s official register.13 Everything suggests that there was little enthusiasm for the whole exercise, and certainly none for anything that presented all six of the articles as the faculty’s – and by inference, the French church’s – official doctrine.14 But, of course, the six articles now formally existed, to the delight of the parlement of Paris, which gleefully registered them and insisted that they be published and taught throughout France; a royal edict followed a few weeks later, which repeated the parlement’s order.15 It is ironic, in the light of these developments, that the faculty spent much more time and effort in producing two far less well-known censures of its own in 1664 – one against ultramontane ecclesiology, the other against laxist moral theology – which did represent its considered views. Although such concerns had much less interest for either the parlement or Louis XIV’s ministers, they acquired their own independent significance. The faculty’s censure of ultramontane thinking (which by the 1660s increasingly included a defence of papal infallibility) was itself the subject of a full-dress papal riposte and condemnation in 1665, the first time that the papacy condemned a decision of the Paris theologians. But the second censure, against moral laxism, experienced the opposite outcome: it was formally adopted by the assembly of clergy of 1665, and then by the papacy itself in 1666 and 1680, signalling that the ‘rigorist’ turn in early modern Catholicism was not confined to France.16 III These developments ran in parallel with those of the Jansenist conflict in the early 1660s. When Denis Talon launched his attack on Pavillon’s letter to Louis XIV in December 1664, he was no novice.17 Like his predecessors in the position of avocat-général at the Paris parlement, among whom figured Antoine Arnauld père, he was almost routinely involved in the faculty’s affairs. He has been described as the ‘most doctrinaire’ of the gens du roi in the parlement,

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although ‘his inflammatory indictments were rarely followed by the court when it came to formulating its decrees’.18 At a time when ‘incidents’ of the kind we have been exploring seemed to be multiplying and straining relations between church and monarchy, Talon was among the least likely to seek to calm troubled waters. For their part, the assemblies of clergy were just as prone, as we have seen, to be incensed by the doléances inserted in the cahiers of the provinces’ deputies, especially if similar problems came to their notice during their sessions. In 1665 it was the ‘excesses’ of the parlement’s magistrates on ‘tour’ in the Auvergne relating to religious affairs that provided the major source of exasperation over the usurpation of ecclesiastical jurisdiction by laymen. Along with Talon’s attack on Pavillon and the assembly’s censure of Talon’s main assertions as ‘schismatic and heretical’, they offer a useful, brief glimpse of the state of church–monarchy relations in the early years of Louis XIV’s personal rule. In his lengthy plaidoyer against Pavillon, Talon consistently underlined the king’s (and implicitly Mazarin’s) moderation in handling the Jansenist affair, and his preference for limited measures when he could well have imposed more draconian ones. He opened with the kind of question that, coming from a parlementaire, the French church knew to be heavily loaded: ‘what place does the coronation (sacre) grant our kings in the sanctuary, what role in the administration of sacred things, and what part in that which concerns the externals and the discipline of religion?’19 Whereas Pavillon’s version of French history showed earlier monarchs offering their assistance in enforcing the decisions of church councils, and thus respecting spiritual authority, Talon took from an earlier age – from the Old Testament to the Carolingian monarchy – what he saw as ample evidence of a different pattern of activity. Christian antiquity itself showed that emperors and kings had frequently convened and presided over councils and synods, and even intervened to impose their own equivalents of religious formulas and doctrines in order to deal with heresies in their day. Were not these, Talon then asked, ‘clear marks of jurisdiction and authority’ belonging to Christian princes? He concluded with an attack on ‘those who presume to think that God has reserved to them alone the profundity of his counsels and the revelation of eternal truth’.20 These two versions of Christian history could hardly have been further apart as far as the relations between the religious and the political were concerned. Talon’s speech was duly denounced as heretical and schismatic by the 1665 assembly, especially for suggesting ‘that temporal princes have the power to judge the doctrine of the faith and church discipline in its entirety’.21 Talon’s thinking, they added, smacked of the principles that were at the root of the Anglican schism and heresy. To Talon’s question of what rights the royal sacre gave France’s kings ‘in the sanctuary’, the assembly firmly replied that while it gave them a status

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higher than other princes, ‘it did not remove them from the flock in order to place them among the pastors [i.e. the bishops], to whom alone God gave the power to judge the doctrines of the faith’.22 Coming from the source that it did, Talon’s language, however couched, could not but rile the assembled leadership of the French church; all the more so as his speech had been printed and widely circulated. The mindset it revealed was, in their view, a symptom of what they had been combating for years. In the mid-1660s, their dislike of the caesaro-papism defended by Talon was exacerbated by reports that parlementaire magistrates holding assize courts (grands jours) in the Auvergne seemed to be taking their cue from Talon’s principles. It was not the first time that magistrates conducting such assizes had taken such a wide view of the royal authority that they personified. The grands jours of Poitiers in 1634, in which Denis Talon’s father had played an important part, had ordered visitations of parishes, churches and clergy across that huge diocese (nearly 800 parishes), to be conducted by four pairs of commissioners, one chosen by the bishop and one by the magistrates in each case. Their brief was to assess and help repair the (physical and material) damage done to the parishes by the Protestants; because of this specific consideration, the authority of the monarchy to act was considered unobjectionable, even if in practice the inspectors took a much wider view of their assignment.23 The 1634 exercise seems to have provoked few objections at the time, probably because of its Huguenot dimension (requiring royal intervention), but also because the bishop of Poitiers gave it his full support.24 Thirty years later, during the more famous grands jours of the Auvergne – another sprawling province with a turbulent, violent nobility but with no significant Protestant presence – the Parisian magistrates appear to have acted largely on their own initiative, and to have drafted quite detailed prescriptions for the performance of religious services by the parish clergy and for the reform of the houses of religious orders.25 These at least were the reports that reached the 1665 assembly of clergy in Paris, which desperately sought to obtain copies of the decrees issued by the magistrates in order to condemn their unwarranted invasion of the sanctuary. These overlapping discussions of parlementaire theory and practice led the assembly to predictable conclusions – a formal censure of Talon, the first ever to be made by an assembly of clergy of a speech by a senior parlementaire; and an energetic effort to induce Louis XIV into revoking the decrees of the grands jours. No less predictably, obtaining such results proved far more elusive than agreeing on the need to take action. There followed several weeks of cat-and-mouse feints in early 1666, at the end of which the clergy’s request that Talon’s speech be struck out of the parlement’s registers was checkmated by a counter-demand from Louis XIV that the clergy should remove their censure of Talon from theirs, given that Talon had

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‘explained’ and excused himself to the king in the meantime. But as neither side would make the first move, the respective pronouncements remained as – and where – they were.26 The clergy’s other demand, namely the royal suppression of the obnoxious decree of the grands jours, which the king had initially suggested would be forthcoming, also proved elusive. It had been suspended after the clergy’s initial complaints, but the objective of a full royal repudiation gradually evaporated and was silently dropped.27 Thus by early 1666, the papacy had censured the Paris theology faculty and the assembly of clergy had censured the avocat-général’s speech; both these occurrences were novelties. But the equivocal status of the decrees of the grand jours on religious questions was probably closer to the centre of gravity of actual relations between church and monarchy at that date. Louis XIV may have instinctively leaned towards the clergy in some of these conflicts, but he also seems to have received – and accepted – strong contrary advice that made him stop short of taking sides overtly. The Jansenist affair had, for reasons already considered, exacerbated the gallicanism of the parlement, but at a time when papacy and monarchy acted in close co-operation, that gallicanism was denied some of its most common forms of expression. And that may have spurred it to continue with its attempts to whittle away ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Like its predecessors, Louis XIV’s government was bombarded with demands that it prevent the parlements and other royal courts from doing this, and the assemblies of clergy had become one of the main platforms for such demands. This could not have happened without the active support of the bishops who dominated the assemblies, so that the defence of ecclesiastical jurisdiction seems to have gradually mutated into the defence of episcopal authority over the years. It would be easier for historians to track and understand this shift if more was known of the fate of ecclesiastical jurisdiction ‘on the ground’ during these decades. France’s clergy were united in theory in defending church jurisdiction against intervention by its royal-secular counterpart, but they found it hard to sustain that unity in practice, and both high and lower clergy, as well as the religious orders, made liberal use of the otherwise detested appeal comme d’abus to the secular law courts in order to defend their own interests. By the age of Louis XIV, the increasingly powerful bishops were keen on developing their own administrative apparatus within their dioceses at the expense of the church courts which had always enjoyed a degree of autonomy in exercising their jurisdiction, and which were capable of upholding the claims of the lower clergy in intra-clerical disputes.28 This may explain why the strongest accusations made against the magistrates in the Auvergne in 1665 were that they were usurping episcopal authority just when bishops increasingly monopolised the rights to visit (i.e. inspect) and reform local parishes and

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clergy; there is little sign of such protest against similar actions a generation earlier in Poitou. The pressure put on Louis XIV to quash these initiatives was correspondingly strong and although it failed to obtain results in 1666, it would continue to figure on the assemblies’ agenda for many years to come. IV The celebrated crisis of the régale, as it is known, may seem quite distinct from the issues we have just discussed, but because it focused on royal prerogatives that combined the temporal and the spiritual, it raised the same kinds of question. Moreover, the manner in which it blew up was in keeping with the frequently unexpected character of French clashes over politico-religious questions. In retrospect, it may seem as if the main parties to it sleepwalked into confrontation, and then found themselves either unsure or unwilling to retreat from positions that they had taken up. In addition, halfway through the crisis the specific problem of the régale itself was largely forgotten, superseded by the most celebrated gallican ‘moment’ in French history. The historiography of the latter subject is immense and frequently partisan, not least because until the mid-twentieth century it was the single most important historical battleground for gallicans and ultramontanes. The denounced it, alongside Jansenism, as the culprit responsible for the disasters that later befell French Catholicism, yet in this dispute the Jansenists mainly supported the ultramontane position. The rival historiographies each had their share of the selective use of sources and the tendentious interpretation of events and intentions. A detailed analysis of the gallican crisis would fill – and has filled – entire volumes, so the purpose of the pages that follow is to replace and examine it in its historical context. The initial clash over the régale was sparked by Louis XIV’s belated adoption, in 1673, of the thesis, developed by the lawyers of the Paris parlement since the beginning of the century, that the régale was a royal prerogative that was ‘universal’ and inalienable throughout the kingdom, and not just a historical accident which existed in some provinces but not others. The régale asserted that during episcopal vacancies the king was entitled to step into the bishop’s shoes and consequently to collect his revenues and fill those vacant church benefices without cure of souls that were in the bishop’s gift, until such time as a successor took up office. It was therefore both a temporal and a spiritual prerogative. Because the régale had previously been unknown across much of southern France, and its extension had been specifically forbidden by the general Council of Lyon (1274), there was always the possibility of opposition to its extension there, but neither the king nor his advisers expected much resistance when such an extension was first decreed in 1673 and then

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reiterated in 1675.29 There is no evidence that either Archbishop Harlay or the royal confessor opposed it. It has been suggested, not implausibly, that the decision to adopt the régale in 1673 was a gesture towards the parlement, its real champion, during wartime (the Dutch war 1672–78), when the court’s co-operation on financial questions was vital.30 Even if that were not the case, it extended the pattern of the previous decade of supporting the parlement’s gallican positions. There were good grounds for thinking that the régale would encounter little opposition: in practice, the crown had not kept for itself the episcopal revenues of vacant dioceses already subject to the ‘temporal’ régale since Richelieu had found an alternative solution in 1639; nor was it now proposing to reverse the established practice of simply handing over those revenues to the incoming bishop on his taking up office.31 Richelieu had also intended finding a solution to the objections to the ‘spiritual’ régale, but he died before he could do so. Successive assemblies of clergy frequently dealt with incidents arising from the workings of the régale, especially in the spiritual sphere. In the process, they found themselves in direct opposition to the parlement, whose thesis on the régale’s universal validity was severely damaged by Pierre de Marca in 1655.32 Despite the fact that the régale’s significance was by then more symbolic than real, the clergy failed to dissuade the crown from suddenly adopting the parlementaire view that it was an inalienable and universal crown right in 1673. At the same time, provision by the crown to vacant benefices without cure of souls, essentially in cathedral and other chapters, did not seem by the early 1670s a major problem in the eyes of many people, bishops included, across France, not least because episcopal vacancies tended to be of increasingly short duration. Consequently, the first responses to the crown’s policy were, to say the least, muted. Nor did the papacy take much notice of what might be regarded as an assault on long-standing ecclesiastical immunities, let alone protest against such a unilateral decision in relation to them; Rome was as wary as ever of intervening motu proprio in France’s religious affairs, especially when their political entanglements were so evident.33 Within France, too, the reaction was limited. Of the fifty-nine southern bishops affected by the new measure, all but two accepted it without demur. In a move that resembled the anti-Jansenist formulary, the crown obliged all bishops then in office – and not merely those to be appointed in the future – to sign a declaration of acceptance of the régale; failure to comply would mean that their dioceses would be considered vacant ‘en régale’, with the prospect of the benefices without cure of souls falling vacant within those dioceses being filled by royal provision over the head of a reigning bishop. The two southern bishops who refused to comply with the royal order were Pavillon of Alet and Étienne Caulet of Pamiers, both of whom, but especially

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Pavillon, had become embroiled in the Jansenist conflict during the 1660s. That element of continuity with past resistance to royal power played its part in the development of the ensuing crisis, not least because the two bishops were supported by the Port-Royal circles and, more surprisingly, by philoJansenist allies in Rome itself.34 Most unexpectedly, from 1676 onwards, the new Pope, Innocent XI, made no secret of his admiration for Pavillon, while showing no fear of a Jansenist bogey. Despite being advised by several of their more distinguished confrères that the régale was simply too insignificant to fight over, Pavillon and Caulet persisted in their refusal to accept the royal declaration.35 Thus when benefices in their dioceses began to fall vacant en régale, the result was that some candidates sought and obtained title to them from the crown, only to be opposed by those nominated by the bishops themselves. Pavillon and Caulet responded, on classic canonical grounds, by excommunicating as intruders those clergy who had obtained royal provision, only for the latter to appeal in their turn to the royal council for its support against the bishops and their nominees. Thus a local imbroglio quickly became a much wider problem: when the two bishops’ sentences of excommunication against ‘intruders’ were quashed by their respective archbishops, they appealed to Innocent XI in late 1677.36 His acceptance of their appeal against the régale a few months later moved the problem on to yet a different plane, especially as over the next two years he despatched three briefs to Louis XIV containing veiled threats of action against him, excommunication included, if he did not withdraw the régale declaration altogether. He even invoked, among others, the authority of Pierre de Marca in order to undermine the king’s policy. By the time the third and most threatening missive arrived in February 1680, both Pavillon and Caulet were dead and an ad hoc solution involving their successors should have been possible; in fact, it was the opposite that occurred. By this date, the key issue was no longer the régale itself, except perhaps within the two southern dioceses, where rival factions of clergy (régalistes and anti-régalistes) confronted each other and produced a noisy secondary conflict. Elsewhere the régale gradually faded, even from the pamphlets and propaganda, by 1681.37 When, later that year, and after some hesitation, Louis XIV finally authorised a special assembly of clergy to meet, it was because the inflexible Innocent XI seemed to threaten the gallican monarchy on a key issue – its immunity from papal sanctions. The agenda of the extraordinary assembly contained just two items: the implementation of the régale itself and, especially, the Sorbonne’s largely forgotten six articles of 1663. The resurrection of the Sorbonne articles signalled that it was time to circle the wagons in defence of the gallican liberties. By comparison with the earlier confrontations that we have studied so far, it is the role changes that are most striking during the 1680s. The régale may have been a parlementaire

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‘invention’, but it had been formally adopted by the crown and, with a few exceptions, it was not opposed by the French church, whose leaders argued that there were more serious problems, including the Protestant question, facing them by 1680. The parlement could thus have no ‘enemy within’ to campaign against this time, and both the king and the church were keen to keep the court on the sidelines. It was the stance of the French church which was the most obviously different to that of earlier confrontations. In the lead-up to the assembly that produced the four gallican articles of 1682, it remains difficult to determine clearly who took the initiative, not least because the leading figures of the church at the time – from Harlay to Bossuet and Le Tellier of Reims – were all connected (sometimes as members of the same families) to the principal ministerial factions, essentially the Colberts and the Le Telliers, whose own political manoeuvres were closely tied to these events; in the wake of the crisis provoked by the gallican articles themselves these leading figures became anxious to conceal their past actions and blamed the mistakes on their rivals. However, it does seem that Archbishop Le Tellier (and his father, chancellor of France since 1677) was decisive in the clergy’s initial response to the papal pressure on Louis XIV – namely the letter of the ‘minor’ assembly of clergy of 1680, which famously and ominously declared that the French clergy were ‘so firmly attached to His Majesty that there is nothing that could separate us from him’. A brief ad hoc assembly of bishops present in Paris, similar to those assemblies of 1653–54 that dealt with the Jansenist affair, followed in 1681, and it proposed the convening of either a national council of the gallican church, or at least an extraordinary assembly of clergy. A cautious Louis XIV took some persuading to convene such an assembly, but ensured that only ‘safe hands’ would be elected to it; if there was always the possibility that it might become a national council, the crown was not keen to either predetermine or pre-empt such an outcome, and decided on convening an extraordinary assembly.38 The most famous of all assemblies of clergy of the ancien régime, meeting between November 1681 and June 1682, initially seems to have seen its major task as that of ‘fixing’ the problematic features of the current spiritual régale arrangements in such a way that they would cease to be objectionable. The assembly’s proposals to that effect were swiftly incorporated into a royal edict in January 1682, as a result of which the deputies formally accepted the régale as binding throughout France – and then forwarded the revision to Innocent XI for his approval, confident that all the objections to it had been effectively met. Instead, they found themselves in receipt not just of a blunt rejection of the régale itself, but of a stern rebuke for their unwillingness to defend the ancient rights of the church. Fearful that a formal papal censure would follow in short time, the assembly reacted by hastily finalising the four gallican

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articles in March 1682; within days of the assembly adopting them, they were incorporated into another royal edict, which on its immediate registration by the Paris parlement became a law of the land. As is obvious from the haste involved, the immediate purpose was to shield both the French church and the king in the event of possible papal chastisement. The 1681–82 assembly had opened with Bossuet’s sermon ‘on the unity of the church’ – the most famous sermon ever preached on such an occasion. Initially, Bossuet himself was among the least inclined of the deputies to make any declaration on the gallican question in the increasingly tense circumstances of early 1682, so it is surprising that he should have ended up refining the earlier – and more abrasive – versions of the four articles in a language and a theological vein that were quite distinctive. Although the son and grandson of members of a parlement (Dijon) and a doctor of theology (Paris), whose various ‘maxims’ he had assimilated and reworked over many years, Bossuet’s version of the four articles struck a different note from those of his political and theological mentors. He was an Augustinian steeped in the Fathers of the Church, but also a firm anti-Jansenist whose concept of the church was the gallican one of a spiritual and sacramental community of believers rather than an institution of monarchical character. He saw ‘Rome’ as a metaphor – or shorthand – for the universal church, the one inseparable from the other; for that reason, the church could not err, although individual popes had, and would continue to do so. Bossuet’s ecclesiology was also heavily influenced by his long-standing intellectual efforts to obtain the return of the Huguenots to the Catholic church, which impelled him to exalt the church’s unity while simultaneously circumscribing papal power. His gallicanism was innate, if also seriously boosted by his admiration for Louis XIV, all of which made him less than impressed by the papacy as an institution and especially by its claims to infallibility. The latter could only belong to the church as a whole, and it materialised only when the consensus of the whole church was forthcoming.39 What Cardinal du Perron and the French church abhorred in 1614 was now becoming law in France, and that law was being proposed by du Perron’s ‘successors’ within the French church. The gallican theses proclaiming the absolute autonomy of princes from any ecclesiastical power, the unbreakable character of the duty of obedience owed to princes by subjects, and the exclusively spiritual nature of the authority of the papacy and the church – all were reaffirmed in 1682 in a single article, the first, and were tightly wrapped together in language that was larded with quotations from the Bible and asserted that such principles were entirely in line with God’s word. This ‘political’ gallicanism was precisely what du Perron had rejected in 1614, but it was easier to do so in 1614, since du Perron was denying the right of laypeople to

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make such a judgement; this was far removed from what emerged in 1682. The three remaining articles of 1682 also belonged to the gallican traditions of the French church. The middle pair of articles were devoted both to acknowledging papal power on spiritual matters and to underlining the limits of that power; they affirmed, not surprisingly, the gallican consensus on the superior authority of the general councils since the fifteenth century, which was still in force. The final article, declaring that the ‘pope had the principal part in questions of faith and that his decrees concern all of the churches and each church in particular’, but that his judgement is not irrevocable ‘unless the consent of the church intervenes’, took clear aim at the theory of papal infallibility, which the article attributed only to the church as a whole. Despite this evident restriction, which was a gallican sine qua non, Bossuet’s four articles were far less hostile in their language towards the papacy than earlier formulations; they made a deliberate effort to bring the papacy back into gallican thinking as an active partner deserving respect and obedience. The major difference between the 1663 and 1682 articles is, as we have already seen, that the Sorbonne had largely couched its statements in deliberately negative and opaque terms (i.e. what the faculty did not teach), whereas those of 1682 were formulated in a way that would sustain their prominence henceforth as the declared teaching of the French church. For all the political manipulation of the 1682 assembly, there is little evidence of substantial opposition, either within its ranks or in the wider French church, towards such a move. The possibility of papal censures against the two archbishops (Toulouse and Narbonne) who had quashed the actions of Caulet and Pavillon in their dioceses concerning the régale was an important factor which, as in previous decades, made the assembly sense the danger to the episcopate as a whole and seek protection from it in the form of the four articles. Intriguingly, in view of the origins of those articles, it is worth noting that the Paris theologians were the least willing to accept the 1682 ‘revision’ as binding on them and their teaching. They found the process devised for implementing the declaration in the faculty, which effectively placed the parlement in the position of guardian and policeman of the faculty’s teaching and orthodoxy, even less palatable; several recalcitrant doctors were duly expelled.40 In the short run, the language in which the 1682 gallican articles were expressed was no guarantee of a peaceful outcome to the crisis. But that mattered much less than the fact that Louis XIV, like his late-medieval predecessors, had the French clergy on his side from the outset. This conflict with the papacy, by far the most severe of the seventeenth century, seemed at this point to be leading France into imitating Henry VIII of England’s break with Rome in 1534. Yet despite the mutual suspicion and the long periods of ill humour, posturing and stonewalling on both sides in the 1680s, there was no

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inexorable logic of ideas or of historical precedent at work during the crisis. Firstly and crucially, Innocent XI abstained from censuring the declaration and four articles of 1682, which he must have been sorely tempted to do, especially as it was an assembly of clergy, rather than the crown itself, which had openly taken the initiative in formulating the gallican articles in the name of the French church. A decree drafted after much discussion and revision in Rome to that effect was never published, possibly because the gallican denial of papal infallibility was itself too well supported historically.41 Innocent XI soon signalled his willingness to call a truce. For his part, Louis XIV precipitately wound up the 1682 assembly, for fear that its increasingly zealous defence of the crown might take the quarrel with Innocent XI a step too far.42 Thereafter, the clergy were kept well out of the conflict, as the crown belatedly rediscovered the possibilities of direct diplomacy.43 In fact, it was a secondary, ‘knock-on’ issue which overtook such hopeful signs of a will to repair relations, prolonging the crisis for almost another decade. In September 1682, the Pope refused to grant their bulls to two of the non-episcopal deputies to the 1682 assembly who were nominated to vacant bishoprics just as the assembly disbanded – a common practice by this date; as deputies, they had voted for and signed the four articles. The papal stance was immediately countered by the French ambassador in Rome, Cardinal d’Estrées, who declared, on his own initiative, that so long as the two deputies were not confirmed as bishops by Rome, none of the king’s other episcopal nominees would seek papal confirmation. This was a purely tactical gambit to persuade the Pope to back down, but after Louis XIV approved of it, an impasse was soon reached, whose duration nobody could – or did – predict. Thus, it was emphatically not the papacy, as is often claimed, that refused to confirm French episcopal nominations generally; on the contrary, Rome was quite keen to confirm royal nominees, as that would have undermined the French boycott. In that, however, Rome failed, as the French crown, unable or unwilling to change tack by this point without loss of face, successfully prevented any of its episcopal nominees from breaking ranks. Thus by the mid-1680s, the two parties were in deep deadlock over a ‘secondary’ issue, despite France’s growing lack of serving bishops, whose presence was needed more than ever during and after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, especially to deal with the consequences of the largely forced mass conversions of Protestants in the southern dioceses most affected by the dispute with Rome. But each time suggestions for a negotiated solution were floated, the inflexible Innocent XI insisted on the retraction of the 1682 régale edict.44 Moreover, efforts to break this deadlock could be seriously ambushed by unrelated issues that were all too easily inflated in such moments of mutual suspicion. Thus Innocent XI’s decision, taken as part of his continuing efforts to

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reform Rome itself, to reduce the size of the ‘quarters’ (districts) around the city’s embassies – they were a source of much crime and disorder – met with a firm, even provocative, French refusal to budge, when at another time it might have caused little or no fuss.45 The upshot of this obstructionism was a famously misunderstood incident in early 1688 when Louis XIV was informed by the Pope that he had incurred ipso facto the automatic excommunication provided for in the all-purpose bull In Coena Domini against those, especially rulers, who infringed ecclesiastical liberties. But, contrary to what has often been claimed, this was not an explicit excommunication issued by Innocent XI against Louis XIV in person; the king of Spain was similarly informed of his infringements of the same bull during the 1680s.46 In any case, In Coena Domini had always been rejected in France, where it had no authority, as the Pope himself well knew. Above all, the communication of this sanction was deliberately kept secret by both king and pope so that dangerous misinterpretations of it would not arise. Yet Louis XIV still did not feel reassured that nothing further would happen, so by way of precaution against any future papal censures directed against him personally, he had the avocat général of the Paris parlement lodge a formal appeal to a future general council of the church, also in early 1688.47 This tactic had not been used by France since 1551, but it shows how well stocked the parlementairegallican arsenal still was when it came to checkmating papal actions, actual or potential. Yet this spectacularly out-of-season move, which recalled the ‘withdrawal of obedience’ tactics employed by the monarchy against the papacy during and after another major crisis, the Great Schism (1378–1418), was itself fraught with unseen dangers, which included possible papal censures. The question of how far the crown should seek to mobilise broad support for such an appeal was also a delicate one, as there was no guarantee that it could be effectively controlled; it was decided in 1688 that such a ‘campaign’ should be limited to informing, in a somewhat ad hoc fashion, the bishops then present in Paris, the theology faculty, and the city clergy, regular and secular.48 Serious doubts also surfaced as to whether the king of France’s powers of church patronage would be secure if, as some were now suggesting, he were to repudiate the Concordat of Bologna (1516) and return to an earlier type of gallican regime. It appears not to have occurred to anyone in 1688 that they were opening a Pandora’s box: within a generation such an appeal to a future council would be turned against the alliance of monarchy and papacy by Jansenists and their supporters. Meanwhile, relations between France and the papacy were far worse by the late 1680s than they had been at any time since 1682, and the appeal itself, which was accompanied by threats of further political and military intervention against Rome, seemed to scupper any hope of a negotiated outcome.49

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As with the Jansenist conflicts of the 1660s, it took the election of not one but two new popes in quick succession after Innocent XI’s death in 1689 before the overlapping conflicts unleashed by the régale were gradually resolved. While filling the huge gaps in the episcopate was of major importance by the early 1690s, it proved slow going, as it took an unconscionably long time – nearly three years – for the French and papal courts to agree upon the terms under which the incoming bishops who had been deputies to the 1682 assembly would apologise to the Pope for any offence their behaviour might have given to the papacy.50 The deadlock was initially caused by the French refusal to accept that the deputies to the 1682 assembly had engaged in doctrinal ‘innovation’ or had even intended to innovate by adopting the gallican articles; thus any offence could only have been hypothetical and unintended. With the ensuing dispute ‘over conditionals and indicatives’ threatening to become interminable, given the intransigence displayed by Rome in particular, it was Louis XIV who backed down.51 However, the conflict did not end with the matter of episcopal vacancies: they were, after all, the consequences and not the causes of the conflict, which remained to be resolved. Anxious to come to terms with the papacy at a time when he was almost single-handedly at war with the major European powers, the king and his advisers realised that more serious concessions were necessary. Beginning with a climb-down over the embassy ‘quarter’ in Rome in 1689, Louis XIV finally confirmed in September 1693 an earlier verbal promise to the effect that he had ordered that the 1682 edict containing the four gallican articles should not be implemented.52 The edict itself was not formally revoked, as revocation would have been tantamount to disowning the leadership of the French church and undermining the gallican maxims. Instead, the four articles would remain, but would not be binding on the clergy and theologians of France. Finally, there was the régale itself, the fons et origo of the conflict, which Louis XIV had likewise promised the new Pope that he would attend to. In late 1693, after consultations in Paris, the king offered to surrender his claim to exercise the régale by imprescriptible crown right, if in return the Pope would concede it to him by issuing a special indult. He had briefly offered the same bargain to Innocent XI in 1680, but it was rejected and subsequently forgotten. Risky as this overture was in itself – it is easy to imagine the dismayed response of the various gallicans committed to defending French autonomy vis-à-vis Rome had they got wind of it – it is the Pope’s response to it which is perhaps the most surprising. On each of the numerous occasions between 1693 and 1697 when Louis XIV reopened the subject and pressed Innocent XII for a definitive settlement of the régale dispute on these terms, the Pope politely rebuffed his efforts. In doing so, the Pope turned down

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what might seem a perfect opportunity to show just how much the king of France – especially in the person of Louis XIV – still depended on the papacy for his claims to exercise his powers over the French church. Arguing that wartime (the Nine Years War was then in full swing) was no time for such decisions, Pope Innocent may well have been wary of some deeper-lying trap in the French offer, but he certainly feared a domino effect, whereby other Catholic powers, especially the Habsburgs, would demand the same concessions as the king of France. Rather than having to face such a prospect, he preferred to leave the dispute unresolved, while assuring Louis XIV that he would not interfere with the workings of the ‘reformed’ régale. Thereafter, unbeknown to all but a few diplomats, it was papal reticence that tacitly allowed the régale as royal right to remain in force in France for another century.53 V The prolonged gallican crisis triggered by the régale had almost come full circle after nearly twenty years, by the end of which France found itself at war with most of the major powers in Europe (1689–97), and desperately short of both friends and allies, not to mention money. A combination of demographic setbacks, the high costs of war and economic stagnation were a major feature of the 1690s, a situation that would continue almost until the end of Louis XIV’s reign in 1715.54 Such conditions produced some innovations, one of the most unusual of which was the first universal tax – the capitation – introduced in 1695, which the nobility and the clergy, both normally exempt from taxation, were required to pay.55 In fact, the clergy’s contribution to the royal finances, as expressed by the don gratuit voted in 1690 and 1695, had already rocketed quite independently of the capitation tax. In the light of problems discussed in this and earlier chapters, one might expect either the French assemblies of clergy and – or – the papacy to protest, as they had in previous generations, against the fiscal burden being heaped on the French church and clergy. But the assemblies of clergy had by this point decided that the best tactic was to grant, almost without discussion, let alone any haggling, virtually whatever sums the government asked for; in 1695, for example, the clergy voted, on Archbishop Harlay’s proposal, a far greater don than ministers were expecting or requesting.56 Although there was occasional grumbling over it, especially in 1695, the reasoning behind such a shift in behaviour by the assemblies was, it has been argued, to focus on obtaining as much leverage as possible when it came to seeking concessions from the crown over the clergy’s own demands; the bitter haggling of the age of Richelieu and Mazarin was becoming a distant memory as early as the 1670s, thanks to a radically

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different approach taken by the assemblies under the leadership of Harlay, who served as president of virtually every assembly until the eve of his death in 1695. The 1695 assembly, as it happened, witnessed one of Harlay’s triumphs: an extensive royal edict reforming and strengthening church jurisdiction. Indeed, the timing of the edict could be regarded as evidence of the crown taking a leaf out of the clergy’s book by granting it just before the 1695 assembly convened so as to elicit a substantial don gratuit – which duly materialised.57 The papacy, for its part, seems to have paid scant attention to the finances of the French church or the impact of dons gratuits and other payments to the crown during these same decades. It briefly expressed concern that the capitation was a breach of clerical immunities, but the French government’s position was that since no alienation of church property was involved, there were no grounds for concern or action on Rome’s part. The latter’s response to the 1695 edict on church jurisdiction was, on the face of it, more robust.58 The edict was almost the last of its kind, with a lineage stretching back to the 1629 Code Michau and the Ordinance of Blois of 1579. It differed from these predecessors in that all of its fifty articles were concerned exclusively with religious and ecclesiastical affairs, a distinction which in the past would almost certainly have given rise to acrimonious exchanges. For all the detail it contained on legal procedures, appeals and the competence of church courts, it was primarily designed to expand and fortify episcopal authority over the rest of the clergy, regular as much as secular; it paid close attention to issues like the control and licensing of preaching, the administration of the sacraments, and the reform of houses of religious orders. Although it made no reference to the newly converted Protestants, it is likely that the crown’s recent record of dealing with religious matters concerning them encouraged it to extend its efforts to Catholicism itself. The senior French clergy, who had pushed for such royal support for many years, welcomed the 1695 edict and its contents. But the religious orders were much less enamoured of what seemed like another major setback for what remained of their privileges of self-government and their pastoral autonomy. To that extent, the edict was also an attempt to end the centuries-old standoff between seculars and regulars. The Roman reaction to the 1695 edict, which was no doubt influenced by some of the religious orders, can be taken as one indicator of where church and state relations stood at the end of the century. The initial response from Rome was to object that Louis XIV was now unilaterally attempting to regulate questions of ecclesiastical discipline and authority as if they were not really different from temporal affairs; he was thus politely asked to ensure that, to use Pavillon’s terms, he did not overstep the bounds of secular authority. The French reply to these objections was that the contents of the edict

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conformed to the decrees of the Council of Trent, and that within the kingdom of France the king was both the protector and ‘executor’ of the canons. However, Louis XIV did accept that the article concerning episcopal authority over the regulars might have been a step too far and he agreed to re-examine and revise it – which duly happened in 1696, thus reassuring the religious orders and the papacy of his goodwill. In reply to this gesture, the Pope admitted that he had only raised his objections to the edict for form’s sake, in order to silence the complaints of the regulars; he had no intention of interfering in the way that it was implemented within France. At that point the exchanges ceased, with Innocent XII avowing that he had no wish to imitate his predecessor Innocent XI and start another round of the sacerdotiumversus-regnum dispute.

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CHAPTER TEN

A Huguenot Half-century

B

y comparison with the sound and fury of the Jansenist and gallican disputes, the experiences of France’s Protestants during the decades after they finally lost their political and military power in the late 1620s seem both harder to pin down and less noteworthy. The extended mid-century from 1630 to about 1680 could compete neither with the fortitude displayed by the generation which defended the cause at La Rochelle in the 1620s, nor with the tragic but often heroic resistance, in very changed circumstances, to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes of the 1680s and later. Sandwiched between these two historic peaks, the intervening half-century seems rather ill-defined and, as a result, subject to divergent assessments by historians. In 1961, Émile-G. Léonard famously summarised the existing historiography by stating that it was an age when the Huguenots became lethargic, theologically, socially, politically and institutionally, losing the fire and commitment that had previously characterised them. When the time of tribulation came under Louis XIV the great majority were unprepared for the challenge, but the revocation, Léonard argued, was salutary because it finally raised them from that long slumber.1 Such a comprehensive verdict, treating Protestantism as the sick man of France, now seems excessively judgemental and self-flagellating, measuring developments uniquely in terms of the tragic denouement of 1685. Almost inevitably, subsequent research has unearthed evidence that contradicted Léonard on many points, leading to a more nuanced general view of these years. In 1968, Daniel Ligou could only assert that the condition of French Protestantism around 1661 was ‘not too sombre’.2 Twenty years later, Menna Prestwich peered through the other end of the lens, boldly asking whether the years from 1629 to 1661 should not be considered ‘a golden age’ for the Huguenots who, shorn of their military and political power, contributed significantly to contemporary economic, financial and even cultural and artistic developments.3 Despite such advances, the history of French

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Protestantism throughout the half-century between 1630 and 1680 remains oddly disconnected from the mainstream of the country’s politico-religious history. The more combatively ‘confessional’ its historiography, the less room it seemed to leave for alternative interpretations – let alone for an approach that would consider the period between 1630 and 1680 as one of variation, false starts and uncertainty.4 The major developments of these decades do not lend themselves to a straightforward narrative. As a result, the following pages move forwards and backwards through these developments without assuming that there was anything inevitable about the final outcome. The chapter discusses important developments not touched on earlier, which will illustrate the continuing vitality of French Protestantism while underlining how limited generalisations purporting to be valid for French Protestantism as a whole can be. I The political and military superstructures of France’s Protestants’ (RPR) may have been dismantled by 1630 – with a few ‘tolerable’ exceptions, such as the increasingly episodic national synods and the Protestant general deputies to the court.5 Although the Huguenot ‘party’ was replaced by the churches in certain respects, it was still too early for contemporaries to ignore the Protestants, either militarily or politically. The 1620s had indeed shown that Protestant rebellion, when conducted in isolation from other forms of discontent, especially that of the aristocracy, could be dealt with effectively, especially when that revolt cut across the Richelieu ministry’s foreign policy priorities. By comparison, the following three decades witnessed far greater discontent, which at different times embraced almost every social group in France, from the aristocracy to the peasantry, and especially the towns. And the most rebellious areas overlapped considerably with the geography of Protestantism. From the Languedoc revolt of 1632 to the Fronde (and its subsequent local embers) of the 1650s, there were numerous opportunities for the Protestants to piggyback on such discontent with the crown and its policies; in each case, the temptation for Huguenot towns, whether former security towns or not, to take up arms to regain their earlier autonomy must have been difficult to resist.6 Despite this self-restraint, there was much more suspicious activity – political and military – by the Huguenots of Languedoc and the Cévennes in the 1630s and early 1640s than is usually recognised. It seems that Richelieu remained as reluctant as ever to become embroiled in further conflict with the southern Huguenots, whose ‘troublemakers’ he appears to have left in relative peace.7 The Protestants’ political behaviour was, as always, closely tied to the evolution of their nobility. With their military power and the political

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assemblies a thing of the past, Protestant nobles lost the core of their historical raison d’être within the Huguenot camp – which was now largely reduced to a religious entity. For nobles anxious to sustain or improve their ‘reputation’, there were very few alternatives to direct royal service. The crown’s growing unwillingness to advance the careers of Protestant nobles disinclined to adopt the same religion as the king increased the pressure on them to convert, as the case of Turenne unambiguously showed.8 By the time of the Camisards (1702), revolt by Protestant nobles had become virtually impossible, despite Catholic assertions of such involvement at the time. After 1629, Rohan could only find service in the royal armies operating outside France, and no one emerged to take his place. Conversion to Catholicism by major figures like the duc de Bouillon (1634) obviously rendered them incapable of replacing Rohan, though it did not make Bouillon himself any less ready to plot against the regime. France’s entry into the Thirty Years War in 1635 made it more necessary than hitherto to grant military commands to individual aristocrats, Huguenot as well as Catholic, who had previously been kept on the sidelines.9 The Fronde, especially during its aristocratic phase (1650–53), seemed to offer some scope to Protestant nobles anxious to reverse past defeats, not least because the normal pillars of monarchical rule – the parlements and the nobility – were themselves in rebellion; such circumstances were unusual enough for a rethink of Protestant attitudes not to be beyond bounds. For its part, the Bordeaux Fronde proved the most radical, associating with Mazarin’s principal rival, the Grand Condé, in 1652, but also with the political radicalism personified by two English Puritan agents despatched there.10 Despite such rumblings, which seemed to offer a ramp for Protestant political ambitions, especially in the previously autonomous southern towns, the great majority of the Protestants stayed firmly loyal. But the crown could not – and did not – take that as a given, especially whenever there was a hint of external support for its Protestants. Considering the religious content and significance of the conflicts within the British Isles and the Holy Roman Empire during these decades, France was, for once, fortunate not to find itself engulfed in new wars of religion around 1650. In the changed political circumstances since 1630, the message of full obedience to absolute monarchy encountered diminishing resistance in the Protestant ranks. It was endlessly reiterated in sermons, addresses and treatises, with a major Saumur theologian, Amyraut, choosing to publish his uncompromising Discours de la souveraineté des roys in mid-Fronde (1650). In it, he firmly separated the political from the religious sphere, the better to show that the principles of the second were not transferable and could not be used to argue for alternative political relations.11 Such loyalism can only have been reinforced by the events of the English Civil War, culminating in Charles I’s execution, from

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which France’s Protestants were desperate to dissociate themselves, then and later.12 The Declaration of Saint-Germain of May 1652, in which Mazarin praised and thanked the Protestants for their steadfast loyalty to the crown during the recent disturbances, would have been a rare gesture in any period.13 While acknowledging and encouraging their culture of obedience, the declaration was as much concerned with the immediate future as with the recent past. It was designed to persuade the Protestants to resist the temptation of revolt at this critical moment in the Fronde. In return for their fidelity, the declaration – like its less-known predecessor of 1649 – appeared to remove at a stroke the restrictive measures taken against the Huguenots since 1629.14 However, in the turmoil of the Fronde, the declaration was never submitted to the parlements for registration, leaving its real political and legal status uncertain in subsequent years.15 Whatever Mazarin’s real intentions were at this date, he would soon have an additional reason to relax the pressure on the Protestants – his alliance of 1655 with Cromwellian England, which in the early 1650s had been suspected of trying to establish itself as the ‘protector’ of French Protestantism (as James I had in the 1610s).16 The Cromwellian alliance, in addition to removing the threat of English intervention in the Midi, also helped to ensure that the Protestants would not be overtly molested during the final years of Mazarin’s ministry. But this prospect did not escape notice: concerned at what it saw as a revival of Protestantism during these years, a well-briefed assembly of clergy protested vehemently in 1656 against the 1652 declaration. Significantly, it had the support of the parlements. The upshot of their combined pressure was a new royal declaration in 1656, effectively superseding that of 1652.17 But like the anti-Jansenist formulary of 1657, this backtrack looks like an instance of Mazarin’s readiness to give ground in theory, while preventing follow-up action from taking place. The cardinal’s tactics, as we shall see, did not stop the work of restricting the Protestants’ privileges; it merely ensured that it continued more discreetly and locally.18 When the time came for him to govern in 1661, Louis XIV would enjoy considerable latitude in deciding what to do in relation to the Protestants, which was possibly what Mazarin was seeking to enable during his final years.19 II The legacy of the Richelieu–Mazarin years, as far as the Protestants are concerned, was ambiguous: they were protected essentially for reasons of state, by a monarchy whose policies were subject to alteration. The Cardinals did not openly conduct anti-Huguenot policies, but they did tolerate – and to some

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extent institutionalise – low-profile initiatives taken further down the chain of political command which, cumulatively and over several decades, set an important pattern that would continue under Louis XIV. It was precisely these measures that the Protestants were so keen to see annulled during and after the Fronde. Most of the key agents in the process are already familiar from other contexts, but their responses to the Huguenot problem after 1629 saw them co-operate in new ways. The challenge of dealing with practical problems in the wake of the 1620s wars gradually multiplied the opportunities to apply the law – and the terms of the Edict of Nantes itself – in an increasingly restrictive or ‘rigorous’ fashion. By the early 1660s, this improvised approach, sometimes called ‘administrative persecution’, had fashioned a template that could operate effectively ‘on the ground’, far from the court and capital, and at moments when official royal policy towards the Huguenots was not itself overtly hostile. During, and especially after, the military campaigns of the 1620s against the Huguenots, the French monarchy employed commissioners, as it had in similar post-conflict situations since the 1560s, to supervise the return to peace in the provinces and cities most involved in these conflicts. The task of razing fortresses or citadels, confiscating the artillery of former Protestant security towns, and so on, which began in the 1620s would be pursued more widely during the 1630s. Other, related objectives gradually surfaced, especially that of altering the balance of political power within the Protestantdominated towns, to prevent them from engaging in military resistance in the future. By the early 1630s the crown’s use of special commissioners had changed markedly since the previous century – and even since the Edict of Nantes itself. The unplanned, incremental development of the provincial intendancies was already well under way, and the remit of their commissions was gradually becoming more all-purpose – justice, finance and ‘police’. Not by accident, the provinces with significant Protestant populations were among the very first to attract these temporary, but resident, new-style commissaires départis.20 More and more, it was to them rather than to ad hoc commissioners that the tasks involved in restoring order and royal control in Protestant areas were delegated. Virtually none of these intendants were themselves Protestants, even where two of them were appointed to work together in ‘difficult’ provinces such as Languedoc. Moreover, by mid-century the great majority of the intendants were originally magistrates from the parlements, especially that of Paris, which meant that they were steeped in the evolving political credo of authoritarian monarchy that could accept no legitimate basis for dissent, political or religious.21 One of their number, Jean Balthazar, intendant in Languedoc in the mid-1640s, compared Catholicism and its Protestant rival with a vehemence that invited no contradiction:

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the exercise of their [Protestant] religion is not on the same footing as ours. Catholicism is the older, the legitimate and unique religion, that of both the king and the state. The king’s subjects are entitled to conduct Catholic public services everywhere, for which they need no permission, because they fully possess such a faculty and are within the common law of the kingdom. The so-called reformed religion is a religion of edict – new, separate, and contrary to that of the king; a religion of concession and toleration that may only be freely and publicly exercised in certain designated places.22

As his references to Catholicism as the religion of king and state suggest, Balthazar was not a dévot, but rather a champion of authoritarian royal power; such a distinction may well have escaped those contemporaries who did not see the problem of religious coexistence as he did.23 It is not surprising that the intendants found it natural to work in tandem with like-minded Catholic magistrates in the provinces.24 Above all, they could count on the dévot circles across France – and vice versa. The new and rapidly expanding Company of the Holy Sacrament encouraged a more organised and single-minded approach to undermining the Edict of Nantes’s regime from within.25 It was not until the 1650s that local chapters of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith became operational in south-eastern cities like Grenoble, Lyon, Aix and Montpellier, where they sometimes acted as the public face of the Company in pressurising the authorities to act against Protestants. Both organisations included magistrates from the parlements or other local courts and, by mid-century, they were joined by several provincial intendants. The more connected the intendants were to such milieux, the less likely they were to be simply the docile recipients or executors of royal orders; they frequently anticipated or interpreted those orders in ways that put pressure on the royal council, which could not always strike down their initiatives. A prime example of the successful dovetailing of such institutions and organised groups was France’s most ultra-Catholic city, Toulouse, which had been viscerally hostile to religious coexistence since the early 1560s.26 That hostility extended from an early date to the chambre mi-partie based at Castres. The chambre’s role in making the Nantes regime work by adjudicating lawsuits between Catholics and Protestants was, not surprisingly, regularly obstructed by the Toulouse parlement, which had other, non-religious grounds for opposing the chambres as interlopers threatening to undermine its own jurisdiction as a ‘sovereign’ court. This concern proved to be one factor in the unusual tactical alliance already noted between the parlements and the assemblies of clergy by the 1650s. In this issue – and others – corporate self-interest could sustain a limited but powerful partnership. The assemblies of clergy objected vehemently to Catholic–Protestant conflicts over church benefices,

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tithes and church patronage being referred to the chambres, and wanted them to be reserved to the parlements. The bishops who dominated the assemblies brought to these events their own prior experiences – which could vary widely, depending on the scale of the Huguenot presence within their dioceses. Almost certainly galvanising the bishops in ways that might not otherwise have occurred to them, the assemblies rarely missed an opportunity to bring Huguenot abuses of power or of the law to the king’s attention, and to deplore the continuing regime of religious coexistence, of which the role of the chambres de l’édit was a particularly irksome reminder.27 As the restrictive – or ‘rigorous’ – interpretation of the edict gathered pace, especially during the 1650s and 1660s, the chambres de l’édit found themselves increasingly on the defensive throughout France.28 To this roster we should add the most active elements of the Catholic church, and especially the new religious orders, particularly the Capuchins and the Jesuits. Using a combination of preaching, missions, schools and colleges, they brought the confessional fight to many parts of southern and western France where it had not previously been witnessed. But the real impact of the Catholic Reformation on the Protestant communities is hard to measure, and it probably differed significantly in areas where Protestants were in a majority or a minority. The city of Lyon may serve as an example here. A hub of Catholic-Reformation Catholicism, it established in 1659 a local Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith with the conversion of the Protestants as its objective. In the following twenty-five years, it converted about 570 out of a Protestant population of 1,700. But this impressive-looking result takes on a quite different significance when it is realised that most of the converts were immigrants, widows, children and other marginal figures; in fact, the core of the relatively small Protestant elite of Lyon was barely touched by the Company’s best efforts.29 Similar patterns probably applied elsewhere. In the short run, the Catholic convertisseurs were far less successful than either their predictions or their propaganda would lead one to believe, especially in regions where the Protestants were in a majority. However, they did display the kind of tenacity that the ordinary parish clergy were simply unwilling or unable to muster.30 And with conversions to Protestantism still outstripping those to Catholicism in parts of lower Languedoc until about 1670, the Catholic missionaries and their supporters eventually came to accept that more forceful royal intervention was needed to break the resistance of their religious rivals.31 These various actors probably had different motives and preferences when confronting the Protestant problem, but even allowing that they did not always work hand-in-glove, they nevertheless constituted a formidable combination at a time when the monarchy was still publicly committed to upholding the

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terms of the Edict of Nantes. It was they who gradually assembled the arsenal of legal precedents that would become so prominent under Louis XIV in dealing with the Protestants; in particular, they conceived and developed the ‘rigorous’ interpretation of the edict, especially articles 8 and 9, which dealt with the places where Protestants had the right to worship.32 If the assemblies of clergy were an increasingly vocal mouthpiece of such a campaign, it was mainly because they were provided with detailed information and advice on how to proceed by these dévots – who might also be magistrates or episcopal officials – active in provincial towns situated in the main regions of Protestant settlement. Such combined action enabled the 1655–57 assembly successfully to pressurise Mazarin into effectively rescinding the 1652 Declaration of SaintGermain.33 The 1660s provide striking evidence of how much had been done since the 1630s, with the successive publication of several huge volumes that became virtual ‘handbooks’ of legal precedents and decrees compiled mainly by lawyers who presented the accumulated jurisprudence for practical use and consultation.34 The first of these guides was the work of an experienced Jesuit missionary, Bernard Meynier, but the title of his work – De l’exécution de l’édit de Nantes et le moyen de terminer dans chaque province le grand différent et ses principales suites (1662) – shows that it closely resembles those of the lawyers who would follow his example. Meynier subsequently produced other volumes specifically on provinces with large Protestant populations, such as the Dauphiné and Aunis-Saintonge. Noting, for example, that the number of Protestant churches in the Dauphiné had grown since 1598 from seventy to around 200, he concentrated on the ‘illegality’ of that expansion and on developing the arguments capable of reversing it.35 In 1666, Pierre Bernard, a judge in the présidial court of Béziers, followed with his massive Explication de l’édit de Nantes. It was he who came up with the idea that even if a local town council were half Protestant and half Catholic (mi-parti) this should not affect the underlying legal ‘status’ of the town or village itself, because, he argued, ‘no community could be divided or shared, as it was entirely Catholic’. Such a legalistic notion of community was, clearly, immune to the ‘accidents’ of local demography. Bernard admitted that the law in force when he was writing did not quite support this view, and advocated the need to press for the necessary changes.36 The best known of all these compilations was Jean Filleau’s encyclopaedic Décisions catholiques of 1668. ‘A veritable machine to conduct legal warfare’, it was organised around 141 court rulings, on which it offered a comprehensive array of legal judgments specifically against the Protestants. To them he appended numerous other ‘proofs’ (correspondence, court pleadings, records of conversions and so on) which, taken together, constituted a substantial dossier on each ‘decision’ to help in pursuing further lawsuits arising from them. Filleau’s work may not have appeared in print until 1668, but it had

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already circulated – and been widely used – in manuscript well before that; its origins went as far back as the grands jours of Poitiers of 1634, where the young barrister Filleau – and others, too – began to learn how to use the legal machinery as an instrument of Catholic reform in a heavily Protestant province.37 Publications like these set a standard for years to come, and others followed in due course; updated editions appeared containing the abundant harvest of new legal decisions of the 1660s and 1670s, for which there was an evergrowing demand from the dévot milieux throughout France. The authors were themselves frequently solicited for further opinions and assistance by local dévots (e.g. members of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith) over local cases; in their court submissions or documents the latter would regularly cite chapter and verse from Filleau or Bernard.38 It was in such an incremental and partially co-ordinated fashion that the working-out of the ‘rigorous’ interpretation of the Edict of Nantes and the regime of confessional coexistence associated with it took shape. It would continue to unfold in the decades leading up to the revocation of 1685. III All of this seems utterly remote from the decades of relative peace across Europe following the wars of religion, when calls were made for religious union that would, it was hoped, deliver Europe from its self-destructive confessional conflicts. James I of England, as we saw, took up an agenda that appealed to many gallicans and other disillusioned figures, Catholic and Protestant alike, in different parts of Europe.39 But the numerous proposals and projects of an irenic kind that were launched gained relatively little support, partly because their originators were either marginal figures within their own confessions or belonged to small intellectual circles. It was not always clear whether their objective was a new union, rather than a reunion of the churches. The return of war, in both France and Europe, from 1620 onwards, made it even less likely that such appeals would produce concrete results. Meanwhile, confessional divisions only hardened, and with the passing years they were gradually, albeit very unevenly, internalised by their respective populations; the barriers to union (or reunion) were gradually becoming stronger and more widely spread. In this respect, France was at a crossroads by the late 1620s. The decision to retain the Edict of Nantes, shorn of its politico-military elements, was, as we have seen, accompanied by the strongest insistence to date that France’s Protestants should return to the true church. This insistence was more than empty rhetoric. Having survived the clash with the dévots over this question,

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Richelieu attempted to demonstrate that their differences were over means rather than ends. He could argue, with some consistency, that free, voluntary conversion was the only acceptable way to bring the Protestants back into the fold. As bishop of Luçon, he had agreed to a truce with the substantial local Protestant population on arrival there in 1609, and that ‘peace’ survived until the revolt of the early 1620s.40 By the latter date, preaching missions to convert the Protestant population to Catholicism had begun, particularly in the cardinal’s own province of Poitou. These missions also aimed as much, if not more, at reinforcing the faith of the Catholic populations who might still be tempted to embrace the religion of Protestant neighbours who were often their relatives, spouses, guardians, patrons or employers. Richelieu’s protégé and future adviser, Père Joseph, was the principal advocate of missions, but he took a rather different view on the methods permissible for conversion. He supported the familiar Augustinian motto of ‘compel them to enter’ the church, on the grounds that the Huguenots were so obdurate and benighted that some coercion was allowed, and would be justified by the results among the next generation of children of converts. This bred a willingness to seek royal support for conversion methods and strategy, and from the late 1610s onwards Marie de Medici and Louis XIII supported the missionaries.41 During the 1630s, Richelieu himself would do likewise, financing missions that bore his name in areas of southern France.42 These efforts were virtually inseparable from the ‘controversies’ conducted by Catholics and Protestants during these years. The return of peace after 1598 heralded the organisation of hundreds of often elaborately stage-managed confrontations – ‘duelling for theologians’ – between Catholic and Protestant ‘specialists’ in the genre.43 Its very format, which required a winner and a loser, encouraged the taking up of antagonistic positions by both parties. But despite the publicity they attracted, these ‘conferences’ proved even less fruitful than the preaching missions, and were largely abandoned by the 1630s in areas like Poitou, where they seemed to do little more than reinforce existing confessional boundaries.44 Their decline did not signify the demise of religious controversies as such. They had become virtually institutionalised, with Catholic universities and Protestant academies establishing special courses on the subject to defend their respective orthodoxies. Between 1598 and 1685, when over 7,000 works of controversy were published in France, nine out of ten were in French, which enabled them to reach a wider audience than had they remained Latin ‘scholastic’ treatises. As the century wore on, the number of laymen contributing to the controversies grew in number, though without ever being more than a small minority.45 Such ‘normal’ activity may not have attracted much notice beyond the admittedly widening intellectual circles, since both churches, and

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especially the Catholic, were simultaneously pumping out huge numbers of spiritual works for popular use. However, the more the clergy and elements of the laity, Catholic as well as Protestant, were exposed to controversial works, the more they were ‘socialised’ into the hardening orthodoxies of their respective churches.46 Numerically tiny, the Protestant clergy were probably better educated in such questions than the vast majority of their Catholic adversaries.47 This mattered more than previously because, with the gradual drift of the Protestant nobility towards Catholicism, the pastors increasingly took over the leadership positions within the Protestant churches. The pastors of individual churches, especially in the main Protestant towns, and the professors of the academies could thus wield significant influence for or against interconfessional debate. But it would be a mistake to think that Protestant congregations were committed to following their lead, as some found to their cost. For as long as the consistories and provincial synods functioned relatively normally, ministers who seemed to be selling out to Catholic blandishments were subject to short shrift.48 IV It was within this wider context that Richelieu attempted to restore religious unity by an agreed formula acceptable to the Protestant churches. But such a project was beset with numerous difficulties: it was almost certain to produce serious opposition from both confessions, and could be derailed if just one side rejected its terms. In a gallican environment, there was more room to explore such an objective, but firm papal opposition could nevertheless wreck anything that Rome did not approve of. The content of any formula of union would itself be exceptionally difficult to agree upon, given how far apart Catholicism and Calvinism were, both theologically and ecclesiologically. And whatever the formula agreed upon contained, it would also be very difficult to impose from above, even by a figure like Richelieu. The cardinal’s own credentials were not just political, as he had himself engaged in controversy with the Protestants during the late 1610s and spent several years working on a major work that would appear posthumously – the Méthode la plus facile et la plus assurée pour convertir ceux qui se sont séparés de l’église (published in 1651). The title conveys Richelieu’s optimism that when it came to solving problems reason and good arguments should prevail; like many contemporaries, he believed that ‘short and easy methods’ would suffice for the task. Having established that there was one true church and that it was not that of the Protestants, he turned to separating the revealed articles of faith from other ‘secondary’ doctrines derived from them. Richelieu’s work owed more to its author’s rank than to its intellectual originality, but that only

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makes it more representative of the thinking of his generation.49 Having learned earlier the skills of the controversialist from members of his own entourage, he employed a number of writers actively involved in controversies with the Protestants. The most aggressive and resourceful of them was the former Jesuit, François Véron, whose techniques were given the derisory label of ‘Véroniques’ at the time. He was joined in the cardinal’s service by the Protestant converts Louis du Laurens, who later joined the Oratory, and Brachet de la Milletière, who participated in the La Rochelle assembly of 1620 and who would only formally convert to Catholicism in 1645 after being excommunicated by his own church.50 Shortly after securing his political position during the crisis of late 1630, Richelieu began seeking ways to persuade the Protestant churches to embrace union with Catholicism. In 1631 he was reportedly aiming at secretly obtaining prior agreement to such a reunion from a substantial number of deputies to the Charenton national synod, in the hope that by declaring their own adherence to Catholicism at the right moment, they would provide enough momentum to sway the other deputies into following them; but news of this plan leaked too soon, effectively torpedoing it. A year later, when he was in post-revolt Languedoc, the plan had changed to one of convening, under royal authority, a ‘national’ conference of representatives of the two churches to prepare a fullscale reunion, when Catholicism would be proclaimed as the only religion allowed in France. As reported by the papal nuncio, it was anticipated that a dose of force might be required to persuade the rump of Protestant recalcitrants to agree, but Louis XIII seemed ready to apply that force. This would have been tantamount to a re-run of the colloquy of Poissy, except that in 1631 the intention was to obtain papal approval of the proposal and its outcome. Rome’s response was not encouraging: it firmly objected to any assemblies other than general councils convened by the Pope discussing major religious questions.51 Richelieu only revived the question of religious union in late 1640 and 1641, as one of several objectives that had been shelved during the war against the Habsburgs. The facile optimism of the early 1630s had largely evaporated by 1640, but he still evidently believed that once the Protestant pastors had agreed on reunion they would have little difficulty converting their congregations. Although he remained prepared to bribe or pension Protestant pastors to obtain their agreement to his plans, he had come to realise that substantive concessions were needed. He accepted that union would require the shedding of certain non-essential elements of Catholicism that were objectionable to Protestants; this shift in his thinking appears in the final sections of his Méthode la plus facile, which differ significantly from its earlier chapters.52 The search for a common slate of core doctrines on which both churches could agree at the expense of adventitious or secondary characteristics would

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become a regular feature of such efforts for decades to come. However, whenever it came to listing the articles of faith held by all confessions, the scope for serious disagreement was very substantial, since France’s Protestants had rejected far more elements of Catholicism than either Lutherans or Anglicans. As gallicans and full-blown supporters of divine right monarchy, they were most unlikely to accept any form of papal temporal power, not least because they had declared the Pope to be Antichrist within living memory. Richelieu’s plans did attract interest from some Protestants, including Hugo Grotius who was then Swedish ambassador to France; the cardinal also encouraged Véron and others to float the kinds of concession that the Catholic side would make on the road to union with the Protestants.53 The question of how far he was prepared to go to achieve such a religious union arose during his last years, leading to rumours that his plans needed – and indeed dovetailed with his own ambition to obtain – either a papal legation in France or a quasi-autonomous position of patriarch of France.54 V With Richelieu’s death these efforts faded from view, victims in part of the growing lassitude towards sterile inter-confessional ‘controversies’. Reunion and conversion – and their preconditions – would only return to the agenda during the quite different climate of the 1660s and 1670s. In the interim, Protestant theologians were convulsed by their own ongoing internal controversies on questions of grace, justification and predestination, which were not unlike those posed by the Jansenists within Catholicism.55 While the northern academies were receptive to more liberal intepretations of Calvinist thought on these problems, their southern counterparts remained faithful to the Genevan orthodoxy. One consequence of the confrontations with Catholic controversialists was an emphasis on establishing the characteristics of the true church, a development that, taken alongside the synodal structure of the Calvinist churches, was not likely to facilitate reunion.56 A brilliant generation of theologians, such as Moïse Amyraut, Pierre du Moulin, Charles Drelincourt, Jean Claude and Jean Daillé, were more than a match for their Catholic rivals; they were also active as preachers and teachers within the major academies, which remained places of considerable intellectual vitality. The ‘little flock’, as Mazarin called the Protestants, may have numbered less than one in twenty inhabitants by mid-century, but it was far from moribund. It is thus not surprising that their Catholic rivals began to notice that their numbers were rising again during the 1650s. Given that the Protestant population was spread very unevenly throughout France, we should not assume that the effects of the activities described so far,

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and the Protestant reactions to them, were uniform. It is indispensable at this juncture to examine some of the different consequences of such dispersion. Languedoc contained up to three-quarters of France’s Protestants, with the areas of greatest density located in lower Languedoc – from Montpellier northwards into the Cévennes and the Vivarais. This, added to the province’s size and distance from Paris, might suggest that Languedoc was better left well alone. But the sudden termination of the century-long Montmorency governorship as a result of the revolt of 1632 – in which, as we saw, several bishops were implicated – created an unexpected opportunity to strengthen direct royal control there, despite the problems raised by its size and distance from Paris. The Edict of Béziers issued immediately after the suppression of the 1632 revolt sought to curtail the provincial estates and tighten royal control of taxation in particular. The work of eliminating fortified towns had already begun, but it soon became clear that a major obstacle to the political change desired by the Richelieu ministry was the widespread Protestant domination of urban councils (the consulats), which reflected their massive demographic superiority in many of the province’s towns.57 An edict of September 1631 had already insisted that henceforth all consulats (and also hospitals and colleges) in previously Protestant-dominated towns must become bipartisan (mi-parti); and, more crucially still, that the first consul, who was entitled to represent the town at the provincial estates and local tax assembly (the assiette), must henceforth be a Catholic. In both instances, the local demography was deemed to be irrelevant, although it proved virtually impossible in many towns to find a Catholic to elect as first consul. This reshaping of municipal political power in favour of Catholics, even where they were in a tiny minority, was implemented more energetically after the 1632 revolt. Because of its nature – it did not apply in Catholic towns with Huguenot minorities – it is not hard to imagine that local Protestants resisted it with every trick or scheme they could contrive, as the correspondence of protesting intendants and other Catholic figures in subsequent decades abundantly attests.58 This campaign, and several related measures triggered by it, was the first major step in disenfranchising France’s Protestants in their own heartlands. Its existence alone suggests something of the reserves of selfrestraint that Protestant non-participation in the Fronde must have required, especially in the Midi.59 The policy of municipal bipartisanship was one of the most detested measures of Louis XIII’s reign, one that the Protestants believed Mazarin had annulled by his Saint-Germain declaration of 1652.60 As Caldicott noted, the campaign for Huguenot political marginalisation was conducted with supportive winks and nods from Louis XIII’s ministers, at a time when the Richelieu and Mazarin governments were ostensibly pursuing fiscal reform and preserving Huguenot rights under the Edict of Nantes. However,

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the limited success of the Catholic offensive may be gauged from the fact that in places like Nîmes more Catholics converted to Protestantism than Protestants to Catholicism until well into the 1660s, and that the growth of Catholic urban populations in towns from La Rochelle to Montpellier owed infinitely more to rural immigrants than to converts within their walls.61 During this same period, it seems that in the neighbouring province of Dauphiné, which also had a significant Protestant population, interconfessional relations were rather less fractious than in Languedoc. The provincial estates were moribund well before 1640, denying the Catholic bishops the platform that their Languedocian counterparts possessed, while the absence of aggressive royal intendants probably hampered the province’s dévots for a time. It would not be until the 1660s or 1670s that the Catholic offensive really took off there, when conversion campaigns were one of its principal features. Neither Languedoc nor the Dauphiné can be held as representative of Huguenot experience during the middle decades of the century, but the fact that their experiences differed so considerably should suggest how much variation there was throughout the country as a whole. Languedoc was clearly critical, not only because of the size of its Protestant population, but also because it became something of a laboratory used by intendants, parlementaires and dévots anxious to undermine the regime of confessional coexistence there. Poitou had a substantial Protestant population but, despite the presence of La Rochelle, it did not become a major area of confessional confrontation during the seventeenth century, while the local authorities showed little energy in enforcing repressive legislation before the dragonnades of 1681. Such relative moderation among both the population and the provincial authorities may well explain the porosity of the ‘sacred boundaries’ identified for the region by Keith Luria: Poitou did witness an incremental sharpening of separate confessional identities, but in a manner consistent with continuing social, economic and other relations. Such differing variations in confessional porosity were obviously not confined to Poitou.62 Within the minority Protestant provinces of northern and central France, Normandy offers an interesting example of a different trajectory. With approximately forty places of worship and thirty-five pastors, the ‘religion’ was more or less equally distributed between the main towns of the province (especially Dieppe, Le Havre, Alençon, Caen and even the very Catholic city of Rouen), with significant ‘pockets’ of rural entrenchment, especially in the ‘Pays de Caux’. Yet the overall Protestant population around 1660 was no more than about 35,000, less than 2 per cent of the province’s overall population. As in other parts of France, it tended to contract for lack of sources of demographic replenishment from rural areas. From the outset, the Edict of Nantes was

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applied highly restrictively by a notoriously hostile Rouen parlement, but Normandy’s absence from the 1620s wars at least spared it additional vexation from 1630 onwards. Nor, in contrast to Poitou, did the province suffer unduly from the 1661 commissions of investigation we shall encounter later in this chapter. In fact, the commissioners were slow to act there and, when they did, they frequently disagreed over the legality of the province’s Protestant temples. As a result, it was mainly as late as 1679 and afterwards, when the royal council decided to mop up the undecided cases from the previous decade, that Normandy’s temples first faced the prospect of full-scale demolition.63 VI It should be evident by now that the condition and prospects of France’s Protestants during the early years of Louis XIV’s personal rule were delicately balanced, and that ‘official’ royal policy towards them was only part of a much wider picture. Their political loyalism since 1630 was certainly a major factor in their favour, but its development did not prevent Catholic critics from denouncing them as fundamentally disobedient and rebellious. Despite the squeeze placed on them in increasingly numerous ways, their churches continued to function more than adequately and were well supported by their congregations, while the pastors, well educated in their academies (and sometimes elsewhere in Europe), were superior to the vast majority of their Catholic counterparts. The defection of individual Protestant theologians or intellectuals had little effect on their former co-religionists. In 1661, Louis XIV, having kept Mazarin’s leading ministers in his service, was under no immediate or irresistible pressure to act against the Huguenots. The Mémoires which bear his name and which were composed in the late 1660s may not, despite their year-by-year format, represent his sentiments concerning the Protestants in 1661 – the year to which they were assigned – but they probably reflect royal thinking generally during the 1660s. They convey an unwillingness to use violence to convert the Protestants, but they also plainly assert that the Edict of Nantes should be applied to the letter, with all the loopholes or subsequent additions and ‘misinterpretations’ rigorously removed. They reiterate, as if it was self-evident, the view of recent Catholic apologists that Catholicism had by now been so successfully reformed that the original cause – and continuing excuse – for the Protestant Reformation was no longer valid, and that a refusal to return to the true church was henceforth unjustifiable.64 However, as we have already seen with both Richelieu and Mazarin, general statements, whether in private musings or in royal declarations, often fail to indicate the way that actual policy and political action moved where Protestantism was concerned. That would continue to be so in the first decades of Louis XIV’s

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rule. For example, Mazarin’s suppression of the Company of the Holy Sacrament in late 1660 – reiterated by the king in 1666 – might seem to herald the end of dévot activism against Protestantism. In fact, the Company’s dissolution merely drove its activities back into the shadows, while the crown’s adoption of many of its objectives in subsequent years scarcely amounted to a rejection of its ultimate ambition – the religious reunification of France.65 During Mazarin’s last days, plans were also completed for the despatch to the provinces of the commissioners who had been charged as long ago as the 1656 royal declaration with investigating Protestant infringements of the Edict of Nantes; within a few months of his death they were ready to commence an extensive enquiry, especially in the southern and western provinces. The assembly of clergy of 1660–61, trying to sustain the momentum of its predecessor of 1655–57, supported this agenda faute de mieux, since it would have much preferred to see the parlements exercise jurisdiction over inter-confessional conflicts rather than either commissioners or the chambres de l’édit.66 However, the commissioners’ work, which spread over several years from 1661 to 1664 and, in some cases, until 1668, confounded such pessimistic expectations; it was detailed and thorough and, from a Protestant point of view, extremely unfavourable. Despite consisting of one Catholic and one Protestant, the commissions concluded overwhelmingly in favour of the restrictive interpretation of Nantes, with only a limited number of split judgements (partages) arising from disagreements among them; the days when the commissioners’ primary task was to ensure peaceful coexistence in the localities were long since gone, and even the Protestant commissioners were now locked into the logic of the new legal scholasticism spawned by the slogan of ‘the edict and nothing but the edict’. It was the Catholic commissioners who dominated the investigations – as they would the recherches de noblesse of the mid-1660s. Virtually all of them were serving intendants in the provinces concerned, combining political and religious attitudes that, as we have already noted, made them no friends of the Protestants. If the Protestant population had more confidence in them than in magistrates from the parlements, that confidence was misplaced in this instance.67 By contrast, the Protestant commissioners seem to have been more obscure figures, in no position to compete with the intendants; this disparity in status (and sometimes in grasp of legal procedures) may well have persuaded them to accept the premises of the ‘rigorous’ interpretation of the Edict of Nantes.68 The result, as one historian put it for Languedoc, and which probably applies to other regions, was ‘a systematic assault on the rights of the Protestants’, especially – but not solely – on the right to participate in local government.69 It was during the 1660s investigations, too, that the local ginger groups really came into their own, as they enjoyed far more scope for their activism than

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previously. The investigations ordered in 1661 were to be conducted by the commissioners in response to petitions against Protestant infractions from the syndics of the clergy of the individual dioceses. The syndics were free to take on lawyers and advocates of their choice to assist them in preparing appeals against the Protestants as well as during their appearances before the commissioners themselves. Not only did the authors of the legal handbooks that we have already identified find their works in great demand, but they were themselves often co-opted to assist the syndics in different parts of France. Thus the Jesuit Meynier and the Poitiers lawyer Filleau were extremely active during these years, but there were many other, less well-known but indispensable figures who now enjoyed unprecedented scope to pursue their anti-Protestant proclivities. One such advocate was Pierre Bomier of La Rochelle, who has been described as ‘the soul of the group of “propagators” who led the anti-Protestant campaigns in La Rochelle from 1648 to 1679’; he even managed to get himself appointed secretary to the commissioners investigating local infractions by the Protestants. There is every likelihood that such individuals and groups had once belonged – or continued secretly to belong – to the Company of the Holy Sacrament or its surrogates.70 When Bochart de Champigny, the commissioner for Dauphiné and Provence in 1661, arrived there, he was accompanied from place to place by local dévots who bombarded him with advice and memoranda – so much so that his itinerary can be reconstituted from the surviving records of the Grenoble and Aix chapters of the Propagation; his investigations were, not surprisingly, overwhelmingly favourable to the Catholics.71 Begun in 1661, the investigations of the royal commissions were, with some exceptions, complete by 1665, by which time they had condemned as illegal perhaps one in three or four Protestant places of worship, whose temples were earmarked for rapid demolition; half of all places of worship in Dauphiné, a province with a substantial Protestant population, were closed down, as many of them simply did not have the documentary evidence to prove that their title went back to 1597 or earlier. Where the commissioners disagreed in their judgements, the matter was referred to the royal council for its decision. The latter dealt methodically with the partages of the commissions of one généralité after another, mostly in 1664–65; it upheld the Catholic position in most of the disagreements, especially where demolishing Protestant temples was concerned. This explains why the council sometimes issued dozens of decrees in a single session on such questions.72 It did not stop there: as if such a case-by-case approach might prove insufficient, the council then followed up the individual decrees with a general ruling (règlement) containing dozens of articles relative to individual provinces, such as Languedoc or Dauphiné, thus consolidating and codifying the existing jurisprudence as far as those areas were concerned. Finally, the decision was taken at this time to

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make the recent commissions permanent, with the provincial intendants serving on them ex officio. This was tantamount to serving notice on the minority church that it was henceforth under full-time surveillance.73 By the time the commissioners had reported and the council had finished its work in mid-1665, a perceptible change in attitudes towards the Protestants had emerged. As a result, the deputies to the major assembly of clergy of 1665 were profuse in their praise for what had been achieved, in stark contrast to their counterparts of 1660 who had been deeply sceptical of the value of the commissions.74 There was more to come: ten years after Mazarin’s 1656 declaration revoking de facto that of Saint-Germain (1652), a new royal declaration of April 1666 containing fifty-nine articles consolidated the changes that had occurred for the most part in less than a decade. It recapitulated the core decisions relating to the meaning and practice of the Edict of Nantes; these decisions severely affected a wide range of activities, curtailing the rights of Protestant seigneurs, the work of Protestant pastors, the authority of their consistories, the prospects for Protestant office-holders, the curricula of Protestant schools – and much more.75 VII In a context where royal policy towards the Huguenots was subject to abrupt changes in direction, it was not surprising that efforts at confessional reunion that had faded since Richelieu’s death were revived. Despite the absence under Louis XIV of a Richelieu-like figure to lead such efforts or give them the stamp of royal support, hopes of success were strong enough by the end of the 1660s to justify suspending some of the recent ‘measures of rigour’ against the Huguenots in order to allow other tactics to be tried.76 The long-awaited conversion of the most influential surviving Protestant grandee, Marshal Turenne, in late 1668, seemed to crystallise such expectations; for more than a decade, it had been preceded by widespread consultations, discussions of the major theological positions, and comparisons of the regimes of the other major confessions (Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic). Turenne had no desire to be a lone convert, so he deliberately delayed his change of faith in the hope that it might trigger a wider movement.77 The credit for his final decision to convert was given to Bossuet, but some contemporaries attributed it to Antoine Arnauld. ‘The finest conquest of the century’, Turenne had certainly been influenced by his reading of Jansenist authors like Arnauld and Nicole, in addition to the manuscript of Bossuet’s celebrated Exposition of the Catholic faith. All three were Augustinians capable of showing ‘the perpetuity of the faith’ that Catholicism claimed to personify, and in an idiom that appealed to a Protestant such as Turenne. His conversion was also triggered by his

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well-known dismay over the fragmentation of contemporary Protestantism and the ensuing problem of finding a firm basis for religious truth. Turenne thus came to accept, as his conversion publicly demonstrated, that religious truth could be guaranteed only by the ‘true’ church, the custodian of ‘perpetuity’ against ‘variation’ which, as Bossuet argued, was the mark of heresy. Turenne retained serious suspicions of French (and English) Protestants – or at least the majority in the south – as fundamentally ‘republican’, and thus as having no real place in the royal body politic. Irrespective of the part that Turenne’s own and family ambitions may have played in his decision, it is clear that his protracted conversion reflected major religious developments of the mid-century. Turenne’s conversion came just as the Peace of the Church was being negotiated, and Louis XIV’s government could contemplate war against the Dutch without having to fear the effects of religious division within French Catholicism. Thus, there was every reason to allow Bossuet, Arnauld and Turenne’s many other Catholic divines to pursue their activities after the marshal’s own conversion. For his part, Bossuet had long been engaged in such dialogue with Protestants, particularly with Paul Ferry, the eminent pastor of Metz, where Bossuet was dean of the cathedral chapter during the 1650s and 1660s. At the same time, he was writing his Exposition, dealing with Catholic teaching on controversial doctrinal questions, which was published in 1671. Needless to say, what Bossuet and his circle had in mind was the return of Protestants (reunion) to the true church; thus Protestants needed to know its teaching at first hand and not in the caricatured form assumed to be prevalent among them. But the crux lay in how Bossuet – and other convertisseurs – presented Catholicism to them, given Protestant aversion to so much of its contents. Bossuet took a consistent position by adopting the decrees of the Council of Trent as his yardstick. On all major questions of faith, Catholicism was defined by the council’s decrees; everything else was a matter of opinion, which meant that converts could not be required to subscribe, for example, to papal claims to temporal power (direct or indirect) or to infallibility.78 The fact that France had not formally received Trent’s decrees, and that this refusal concerned matters of discipline rather than of faith, gave Bossuet and likeminded gallicans more latitude than they would have enjoyed elsewhere in Catholic Europe. Bossuet’s redrafting of the gallican articles of 1682, in which papal primacy was largely symbolic of the unity of the church, was made with one eye on the conversion of – or reunion with – France’s Protestants.79 It should be obvious that Bossuet’s attempt to use strict Catholic orthodoxy as the basis for reunion with the Protestants was anything but latitudinarian in intent. He left no doubt that the Protestant Reformation was a schism, which had lost its justification with the success of the Catholic Reformation. As he would argue in another

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major work, truth is older than error, and the history of Protestantism was strewn with ‘variations’ which were characterised by novelty and innovation. Bossuet was far from alone in challenging the Protestants and their beliefs. By the 1660s and 1670s, the Jesuits had largely abandoned the ‘controversies’ – as they had the political debates a generation previously; only one of them, Maimbourg, made a widely read if not especially penetrating contribution, mainly in the form of historical accounts of past heresies, to the polemics with the Protestants from the early 1670s onwards.80 The Jesuits’ scholarly place was to be taken over by the Maurist-Benedictines and the Oratory. But the major surprise was that the real heavyweights now came from a quarter that Maimbourg had spent most of his time attacking – the Jansenists. An important and unexpected dividend of the Peace of the Church of 1668–69 was that it released a considerable number of accomplished Port-Royalist writers and scholars who had previously been either imprisoned, on the run, or busy defending their own cause. Their range of intellectual interests was especially wide, and they included history, patristics, biblical exegesis and liturgy, as well as moral and controversial theology, all of which were exceptionally valuable for debates with France’s Protestants.81 The result was ‘a veritable explosion of scholarly energy’.82 Over the next decade or more, they seriously raised the quality of Catholic thinking and writing across a broad front, adding considerable weight to the polemical argument used by Bossuet and other controversialists that Catholicism’s self-reform was such as to remove any justification for the continuation of Protestantism as a separate ‘sect’. The leading Jansenists, especially Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, piled the pressure on their Protestant opponents; as Augustinians with a reverence for Christian antiquity and an experience of defending a minority cause, they became the most dangerous opponents of Protestant positions. The Jansenists’ involvement in interconfessional polemic began before the Peace of the Church, but it increased markedly after 1669. Arnauld (or rather Pierre Nicole) produced a short, first version of the massive Perpetuity of the faith of the Catholic church concerning the Eucharist in 1664 which, in response to subsequent Protestant rebuttals, was expanded to three volumes between 1669 and 1674; its title alone gives a clear signal of its line of argument.83 That was only the beginning; the indefatigable Arnauld published a series of bruising new ‘controversies’ during the 1670s and early 1680s, whose titles frequently accused the Protestants of impiety in both morality and doctrine. Controversy and exchanges in print thus poured off the presses during the 1670s, increasingly pigeonholing the Huguenots as schismatics and rebels, whose religion and church were false and without warrant. Such accusations were heavily loaded politically, and enabled those employing them to perpetuate the myth of rebellious Protestants, their ultra-royalism notwithstanding. This

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shift itself reflects the relative trajectories of Catholicism and Protestantism in France since the age of Richelieu, when French Catholicism still had to put its house in order. This weakness was one important reason why its propagandists were unable to impress or seduce their opposite numbers for a long time. However, by the 1660s and 1670s, the situation was changing, especially after the intra-Catholic Jansenist feud had been suspended. The Catholic Reformation had begun to show results – pastoral, educational and intellectual – that increasingly licensed its apologists to claim that whatever reasons there might have been in the past for Protestants to leave the church of their ancestors, they were no longer valid.84 The Protestants should thus return to that church now that it had been successfully restored to its splendour. If they refused to do so, it was owing to their rebellious, schismatic and insubordinate nature. The RPR did not constitute a church, and what they believed and practised was not a religion. Turenne’s conversion probably dented Protestant resistance much less than it stirred Catholic ambitions. He immediately tried to persuade Louis XIV to take the lead and produce a rapid solution, while the king himself was keen to revive Richelieu’s earlier four-step plan for reunion in late 1668 and early 1669. But with the papacy as hostile as ever to a gallican inter-confessional conference that would pave the way for reunion, nothing came of this particular approach.85 It was accepted that funding the number of conversions it envisaged would be expensive, although Louis XIV seemed willing to set aside such sums. But actually producing the funds proved far more difficult over the following years, and Turenne died, in 1675, before anything serious had been attempted. One of the unavoidable questions was how precisely to use money during the process of converting Protestants, and their pastors in particular.86 Quite coincidentally, in the early 1670s the new Port-Royalist bishop of Grenoble, Le Camus, set about converting the Vaudois population in his diocese, and he came up with a non-violent method, which included providing financial support to sustain those converted in their new condition. His successes impressed governing circles at court, and in 1676 Louis XIV was persuaded to adopt Le Camus’s approach and establish what soon became known as ‘the conversion fund’. The assemblies of clergy had long had a similar fund to support ex-pastors, and continued to use it during the 1670s.87 But despite not being fully spent over the years, it no longer matched the growing ambitions of the mid-1670s. The Company of the Holy Sacrament and the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith had also provided funds in the past, but they were more haphazard in size and regularity.88 Ironically, it was the régale that was now designated to provide the monies needed for the new fund to operate. Administered by a recent Protestant convert and friend of Le Camus, Paul Pellisson-Fontanier, the ‘conversion fund’, as it became known, would come to be perceived as one of the most odious initiatives of these years.

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The intention was to make conversion thinkable, especially for Protestant ministers who, once they had converted, would have had no obvious source of income to maintain themselves and their families. It is not hard to see how easily such an intention could become an inducement to, and a reward for, conversion, and thus wide open to the abuses that quickly followed, such as the misappropriation of the funds themselves, and the multiple or dubious ‘conversions’ that gave it a bad name. In the event, the individual pensions were too small to tempt most potential converts, with the result that the total number of conversions officially recorded for the four years 1676–1679 was disappointingly low at just 10,000, nearly half of which were credited to Le Camus’s own efforts in Grenoble.89 Such limited progress almost certainly helped to garner support for tougher methods in dealing with Protestants in subsequent years. VIII These were not the only noteworthy cases of the meshing of local and countrywide initiatives during the 1660s and 1670s. The chambres de l’édit were, as we have already seen, under severe pressure from the alliance of the parlements and the Catholic church leadership, precisely because their activity was a thorn in the side of both parties. The crown’s reluctance to either transfer jurisdiction over confessional lawsuits to the parlements or to reintegrate the chambres within the parlements themselves did not prevent lesser measures that would curtail the chambres. Perhaps the most significant was a royal council decree of November 1664 designed to prevent them from accepting lawsuits concerning the affairs of the ‘communities’ (cities, towns, villages) of France since, as the decree famously put it, ‘all communities are to be considered as belonging to the Roman, Catholic and Apostolic church’. Such a decree illustrates how difficult it was to distinguish local ‘political’ problems from others of an inter-confessional nature. Its immediate intention was to restore to the increasingly hard-line parlements a substantial slice of jurisdiction over towns with a Protestant population, while also insisting that Catholic schools, hospitals and other institutions be established in Protestant-dominated towns. And, as one historian has put it, if all the communities of the kingdom were to be considered Catholic, there was ultimately nothing to prevent a similar logic from being applied to the kingdom itself.90 Only two years later, in 1666, the last grands jours in French history were held by the parlement of Toulouse in Le Puy and Nîmes (October 1666–February 1667). The chambre mi-partie of Castres made strenuous efforts to be represented among the magistrates involved in the assizes but, as Louis XIV’s Mémoires admit, that was not deemed ‘advantageous to religion’ and the

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chambre was successfully given the run-around.91 This was effectively a green light to the Toulouse parlement for what was perhaps one of the most symbolic confrontations of these years – France’s most ultra-Catholic parlement facing its most irreducible Protestant ‘stronghold’, Nîmes and its environs. During the three months that the grands jours spent in Nîmes, it ‘rained’ decrees (180 in all) on the Protestants, as the parlement sought to impose its authority in parts of Languedoc that had hitherto kept it at bay; judging by the parlement’s subsequent activities, from 1667 to 1682, the experience of the grands jours enabled it to extend its power more widely by imposing measures first taken at Nîmes throughout its vast jurisdiction.92 The grands jours relied on the existing legislation, and especially that of the previous few years, to marginalise the Protestants by trying to drive them out of offices, royal and municipal, but also from numerous professions, close their schools altogether or, if that was not possible, prevent the teaching of religion in them.93 By requiring, for example, the Protestants to bury their dead exclusively at nightfall or daybreak with an attendance of no more than thirty and, later, ten people, and banning them from singing or ringing bells for their services in public places, the grands jours aimed to ‘render them invisible and unheard’ within their own communities; the corollary of such measures would be that their Catholic neighbours regained exclusive control of the public spaces and ‘monopolised the symbols of the sacred’.94 Needless to say, the repetition of such ordinances may only prove how difficult, if not impossible, they were to enforce in certain parts of France. But equally, it signifies the will of those behind them to maintain – and extend – the pressure on the Protestant communities. By the mid-1660s, for example, the clamour for outright suppression of the chambres mi-parties and the chambres de l’édit was increasing steadily. The crown may not have particularly liked the chambres in general, but was in no rush to make a tabula rasa of them. Yet in January 1669, only a month before it halted the current anti-Huguenot campaigns, it suppressed the chambres de l’édit of both Paris and Rouen, which were responsible for virtually all of northern and central France. Neither chambre had been especially combative in defending the Protestants, especially as their membership was overwhelmingly Catholic and their own parlements had little regard for them. Their suppression was essentially a gesture, but one which suggested that the remaining chambres mi-parties of Toulouse, Bordeaux and Grenoble might not be untouchable. All three were the butt of their parlements, but the crown was evidently nervous of suppressing them in 1669. Instead, it merely removed that of Toulouse from the strongly Protestant town of Castres to the Catholic one of Castelnaudary.95 In fact, the surviving chambres lasted another ten years, and were the first victims of the next and final anti-Protestant campaign before the revocation of 1685.96

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There was a certain similarity in the fate of the Protestant academies during these years. That of Montauban, which was the bastion of southern Calvinist conservatism, was removed to the remote town of Puylaurens as early as 1660. The Nîmes academy was suppressed outright in 1664, after losing a furious battle with the Jesuits, while that of Sedan followed in 1681. Saumur proved a more difficult target, but it was subjected to the legal equivalent of guerrilla war, culminating in a debilitating lawsuit of 1670 that was only resolved months before the revocation, in January 1685.97 Intended to cripple French Protestantism intellectually, the timing of these suppressions owed as much to local politics and pressure group campaigns as to official royal policy. It was for external political reasons that Louis XIV suspended the antiProtestant measures in early 1669. This time the revolving door was set in motion by the prospect of war with the Dutch, even though it did not actually begin until 1672; the regime wished to avoid both internal disturbances and external reputational damage if it was seen to continue persecuting its Protestant subjects. It will be recalled that the Jansenist conflict was also set aside at the same time and for the same ten-year duration, thanks to the Peace of the Church. In a lengthy declaration of February 1669 running to thirtynine articles, Louis XIV suspended the previous one of 1666, rather as Mazarin had done in 1656 in relation to the Saint-Germain declaration of 1652. But as the new declaration’s contents clearly show, the status quo for the Protestants in 1669 was not to be that of 1656 or 1652, let alone of 1629.98 At best, by 1669 they could look forward to a respite or a truce, after which another round of repression was to be expected. On the Catholic side, those most eagerly seeking the end of French Protestantism had by now learned to live with such a volte-face by the crown and to bide their time; the declaration heralded less support for repression from the court, but that would not prevent continuing efforts to absorb and impose existing measures – and to devise new ones for the future. National and local ‘timetables’ did not have to work in perfect harmony when it came to testing the limits of existing legislation. By now, the unspoken assumption was that what the Edict of Nantes did not explicitly permit was forbidden, but translating that maxim into practice could take time. The edict had become the straitjacket that it was never intended to be; its many inconsistencies, which had been both necessary and useful at its origin, had only made it more susceptible to restriction once that tactic had first showed its potential. In the late 1660s and 1670s, with continuing support from the parlements and the Catholic church, there was no reason to abandon the étouffement of the Protestants and their churches.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

To Fontainebleau and Beyond

B

y the time Louis XIV finally extricated himself, in early 1679, from the Dutch war, which had not proved to be the expected military promenade, France was on the verge of an era in which it accumulated more conflicts over religion than at any time since the end of the previous century. It was not alone in this regard since, despite the Westphalian settlement and its supposed expulsion of religion from international politics at least, religious questions made something of a comeback within inter-state relations during the 1680s, especially in the neighbouring British Isles and the Holy Roman Empire. This return owed much to the territorial gains made by Catholicism during the previous century, which increasingly worried the northern Protestant powers.1 The French crown’s determination to deal with perceived religious challenges within its own borders was never more evident than immediately after the conclusion of the treaty of Nijmegen, in which French diplomacy appeared to make Louis XIV the arbiter of Europe. The peace also freed France of the need to appease foreign Protestant allies, while the conflict with Innocent XI – as well as the more uncertain prospect of a Spanish succession – was a powerful incentive to demonstrate that France was more Catholic than any of its neighbours.2 On the other hand, France’s treatment of internal religious dissent, especially of its Protestants, during the 1680s was to meet severe criticism across Europe generally, and not just in Protestant countries; much of that criticism was either circulated by French émigrés or based on information that they provided. Although the individual conflicts within France had their own particular chronologies and characteristics, at certain junctures they overlapped, thus complicating the resolution of the other conflicts. The reactivation of the antiHuguenot campaigns coincided with moves against the abbey of Port-Royal almost immediately after the death in 1679 of the duchesse de Longueville, Louis XIV’s cousin and protector of the abbey. Although a full-blown anti-

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Jansenist campaign similar to that of the 1650s and 1660s did not occur until the early 1700s, the sense that the Peace of the Church had been torn up was widely shared after this attack; within a mere two months Antoine Arnauld went into exile in the Spanish Netherlands, and others would join him there in the following years. By 1679 Louis XIV’s quarrel with Innocent XI over the régale was also escalating towards confrontation, leading to the gallican crisis of 1682 which would take a full decade to resolve. Long before its termination in 1692–93, the failure to make peace with Rome played havoc with some of the regime’s other plans and expectations, both at home and abroad, and especially its handling of the Protestant problem before and after the revocation. For example, the growing number of episcopal vacancies, which was a major consequence of this impasse, became a real headache after 1685, when dealing with the flood of ‘new’ Catholics required active bishops in the dioceses most affected by the revocation. Moreover, the impression that France’s Jansenists sided with the Pope rather than the king in the régale conflict was widely shared by those in governing circles, some of whom attributed Innocent XI’s lack of public enthusiasm for the revocation of the Edict of Nantes to such influences within the Roman curia itself.3 It thus added to the existing rancour towards Jansenists as trouble-making, even disloyal subjects. However, when it came to disobedience and disloyalty, it was the Protestants who still topped the bill. Anti-Protestant propaganda had insisted so strongly on this theme that by the 1670s words like ‘tolerance’ or ‘tolerated’ were virtually terms of abuse because they referred to schismatics and heretics who had rebelled against the true church. Moreover, the Protestant refusal to adopt the religion of the king and the overwhelming majority of his subjects was itself increasingly regarded as intolerable, even when that refusal was defended as a matter of conscience. In such a context, Protestant arguments that the Edict of Nantes should be treated as a fundamental law of the kingdom, and thus inviolable, were rejected; on the contrary, the edict was itself an act of violence, having been extorted under duress in extreme circumstances, and that was enough to invalidate any claims it might have to legitimacy or ‘perpetuity’. Such shifts in language and attitudes were not inconsequential: they heralded and prepared the way for a definitive elimination of heresy from a realm which had ‘endured’ too much religious dissidence for too long.4 The increasing self-confidence of the Catholic church as well as the impact of Augustinian theology well beyond the ranks of the Jansenists combined to widen support for tough measures against Protestants, which might also include forced conversions. And, as we noted in the previous chapter, the contribution of the leading Jansenists to the revived campaign of controversy against the Protestants since the mid to late 1660s came at a critical moment, articulating more forcefully than hitherto the basis of the claims of Catholicism

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to be the only vehicle of religious truth. Alongside the work of the compilers of legal and other precedents, such controversies contributed to the continuing efforts on the ground towards stifling Protestantism into inanition, efforts which could proceed in the absence of overt royal support.5 Louis XIV’s subjects were less than unanimous over how the final, happy outcome of a realm free of heresy should be achieved, and that uncertainty extended from local authorities to the royal council. I The resumption, by the crown, of repressive measures towards the Protestants in mid-1679 ushered in the ‘agony of the RPR’, in Elisabeth Labrousse’s phrase.6 Virtually coinciding with the first move against Port-Royal, the decision to reassign – in fact to suppress, but this was nowhere mentioned – the three remaining chambres de l’édit signalled the end of the relative respite enjoyed by France’s Protestants during the previous decade; the royal edict dealing with the chambres insisted, in terms that would reappear almost verbatim in the 1685 revocation, that they were no longer needed, since the Protestants had ‘caused no new troubles’ since 1629 and confessional animosities among the king’s subjects were a thing of the past.7 There was, consequently, no reason why the magistrates and the functions of the chambres should not be returned to the parlements of Bordeaux, Toulouse and Grenoble, whose well-known proclivities – Grenoble was the most moderate of the three – did not augur well for the Protestants subject to their jurisdiction; henceforth, the parlements were in a stronger position to contribute their own mite to the process of religious repression. At virtually the same time, the royal council began clearing the backlog of partages (which had been suspended since the 1660s) over whether particular Protestant temples should continue to exist or not; the council’s decrees handed down in and after 1679 were overwhelmingly negative, condemning most of the temples concerned to destruction.8 By this juncture, the array of interdictions and restrictions affecting French Protestants was enormous, but significant new measures were taken after 1679 to further tighten the noose, as the need for updated editions of the legal handbooks produced since the 1660s attests.9 Enumerating just a fraction of the existing prohibitions would fill a small volume but it can be said that, taken together, they express an expanding determination to exclude Protestants from public life in the broadest sense of the term, banning them from holding offices (mainly royal and municipal) or exercising numerous professions, trades and crafts, which they usually dominated in the regions where they were sufficiently numerous.10 Many of the restrictions of these years were designed to make it impossible for Protestants, whether as seigneurs, guild-masters or

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employers, to exercise the kind of pressure that might persuade or compel Catholics to convert to Protestantism. The purpose of measures taken to close Protestant academies and schools was self-evident: Protestant schools would be replaced by Catholic, and especially Jesuit, counterparts, while uneducated Protestants would, it was thought, be less liable to resist the activities of Catholic convertisseurs. Closely linked to all this were the numerous attempts to hamstring the pastors, widely regarded by Catholics as the main source of Protestant antipathy and of the misconceptions of their religion. Requiring them to change place every three years (1684) was a late addition to many earlier restrictions designed to minimise their capacity to influence their congregations.11 The decision, taken in December 1678, to evict all Protestants from the town council of Nîmes, the most determined Huguenot stronghold in France, left little doubt as to what was intended; a host of similar measures soon followed for other Protestant towns, especially in the Midi, and continued for several years afterwards.12 A few examples will suffice to convey the nature and rationale of the new restrictions after 1679. The process of excluding Protestants from the legal profession, already well advanced where court magistrates were concerned, was widened by a new measure imposed in 1682, forbidding them from acting as notaries, solicitors or process-servers. Since law practice in the widest sense was the most common route to improving one’s social status during the ancien régime, these measures were designed to deny the Protestants the most common marks of local ‘notability’.13 An earlier edict of February 1680 banned Protestants from acting as midwives; five years later, a similar ban followed to prevent Protestants from becoming medical doctors, pharmacists or surgeons. The common thread between these two measures was that Protestants could simply not be relied upon where the sacraments of the church were concerned. Although Protestants recognised baptism as a sacrament, their midwives could not be trusted to baptise children born into Catholic families in the proper manner and almost immediately after birth, as the church insisted. Even less could Protestant midwives or doctors be expected to administer the last rites to their patients, who often included women dying in childbirth, since the sacrament of the dying was not one that they recognised.14 Measures like these reveal a close attention to the detail of confessional interaction and how to disrupt it; others from these years show a grander ambition to impose full-blown confessional separation. Seventeenth-century confessional differences had not dissolved the interlocking ties of lineage, profession and social rank. Catholics and Protestants continued to live and work together in varying degrees of amity and constraint. Intermarriage was routinely decried by both churches, precisely because of the blurring of confessional boundaries that it signified, but it continued in many parts of

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France, with conversion to the religion of the spouse (mostly that of the husband) a common feature of such unions; sometimes these conversions were purely formulaic and might be renounced almost immediately after the wedding itself. Such behaviour was only one of many irritating spanners in the works of confessionalisation.15 Several related measures taken from 1680 onwards to deal with the problem show the extent of the crown’s wish, prompted as it often was by the assemblies of clergy and other pressure groups, to intervene more forcefully than previously in this domain. Thus an edict issued in November 1680 simply banned Catholics from marrying Protestants henceforth. A few months earlier, the crown had extended to all Catholics a ban, which had hitherto applied only to Catholic clergy since 1665, on converting to Protestantism. Sensing that conversions in the other direction, to Catholicism, might perhaps be less than genuine, since they were often obtained by monetary inducements, it banned such converts from returning to Protestantism on pain of banishment from the kingdom and the confiscation of their property. To make this difficult measure stick, it was also decreed, in a draconian measure described as ‘a charter for agents provocateurs and spies’, that the temple in which the relaps was received back into the Protestant fold would be razed to the ground and its pastor banished from the realm.16 II The revocation of the Edict of Nantes is associated in the minds of posterity, historians included, with a number of notorious practices which continued until 1685 and beyond. The most prominent are the razing of Huguenot temples, the kidnapping of Protestant children over the age of seven if they wished to convert to Catholicism and, finally, the dragonnades. The first of these has the longest history, owing to the conflicts generated almost ab initio by confessional coexistence within the cramped spaces of ancien-régime towns. It is worth briefly charting the evolution of such conflicts because of what they reveal of the hardening in both attitudes and policies over several generations; it was only gradually, during Louis XIV’s personal rule, that the problem of the Huguenot temples came to be viewed increasingly in terms of their physical liquidation. It has been estimated that by mid-century there were approximately 750 places of Protestant worship in France, with an equivalent number of pastors, but that the temples themselves perhaps numbered around 700, as pastors might well serve more than one congregation.17 Some temples were refitted former Catholic churches, others were newly built in an architectural idiom far removed from Catholic models. The Edict of Nantes only authorised those Protestant churches for which proof of worship in 1597 could be attested by

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written sources, but in the aftermath of the edict Henri IV and, to a lesser extent, Louis XIII authorised, without undue clamour at the time, additional places of worship, some of them in substantial towns like Amiens or Abbeville. In the post-1629 period, restrictions slowly began to counteract that liberality. Richelieu himself was instrumental in setting a precedent that allowed members of the Catholic clergy to appeal to the parlements to ban Protestant places of worship within ecclesiastical fiefs – beginning with his own fief of the priory of Paray-le-Monial. As ecclesiastical fiefs were numerous and often extensive, such a precedent was not insignificant in the following decades.18 Another example of the restrictive approach that the Protestants would urge Mazarin to repeal in the early 1650s was a royal council decree of 1637 which banned Protestant worship in ‘annexes’, i.e. communities or groups of Protestants which were too small to either need or afford the services of their own pastor.19 In the short term, these measures had limited effect, if the complaints of the 1655 assembly of clergy about the building of new Protestant churches can be believed. The commissions of enquiry of the early 1660s opened the sluice gates, although many of the 150 or so temples condemned to demolition by 1665 were in relatively isolated places where Protestant services were not continuous. It was in Languedoc and Dauphiné that the biggest number of demolitions were ordered, although it seems that such effects could be offset by local seigneurs haut-justiciers who could provide a place of worship on their estates for the local Protestant community. As early as 1661, the commissioners closed twenty-two of the twenty-five temples in the Pays de Gex, on the grounds that as it was not part of France when the Edict of Nantes was proclaimed, it was not entitled to benefit from its terms.20 Other subsequent additions to France, such as Béarn, Sedan and Alsace, would face a similar prospect. There was a substantial relaxation of such activity until 1679, during which time the royal council seems to have behaved more even-handedly in dealing with disputed cases. However, by the time anti-Protestant policies were resumed in 1679, Catholic attitudes towards temples had hardened in other, unfamiliar respects. In earlier decades, objections to temples were formulated in practical terms – they were too close to a Catholic church or they constituted a nuisance of some kind – so that the solution envisaged was usually to seek to relocate them; even the assemblies of clergy tended to demand they be moved rather than destroyed. However, by 1680, as a result of a series of other measures whose cumulative effect was to force Protestant services and gatherings exclusively inside their temples, the latter increasingly came to personify, in the eyes of the more zealous Catholics, all the negative and repugnant characteristics of heresy; this perception of temples as ‘synagogues of Satan’ also justified banning the display of insignia like the fleur de lys or the wearing of

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official robes by Protestant magistrates inside their walls. Although there were exceptions where former temples became schools or hospitals, the gradual change in attitude meant that demolition of a punitive type gradually became the aim where temples subject to dispute were concerned.21 The deliberate razing to the ground of these buildings has been compared to the punishments inflicted on major criminals, whose houses were traditionally demolished to the last stone. The spontaneous ‘popular’ vandalism of earlier generations had been gradually replaced by an ‘official’ one, which would grow in scale during the early 1680s as further measures against the Protestants were designed to make them invisible, behind the closed doors of their temples.22 It has been estimated that a further 150 demolitions were ordered by the royal council between May 1680 and mid-1684 alone, and that such decisions continued apace for the following year or more.23 It was during the early 1680s that the wholesale destruction of temples in major Huguenot cities like Montpellier, Montauban and La Rochelle occurred as punishment for receiving relapsed converts returning to Protestantism; the same happened, albeit for perhaps other reasons, in Norman towns like Caen, Le Havre and Rouen, whose Protestants still believed as late as 1683 that they were in no serious danger.24 It seems likely that the acceleration of the demolitions during these years also owed something to the fact that local jurisdictions, from parlements down to présidial and bailliage courts, were allowed to intervene in the process, which only increased the local pressure to erase temples from the map.25 Insult had already been added to injury in that the Protestants themselves were obliged to bear the costs of demolition, although they could use the remains of the temple – furniture, masonry and other materials – to defray some of the costs in question. By October 1685, only around fifteen temples were thought to be still standing in the entire kingdom, and it is highly revealing of the obsession they generated that the destruction of those remaining was specified in the first article of the Edict of Fontainebleau, even before the ban on Protestant worship itself.26 III The discussion so far should make it clear that by the early 1680s the machinery of repression was actively aiming for completeness, on paper at least, and that there was no shortage of individuals and institutions willing to enforce it across France. What it might have produced over one or two generations, had it been allowed to function with the firm, continuous support of the monarchy – itself a relatively major ‘if ’, given the inconsistent pattern of such support since the late 1620s – can only be a matter of speculation. Madame de Maintenon seems to have sensed this when predicting in 1681 that within

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twenty years there would be no Huguenots in France, if God preserves the king.27 For, despite the scale of confessional discrimination so elaborately and patiently put together by the early 1680s, frustration with the limited success of the gradualist approach, as measured by the modest number of conversions deriving from the use of Pellisson’s caisse and other initiatives, surfaced at precisely this moment, and led to a major change in strategy. It is noteworthy that the most important manifestation of the impatience to rid France of its Huguenots was itself improvised, effectively illustrating how policies of repression could generate their own momentum, if not exactly ‘from below’, then at least from the peripheries. By comparison with the destruction of temples, the dragonnades were a far more recent mechanism to engineer ‘fasttrack’ conversions to Catholicism. The fact that they emerged as a regional initiative, with the partial and deniable support of one or more royal ministers, is itself significant, as it reveals how broad a coalition of interests were by then involved in the anti-Protestant campaigns. The use of royal dragoons (who were mounted infantry) to deal with local conflicts in seventeenth-century France was relatively limited but growing by the 1670s, as is evidenced by their deployment to deal with the Breton peasant revolt of 1675 and, of particular interest here, to intimidate the anti-régale supporters of Bishop Caulet in the diocese of Pamiers in 1680.28 Another element of continuity was that the latter campaign was devised by a provincial intendant, Foucault, who would become a major specialist in such forms of intimidation against the Protestants elsewhere in France in the coming years. Thus, it was hardly surprising that a fellow intendant, then in charge of Poitou, should have attempted to adapt such techniques to deal with ‘his’ Protestants the following year, in 1681. And he did so despite the fact that a recently installed bishop of Poitiers was himself actively applying the Pellisson–Le Camus methods of conversion to good if not spectacular effect.29 That the intendant could decide to adopt a different approach is evidence of a trend in which the provincial intendants were increasingly taking precedence over bishops in dealing with the Protestant problem in the provinces. But the continuity of dévot hostility towards Protestantism could not have been better personified than by the intendant of Poitou himself – René de Marillac, grandson of Richelieu’s adversary, who was, not surprisingly, closely linked to the dévot networks in Paris and Poitou. When Marillac introduced the royal dragoons, the missionnaires bottés, to Poitou in May 1681, several months ahead of a planned winter-quarters billet there, it was with the tacit support of the war minister, Le Tellier de Louvois, and with as many external precautions as possible in order to disguise his real objective: to billet the dragoons on Protestant families who would be forced by the deliberately rough treatment of the soldiery to convert to Catholicism. For

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this plan to work, Catholics also needed to be billeted, but to a much lesser extent, while the richer Protestant families were to be specifically targeted in the hope that their conversions would create a ripple effect within the lower social milieux of their co-religionists. And for Protestants considering conversion, there was the attractive prospect of a two-year exemption from billeting. By comparison with the normal conversion tactics used hitherto, this carrotand-stick approach produced a stunningly large number of converts in its first six months of existence – up to 38,000, representing nearly two-thirds of Poitou’s Protestants – with the prospect of even more to come once it became clear that the mere threat or rumour of the arrival of the dragoons was capable of triggering mass conversions. But strong protests against such methods reached the court and finally led Louvois to reprimand Marillac, who was duly removed as intendant in early 1682 and replaced by his more prudent cousin, Lamoignon de Bâville. Louvois also had to rebuff requests from the intendants of Montauban and Limoges to imitate Marillac’s example.30 By the time the dragonnades were resumed in 1685, the Le Telliers’ grip on royal favour would be much stronger, especially in the wake of Colbert’s death in 1683. As a result, there was much less difference of opinion within the highest political circles over the need – if not the precise method – to resolve the Protestant problem. Between 1681 and 1685, other measures were tried, some of which seem to have been compensating for the abandonment of the dragonnades. For its part, the assembly of clergy of 1682 attempted, via an avertissement pastoral addressed especially to the Protestants and intended to be read out to their consistories in the presence of the provincial intendant and the local bishop’s representative, to persuade them of the urgent need to abandon schism and heresy and return to the true church. But the Protestants found an effective way of deflecting this thinly disguised Catholic ultimatum, accompanied by the threat of worse persecutions if they did not comply; in rejecting any claim to jurisdiction over them by Catholic bishops, they crucially avoided falling into the trap of seeming to defy the authority of the monarchy itself.31 Likewise, for a brief moment the assembly of clergy of 1685, responding to a firm initial request from Louis XIV himself, set about putting together a profession of faith that would satisfy – and silence – the Protestant ministers who were then criticising the Catholic missionaries attempting to convert their congregations. But fears that any such statement would have had to be gallican and irenic in content if it was to attract Protestant adherence led to strong Catholic objections – and not just from Rome – which effectively killed off the last attempt at church reunion by a negotiated credal agreement only months before the revocation was published. Had such a solution been obtained, it would probably have dashed any hope of settling the ongoing dispute with Innocent XI.32

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In the event, these failures, coming on top of the limited number of Protestant conversions, made it easier to resurrect the dragonnades in 1685, by which time the provincial intendants were keener than previously to try that method on a grander scale; the only significant dissenter among them, d’Aguesseau in Languedoc, was promptly replaced by a more willing figure, Bâville.33 Once the dragonnades began again in mid-1685 and were applied across the great Huguenot crescent from Aunis to Dauphiné, they quickly produced results on a massive scale, sometimes even before the dragoons themselves reached their destinations. This time the technique was initiated in Béarn by the ever-willing Foucault.34 He closed down all but five temples there in one swoop; the fortunate ones he temporarily retained as windowdressing, precisely because they were already compromised for contravening the existing legislation and thus could be easily demolished whenever he chose.35 From Béarn, the dragonnades swept northwards like a storm, scattering Protestant resistance in its way; Foucault himself was even transferred northwards to Poitou a few months later, to ensure the same results as in Béarn.36 Historians have identified in numerous places across France a sudden spike in the number of conversions that occurred over a matter of days or weeks during these months, correlating them to the movements of the dragoons. In the small town of Marsillargues in Languedoc, 1,040 conversions occurred between 1 October and Christmas 1685, but of them 678 were recorded on three days in early October which coincided with the arrival of the royal troops.37 Similar patterns of massive ‘pre-emptive’ conversions can be found elsewhere, which led one military commander to complain that the Protestants converted so quickly that they denied his dragoons their billet for the night.38 Nor did the dragonnades cease when the Edict of Nantes was revoked in October 1685. Despite the promise to respect the liberty of conscience of those Protestants who did not practise their religion, Louvois promptly made it clear that anyone hoping to use such a justification for not converting to the king’s religion would face a deserved, even brutal shock.39 In particular, it was judged necessary to use the dragoons in several provinces of central and northern France that had hitherto almost completely escaped their attention and had, perhaps for that reason, been unduly slow to embrace Catholicism. In Normandy, for example, the dragoons were on the move almost as soon as the new edict of revocation was registered. In and around Caen, as well as in lower Normandy generally, the surviving Protestant population converted in its entirety during the final weeks of November 1685, with the mass conversion of Alençon’s Protestants a typical example of the dread inspired by an impending dragonnade.40 These post-revocation dragonnades were as violent as their predecessors, probably because it was critical to prevent overt Protestant

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resistance from undermining the very justification – there were no more Protestants in France – for the revocation itself.41 IV In the long and tortuous history of religious division in early modern France, the Edict of Fontainebleau, revoking the edicts of Nantes and Nîmes, has the distinction of being by far the shortest of all the ‘edicts of religion’ (and of the subsequent declarations and règlements) issued over almost 125 years. Containing just twelve articles and preceded by a justificatory preamble of almost equal length, its brevity signalled that it was administering the last rites to a body considered to be on the verge of extinction. Since virtually every Protestant institution had by now been dismantled, it was easier to think that ‘the religion’ could be buried without undue public fuss. For that reason, most of the 1685 edict’s articles were proscriptions against persons. Yet the edict’s brevity was no guarantee of coherence, as already noted with reference to the haste with which the demolition of the surviving temples (art. 1) was placed before the prohibition of all Protestant religious services, even in private houses and behind closed doors (art. 2). Baptism by Catholic clergy, and schooling and religious instruction in Catholicism, were rendered obligatory for all Protestant children, whose separate état civil no longer existed. The final article (no. 12) guaranteeing the remaining Protestants full protection under the law ‘until they were enlightened like the others’ (i.e. until they converted) and on condition that they did not practise their religion in the meantime, seems like a hasty afterthought designed to appease European powers and observers while disguising what was really happening on the ground. If it was so intended, its effect was nullified by the refusal elsewhere in the edict to allow Protestants unwilling to abandon their religion to leave France under pain of despatch to the galleys for men and imprisonment for women. Within a wider European context extending back into the sixteenth century, such a right to emigrate (ius emigrandi) was considered the normal option to offer to religious minorities or dissidents; its denial in 1685 only sharpened criticism, much of it by French émigrés, of Louis XIV’s policies across Europe. The choice facing Protestant pastors was the opposite: either conversion to Catholicism or exile. If they converted, they could expect a royal pension to sustain them and their families, but if they emigrated, they would have to leave behind their children over the age of seven, who were to be brought up as Catholics.42 The edict itself made no mention of the latter restriction, which had already been imposed in 1681, any more than it mentioned the penalties they would face (life in the galleys or execution) if they remained in France without converting.

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The apparent inevitability, despite its ultimate suddenness, of the revocation led contemporaries, later commentators and historians to speculate at great length as to who among Louis XIV’s inner circle was its ‘real’ inspiration. But the search for the ultimate author of the ‘fault’ or ‘error’ is less important than its timing and possible objectives.43 The re-militarisation of the conversion programme and the spectacular results that it produced in such a short time (May–October 1685) seem to have suspended scepticism and critical thinking within ruling circles, making it ever more difficult to resist the momentum towards a revocation once such an outcome began to prove not just the logical one but also the one that Louis XIV himself seemed to want; guessing what the king ‘really’ wanted evidently took pride of place over warning him of potential difficulties. With France at peace with its neighbours since late 1684, the time seemed right to burnish the image of the most Christian king, recently tarnished by his failure to help defend Vienna against the Turks and his quarrel with the Pope. Nor was the chorus of approval which greeted the Edict of Fontainebleau on its publication likely to prompt any doubts about the wisdom of such a fateful decision. In the immediate aftermath, virtually without exception, the major intellectual figures of the day, including many Jansenists and Port-Royalists, enthusiastically welcomed the revocation, some considering it as little short of a miracle; St Augustine’s interpretation of the ‘compel them to enter [the church]’ text of the New Testament had a far more powerful grip on their minds than later generations can imagine.44 In such a context, it is hardly surprising that Innocent XI’s delayed and unenthusiastic congratulations, founded on very different considerations, should have been a serious disappointment to Louis XIV. Above all, the Pope’s brief – for once well named – applauding the king pointedly added that he should expect his reward for such a great decision from God’s goodness; this was a clear signal that the concessions from Rome that he eagerly hoped the revocation would trigger would not be forthcoming.45 This had been the papal attitude since at least early 1685, and it was not affected by the subsequent enthusiasm within France. The elevation, in September 1686 of Le Camus of Grenoble, the principal artisan of conversion by persuasion, to the rank of cardinal without Louis XIV’s approval was itself a particularly sharp confirmation of that deflating message.46 V Once the Edict of Fontainebleau was registered, within a few days of its signature, by the parlements, France ceased to have a Protestant minority and the RPR was consigned to the past; all of the king’s subjects were finally Catholic, with the converts known henceforth as new Catholics. But the fictional

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character of the new situation was too manifest to be ignored for long; the great majority of the mass abjurations agreed or signed under duress were meaningless in religious terms. Once the initial euphoria that greeted the revocation abated, it quickly became clear that little had changed in the behaviour or attitudes of most of these new Catholics. For a time, as noted above, the last article of the edict led some of them to believe that they could simply remain Protestants without being molested if they did not practise their religion, while others now regretted that they had so precipitately converted during the dragonnades. The fear that many might thus return to Protestantism actually grew stronger after October 1685, which meant that they remained under close surveillance. This was most evident at Easter 1686, when the new Catholics were expected to perform their Easter ‘duty’ by confessing their sins and taking communion in the rite of their new church. Aversion to these two features of Catholicism was always particularly strong within French Protestantism, and the recent mass conversions had scarcely diminished it. How widespread the imposition of forced communion on the new converts was in 1686 and later cannot be satisfactorily estimated, but it became notorious enough to be recognised, even within government circles, as one of the worst elements of post-revocation coercion. It prolonged the billeting of troops on families reluctant to take the sacraments, while also encouraging the posting of troops or ‘inspectors’ in, or near, churches in order to maintain the pressure on recalcitrants. In late 1686 a formal instruction was sent to provincial intendants to prevent the new Catholics from being forced to take the sacraments; but the order was kept secret, presumably so that those refusing the sacraments could not conclude that their resistance had triumphed. Confusing signals such as these probably allowed many local officials to proceed according to their own lights. Royal ministers such as Colbert de Seignelay and Louvois were at opposite ends of the spectrum in their responses to local reports or demands, which in turn ensured that complaints about forced communion would continue for several years to come.47 It will come as no surprise, therefore, that just as the dragonnades did not disappear on the eve of the revocation, the latter was not the last item of restrictive anti-Protestant legislation; its very brevity ensured that further measures – often with increasingly draconian punishments attached – were deemed necessary to copper-fasten the status of the new Catholics and to prevent any backsliding that would undermine the king’s ‘great design’. The vast majority of these measures were added within a year or so of the revocation, leading one historian to conclude that there was ‘enough . . . in the legislation from January to July 1686 to give a legal warrant for the terrible punishments’ of the next century.48 Even so, further major ‘declarations’ proved necessary in 1698 and 1724. The formal titles (edicts, declarations, decrees) of

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such measures do not always reflect their real significance, as a few examples will show. Since the raising of children as Catholics was a key objective of the whole campaign, parents who refused to send them to catechism and the Catholic Mass risked having them taken from their custody and handed over to Catholic guardians or placed in institutions at their parents’ expense. Likewise, a declaration of April 1686 insisted that new Catholics who died having refused to receive the last sacraments should be denied burial (or should be dug up, if already buried), their bodies left on open ground and their property confiscated. Further declarations tightened up loopholes allowing Protestants to contract civil marriages and obliged them to follow the ritual of the Council of Trent as observed in France. It did not take long for it to become clear that, the last article of the 1685 edict notwithstanding, every subject of the king of France was reputed to be Catholic.49 It was also recognised in governing circles in 1685 that giving the label of new Catholics some substance would require more than just the force and legislation provided by the monarchy. Archbishop Harlay of Paris, who was in frequent contact with Louis XIV throughout this crucial decision-making period, took the initiative in organising ‘royal’ missions in the main provinces of Protestant settlement almost immediately after the revocation itself. But they did not get off to a good start. In the face of episcopal opposition and foot-dragging, an enraged Louis XIV handed supervision of the missions to the intendants, who were authorised to reply to objectors that their orders came from the king.50 Opposition was all the more galling as Harlay had deliberately ignored the religious orders – the Jesuits, the Capuchins, the Récollets – which had hitherto dominated missionary activity, on the grounds that they would not be well received by the new converts; instead he chose a large contingent of able preachers from the secular clergy. Among them was Fénelon, who gathered around him a group of missionaries to be sent to the Aunis-Saintonge area; Fénelon himself was coached by his mentor Bossuet on how to conduct the mission.51 As part of this campaign, it was decided to print for distribution to the new Catholics a huge quantity of copies of the Bible, psalms, sermons and other Catholic apologetic works (such as Bossuet’s own Exposition) that, it was hoped, would help to fortify the faith of the new converts.52 But soon there was further opposition, especially from the orders excluded from the missions, to allowing recent converts to have works that genuine ‘old’ Catholics could not possess or read at all; similar objections were made against missionaries who downplayed particular Catholic practices – the veneration of the saints or the Virgin, for example – in the hope of generating a progressive conversion in which practices that might be unacceptable at the outset would prove easier to embrace at a later, more ‘enlightened’ stage of the process. Such irenic missionary tactics often generated friction

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locally – sometimes with bishops who did not control the missions as they would have wished – while the objections to them could make their way back into the political mix at court. In some cases, objections were accompanied by insinuations that the missionaries seeking to avoid certain Catholic traditions were either Jansenists or influenced by them; some of the books distributed to the converts were alleged to contain similarly suspect ideas, and were subsequently revised or withdrawn from circulation; it was said that allowing the new converts to sing the psalms, even in a Catholic version, was more likely to encourage them to remain Protestants in all but name.53 Fénelon was one of those targeted in this way, with the result that, despite enjoying the ministerial protection of Colbert de Seignelay, he had to adjust his methods before abandoning the mission in 1687.54 The concept of ‘royal’ missions was relatively short-lived, and the failure of the expected results to materialise made it easier to transfer the principal responsibility for dealing with the new Catholics to the bishops by 1687–88. But the bishops were no less divided in their approach to the methods that should be used – particularly over coercion by the ‘secular’ arm – in promoting religious conformity. A not insubstantial minority scattered across the kingdom, mostly with Port-Royal connections, abhorred violence and the profanation of the sacraments that it produced, and thus insisted that the dragoons depart – no mean achievement when they were facing ministers with few scruples like Louvois. But their aversion to violence should not be taken for tolerance. In a church that was increasingly Augustinian in its theology, the problem of religious dissent was seen through Augustine’s strictures against the Donatist heretics of his day, rather than through precepts that would only later be developed by the Enlightenment. For Le Camus of Grenoble, the most influential and determined of the convertisseurs, it was legitimate to exert pressure on new Catholics to convert and conform, and that might include threatening them with the return of the dragoons or exiling or imprisoning ringleaders; Fénelon was not averse to bending his key principles in the search for immediate, positive results.55 In Languedoc, the province with the highest proportion of new Catholics scattered across more than twenty dioceses, only two or three bishops were hostile to the use of violence in obtaining conversions or conformity. At an informal meeting of its bishops held in late October 1685 to consider how to deal with the post-revocation challenge, it was agreed that the missionaries would need to be prudent in insisting on certain Catholic religious practices – for example, devotional confraternities and miracles – that were likely to alienate the new converts. Yet the ensuing missions achieved little. The two Jansenist-leaning bishops were simply too few and, more to the point, too much out of political favour, both in Languedoc and Versailles, to carry their

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colleagues with them. Moreover, their approach to the new Catholics was criticised in the same terms as were those of other missionaries such as Fénelon. At the opposite end of the spectrum were the bishops of Nîmes (the famous preacher Fléchier) and Alès, where the Protestants were the most numerous; their hard-line approach placed them much closer to Louvois and Bâville. The majority of the Languedoc bishops were not zealots of either persuasion, however, but seemed willing to fall in with the crown and the intendant, in the image of Cardinal Bonzi, long the dominant clerical figure in Languedoc politics, who showed scant enthusiasm for leading the campaign for religious uniformity there.56 Few of them seem to have thought of the problem they faced as a specifically religious one. Fléchier of Nîmes would speak for them, and for many other Catholics, when he wrote some years later, in 1698: ‘what remains of Calvinism is not a religion, but a party which maintains itself as best it can by organised conspiracy’.57 VI By the time that the main responsibility for dealing with the new Catholics was devolved to the Catholic bishops, France was again inching towards war on a grand European scale. In the past, as we have seen, such a prospect had been capable of altering the political context in a way that offered some respite to the religious minority. But no such minority existed on paper after 1685, and Louis XIV was adamant that he would neither repeal nor suspend the Edict of Fontainebleau; it was an irreplaceable element of his ambition to be seen as the champion of Catholic Europe. But this is to consider the status of France’s New Catholics from only one vantage point. Their own responses to the revocation need to be considered if we are to understand the subsequent developments. By far the best-known response was, of course, emigration on a massive scale – the one option that the 1685 edict explicitly denied France’s Protestants. Indeed, it proved to be the largest emigration in early modern history, apart from the expulsion of the Spanish Moriscos in 1609, from which it differed most obviously in not being authorised.58 Historians remain as divided over the numbers of those who emigrated as over its consequences – economic, political and intellectual as well as religious. Smaller but not insignificant numbers of Protestants, often wealthy and well connected, had already settled abroad before 1685 and their networks facilitated the much more massive migration thereafter. Despite the difficulties, physical dangers, and the penalties for being caught trying to leave France, at least 150,000 people emigrated between 1685 and 1715, most of them during the years of international peace, from 1685 to 1689 and 1698 to 1702. The geography of ‘Protestant’ France was further altered by the fact that emigration was most massive from the

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maritime and frontier provinces, and that proportionately twice as many northern Protestants emigrated as southern. It also seems that nearly four out of every five ministers left France, as they were ordered to, yet they were to be strongly criticised for this subsequently.59 The great majority of the emigrants headed towards Switzerland, but above all the Dutch Republic and England, which were in the vanguard of Protestant Europe’s opposition to Louis XIV by the late 1680s. Many of these émigrés hoped to return to France; they had left family and property and were anxious to sustain their co-religionists who had stayed behind. The Protestant ‘Refuge’, as it soon became known, had few counterparts in its time, as the term describes far more than the condition of an emigrant population. The Refuge of the Dutch Republic was by far the most active, pumping out pamphlets, newsletters, books and other materials which were smuggled into France and circulated under the table there. By 1685 the major intellectual figures of later seventeenth-century French Protestantism lived mostly in Holland, and in some cases their departure had preceded the revocation itself. For example, two of its most prominent writers, Pierre Bayle and Pierre Jurieu, settled there when the Sedan academy, where they were professors, was closed in 1681. Both quickly became effective and incisive critics of the pre-1685 royal policies and their supporters. But their analysis of the calamity and their advice to those who remained in France could differ sharply. Bayle continued to subscribe to the creed of royal absolutism, while the prolific Jurieu (grandson of Pierre du Moulin) began to criticise the despotism which made the recent policies possible. As the title of perhaps his only work that is still read suggests – ‘The lamentations of France enslaved and aspiring to liberty’ of 1686 – he took aim at a much broader target than the condition of Protestantism. He tried to develop arguments from natural law about the mutual duties of rulers and subjects that would limit such royal excesses; influenced by the English political revolution of 1688, he also placed growing emphasis on the ultimate sovereignty of the people. But not even the extreme conditions of the 1680s could make him completely ditch Huguenot adherence to notions of rule by divine right.60 Above all, Jurieu wrote and circulated, before and after 1685, a long series of influential and widely read ‘pastoral letters’ rebutting Catholic claims, recycling information from inside France, urging Protestants not to despair, and even prophesying that the end of their tribulations would come in 1689.61 When Protestant ‘prophets’ began appearing in France itself around 1689 and later, it was Jurieu who supported them, while Bayle and many others in the Refuge were either embarrassed by, or hostile to, such ‘superstitions’. Between them, Bayle, the so-called precursor of the Enlightenment, and Jurieu, the heir to a long Huguenot tradition, exemplify the tensions that traversed the exiled

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communities.62 Yet despite internal divergences and the criticisms levelled against the émigrés, the Refuge – considered as a political and religious diaspora rather than a merely demographic phenomenon – was a distinctive form of resistance, without which many of those who had remained in France might not have continued to resist the attempts to turn them into real rather than nominal Catholics. Throughout the years during which the combined forces of church and state had been busy – albeit episodically – tightening the noose around their neck, France’s Protestants had continued to play the card of loyal and disciplined subjects, who received their tribulations as coming from God and as punishment for their sinfulness. But far from commending them to their adversaries, such hyper-loyalism was viewed as a cloak for their wrong-headed obduracy; their legendary patience in the face of acts of humiliation and persecution exasperated rather than mollified the more zealous Catholics. The dragonnades were thinkable at least in part because of such attitudes, which did not evaporate after the formal conversions to Catholicism of 1685. Although the final article of the new edict apparently guaranteeing religious liberty caused some initial confusion and may have slowed the early flood of emigrants, the first ripples of resistance were becoming visible by early to mid-1686. Whatever the true number of Protestants who emigrated may be, the vast majority of them still lived, as new Catholics, within France in 1685 and later. The severity, which is especially visible in the 1685 edict, of the measures taken against pastors refusing to convert or who returned illegally to France was not accidental; it was based on the assumption that once deprived of their spiritual leaders, the headless Protestant congregations would be incapable of independent action. But eliminating the pastors could, if too successful, have unintended consequences, creating a void that would enable others to assert themselves; as has often happened in similar situations, it was the more radical voices that came to the fore. By early 1686 illegal assemblies had begun to appear in different regions, and especially across the southern provinces. Another phenomenon not seen since the 1550s also returned, that of the unattached, itinerant prédicants, who preached and held open-air services, but who, being unconsecrated, could obviously not conduct the communion service. Since the assemblies in question were clandestine, and were often held at night and in remote places in order to escape surveillance and repression, it is obviously difficult to gauge their importance or geographical scale. But once the authorities realised that they were spreading, severe repression followed; the fact that France was still at peace with its neighbours made it easier to deploy troops for the purpose in the regions most concerned. The first wave of ‘assemblées sauvages’ was snuffed out by 1687 in Languedoc, by 1688

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in Poitou, but with the outbreak of the Nine Years War the next year, the authorities in these areas were anticipating the possibility of a full-scale Protestant uprising.63 On occasion, the repression could involve the massacre of some of those attending the assemblies; but they were mostly followed by executions, imprisonment, or a life sentence to the galleys. It was usually too dangerous to organise such assemblies in towns or cities, but it seems that in places like Nantes, Lyon or La Rochelle smaller, more discreet gatherings occurred behind closed doors and sustained Protestant resistance to religious conformity.64 Within two years at most of the assemblies’ demise, a different phenomenon arose which divided Protestant opinion even more, so un-Protestant did it seem to many within France and in the Refuge abroad. However, like the assemblies just discussed, it was a response to the systematic dismantling of the structures of the Protestant churches, and especially the disappearance of their pastors. Prophesying and prophets were distinctive in several respects. In many cases it was children or young adolescents who took centre stage; if they were adults, they were usually people who were either barely, or not at all, literate; most unusually, women figured prominently among them. Jurieu’s own prophecy of Protestant liberation in 1689, and his support for prophetism as it developed within France, bolstered the credibility of the prophets. Beginning in Dauphiné in early 1689 with a young prophetess whose preaching was based on Old Testament texts, the ‘movement’ spread rapidly and haphazardly into neighbouring regions, like the Vivarais, where the prophets attracted large crowds. Once again the intervention of the intendants and the royal commanders eliminated them in a matter of months, by March 1689; but they remained apprehensive as to what might happen during a major European war.65 Jurieu’s ‘fatal’ year of 1689 came and went without the predicted liberation. For the following decade French Protestantism seemed to freeze, especially as several illegal, itinerant pastors were caught and executed. But equally suddenly, in peacetime, prophesying resumed in the southern provinces in 1700, with similar responses: open-air assemblies and a convulsionnaire effect that, preceding by some forty years that of Parisian Jansenism in the 1730s, attracted widespread comment and puzzlement, inside and outside France. The oncedisciplined congregations of the spoken word now seemed to have mutated into ‘fanatics’. Such typically revivalist events were concentrated in Dauphiné and, especially, the Cévennes, where the prophets could move more freely than elsewhere in France. This time, however, repression provoked an armed revolt, that of the Camisards, which lasted longer – over two years from July 1702 onwards – than any ‘popular’ uprising, religious or otherwise, in early modern Europe, thanks primarily to the hit-and-run guerrilla tactics of its leaders, but especially to the local support on which the rebels could rely. Its termination

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in mid-1704 owed less to military defeat than to dissension among its leaders and, more conjecturally, the absence of the expected support of Louis XIV’s foreign enemies. It was confined to a relatively small but notoriously inaccessible region of France where Protestants had been in the majority since the sixteenth century. In addition, it saw a return of sectarian violence reminiscent in many ways of the wars of religion, especially with the formation of local Catholic militias to assist the regular royal troops who were often too stretched to control many areas of the Cévennes. Local hostilities involved not just individuals or families, but whole villages whose mutual suspicions and rivalries burst to the surface, leading to raids, assassinations, ambushes and scorchedearth practices in which confessional hostilities did not exclude a certain hatred of the rich by the poor.66 Despite a persistent Catholic belief to the contrary, the revolt was not supported or secretly led by the Protestant nobility of the region, who found themselves caught between traditions of allegiance to the crown and detestation of the post-revocation repression; it is not difficult to extrapolate from this that the ever-dwindling Huguenot nobility elsewhere in France was even less able, or willing to engage in such defiance.67 The embers of revolt continued to smoulder until around 1710, as the evidence of prophesying, executions and condemnations to the galleys for these years abundantly shows. VII The crown’s policy towards its former Protestant subjects could not but be affected by the two huge wars that dominated the final twenty-five years of Louis XIV’s reign. But this time, there were no suspensions of anti-Protestant legislation. On the contrary, repression had been routinised by the late 1680s, and it continued thereafter. Thus new Catholics caught attending assemblies or attempting to leave the kingdom could expect little indulgence, while pastors or ringleaders could expect execution. Coming so soon after the repression of the first wave of assemblies and prophesying, the years of the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–97) were relatively quiet. Yet there was no hiding the lack of success of the policy of confessional unification: the Huguenots had been decreed out of existence, but it was not difficult to see that they were still defiant and unconverted. As early as 1689, Marshal Vauban made the first of several attempts to enlighten Louis XIV about what had really happened, pointing to the damage, which he saw as more than merely economic, that the revocation had inflicted on France. Furthermore, he warned, the new Catholics might well become a dangerous fifth column within France. He added that heresy was preferable to the kind of atheism that the post-1685 regime promoted among their ranks – a prospect that was

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hinted at by other voices around this time. However, nobody at court, not even Mme de Maintenon, had the nerve to relay such home truths to the king, either in 1689 or later.68 The return of peace in late 1697 provided, as it had in the past, an opportunity to re-examine the Protestant problem. The European coalition aligned against France had not insisted during negotiations on concessions to the Protestants, much to their disappointment, but in some parts of France, at least, rumours began circulating that Louis XIV would allow them to practise their religion again. Encouraged in that belief by the pastoral letters from the Refuge, large-scale assemblies were held in parts of Poitou in late 1697, but were quickly repressed. They may not have spread to other provinces, but that did not prevent the province’s intendant from proposing the reintroduction of the dragonnades ‘invented’ by his predecessor, Marillac, in order to break the resistance of these new Catholics; but he and the governor of Poitou were rebuffed by Pontchartrain, the finance minister who would become chancellor in 1699.69 Against a background of dissatisfaction in governing circles with the results obtained since 1685, of which Vauban and d’Aguesseau were the bestknown critics, it is possible that the revocation of the Edict of Fontainebleau was envisaged in late 1697 or early 1698, but probably not for long, given Louis XIV’s known repugnance to making such a concession.70 Pontchartrain, who initially canvassed the views of the intendants on the subject, blamed the prolonged war for making a coherent handling of the Protestant problem impossible. That was compounded, he claimed, by intendants making their own individual decisions, thus increasing the existing confusion. Above all, he blamed over-zealous intendants – Bâville in Languedoc was the unnamed target here – for their severity, which further compromised the chances of success. There was, he concluded, a serious need for a royal pronouncement to clarify the situation.71 It is unfortunate, given the scale of the consultation, that only three of the nine intendants’ reports commissioned by Pontchartrain in 1698 appear to have survived. All three argued that Protestants be punished severely (up to banishment to the galleys for life or execution for certain offences) for infringing the laws of the kingdom, but when it came to religion, the intendants differed as to how much, if at all, they should be coerced into attending Catholic services; intendants operating in provinces with large Protestant populations were those most in favour of coercion.72 More unexpected was the parallel enquiry commissioned in the following months at Louis XIV’s request by Archbishop Noailles of Paris, who asked twenty-five bishops, most of them from southern or western France, to present their views.73 Their responses, all of which have survived, focused essentially on the current state of the new converts in their dioceses in 1698 and how best to deal with religious dissidents. Because they were confidential, the responses

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were often forthright, but they differed widely in their diagnosis. Like the intendants, the bishops assumed that it was the behaviour of the elites within these former Protestant communities that was vital; persuading or constraining them would bring the rest of the population into line.74 The Languedoc bishops were, not surprisingly, the most hard-line, attributing Protestant resistance to Catholicism to small groups of ringleaders who had previously been members of the governing consistories of the Protestant churches; unless such individuals were rendered harmless, there would be little progress towards full conversion. This was only one of many reasons why they could see no way forward without substantial royal support and a continuation of coercive – but not violent – measures. One after another, the southern bishops referred to historical precedents, from the Donatists to the Albigensians, showing that heresy had never been vanquished merely by preaching or exhortation but had required the intervention of the prince, who was entitled, as the ‘external’ bishop, to use his authority to ‘compel them to enter’, and remain in, the true church. In making such statements, they explicitly pointed out the differences between northern and southern France, asserting that their northern counterparts would change their tune if exposed to the behaviour of southern Protestants. For their part, the northern bishops who were consulted, and Bossuet in particular, favoured douceur and avoiding compulsion where religious services, and especially frequenting the sacraments, were concerned; they were also severely critical of the way in which the bodies of Huguenots who had died refusing the Catholic sacraments were treated. Noailles himself read the early history of the post-Constantinian church in terms of relative tolerance, and urged Louis XIV to avoid all forms of religious coercion.75 The archbishop of Sens wrote that moderation would be approved mostly by people not directly confronted by the problem, but admitted that the tougher approach would probably be of greater benefit to the state and, once it had proved successful, to religion itself.76 Not one bishop, however, requested that the revocation should be undone, doubtless knowing that Louis XIV would not countenance it. Although the outcome of this extended consultation and the debates it generated in governing circles was rather limited, it would be hard to find a better illustration of the straitjacket that the monarchy had fashioned for itself. It began with a royal declaration in December 1698 which maintained the edict of 1685, reiterated the ban on the practice of ‘the religion’ in France, and admonished the Catholic clergy, high and low, to mobilise their forces in order to get to grips with the challenge of making real Catholics of the newly converted. No penalties for recidivism by the new Catholics were mentioned, but they were expected to attend Catholic services, send their children to catechism and parish schools, and marry in accordance with

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Catholic prescriptions.77 This was followed a month later, in January 1699, by an extended instruction to the intendants which attempted to restore, de facto at least, the jurisdiction of the normal law courts where the former Protestants were concerned, while urging the intendants to avoid unnecessary force or precipitation when it came to imposing respect for the laws concerning heresy. They were urged to act as the eyes and ears of the crown and to report problems to the king rather than acting on their own initiative, so that a coherent approach to dealing with the new Catholics would emerge ‘from above’. The instruction concluded by urging them to consult with the bishops on a continuous basis in order ‘to support their zeal and efforts to increase the worship of God and the Catholic religion in the kingdom’.78 This instruction may not have been an attempt to make the intendants the agents of the bishops, but it was a partial recognition that the desired objective of full conversion of the Protestants could only be achieved by patient long-term instruction and acculturation, in which the emphasis was placed on ensuring that the children of the new Catholics would be educated as full Catholics, regardless of their parents’ obduracy. It was this provision that enabled the hard-line Catholics, especially in the Midi, to continue to put pressure on families in which parents and adults were refusing to practise their new religion.79 The impossibility of any admission that the cart had been placed before the horse is best revealed in the last and most surprising act of the 1698 consultation: a secret memoir addressed to the intendants on top of the ‘ordinary’ instruction that we have just seen. Of course, secrecy and dissimulation had preceded the revocation of 1685, as is clearly evident, for example, in the way in which Louvois coached Marillac to disguise the real intention behind the use of the dragonnades in 1681 and later.80 Within a few weeks of the revocation itself, public statements and secret instructions began to diverge again, as we have seen in relation to forced communion in early 1686, with Louvois now warning local officials what they should not do.81 He and his father, Chancellor Le Tellier, also issued secret instructions in October 1685 not to disturb merchants or artisans in Rouen and Sedan whose services and presence were needed by the monarchy; similar instructions probably continued thereafter, especially when Vauban began pointing out the economic damage done by the revocation.82 Such a façade had something to do with trying to offset criticism from abroad, but it arose no less from the persistence of negative views of the Protestants as being ready to take advantage of any perceived slackening in royal policy towards them. In the light of this, it is not surprising that the secret memoir of early 1699 begins by explaining why it was impossible to mention certain ‘secret matters’, not merely in the royal declaration of December 1698 but also in the confidential instruction to the intendants of January 1699. Since the contents of the

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latter would become known sooner or later, the secret instruction was considered necessary if the intendants were to know what the ‘true’ position was. It then itemised the issues on which the public stance and the recommended practice had to be different, but without the difference being openly admissible. One example may serve to show the logic behind it. The instruction recalled that in the recent consultation the bishops commented on the ‘very bad effects’ generated by the digging up and punishment of the corpses of converts who had refused the last sacraments. It then continued: we are strongly persuaded of the truth of what they say and the need to avoid providing such public spectacles. But it has been decided that this part of the declaration ought not to be abrogated by another law contradicting it, or even be discussed in the instruction . . . so as not to give those ill-intentioned new converts the possibility of taking advantage of this relaxation of the law. It is certain that, given the state that they are in, nothing would be more dangerous than to retract the slightest thing, as they would draw conclusions and spread rumours concerning such matters which would revive the spirit of schism, and thus render the measures and objectives of the edict useless. It is a good thing to avoid a punishment that horrifies people, but it is also worthwhile to allow the fear of such punishment to continue.

In the same vein, the instruction accepted that shedding blood was not a good idea, since it flattered those in search of ‘false’ martyrdom, and that mixed marriages were valuable for promoting religious reunion, but went on to repeat that the real motives for hindering or promoting such things could not be publicly revealed. As for the secret instruction itself, it was felt best to delay despatching it until it had become clear what the effects of the recent royal declaration (December 1698) actually were.83 The existence of several superimposed layers of ‘discourse’ within royal policy towards the Protestants – who in law no longer existed but who were as ‘interiorly’ insubordinate as ever – conveys some idea of how ‘impossible’ the notion of a revocation of the 1685 edict must have been in the highest political circles. That impossibility in turn widened the gap between theory and reality thereafter. The fear by the 1690s was, manifestly, that any public announcement – or admission – of adjustments or alleviations would be taken as a sign of weakness by the Protestants, whose ill will and rebelliousness would convince them that defiance would continue to triumph if only they held firm. This general fear of appearing weak or accommodating drew on, but also reinforced, the view that Protestants were essentially political and conspiratorial. The return of prophesying around 1700 and the Camisard revolt of 1702

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(and with it the threat of foreign intervention to aid rebellion in France) ensured that such attitudes would become even more entrenched for the remainder of Louis XIV’s reign. VIII Only two weeks before Louis XIV’s death, Antoine Court convened and presided over the first Synod of the ‘Desert’ in the remote Cévennes, an event which laid the basis for a reorganisation of the Protestant churches of France. The twenty-year-old Court already had two years of experience as an itinerant prédicant behind him, although he was by no means the youngest of those preachers who had appeared ex nihilo during the previous decades. A few years later, in 1718, he became the first pastor to be consecrated in France since 1685. In re-founding the churches and reviving the synods that had been closed for many years, he and those who joined him, in and after 1715, were attempting to return French Protestantism to some form of normal existence, despite the formal restrictions that would remain in place under Louis XV. Significantly, they also believed that it was time to turn their back on the two most recent Protestant movements – those of the prophets and the Camisards – into which they had been born and without which Court’s own itinerary up to 1715 would have been unthinkable. From Court’s perspective, the alternation of prophecy and revolt in the previous decades symbolised the disarray of his co-religionists and only played into the hands of royal officialdom and the local Catholic clergy. Despite dividing Protestant opinion, especially in the Refuge, these movements showed that Protestantism was not dead within France, and was capable of forms of defiance despite the high risks for those involved. During the 1690s and 1700s, a number of intrepid pastors slipped back into France from exile and tried to sustain local congregations; several were caught and swiftly executed. Similarly close surveillance forced Court himself into exile in Switzerland in the 1720s, where he founded a seminary that would prepare future pastors for the revived French churches. Supported by a new generation of pastors and other followers in France, Court would patiently knit together a new infrastructure which enabled many of France’s Protestants, despite erratic but often nasty flare-ups of persecution in subsequent decades, to emerge from the traumas of Louis XIV’s reign and return to the practice of their religion.84

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he last decades of Louis XIV’s reign were confronted with not just one type of religious problem, even if that of the Protestants was quite different in scale and nature from the others that the regime encountered. A thin-skinned sensitivity towards anything smacking of dissent or resistance had gradually set in, which in turn made the regime increasingly likely to use a heavy hand in its dealings with those attracting its disapproval. A liberal use of lettres de cachet exiled to many parts of France an unprecedented number of individuals whose religious views were deemed unorthodox or their conduct suspect. Likewise, the long conflict with Rome in the 1680s gave an added incentive to defending orthodoxy wherever – even under Innocent XI’s own nose, as we shall see – it seemed under threat. Historians are in the habit of seeing each of these confrontations in isolation. For long periods, the Jansenist problem remained relatively dormant. That did not prevent other conflicts, including the Protestant one, as we have seen, from deepening suspicions of the Jansenists, for whom periods of respite did not mean they were either forgotten or forgiven. This justifies the attempt that follows to treat the Jansenist problem within a wider context of religious tensions and conflict with political ramifications. I By the middle decades of Louis XIV’s reign the handling of religious conflicts itself became increasingly fractious, as the currents as well as leading figures within the French church took sides and, in some instances, sought to avenge a defeat on one front by realigning themselves with others who were also licking their wounds. Thus, as noted in the previous chapter, the different approaches to converting the Protestants or dealing with the new Catholics after 1685 were partly tactical, as some groups sought to maintain their

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authority or influence by discrediting those of different convictions. Perhaps the most revealing example of such conflict was the quietist controversy of the late 1680s and especially the 1690s, which nominally pitted Fénelon against Bossuet, his former mentor, but also wreaked havoc on relations between several other senior churchmen. Because the chief exponents of the suspect opinions in these confrontations were not marginal figures but were increasingly to be found among church leaders, their clashes were virtually bound to involve high-level court faction and politics. The French quietist controversy, which began rather than ended ‘at the top’ of the political pyramid, was the most startling example of such ramifications, as it involved the younger generations of the royal family and thus, implicitly, the future course of the monarchy. By the time the controversy officially ended in 1699, poisonous rivalries had exploded, realigning many of those involved for the next round of the Jansenist dispute. That dispute, needless to say, remained inseparable from the role of the Jesuits in France’s political and religious affairs at a time when they were under severe attack for their supposed moral laxism. To take the example of Fénelon again: his friendship with Bossuet and involvement in the Protestant missions in 1686–87, which had led to his being suspected of Jansenist sympathies, denied him the episcopal promotion that he (and many others) fully expected in the mid-1680s; less than a decade later his association with quietism was partly responsible for his becoming archbishop of Cambrai; a decade later again, by the early 1700s, he had become the most determined enemy of the Jansenists and, more surprisingly, an unconditional supporter of the Jesuits. Until the mid-1690s the dominant figure within church politics broadly defined was Archbishop Harlay, whose promotion to Paris from Rouen in 1671 confirmed his growing influence, acquired mainly as president of the assemblies of clergy. For the first time ever, the assemblies had the same president for a full generation, one who owed his role to Louis XIV rather than his fellow deputies. Learned and eloquent, ambitious and opportunistic, he was also a perfect courtier, combining a capacity for discovering what would please those on high with a hard-nosed authoritarianism towards those around and below him. Suspicion that he used the gallican conflict in the mid-1680s with a view to becoming patriarch of the French church was widely shared, but persistent rumours about his private life made him vulnerable. As Robin Briggs noted, his worldliness meant that he was more likely to steady the ship than to unleash zealotry.1 For example, after the Peace of the Church was finalised in early 1669, he supported suggestions that the troublesome papal formulary of 1665 should itself be scrapped, but the Dutch war of 1672–78 put paid to such plans.2 The death in 1679 of Mme de Longueville, the powerful protector of Port-Royal-des-Champs, came just as that war ended, and it was

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quickly exploited by Harlay to impose a slow death on the abbey by denying it the right to recruit new nuns in the future. Because Harlay was exercising his authority as the ultimate superior of the abbey, his decision was difficult to counter, especially as there was no doubt that he was acting with royal support. As we saw earlier, it made the 1669 peace shakier, but Harlay was not intent on open conflict with other Jansenists.3 Shortly afterwards, he also took advantage of internal dissensions to nail another target, the Oratory of Paris, whose Augustinian and Cartesian leanings, connections to Port-Royal, and dislike of the Jesuits had made the Oratory a thorn in the side of the church establishment for many years. Arnauld’s ultimate successor as the leading French Jansenist was an Oratorian, Pasquier Quesnel, who would quit the Harlaydominated Oratory to join Arnauld in exile in Brussels after 1684.4 But these strokes were opportunist, low-key skirmishes and not the prelude to a largescale offensive. If genuinely strong-arm tactics were used during these years in dealing with Catholic ‘dissent’ it was not against the nuns of Port-Royal but against a small female congregation, the Daughters of the Infancy of Christ, based in and around Toulouse. The congregation had signed the anti-Jansenist formulary, but its foundress had been a close associate of a Toulouse JansenistAugustinian, Gabriel de Ciron; suspected of and denounced for being involved in an international conspiracy, the congregation was dissolved by the royal council in 1686.5 The nuns’ decision to appeal to Innocent XI only made matters far worse for them (as for Caulet and Pavillon), and they were brutally dispersed and, in some cases, imprisoned. This incident lay at the origin of one of the late Racine’s most successful plays, L’innocence opprimée.6 A trickle of ‘incidents’ like these did not amount to resumption of open conflict between the Jansenists and their opponents, but they sufficed, as we have seen, to produce a mini-Refuge of Jansenists, led by Arnauld himself, in the Netherlands, both Dutch and Spanish, after 1679.7 II The arcana of mystical spirituality, especially in its quietist form, were not usually a major concern of the French monarchy under Louis XIV or his immediate predecessors. Even when there was suspicion of the dévots, it did not tend to focus on their spiritual principles or practices, if we except SaintCyran’s experiments with the practice of the sacraments at Port-Royal in the 1630s. The quietist affair of the final decade of the century was the exception, which may be one reason why it is so often passed over with scarcely a mention in most studies. Were it not for the involvement of Bossuet and Fénelon, the two grands esprits of fin-de-siècle Catholicism, that silence might be absolute. Yet the fallout from the heated controversies that it generated did influence the

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behaviour of the major protagonists in the revived Jansenist problem during Louis XIV’s final years. To put it at its simplest, quietism affirmed that the highest stage of the ‘union’ of the individual Christian soul with God was reached when the individual divested himself or herself of all normal desires and concerns other than that of pleasing God and waiting, passively, to be filled by his grace. In such a state, individuals could become indifferent even to their own salvation, leaving it and everything concerning it to God’s care. In one guise or another, such a strand of mysticism had existed for centuries, resurfacing from time to time, often in ‘anti-establishment’ guises. It had been either opposed or condemned outright by the church authorities for its various deviations – especially for presuming that salvation could be attained through a passive ‘pure love’ for God which, in turn, seemed to dispense its practitioners from the duty to undertake the normal grind of ‘good works’ and repentance on the hard road to salvation. By offering the prospect of direct communication with the divine through contemplation, quietism also seemed to de-legitimise institutions and undermine hierarchical authority. By the later seventeenth century, several of the most influential treatises on the subject written by French mystics had been subjected to censure and were placed on the Roman Index.8 Despite this, the quietism which surfaced in the 1680s was originally Roman rather than French in origin, one in which the main figures were a Spanish priest resident in Rome, Miguel de Molinos, and a cardinal. Author of a successful Spiritual guide (1675), Molinos had gathered around him a wide circle of disciples and spiritual dirigés, including Cardinal Petrucci, the full extent of which was only revealed in the mid-1680s. During the conflict with Innocent XI, Cardinal d’Estrées tried to take advantage of that particular discovery in order to embarrass the Pope by questioning his religious orthodoxy. In response, Molinos was quickly condemned and imprisoned for life in 1687, by which time his influence had spread further afield.9 In France a laywoman, Mme Guyon, had read and absorbed his and others’ work by the time she published her Short and easy method to pray of 1685. Despite Guyon herself being harassed and imprisoned several times before and after this juncture, her book and its message had some success. Significantly, she attracted attention within high-level dévot circles at court, especially that of the dukes of Beauvillier and Chevreuse, each married to a daughter of Colbert and both men well-regarded figures at Versailles.10 By 1688, Mme de Maintenon and her new spiritual adviser, Fénelon, were active ‘guyonians’. Within a year, Beauvillier was appointed a minister of state and governor of the young duke of Burgundy, Louis XIV’s eldest grandson and a future king of France in potentia; he in turn appointed Fénelon, who was already his and his brother-in-law Chevreuse’s director of conscience, as Burgundy’s preceptor. In this task Fénelon employed

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scholars and kindred spirits, soon becoming part of an ambitious design, conceived by Maintenon, to reshape the royal entourage and ‘besiege’ Louis XIV himself in the cause of reform, both political and religious.11 For her part, Maintenon also opened the doors of her recently founded (1686) royal maison of Saint-Cyr to Guyon’s new spirituality. However, by 1693, and especially by 1694, rumours were circulating about the deleterious effects of the experiment in quietist spirituality on religious life in Saint-Cyr itself and its possible repercussions in related court circles.12 The prospect of Archbishop Harlay of Paris making political capital out of such an affair – he had already had Guyon imprisoned in 1688 – was taken very seriously by Maintenon, who distanced herself first from Guyon and then from Fénelon. As a consequence, the latter two now needed to have their actions and writings cleared of all suspicion if they, and especially Fénelon as the royal preceptor, were to continue in their activities. This was how Bossuet, Fénelon’s long-standing mentor and a known pillar of orthodoxy, first came to be involved in the affair.13 His initial verdict of March 1694 on Mme Guyon’s writings was negative but not definitive, and it opened the door to a wider examination rather than closing the case. By mid-1694, it was Fénelon who was increasingly in the eye of the storm, as he ransacked the historical sources to support his ideas and submitted his own notes and memoranda over the following months in support of Guyon to the three commissioners – Bossuet, Noailles (then bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne) and Louis Tronson, superior of Saint-Sulpice seminary – charged with a thorough investigation of the problem.14 The ensuing secret conferences at Issy, which were held in Harlay’s diocese but without his knowledge, lasted for eight months in all. Bossuet, who admitted that he had read none of the major spiritual writers, even of his own century, proved tone-deaf to any spirituality or form of prayer that was nondiscursive; he thus remained hostile to Mme Guyon’s methods, while Noailles and Tronson were more favourable to them.15 The outcome was a compromise known as the thirty-four ‘articles of Issy’, which the parties to the extended debate signed, an outcome which, among other things, allowed Bossuet (assisted by Noailles) to consecrate his former disciple, Fénelon, as archbishop of Cambrai in mid-1695.16 In fact, the Issy compromise was no more than a brief truce in a rapidly escalating wrangle. Mme Guyon’s teaching was publicly condemned in pastoral instructions issued by Bossuet, Noailles and others, but she was by now little more than a historical figure who had virtually disappeared from the stage. All attempts to link her spirituality to personal immorality – usually the most effective charge to bring against champions, especially female, of suspect religious practices – had proved futile.17 During 1696 both Bossuet and Fénelon composed major works, the circumstances of whose publication only

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exacerbated the mistrust that had built up between them over quietism, making any reconciliation of their positions impossible.18 Although Fénelon’s ambition was by now to defend a distinctive spiritual tradition rather than merely act as Mme Guyon’s advocate, his association with her ensured that it was he who was suspect and on the defensive. The fact that the Jansenist, Pierre Nicole, openly expressed hostile views of Guyon’s ideas shows how short of natural allies Monsieur de Cambrai now was.19 His austere Explanation of the maxims of the saints appeared in early 1697, and was soon followed by Bossuet’s Instruction on the various states of prayer, which was far better received. A few months later, in early August 1697, Louis XIV, now finally apprised of the implications of Guyon’s and Fénelon’s ideas, stripped the archbishop of the preceptorship of his grandson, and banished him from the court to Cambrai. He did allow the Maxims of the saints to be submitted in April 1697 to the Pope for judgement, but rejected Fénelon’s request to go to Rome to defend his book, perhaps because he suspected that Rome might fall under the archbishop’s spell. Over the next two years, Fénelon and Bossuet traded heavy blows in print, with an increasingly rattled Bossuet resorting to dubious tactics to impose his ‘truth’. The final verdict was published in a papal brief of March 1699, when twenty-three statements from the Maxims were condemned as ‘erroneous’.20 Contrary to what happened where Jansenism was concerned, that proved to be the last act of the drama, as Fénelon chose not to challenge the papal ruling; in fact, he publicly accepted it, proclaiming his full obedience to the authority of the Pope – itself a form of anti-gallican defiance – from his cathedral pulpit in Cambrai, one of France’s most recently acquired dioceses. The papal brief Cum alias was itself quickly ‘received’ by specially convened provincial church councils throughout France, which was the closest that the early modern French church ever came to realising the gallican dream of a concerted papal-episcopal magisterium in action.21 Taken on its own terms, this convoluted episode, in which both Bossuet and Fénelon (and their friends) misread each other’s intentions at crucial moments, might suggest that France was convulsed over questions of spirituality while a major European war raged abroad and demographic and economic disasters struck at home. As its denouement suggests, this would be a considerable exaggeration. The papal verdict on Fénelon’s work was reluctantly delivered, as Innocent XII and many others in Rome were in fact admirers of Fénelon, whereas Bossuet’s reputation there since the gallican articles of 1682 was understandably negative. Ceteris paribus, there would have been no papal condemnation at all; when it did finally appear, it was effectively diluted by being issued in a mere ‘brief ’ rather than in the expected bull. Moreover, it was so unspecific and lenient towards the censured statements, which were labelled

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as merely erroneous, as to give little scope for angry contestation. The most evident outcome of this ‘twilight of the mystics’ (Louis Cognet) was the rejection by the French church of a spiritual tradition that was at times both troublesome and awkward, but to which revered seventeenth-century figures such as François de Sales and Bérulle clearly belonged.22 It settled instead for a ‘rational’ or ‘external’ set of religious practices codified by church councils and supervised by its clergy. ‘Quietist’ ideas were never likely to attract more than a thin sliver of the elites, Roman or French, but the fear of ‘deviant’ convictions forming a basis for alternative courses of action, political as much as religious, was probably at its most potent during the latter decades of Louis XIV’s reign. Almost from the outset, the quietist controversy had political implications, although attempts to reduce it to a purely political clash generated by the antagonistic ambitions of Bossuet and Fénelon has not won much support; such a one-dimensional account ignores much of its originality and ramifications.23 It was undoubtedly part of an attempt to move the court and the government of Louis XIV’s last decades in a dévot-reformist direction, an attempt which continued long after the crisis formally ended in 1699. Mme de Maintenon’s well-known efforts to turn her husband into a dévot did not stop with his personal religion, and her underlying ambition seemed to come closer to realisation after 1689 with Fénelon and the Beauvillier–Chevreuse coterie installed in influential positions at court. As preceptor to a future king, Fénelon had to tread a fine line between preparing his young charge to rule in due course, on the one hand, and promoting ideas that might undermine the stability of the current regime, on the other. To some extent, he had been prepared for this task during the 1670s and 1680s by his participation, alongside like-minded intellectuals such as La Bruyère, Pellisson, Fléchier and other disciples of Bossuet, in the so-called ‘little council’, which developed broad ideas rather than a specific programme for a full Christianisation of French society, a ‘politique chrétienne’, and the restoration of the traditional cadres of French society (nobles and peasantry).24 Fénelon himself naturally brought some of these ideas with him to the preceptorship, and would continue to refine them until his death in early 1715. The blistering tone and content of his notorious letter of 1693 to Louis XIV – undelivered and unread, like Vauban’s memoir on the Protestants – did not prevent him from professing unconditional loyalty to the king while deploring the effects of his policies and the baleful influence of ministers and other members of the royal entourage, notably Archbishop Harlay and the confessor, La Chaize.25 Despite the subsequent falling-out between Maintenon, Fénelon and Bossuet, it seems highly significant that when Pontchartrain, the future chancellor, took the initiative, in 1697, of denouncing to Louis XIV the

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activities of a cabal in both religious and political terms, he described it as ‘a party that was dangerous (redoutable) to religion, pernicious to good morals, and capable of introducing a fanaticism that would be as fatal to the church as to the state’.26 It was Bossuet and Archbishop Le Tellier of Reims who had briefed Pontchartrain on how to describe the danger; if the alarm was indeed raised in such terms, then it was calculated to appeal to the king’s visceral dislike and fear of court cabals.27 But with the end of the War of the League of Augsburg approaching, the prospect of internal reforms within France also loomed, and that heralded potential political divergence at the top. For example, it was at Fénelon’s suggestion that, as part of Burgundy’s political education, the provincial intendants should produce a detailed report on their regions (the generalities) – an ‘audit’ of the state of France at a very difficult moment, with a view to finding evidence that would buttress arguments for the need for reform.28 Whether Pontchartrain’s subsequent initiative to deal with the Protestant problem via the extended consultation of 1698 was an opportunistic adoption of such peacetime objectives is hard to say, but the fact that Fénelon’s relatives and friends were finally expelled from Versailles in the same year suggests a desire to exclude competing influences at court. The Burgundy–Beauvillier–Chevreuse circle itself continued to function for the remainder of the reign, and Fénelon’s most famous work, Télémaque, published just a month after his Roman condemnation in 1699, was intended to provide alternative notions of government to those in vogue under Louis XIV. Despite an exile that would last until his own death in early 1715, Fénelon continued to supply the circle with a flood of ideas, advice and projects with a view to establishing a monarchy that was both dévot and reformist, and one in which the church had regained its autonomy.29 Hopes of a post-Louis XIV monarchy cast in just such terms, and in which Fénelon was expected to play a major role, were briefly rekindled when Burgundy himself became dauphin in 1711, only to be shattered by his death the following year. By then, some of the themes developed by the circle were familiar to other groups at court that were also seeking to reshape France during the minority of Louis XV.30 Another significant consequence of the quietist conflict was the divisions that it opened up within the higher circles of the French church. Until his death in August 1695, the threatening shadow of Archbishop Harlay hung over the affair from the outset; the secrecy of the Issy conferences was only one example of the widely shared dread of his readiness to destroy the careers and reputations of his colleagues if given the opportunity. In many respects, the quietist dispute cut across the familiar gallican–ultramontane or Jansenist– Jesuit alignments, pitting former friends and allies against each other. The rift between Fénelon and his mentor Bossuet was only the most spectacular of

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such partings. In retrospect, its consummation seems to have taken an unconscionably long time – as if they and their supporters sleepwalked into it. As late as 1696, both men still believed that they could exchange their ‘systems’ of thought and gain each other’s approval of their ideas. At the outset of the quietist episode, Fénelon had to be cleared of suspicion of Jansenism before being approved as royal preceptor. This was done by known anti-Jansenists such as Louis Tronson, the Jesuit Le Valois and François Hébert, then curé of Versailles, yet his appointment was welcomed in Jansenist circles.31 During the 1690s, some of the most influential Jesuits defended the Augustinian, Bossuet, despite the many differences that still separated them. Fénelon’s appointment as archbishop of Cambrai disappointed the Jesuits, especially those of Cambrai itself, yet as the quietist dispute developed, it was the Jesuits who emerged as his strongest supporters, especially in the late 1690s and in Rome itself.32 Once Nicole had thundered in print against mysticism in 1695, it became more difficult for the Jansenists to cultivate or support the royal preceptor, but it was the intervention of the Jesuits in support of Fénelon which ensured that the quietist dispute took on the more familiar shape of a Jansenist-versus-Jesuit confrontation.33 Within France itself, the 1700 assembly of clergy, dominated by Bossuet, Noailles and Le Tellier, delivered a serious blow to the Jesuits by condemning a wide raft of ‘laxist’ propositions. Despite ditching Fénelon in 1694, Mme de Maintenon’s ambitions to reform the court were kept alive by her success in obtaining the dévot Bishop Noailles of Châlons as successor in Paris to the detested Harlay in mid-1695; and the Noailles connection was subsequently cemented by a marriage alliance with a niece of Maintenon. But Cardinal Noailles, as he became in 1700, was not the master-politician that Harlay had been, so that Maintenon’s reliance upon ‘her’ archbishop came under intolerable strain during the final decade of the reign when a new Jansenist crisis erupted. By then Maintenon’s antiJansenism made her as much an enemy of Noailles, a gallican often taken for a Jansenist, as she was of Fénelon, despite the fact that he was by now the most committed anti-Jansenist strategist.34 By disrupting many conventional alignments, religious and political, the quietist affair helped to bedevil the handling of the Jansenist problem when it returned to the fore after 1700. III The quietist affair was not the only one in this period that enabled other conflicts to be fought by proxy. This was particularly true in relation to the question of the moral demands of Christianity within the context of the Catholic reform, which lay at the origins and development of the Jansenist conflict in France as far back as the 1620s and 1630s, and which continued to

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overlap closely with it thereafter. By insisting on contrition (sorrow for one’s sins because they offend a loving God) rather than attrition (sorrow for one’s sins because one may suffer in hell as a consequence), Saint-Cyran, Arnauld and the ‘disciples of St Augustine’ made stiff demands of those taking the key sacraments of penance and communion. This position was bound to provoke a confrontation with the Jesuits (but others too), who were increasingly accused of being too laxist – a word that would be constantly used to define the Jesuit position thereafter – when it came to one’s religious obligations. What started as a sacramental–pastoral difference gradually widened to other areas of not merely ‘religious’ obligation, but also social and political behaviour generally. The Jesuits were also accused of developing an arsenal of arguments that justified taking the easier road to salvation, thereby encouraging a laxist mentality that stood in direct contrast to the ‘rigorist’ position most associated with the Jansenists.35 Thanks, inter alia, to the adoption of Carlo Borromeo’s rigorist ‘instructions for confessors’ in the mid-1650s, at virtually the same moment as Pascal was caricaturing and ridiculing Jesuit casuistry in the Provincial letters, the French church found a way to be both morally rigorist and theologically orthodox.36 For many Augustinians, this meant that they could tread a safe middle way and avoid the accusation, at least in theory, of being Jansenists. More unexpectedly, perhaps, a similar ‘rigorist turn’ was evident in Rome itself, even before the key pontificate of Innocent XI (1676–89), with the result that ‘laxist’ propositions were submitted for examination and were subsequently censured by the papacy on several occasions (1655, 1666, 1679). These conflicts inevitably became an arena within which the hostilities between Jesuits and Jansenists, broadly speaking, could be pursued under other guises, especially in the years following the Peace of the Church of 1669. Paradoxically, the Jesuits experienced their own ‘civil wars’ during the two decades (1687– 1705) when their superior-general, Tirso Gonzalez, tried to impose his own moral teaching, which seriously threatened the ‘probabilist’ traditions of the order; such internal controversies almost invited further assaults on a weakened opponent from Augustinians and rigorists of various stripes.37 Consequently, ‘Molinism’ gradually became a term of abuse that referred to a much wider moral laxism than simply theological deviation. As we might expect, the French critics of such laxism preferred to deal with it within France itself rather than take the case to Rome, despite the growing congruity of their respective attitudes to moral questions. The Paris theology faculty would probably have intervened more energetically in these questions had not the authoritarian Archbishop Harlay kept it on a tight leash in order to affirm his own doctrinal authority as bishop; he had little difficulty in persuading individual doctors of the faculty to work for him, but he was

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hostile to them as a corporation with aspirations towards an independent magisterium; as we have seen, the papacy was also content for the faculty to be muzzled.38 In any case, Harlay had no wish to be encumbered by a censure of laxism, not even by the assemblies of clergy that he dominated so ‘despotically’, as one contemporary put it.39 Despite being a doctor of the faculty, Harlay’s successor, Noailles, shared his authoritarian episcopalism; he belonged to a generation of churchmen convinced that bishops were the ‘real’ doctors of the church, and that professional theologians should be docile advisers rather than decision-makers or censors of error. For that reason, he viewed the bishop-dominated assemblies of clergy as the authoritative voice of the gallican church and entitled to pronounce on religious matters. Thus, the full-dress censure of 121 laxist propositions by the 1700 assembly was a long-postponed moment, given that it was unfinished business left over from the 1682 assembly which had been hastily curtailed before its gallican zeal could create more headaches for Louis XIV’s regime. In 1700, several leading figures from 1682 were still active, especially Bossuet and Le Tellier, both of whom were anti-Jesuit Augustinians and, along with Noailles, instrumental in carrying the censure at the assembly. In content, the French censure may have followed closely those of recent popes, but the fundamental consideration was to be seen to act in accordance with gallican views of episcopal authority.40 It should also be remembered that about this time another controversy, that of the so-called Chinese rites, was engulfing the Jesuits, albeit primarily in Rome.41 IV It was in a context of frequent skirmishing and mutual provocation that the crisis of the second Jansenism – or neo-Jansenism – bubbled up to the surface. Its timing was not the consequence of a major novelty, such as the publication of the Augustinus or the Frequent communion had been in the early 1640s or the papal condemnation and the formulary in the 1650s and 1660s. The elements required for a new round of conflict had been present for many years; it was a question of which of them might spark off new disputes and interventions by the crown or the church authorities, French or Roman. There had, nevertheless, been some subtle shifts since the Peace of the Church of 1669. Arnauld, who was by far the dominant figure within the Jansenist/PortRoyalist camp until his death in exile in 1694, came to realise that the Augustinianism of Jansen was the Achilles heel of the cause. As early as the 1660s, he and others attempted to align their thinking on the key subject of grace and salvation with that of the solidly orthodox Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, but to little effect, it seems, at the time. Arnauld continued to stress

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the orthodoxy of Jansenist thinking within a Thomist framework during his years of exile (1679–94), frequently berating the Dominicans for their reluctance to acknowledge this and urging them to join him in his campaign against the Molinism of the Jesuits. He seems to have been incapable, in print at least, of grasping why the Dominicans would not jeopardise their reputation for orthodoxy by throwing in their lot with the Jansenists, or engage in a power struggle with the Jesuits themselves.42 Arnauld’s failure was not primarily intellectual: it was also due to the fact that for many contemporaries the existence of a Jansenist ‘party’ was as much taken for granted by the 1680s as the existence of a Protestant party was. Its existence and activities were obviously connected to, but also somehow independent of, the unresolved theological or ecclesiological debates, so that there was little prospect that a resolution ‘from above’ of those debates would see the Jansenist ‘party’ simply evaporate. This perception of what French Jansenism ‘really’ was owed its existence to an equally embedded form of anti-Jansenism, whose leading figures were keen to seize the opportunities that arose to deal a mortal blow to what seemed by 1700 to be not just a ‘party’ but also a conspiracy to subvert Christianity. For anti-Jansenists, dealing with the latter involved more than ever both doctrinal and political intervention.43 The ‘active’ return of the Jansenist problem dates from one of those ‘cases of conscience’ that were a characteristic product of post-tridentine Catholicism. Presenting and resolving such ‘cases’ belonged to the moral-theology casuistry already referred to in these pages, on which the Paris theology doctors in particular were regularly consulted. The ‘case’ presented in mid-1701, which did more than anything else to blow away the remaining illusions about the state of health of the Peace of the Church, was put forward by a priest who had been challenged over his religious opinions by his confessor. In reply he stated that he condemned the five propositions ‘purely and without restriction’; that he had signed the formulary willingly; but that he wished to maintain a ‘respectful silence’ as to whether the propositions were to be found in Jansen’s Augustinus. He also professed other religious ideas that could be described as ‘jansénisant’ on grace, predestination, the cult of the saints and so on. It was long believed that no such penitent–confessor encounter actually occurred, and that the case was deliberately contrived in order to bring Jansenism back into view. But despite such a conjecture being wholly plausible, it is generally accepted that it was genuine, not least because the religious opinions in question were those of a nephew of Pascal in Clermont. By the time the cas was signed by forty Paris doctors in 1702, the original text on which it was based had been amended and amplified, as often happened in such consultations. The definitive version declared that the confessor could not deny a penitent absolution if he refused to renounce the opinions that he professed;

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but it also gave – not surprisingly, so soon after the consequences of the 1700 assembly’s condemnation of laxism – a stronger Jansenist-rigorist sensibility to the opinions in question. It was this reworked version that was published as the cas de conscience in July 1702. It provoked heated debate, one episcopal censure in early 1703, and the threat of others to come. Cardinal Noailles was particularly irritated by the Paris theologians’ independence, and quickly obliged them individually to retract their signatures to the cas; the few who resisted were swiftly despatched into internal exile by royal lettres de cachet. Declaring himself ‘the first casuist of his diocese’, Noailles then published a censure of his own, which focused less on the intellectual content of the cas than on the centrality of episcopal authority over such questions. Rome, for its part, found the content of the cas equally objectionable and quickly issued a papal brief (Cum nuper) condemning it and demanding the punishment (viz. eviction from their teaching positions) of those responsible for it.44 But such an unsolicited and independent papal declaration was unwelcome in France, particularly as Noailles and some of his colleagues had already issued their own censures. There was only one way to resolve the ensuing conundrum, namely that Louis XIV formally request a papal bull that would be drafted in such a watertight manner – and virtually under French diplomatic supervision – that it did not clash with the gallican maxims. This option was duly taken, in August 1703, despite many gallicans disliking such recourse to Rome. The shock provoked by the seizure and despatch to Versailles of Pasquier Quesnel’s vast archive and correspondence around the same time cannot be overestimated, as it suggested that within France and Europe generally there was an extensive network of active Jansenists at work, who had their entrées to the papal curia itself; the more such connections were revealed, the more urgent it seemed to silence the conspiracy once and for all.45 But the papacy, true to form, was in no hurry to act, and it took repeated French prompting over the next two years to obtain a carefully worded bull entitled Vineam Domini (replacing the brief Cum nuper) in July 1705. It recapitulated the previous condemnations of Jansenism and proceeded to outlaw the ‘respectful silence’ which was the true target of the bull; but it was vague on one critical point and provided no explicit sanctions against those who would not accept it.46 If gallican sensitivities were alive and kicking in normal times, they tended to amplify whenever an assembly of clergy was in session, since its debates, as we have seen, frequently allowed the parlement or the theology faculty to enter the fray and generate a wider discussion on the issues at stake. But the ‘rapport de forces’ had gradually shifted by the early eighteenth century. The theology faculty meekly accepted and registered the new papal decree virtually without debate, as did the parlement, although it had refused to ‘verify’ the brief Cum

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nuper in 1703.47 A ‘major’ assembly of clergy of 1705 was already in session when the bull Vineam Domini was issued. Under the leadership of Noailles, the assembly agreed to ‘receive’ the papal decision in an active, ‘collegial’ – to use modern language – rather than a passive, declaratory fashion. This type of reception was intended as an example of the doctrinal co-operation ‘par forme de jugement’ by the bishops, in accordance with the fourth gallican article of 1682, which alone made a papal decision irrevocable.48 This had already been done uncontroversially, as Louis XIV himself noted, by the 1699 provincial councils which condemned Fénelon, but far more was at stake in 1705.49 Such a reception was an opportunity to neutralise the subtle anti-gallican gibes in the text of the bull itself, as is evident in the gallican language of the circular and the draft of a pastoral instruction on the subject duly sent by the assembly to the bishops of France. The papal nuncio welcomed the evident determination to have done with Jansenism, but he inevitably deplored the gallican language and ‘interpretation’ used to explain it.50 The outcome was a pyrrhic victory for the anti-Jansenist coalition, in which Louis XIV’s government was the driving force, but in which Rome’s attempts to assert its doctrinal superiority – but not overtly its infallibility, as Fénelon and others had hoped for – were effectively checkmated. Co-operation between the papacy and the monarchy, even when the two sought the same outcome, remained as fragile as ever, as serious elephant traps lay in wait for them when it came to dealing with the unavoidable devil in the detail of major decisions. Rome objected to the gallican strings that were invariably attached to its pronouncements before they could be accepted in France, especially as the clergy themselves were increasingly demanding such safeguards. For their part, the French could not understand why, as occurred in 1705, Rome firmly refused to include even a brief allusion in papal proclamations to decisions ‘received by the church’, which they were convinced would guarantee them an easy ride in France and obviate the necessity of ‘gallicanising’ them ex post facto.51 But that was tantamount to requiring the Pope to become a gallican, and there was little chance of that, especially in and after 1705 when Rome needed to cultivate other Catholic powers apart from France. V There was a relative lull for several years after 1705, during which there were further skirmishes and ample use of lettres de cachet arising from attempts to impose adherence to Vineam Domini on individuals who could no longer take refuge in a ‘respectful silence’ over the droit and the fait. The most spectacular victims of this policy were, as in the 1660s, the nuns of Port-Royal-des Champs. As early as 1706, Noailles, who like his predecessors Péréfixe and

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Harlay could not brook their insubordination, but who also needed to allay suspicions that he was a Jansenist, began to take action against them. Deprived of new members since 1679, the nuns were now fewer (twenty-five in all) and elderly, but as unwilling as ever to accept Vineam Domini without maintaining the sacrosanct ‘respectful silence’ clause. In 1709, the remaining nuns were dispersed to other convents and the abbey closed down. Two years later, the entire site was brutally destroyed, its graves dug up, and the remains scattered in order to prevent Port-Royal becoming a place of pilgrimage. Only the remains of Pascal and Racine, its most illustrious supporters, escaped this new outburst of gratuitous royal violence.52 In 1709, François de La Chaize d’Aix finally died after thirty-four years as royal confessor, and was replaced by the little-known Michel Tellier, whose elevation would soon herald new efforts to kill off the hydra of heresy.53 As for Noailles, whose episcopal authoritarianism led him to punish Paris theology doctors and Port-Royal nuns alike when they stepped out of line, his position as de facto leader of the French church began to weaken in the aftermath of the 1705 assembly.54 His successive faux pas, past as well as present, began to trip him up, as attacks against him from various quarters multiplied. He was held by many, including Fénelon and Maintenon, to be far too lenient towards the Jansenists, having given his approval to Quesnel’s Réflexions morales while still bishop of Chalons and then condemning them after he had moved to Paris. The question – which Noailles is the true one? – was asked in print in 1698 and continued to divide opinion thereafter in the higher reaches of both church and court.55 The answer, insofar as a precise one can be provided, was that Noailles was an Augustinian and an ‘episcopalist’ gallican. A dévot, he was not endowed with the political skills of Harlay and became the focus of attack for Jesuits and their ultramontane allies, but also for Jansenists who felt he should have supported them more strongly. The proverbial ‘man in the middle’, he offended both sides but, more worryingly for someone in his position, he gradually lost the confidence of Louis XIV, Madame de Maintenon and other influential court figures in the years after 1705.56 The arrival of a determined anti-Jansenist confessor was more than likely to make matters worse. Such acrimonious and complex interpersonal conflicts, in part exacerbated by the fallout from the quietist conflict a decade earlier, continued in France during the years immediately preceding the publication of the bull Unigenitus in September 1713. Mutual provocation, via pastoral instructions, censures or anonymous pamphlets, gradually ratcheted up a climate of tension and suspicion either side of 1710. Its most significant consequence was to leave scant prospect of securing a new Peace of the Church inside France, let alone of convening a national council of the French church.57 Thus, Louis XIV again

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found himself seeking the solution in Rome.58 As with the decision to revoke the Edict of Nantes in 1685, it is not easy to be sure who helped most to nudge the king in that direction. With the doughty anti-Jansenist warrior Michel Tellier installed as confessor in 1709, a more combative approach was likely, as is evident in Fénelon’s – and perhaps others’ too – repeated urging of the need to take decisive action against the Jansenists, and Noailles in particular.59 While this generated a readiness for confrontation, it remains less clear how – or why – Louis XIV decided to follow that course of action. What or who was to be the target on this occasion? The papal condemnation of the Jansenist ‘respectful silence’ in 1705 had achieved little, and had been derailed by the gallican format of its reception. A new approach to Rome would have to aim at another, more significant target rather than revisiting earlier decisions. Even if contemporaries sensed that the choice of a particular individual or book for condemnation was to some extent of secondary importance in the grand scheme of eradicating the Jansenist problem, the choice was nevertheless bound to be revealing. Fénelon, who repeatedly urged a thorough cleaning of the Augean stables, suggested censuring the work of Louis Habert, who had been Noailles’s theologian (théologal) at Châlons-sur-Marne, as a means of destroying Noailles’s own reputation. But the suggestion was not taken up, as Habert was not deemed prominent enough for such treatment.60 It was because he loomed so large as a common denominator in several recent incidents that the choice ultimately fell on Pasquier Quesnel, the former Oratorian and associate of Arnauld in exile; he was still publishing and, it was thought on the evidence of his confiscated correspondence, actively directing a widely spread Jansenist ‘party’ from his base in Holland. The choice of Quesnel was also facilitated by the fact that his most celebrated work, Réflexions morales, had been subject to attack and censure in recent years – including one by the papacy in 1708. But that censure was ignored in France because it did not conform to the gallican maxims where papal decrees were concerned. Another consideration was that Noailles had once publicly endorsed the book, so that its solemn condemnation would, at the very least, embarrass him and force him to take sides once and for all.61 The major difficulty with condemning Réflexions morales was that since its first appearance in the 1670s it had been a bestseller, appreciated and read by popes (including the reigning Clement XI), royal confessors and many other people. The choice fell on the 1693 edition of the work which, it was argued, had moved in a distinctly Jansenist direction, not merely on spiritual matters, but also on key questions such as the nature of the church, the efficacy of God’s grace, the obligation on all Christians to read the Bible, and so on.62 Noailles, whose orchestration of the gallican reception of Vineam Domini had seriously angered Rome since 1705, firmly refused to participate in a French condemnation of the Réflexions

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in 1711, leaving Louis XIV with no option but to turn towards Rome, as he had in 1703–05. Despite the rancour against Noailles, papal misgivings about intervening remained as strong as before, and a hesitant and fearsome Clement XI took almost two years to respond to Louis XIV’s increasingly insistent requests.63 But where Innocent X had been positively miserly in condemning just five propositions from the vast Augustinus in 1653, his successor of 1713 dealt in sheer excess: the bull Unigenitus condemned 101 propositions (from an original list of 155) in the aggregate, tarring them all with the same brush but without declaring any single proposition to be overtly heretical. Such an ‘omnium gatherum’ has been described as a distant predecessor of the equally excessive ‘Syllabus of errors’ of 1864.64 As Louis Cognet noted, Rome seems to have viewed the Réflexions as a summa of Jansenist thinking in general, so that Unigenitus was designed not to establish, ex negativo, the orthodox position on individual points of Catholic teaching, but to condemn a whole doctrine.65 Had Unigenitus, which was no product of haste, been better calibrated and confined to censuring a limited number of dubious propositions, it might have been more broadly acceptable.66 But the 101 propositions covered such a wide range of issues – from grace and human liberty to questions with potential political implications – that it was virtually impossible for Unigenitus to escape criticism for a correspondingly wide range of reasons, both political and religious. And since the Réflexions was a work of spirituality and not a treatise in academic theology like the Augustinus, it was far harder to come to grips with. As a verdict, the 1713 bull’s lack of differentiation bore some resemblance to the ‘job-lot’ condemnation of Fénelon’s Maxims, but considering the scale and history of the Jansenist problem, that was a risky option which might prove, at best, a blunt instrument. But this is where the actual content of the condemned propositions mattered less than the underlying gesture itself – aiming at the hydra’s head for the final kill. In the light of this, it is easier to see why the response to Unigenitus on its publication was a flammable mixture of bafflement, incredulity and indignation, and why its triumphal welcome by the antiJansenists in Rome and Paris proved so short-lived. An edifying book that had been read by many for over a generation was now, according to the words of the bull itself, to be shunned as the work of a ‘poisoner of souls’ and ‘a child of the devil’, and as containing false and dangerous doctrines as well as pernicious maxims.67 The bull was savaged by critics, both gallicans and Jansenists, who knew their Bible, history and patristics well enough to pick holes in Unigenitus. Almost immediately, the printing presses were inundated with tracts, pamphlets and ‘letters’ defending and (mostly) attacking it – over 200 items in 1714 alone.68

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The papacy’s slowness in producing the bull had been partly based on reasons similar to those of 1705. Among them was the obvious need for the bull’s terms to be so exact that they would pass muster in France. Above all, however, Rome insisted that the cast-iron guarantee given by Louis XIV that it would be received in France ‘simplement’ (i.e. without the gallican format of 1705 which still rankled in Rome) be honoured to the letter. Having reiterated that promise several times during the negotiations, the king did not expect any difficulty in complying with the Pope’s wishes, even though he had not been shown, despite requesting it, a draft copy of the bull in order to vet its content and language; by the time his ambassador (and other French representatives) in Rome got to read the final document and expressed their doubts about some of its contents, it was too late to call a halt.69 Louis XIV eagerly looked forward to restoring peace within the church at the same time as peace was returning across Europe, and he was initially reassured by both his ministers and the magistrates of the parlement that the bull was in good order; if some of them, such as Colbert de Torcy, the foreign minister, had doubts about the political ramifications of certain condemned propositions, they kept relatively quiet about them at this juncture.70 The future chancellor of France, d’Aguesseau, then a Jansenist-leaning procuratorgeneral of the parlement, proved more perspicacious in prophesying that Unigenitus would crucify theologians and leading royal magistrates alike.71 He also noted that the Pope had done the opposite of Innocent X in Cum Occasione: Clement XI was correct in relation to the fait (the propositions were indisputably taken from Quesnel) but wrong about the droit (many of the articles were perfectly Augustinian and their censure only proved how fallible the papacy was).72 It did not take long for problems to arise. First, the parlement of Paris politely declined to register the bull until the clergy had accepted it, a response that may have been primarily a political tactic but which also acknowledged the clergy’s established role in ‘receiving’ papal decisions.73 However, even that challenge did not seem unduly daunting, especially after it was decided to convene, as Mazarin had done in 1653–54, an ad hoc ‘assembly’ of bishops present at court or in Paris. Nevertheless, by doing so Louis XIV was already in breach of his promise to Clement XI, who had understood that royal acceptance of the bull would alone suffice. Things would get much worse when the assembly of hand-picked bishops met in October 1713. A determined minority gradually emerged which demanded that Unigenitus should only be received, as Vineam Domini in 1705, ‘by form of judgement’. Noailles, who presided, vacillated in the early phases but finally threw in his lot with the minority, who went on to write to the Pope demanding clarification as to the intended meaning of several of the condemnations before they would

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accept the bull. The majority set about drafting a ‘pastoral instruction’ that would explain the meaning of Unigenitus – itself an act of interpretation which further subverted the idea that the bull was to be received ‘simplement’.74 After over four months of confused deliberations and several false dawns, the assembly was disbanded in February 1714 without agreement on how to proceed when an exasperated Louis XIV banished Noailles outright from court and packed off the recalcitrant minority of bishops to their dioceses for Lent. This was duly followed by the ‘personal’ reception of the bull within their dioceses by 112 of France’s 127 bishops.75 At the same time, the king proceeded to impose the bull’s registration on the parlement, but the latter managed to insert a proviso defending the gallican liberties and specifically rejecting just one of the 101 propositions.76 The most defenceless of the three great institutions, the Paris theology faculty, also had serious reservations about Unigenitus, but under direct royal pressure and in considerable disarray its doctors voted by a very narrow majority to accept Unigenitus ‘purely and simply’, i.e. without examination or discussion of its contents.77 The regime thus managed to bulldoze its way past the nay-sayers, damaging its relations with some of its key institutions while at the same time failing utterly to appease Rome, which felt it had been misled and which was now furiously insisting on severe sanctions against Noailles and his supporters.78 At the same time, Noailles banned the clergy of Paris from ‘receiving’ the bull under any pretext, a decision that Louis XIV himself was powerless to rescind. The last year of his reign was spent trying to find ways to burst the perceived abscess within the French church. Fénelon and the royal confessor urged the convening of a national council of the French church that would judge and depose Noailles (and other recalcitrants) as bishops, leaving it to Rome to de-cardinalise the former archbishop. The prospect of a gallican national church was unquestionably, as we have seen elsewhere, Rome’s worst nightmare, but it had little choice but to go along with the idea when Louis XIV asserted that he would convene the council without its approval.79 This was the politics of last-ditch desperation which was rapidly losing touch with reality, but whose intended consequences contemporaries were not to witness because of the death of Louis XIV on 1 September 1715, the day set a few months earlier for the opening of the proposed national council. Indeed, he died having refused to see Noailles unless the cardinal had previously submitted unconditionally to the Pope, a condition that Noailles declared he could not accept in conscience.80 With a long and possibly troublesome minority – if previous regencies were any guide – to follow, the incoming regent, Philippe d’Orléans, was well advised to disengage as quickly as possible from the politico-religious shambles left by the soleil couchant.

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VI The huge controversy which greeted the proclamation of Unigenitus, and the avalanche of publications that followed, would continue unabated during the years after 1715 in the more ‘liberal’ political climate of the regency (1715– 23).81 Despite moments of lull in the storm, the genie proved impossible to put back into the bottle thereafter. Within two years, a tactic that had hitherto been used only by the French monarchy was deployed in a novel manner: an appeal against the bull to a general council of the church, which elicited a wide range of signatures that would grow when the appeals were reiterated in subsequent years. Although virtually all the thousands of signatories of the successive appeals were clerics, high and low, the appeals showed, more than anything else, how far the Jansenist quarrel had escaped its original theological and ecclesiastical moorings, and had come to grip lay society.82 This had been partly true in the past, especially in the 1640s and 1650s, when French overtook Latin as the language of polemical exchange on such questions, as is evident in the success of books from Arnauld’s Frequent communion to Quesnel’s Réflexions and the controversies surrounding them. Yet the scale of what happened after 1713 was itself unprecedented. The ‘constitution’ (Unigenitus) became identified in the minds of many with a subversion of the ‘maximes de France’ that went well beyond questions of theology and religious practices. The successive appeals to a future council should probably not be considered as purely political tactics designed to checkmate church, monarchy and papacy, but also as expressions of the disarray provoked within France by a decision with such broad ramifications.83 The ‘figurist’ theology of history developed in Oratorian–Jansenist circles proved a powerful additional ingredient after 1713 when it came to interpreting contemporary events – especially persecution – in terms of biblical precedents or enigmas; not only did it make sense of the history that successive persecutions signified, but it gave their victims the strength to become – or to remain – ‘witnesses to the truth’. The monarchy’s search for papal interventions had the effect of bringing together Jansenists and gallicans to an unprecedented extent, and established the basis for opposition, both ideological and practical, to the monarchy and existing conceptions of royal authority throughout the following century. The decades after 1715 were to witness more than one volte-face over how to deal with the Jansenist question. In the process, it wrecked many a political career, produced numerous political realignments, and prompted new ways of thinking the relations between subjects and rulers. When a determined cardinal-minister, Fleury, began, with considerable success, to drain the ‘Jansenist’ swamp from the later 1720s onwards, one of his earliest moves was to have Unigenitus declared a ‘law of the state’, the first and last time that a

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papal decree enjoyed such unique status in France.84 Despite its singularity and the changed historical circumstances, such a tactic recalls the pre-1560 monarchy’s coupling of heresy and sedition in its dealings with the earliest French Protestants. After 1730 anyone subscribing to Jansenism was no longer guilty ‘merely’ of religious heresy but also of the political offence of sedition and could be punished accordingly. Yet, unlike earlier heresies, no Jansenists ever claimed to hold the beliefs – or propositions – attributed to them, let alone lost their life for doing so. Historians have often considered Jansenism in its successive guises as a problem either in the history of Catholicism or in the history of France, with predictable differences in the emphasis they place on its genesis, survival and significance. That it arose initially out of unresolved problems within Catholic theology is evident, though that aspect was more evident in post-tridentine Spain or the Spanish Netherlands than in France, where it was pastorally related to the moral and sacramental issues which most concerned reformers and dévots in the decades immediately before the appearance of the Augustinus. If relatively few French Jansenists subsequently shared Jansen’s Augustinianism, it was because their Augustinianism was derived from other sources, among which Bérulle and, later, the Oratory that he founded were the most prominent; by the age of Quesnel, this Augustinianism ‘jansénisant’ was further removed from that of Jansen himself. Although the Louvain–Netherlands networks continued to defend Jansen and St Augustine and, later in the century, to act as a Catholic ‘refuge’ for French Jansenists fleeing persecution, the Jansenist question proved far less turbulent across Catholic Europe than in France.85 From the mid-1650s onwards, papal decrees on Jansenist issues were drafted and worded primarily with gallican France in mind, even though the decisions themselves affected Catholicism everywhere. And Unigenitus itself was accepted with little fuss by the rest of Catholic Europe, with Poland even allowing individual bishops the option of accepting or rejecting it.86 In France, the situation could not have been more different, partly because recent controversies over quietist spirituality and rigorist morality had already mobilised and divided a much broader ‘public’ than elsewhere. Although Jansenism itself seemed relatively becalmed around 1700, its return to public attention via the cas de conscience and the gamble that was Unigenitus added fuel to a fire which contained various other combustibles, revealing a wider crisis of authority that had become more acute by the early eighteenth century. The interconnectedness of the issues, and especially of the major figures involved in them, was perhaps the reason why the royal confessor, Père Tellier, favoured a single, global condemnation that would cover not just Jansenism, but also moral rigorism and other ‘excessive maxims’ – itself a hopelessly disproportionate stance that lumped all targets together for a one-stroke

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authoritarian resolution.87 While the papacy was attempting to assert its infallibility – and at times even that of the Pope himself – the gallican church was still working out the practical consequences of maxims which reserved such an attribute to the universal church. In fact, the two parties were simultaneously evolving in different directions, which made it increasingly difficult to find a magic formula for reaching a consensual acceptance of papal pronouncements in France. By the end of Louis XIV’s reign, it was assemblies of clergy, even of the ad hoc variety, rather than the parlements or the Paris theology faculty, that were most likely to produce confrontation and deadlock. Yet the gallican church was itself no monolith, even in its highest reaches. Throughout Louis XIV’s reign, as we have seen, a handful of independently minded bishops, whether Jansenist or not, had been able to cause serious headaches for the regime, and they were still doing so in 1714–15 and later. The efforts made during the reign to enforce theological and especially ecclesiological orthodoxy often failed to produce the results that their protagonists so confidently expected at the outset. The history of Jansenism, in essence the most rigorous and demanding form of Catholicism available in seventeenth-century Europe, is that of a moving target, which was capable of combining with other forces, religious and political, in unpredictable – or at least unpredicted – ways.88 After 1700, the apparent abandonment by the monarchy of gallican ‘ways of proceeding’ in favour of collaboration with the papacy enabled Jansenism to attract a wide body of support among gallicans, lay and clerical. In a political environment which continued to change, Jansenism could be expected to move in unexpected ways during the half-century following the disappearance of Louis XIV.

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Conclusion

I

W

ithin a week of Louis XIV’s death, the regent, Philippe d’Orléans, wrote to France’s ambassador in Rome: ‘we live in a country where we pass from one extremity [of power] to another without a middle station, and in which one cannot spend too much time on winning people’s hearts’.1 He was alluding to the political danger that a prolonged regency represented, and knew full well that France had regularly experienced the sudden transition from a position of political strength to various degrees of instability or powerlessness during the minority of an under-age king. In the event, by comparison with the regencies since 1560, that of 1715–23 proved to be easily the most pacific; noble revolt and civil war now appeared unthinkable, and were replaced by ‘normal’ court and factional politics. The political stability of Louis XIV’s long personal rule since 1661 had ‘cemented’ a particular style of rule, and effectively buried the earlier revolts and civil wars under a thick carapace of internalised oubliance. If Philippe d’Orléans feared that such upheavals might still recur after 1715, he kept his fears to himself, believing instead that success in winning people’s affections would allow normal politics to prevail. What he probably did not quite anticipate was that religious questions would regularly take centre stage and bedevil normal politics for much of Louis XV’s reign. This is not to suggest that the eighteenth century was more obsessed with religious problems than the seventeenth, but that, depending on which other political players or ideologies they connected with, religious issues were still capable of shaping political debate and crisis. This capacity has been well captured in Michel Antoine’s summary of the political prospect at Louis XIV’s death, precisely because he located the religious issues within a wider context: ‘by facilitating the return of the parlements to the political scene, the crises of the gallican church to a great extent fuelled (animer) the political life of France

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under Louis XV’.2 The degree to which the Jansenist question in particular enabled the parlement of Paris to lock horns with both church and monarchy after 1715 is well documented, but that in turn was only possible because the court mobilised those gallican sensitivities which the regime seemed incapable of understanding or satisfying. Under the heavy hand of the government of Cardinal Fleury and his successors, the increased persecution of Huguenots and Jansenists from the 1720s and 1730s respectively provided much of the ammunition for a gradually widening public debate on religious questions, a debate which, as in the past, encouraged new thinking about political authority, its limits, and subjects’ rights. The capacity of such conflicts to irrigate political debate and forge new arguments was undiminished, even during the Enlightenment.3 In a long-term perspective, it is hard to avoid the impression that it was not that religious conflicts became intrinsically more fierce or insoluble, but rather that the capacity to deal with them effectively diminished markedly during the seventeenth century. This in turn resulted from a gradual shift in attitudes towards the way such problems should be handled. From Henri IV to Richelieu and Mazarin, the Bourbon monarchy and its ministers appear relatively prudent in the face of religious questions likely to escalate into political disputes, neither actively seeking definitive solutions nor unwilling to live with ambiguous outcomes. The memory of the wars of religion was still strong enough to deter over-confident adventurism on their part. In that respect, the monarchy resembled the papacy, whose preferred tactic in dealing with controversies over questions of grace during these decades was to impose silence on the participants rather than seek a definitive resolution. Even Richelieu who, as a theologically literate cleric, might be thought keen to act vigorously in the event of controversy, was far more cautious than is usually acknowledged. As we saw, some of the major controversies of his ministry – the gallican disputes of the mid-1620s and the late 1630s/early 1640s – were left suspended in a state of some ambiguity. His often vindictive treatment of those who opposed him should not be over-interpreted when it comes to wider issues. He was also far less keen than is usually imagined on confronting the Huguenots, even after 1629, realising that failure against them would almost certainly end his career. In addition, it took relatively little opposition for him to shelve his plans for the reunion of Protestants and Catholics during the 1630s and early 1640s. When fortune, in the form of mistakes made by others (e.g. Buckingham in 1627), smiled on him he proved to be unrivalled in claiming, to paraphrase Montaigne, that what he did was what he had wanted to do. Mazarin, who shared none of Richelieu’s intellectual interests, supported the first anti-Jansenist campaign during and after the Fronde, but proved

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reluctant to take concrete action against opponents in his final years. In 1656, he also agreed to allow investigations into the legality of Protestant temples across France, but then simply refused to give the signal for action. In both cases, it seems that defining an official position was a warning shot over the bows of the groups involved, with the threat of possible action tactically held in reserve. Of course, we should not forget how absorbed both cardinals were in the prolonged war with the Habsburgs. Yet it is fair to say that the ‘monarchie ecclésiale’, in the form it took in the time of Richelieu and Mazarin, did not feel obliged to root out resisters at all costs; while the cardinal-ministers were probably confident enough to feel that they could rely on their extensive clienteles to keep religious conflicts from escalating out of control. Under Louis XIV, the political landscape changed considerably, one effect of which was to generate over time an increasing desire to resolve such conflicts once and for all, if necessary by the use of force. By the 1680s at the latest, a pattern was set in which a small handful of rival, family-based ministerial coteries gradually came to monopolise virtually all of the formal levers of power.4 Schooled by Mazarin not to rely on any single individual, Louis XIV regularly sought advice from courtiers or informal counsellors, but this did not really prevent the conquest and preservation of royal favour from becoming a permanent struggle in which the driving impulse among those involved was what might be called ‘working towards Louis XIV’.5 Governed by the overriding objective of second-guessing the king’s intentions and providing a coherent rationale to underpin them rather than of warning him of the dangers involved in a particular course of action, political debate tended to become uniform and conventional.6 The king’s habit of seeking informal advice notwithstanding, there was precious little room within such a closed system of consultation for nay-saying or objection, and when it did occur, as in the lead-up to the revocation of 1685, it was given short shrift. And when critics like Vauban or Fénelon subsequently put their ideas on paper, nobody, not even Madame de Maintenon, would dare transmit them to the king. In the 1690s, a similar kind of fright emerged over how to respond to the influence of quietism at court and close to the throne, but it was not until mid-1697 – years after the Issy conferences and the Bossuet–Fénelon exchanges – that Louis XIV was finally informed of its implications by his most powerful minister, Pontchartrain. None of this behaviour seems to have been based on fear of a terrifying or ‘despotic’ royal response to the bearers of unwelcome ideas; instead it emerged from a consensus not to break the rules of a well-orchestrated routine; the behavioural basis of that consensus may lie in the ‘campaign’, initiated by Richelieu, to enforce on subjects codes of conduct characterised by deference, distance and courtesy towards royal authority from the king himself downwards.7

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In any case, the outcome was a mindset for which forms of religious as much as political dissent – from a convent of recalcitrant nuns to the Protestants – were challenges to be met head on. Their protestations of unconditional obedience notwithstanding, the prolonged demonisation of the Protestants as schismatics and rebels probably ‘contaminated’ attitudes towards other forms of religious contestation. Admittedly, the case of the Protestants was, given its Europe-wide implications, in a category of its own, which had the effect of deferring action against them on several occasions after 1661. But the final decision was all the more draconian when it did come, as if the earlier deferrals now had to be compensated for. The contemporary dispute with the papacy over the régale was accompanied by an uncomprehending indignation at the papacy’s failure to appreciate the nature and grandeur of the king’s successes on behalf of Catholicism. In the latter years of the reign, when the Jansenist question resurfaced after a period of relative quiescence, the reaction was to seek a definitive solution, which was made infinitely worse, from a gallican perspective, by the recourse to a papacy that had its own agenda when it came to Jansenism. Yet the views expressed by virtually all those involved in the lead-up to the bull Unigenitus were rarely disturbed by any sense of foreboding, with many contemporaries effusively describing it as a perfect response that would add to the royal glory. The prime movers in some of these crises, such as the revocation and Unigenitus, were confronted soon enough by their unexpected consequences and found themselves busy blaming others as they tried to dissociate themselves from the decisions in question. This behaviour may, in turn, owe something to the realisation that, once taken, such decisions became irrevocable; the admission of mistakes would, as with the Protestants, only embolden the parties against which they were directed. Only in the case of the régale affair and the 1682 gallican articles did Louis XIV initiate moves to abandon some very public positions, but the conditions of their ‘revocation’ were to be kept firmly secret. II The shifts in attitude towards religious problems, especially where they had implications for political or ecclesiastical authority, and how to deal with them, were themselves linked to the evolution of both church and monarchy during the seventeenth century. At the beginning of the century, the question of whether the ‘church was in the state’ or the ‘state was in the church’ figured widely in the heated debates between gallicans and their opponents. It was essentially the gallican lawyers associated with the parlement of Paris who upheld the first position; their thinking, as one would expect of magistrates, was focused primarily on the question of jurisdiction, and they made no bones

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about their dislike of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. But the question of whether the church was ‘in the state’ or vice versa was far from being purely a question of jurisdiction. We saw in discussing the origins of the régale that the monarchy did not always take much notice of what its leading magistrates thought or said, and that when Denis Talon recalled, in 1666, the actions of the early Christian emperors in religious matters, he got much closer to the bone, which was why he was lucky to escape formal disavowal by Louis XIV when the clergy counter-attacked. The evolution of the Bourbon monarchy is often summarised in terms of its adoption of an absolutist concept of royal authority. But for all such a conception’s attractiveness to successive rulers, it was not a magic solution to every problem, and at times its greatest value may well have been to disguise the rather different face of ‘real’ politics. The expansion of the monarchy’s apparatus of government is not in doubt, as layer after layer of officialdom, old and new, accumulated during the century, particularly in wartime and in response to ever-pressing financial needs. But a great deal of the monarchy’s real power remained unquantifiable and invisible, and depended on its success in deploying its extensive patronage resources to place trusted individuals and their followers in key positions. Royal authority varied considerably from province to province, notably in those which had retained older institutions, such as the provincial estates, which in the age of Louis XIV still met and voted the taxes payable to the monarchy, knowing perfectly well that it would also need their services and goodwill when it came to other matters. There can be little doubt that the monarchy’s ideological and administrative armature was infinitely stronger by the early 1700s than a century or so earlier. But the French church, its principal interlocutor, had not stood still in that same period. Its energetic rejection of a gallican credo at the Estates-General of 1614 gave way by 1682 to a very public embrace of similar propositions. Admittedly, its representatives in 1682 were themselves the authors of the declaration, whereas in 1614 they were responding to an unwelcome ambush from what they viewed as a hostile and unqualified source. The deputies may have been hand-picked in 1682, but a less ‘policed’ assembly would probably not have behaved very differently in the same circumstances. These differences are by no means irrelevant to the respective outcomes, although there were probably far more ultramontanes within the French clergy in 1682 than there were around 1614. Between the two dates, other factors had played their part in the evolution of the French church. During the seventeenth century, the French church became the most ‘episcopal’ church in Catholic Europe. Such a development was implicit in its gallican inheritance, and especially its conciliarist strands, which limited papal supremacy. The fierce disputes between the religious orders and defenders of

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the secular clergy were increasingly concerned with the scope of episcopal authority. Neither of these factors was genuinely new, so they could only be historically significant if they were part of a wider pattern of change. Studies of the making of France’s episcopate have shown that its bishops were being chosen with far greater care than in the century after the Concordat of Bologna, and that even those bishops who were scions of high-ranking families acquired the right educational and other ‘qualities’ needed to maintain their presence among the church’s governing elite. The fact that a rapidly increasing proportion of bishops had studied theology rather than law at university was not irrelevant to the kind of authority they expected to exercise once duly mitred. Their resulting ambition – and capacity – to take up and defend a range of theological positions was one important reason why they would no longer leave such questions to the theology faculties. The relegation of the latter to a relatively passive, secondary role by comparison with previous centuries is a significant development in the direction of a more authoritarian mindset in both church and state during the seventeenth century. Other developments accompanied it. Within dioceses, bishops increasingly developed their own administrative network, preferring to rely on their own appointees bearing relatively new titles such as vicar-general rather than the longestablished figures based mainly within the cathedral chapter and the church court (the officialité). Never before had French bishops issued so many pastoral and other instructions as during the reign of Louis XIV, and it was public knowledge that many of them were composed by the theologians in their service. Ironically, in strengthening their authority they benefited, quite unintentionally, from the parlements’ campaign to undermine the church courts and their jurisdiction.8 III None of this might have had much significance for the wider relations between politics and religion were it not for another development traced in this book. Without seeking to exaggerate the role of institutions, it is clear that the assemblies of clergy – even when they were not in actual session – made a genuine difference in ways that have not yet been accurately measured. Their permanence is visible in other innovations which they spawned and which became routine: the general agents as well as the provincial and diocesan mechanisms for raising money for the crown. Compared to the Spanish monarchy where, according to one observer, it was unusual for senior clergy, and bishops in particular, to meet in any circumstances, the leading figures of the French church did so regularly – at court, in Paris, or in their provinces. The idea that the assemblies might mutate into a national council of the French church may

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have been tenuous and only evoked fleetingly, yet such a mirage was capable of raising expectations of the ‘normal’ assemblies and their capacity. Of course, the monarchy, from at least the Richelieu ministry, did everything it could to ‘pack’ the successive assemblies with deputies well disposed to its needs and demands, but it would be wrong to assume that such practices emasculated them. Like their counterparts elsewhere in early modern Europe, the deputies attending them were long familiar with patronage and preference, as they were all beneficiaries of royal largess as bishops or holders of church benefices in the king’s gift. Such a condition did not make them ‘ballot fodder’ during assemblies, where there was increasing safety in numbers even as they took different sides in debates. Of course, it is also possible that the increasing domination of the assemblies by the senior clergy present itself produced a mindset that left declining room for dissenting voices; that seems to have been prevalent during the thirty years (1666–95) when the assemblies were dominated by Archbishop Harlay. Equally, as we have seen in relation to Jansenism and the régale, a tiny handful of bishops or nuns could create real havoc and force even Louis XIV’s government on to the back foot; while specially convened extraordinary assemblies, such as those of 1682 and 1714, could prove difficult to control and had to be disbanded. Moreover, the regime’s regular financial neediness ensured that it could not afford to alienate the assemblies; their financial ‘generosity’ itself became a card to play in church–monarchy relations. And without ever formally petitioning Louis XIII or Louis XIV to revoke the Edict of Nantes, the assemblies proved a constant and effective clearing house or point of contact for all those seeking to rid France of ‘heresy’. The assemblies also played an underestimated part in the development of the gallican church’s self-image during the early modern period. From 1614 onwards the approved record of each assembly was published for distribution to a wider public. In less than a century such regularity produced a working archive of decisions, discussions and other materials which by 1695 were carefully catalogued and housed in twenty substantial, locked cabinets.9 As a closely supervised institution, the general agency enhanced that continuity of action. The assemblies were also frequently solicited for funds to support a wide range of causes. Among the best known was the celebrated four-volume Gallia christiana of the Sainte-Marthe brothers, originally published in 1656. Devoted to chronicling the list of France’s bishops diocese by diocese ab initio, such an enterprise was bound to impress the assembly in its gallican convictions. But, as we might suspect of seventeenth-century scholarship, such a wide-ranging opus could scarcely avoid treading on someone’s toes. In this case, the toes were those of Richelieu, whose heirs were offended by its notices on the abbé Saint-Cyran and Jansen, bishop of Ypres. Such entries gave the

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Gallia christiana an enduring but unmerited whiff of Jansenism, despite the fact that the 1656 authors were keen to proclaim the virtues of a defender of episcopal authority (Saint-Cyran as Petrus Aurelius) and an exemplary bishop (Jansen). But the objections stopped the 1656 edition in its tracks for two generations, only for another assembly of clergy to sponsor the definitive edition of the Gallia christiana from 1720 onwards.10 IV With both the monarchy and the gallican church reshaping in such ways, the question of whether the church was ‘in the state’ or the state ‘in the church’ appears otiose for the historian: it seeks to adjudicate on a point that rarely concerned contemporaries – and when it did, only in conjectural fashion. This is not to deny that there were periods of friction, as was typical throughout the medieval period, often exacerbated by the particular claims of the papacy to certain forms of authority. The fact that the French Catholic church acquired a greater sense of autonomy during the wars of religion, when the monarchy seemed incapable of defending it, did not diminish its need – or explicit desire – for such support in subsequent generations. The dévots, for their part, were never more assured than when they were working with rather than against the regime of the day – and their behaviour shows that the apple of discord was kept as small as possible. From the monarchy’s perspective, the Catholic church was an indispensable partner in restoring royal authority in a country still prone to revolt and disorder. That church had no reservations about preaching unreserved obedience to God-given kings – as, of course, did its Protestant counterpart. The Catholic church had by far the most extensive communications network of the time, with a vast parish system at its heart, one for which neither ministers nor magistrates could begin to imagine a substitute. The monarchy played a significant part in reinforcing the authority structures of the church, as is evident in its willingness at different times (1629, 1695) to legislate to that effect. Senior clergy played major political roles in certain provinces, acquiring knowledge and political skills there, which could also be deployed during the national assemblies of clergy. It would be surprising if the relative familiarity – not to mention family ties – of many of these figures with the ministerial and court elites did not produce an increasing similarity of views during Louis XIV’s reign, one which discouraged dissenting opinions among those involved. During the first and to some degree the second Jansenist crisis, it was ‘outsiders’ – from Pavillon onwards – who broke ranks and often found themselves slated for it. But disagreements among the major church figures of Louis XIV’s reign were not unknown, albeit mostly contained: Harlay, Le Tellier, Bossuet,

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Noailles, Fénelon and others were frequently at loggerheads, and sometimes sought to settle their scores by deliberately supporting contrary courses of action, especially from the 1680s onwards. The most spectacular exhibition of high-level disagreement came at the very end of Louis XIV’s reign, in the form of the firm resistance to the bull Unigenitus by a minority of the ad hoc assembly of 1714–15, which had to be disbanded in disarray while Louis XIV attempted to impose this disastrously anti-gallican measure. The lessons of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had not been learned, despite all the differences between it and the Jansenist affair, partly because accepting or admitting mistakes had been erased from the government’s repertoire. That would partially explain the most hubristic feature of the Unigenitus affair, namely Louis XIV’s reiterated promise to Clement XI that the bull, whose contents or language he had not seen before publication, would be ‘received’ in France without the slightest discussion. That over-confident promise, which broke with recent precedents, proved to be the first major casualty of the ensuing crisis, equally infuriating the papacy and alienating the gallicans, both lay and clerical. In the search to root out religious dissent of every kind, the monarchy, with the overwhelming support of leading elements of the French church, contrived to lose sight of the enduring elusiveness of the gallican inheritance of previous centuries. And the experience of the following century would show how exceptionally difficult it was to recover that ability once it had been forfeited.

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Notes

Introduction 1. See Chapter 9 below. This crisis figures prominently in most accounts of Louis XIV’s reign. For a few random examples, see Andrew Lossky, Louis XIV and the French monarchy (Los Angeles, 1994), ch. 9, ‘The general crisis of the reign’; René and Suzanne Pillorget, France baroque, France classique, 2 vols (Paris, 1995), ii, 842–5; Alexandre Maral, Le Roi-soleil et Dieu (Paris, 2012), ch. 4, ‘Le souverain gallican’. 2. The most detailed account of this element of crisis is by Jean Orcibal, Louis XIV contre Innocent XI. Les appels au futur concile de 1688 et l’opinion française (Paris, 1949), 13–47. 3. Pierre Blet, ‘Louis XIV et le Saint Siège à la lumière de deux publications récentes: le conflit de la régale, la fable de l’excommunication secrète, la réconciliation de 1693’, Archivum Historiae Pontificiae, 12 (1973), 309–31. 4. Pierre Blet, Le Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège de 1695 à 1715 (Vatican City, 1989), 4–12. 5. Alain Tallon, Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au xvie siècle (Paris, 2002), ch. 1, ‘Une histoire sainte’. 6. Joseph R. Strayer, ‘The Holy Land, the chosen people and the most Christian king’, in T. K. Rabb, ed., Action and conviction in early modern Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1969), 3–16. 7. Colette Beaune, Naissance de la nation France (Paris, 1985), for the most thorough account of such thinking. See also Caspar Hirschi, The Origins of Nationalism (Cambridge, 2012), 66ff. 8. For the medieval historical context, see Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy. The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (Oxford, 1989), esp. chs 7–9, 17, 22. See also Bernard Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1985), 10–11. 9. Tallon, Conscience nationale, 46–9. 10. Ibid., ch. 2. 11. See the key studies by Richard A. Jackson, Vive le roi. A History of the French Coronation from Charles V to Charles X (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984); Ralph E. Giesey, Cérémonial et puissance souveraine. France xve–xviie siècles (Paris, 1987), and his collected essays, Rulership in France, 15th to 17th Centuries (Aldershot, 2004). 12. Beaune, Naissance, chs 3–7. Dale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (New Haven, CT, and London, 1996), 16–23. See also Paul K. Monod, The Power of Kings. Monarchy and Religion in Europe 1589–1715 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1999). 13. See the stimulating essay by Robin Briggs, ‘A moving target, Jansenists and their enemies in France’, in Richard Bonney and D. B. J. Trim, eds, The Development of Pluralism in Modern Britain and France (Frankfurt and Oxford, 2007), 129–52. 14. Tallon, Conscience nationale, 45–6. 15. Jotham Parsons, The Church in the Republic. Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France (Washington, DC, 2004), 130–1.

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16. For brief overviews, see Aimé-Georges Martimort, Le Gallicanisme de Bossuet (Paris, 1953), 17–125; Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition. Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300–1870 (Oxford, 2008), who contextualises French contributions to that tradition. 17. See Parsons, Church in the Republic, chs 2 and 4, for these developments. 18. Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief (Oxford, 1991), 183. 19. Olivier Poncet, La France et le pouvoir pontifical (1595–1661) (Rome, 2011), 51–73; R. J. Knecht, ‘The Concordat of 1516: a reassessment’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 9 (1963), 16–32. 20. Tallon, Conscience nationale, 110–22; idem, ‘Raison d’état, religion monarchique et religion du roi. Un aperçu de l’historiographie française et ses évolutions’, in Philippe Büttgen and Christophe Duhamelle, eds, Religion ou confession. Un bilan franco-allemand sur l’époque moderne (xvie–xviiie siècles) (Paris, 2010), 355–71, at 362. 21. Parsons, Church in the Republic, esp. ch. 2; also Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship. Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance (New York, 1970). 22. Conrad Russell, ‘Parliamentary history in perspective, 1603–1629’, History, 61 (1976), 1–27. 23. See ch. 6 below. 24. The best guide here is James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in early Reformation France: the Faculty of Theology of Paris 1504–1543 (Leiden, 1985). 25. Jacques Verger, Les Gens de savoir dans l’Europe de la fin du moyen âge (Paris, 1997); idem, ‘Une autorité universelle? L’université de Paris et les princes européens au moyen âge’, in Reich, Regionen und Europa in Mittelalter und Neuzeit (Berlin, 2000), 515–26; Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel, eds, Les Universités européennes du xvie au xviiie siècle: histoire sociale des populations étudiantes, ii (Paris, 1989), ‘Les Étudiants et leurs études dans la France moderne’, chs 3 and 5, for a well-documented synthesis on the theology faculties and their students. 26. Sylvie Daubresse, Le Parlement de Paris ou les voix de la raison (Geneva, 2005), 109. 27. Parsons, Church in the Republic, 33. 28. For the evolution of the relations between the papacy and the universities, particularly over theological questions, see Bruno Neveu, L’Erreur et son juge. Remarques sur les censures doctrinales à l’époque moderne (Naples, 1993), 107ff. 29. Thierry Amalou, ‘Entre réforme du royaume et enjeux dynastiques: le magistère intellectuel et moral de l’université au sein de la Ligue (1576–1594)’, Cahiers de Recherches Médievales, 15 (2009), 145–66. 30. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France, ch. 1. 31. See Bernard Chedozeau, ‘La Faculté de théologie de Paris au xviie siècle: un lieu privilégié des conflits entre gallicans et ultramontains (1600–1720)’, mélanges de la Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, 10 (1990), 39–101; and Jacques Grès-Gayer, ‘The magisterium of the faculty of theology of Paris in the seventeenth century’, Theological Studies, 53 (1992), 424–50 (and the same author’s other studies of the faculty which will be noted in later chapters). 32. Cedric Michon, La Crosse et le sceptre. Les prélats d’état sous François I et Henri VIII (Paris, 2008), who first used these terms. They are discussed in a longer chronological perspective in Benoist Pierre, La Monarchie ecclésiale: le clergé de cour en France à l’époque moderne (Seyssel, 2013), 7–13. 33. See the very astute comments on this factor in Briggs, Communities of Belief, 21–17. 34. See Richard Bonney, Political Change in France under Richelieu and Mazarin 1624–1661 (Oxford, 1978), 4; Joseph Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld. Leadership and Reform in the French Church (New Haven, CT, and London, 1987), 62. Chapter 1: The Religion of King and Kingdom 1. William Monter, Judging the French Reformation (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 212. 2. See Norman Housley, Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400–1536 (Oxford, 2002). 3. Luc Racaut, ‘The polemical use of the Albigensian crusade during the French wars of religion’, French History, 13 (1999), 261–79. 4. J. Michael Hayden and Malcolm Greenshields, 600 Years of Reform. Bishops and the French Church 1190–1789 (Montreal, 2005), ch. 3. 5. Alain Tallon, La France et le concile de Trente (1518–1563) (Rome, 1997), for the most exhaustive study of this question: see esp. part 2, chs 1–3 for the shifts in attitude towards Trent. 6. Monter, Judging, 85.

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to pp. 19–25

7. Ibid, ch. 2. The Castilian inquisition was founded in 1478, the Aragonese in 1483 and the Portuguese in 1515. There was no ‘Italian’ inquisition as such, but a Roman inquisition, founded in 1542, which was gradually extended to most, but not all of the peninsula. See Christopher F. Black, The Italian Inquisition (New Haven, CT, and London, 2009), esp. chs 1–2. 8. See Elena Brambilla, Alle origini dello Sant’Uffizio. Penitenza, confessione e giustizia spirituale dal medioevo al xvi secolo (Bologna, 2000), ch. 15, for a comparative discussion of the laicisation of heresy cases in France. 9. Alain Tallon, ‘Inquisition romaine et monarchie française au xvie siècle’, in Gabriel Audisio, ed., Inquisition et pouvoir (Aix-en-Provence, 2004), 311–24. 10. Monter, Judging, 54. Most of the executions occurred before Henri II’s reign, which seems to have been less ‘bloody’ than is usually imagined. 11. William Monter, ‘France: the failure of repression 1520–1563’, in Philip Benedict et al., eds, La Réforme en France et en Italie (Rome 2007), 465–79. 12. Judith Pollmann, ‘Countering the reformation in France and the Netherlands: clerical leadership and Catholic violence 1560–1585’, Past and Present, 190 (2006), 83–120. 13. Denis Crouzet, La Génèse de la réforme française 1520–1562 (Paris, 1996), ch. 4. 14. Studies of these critical years are numerous, beginning with the magnum opus of Lucien Romier, Les Origines politiques des guerres de religion, 2 vols (Paris, 1913). For two recent mises au point, see Crouzet, Génèse de la réforme française, and Olivia Carpi, Les Guerres de religion 1559–1598. Un conflit franco-français (Paris, 2012), part 1, esp. chs 4–5. 15. For a concise account, see Didier Boisson and Hugues Daussy, Les Protestants dans la France moderne (Paris, 2006), chs 2–3. 16. Quoted in Arlette Jouanna, La Saint-Barthélemy. Les mystères d’un crime d’état (Paris, 2007), 301. 17. See the revisionist study by Stuart Carroll, Martyrs and Murderers. The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (Oxford, 2009). 18. Tallon, La France et le concile de Trente, 283–315. See also Noël Valois, ‘Les États de Pontoise (août 1561)’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 29 (1943), 237–56. 19. See below, ch. 6, for the origins of the assemblies. The political and financial context of the Poissy contract of 1561 is analysed in Claude Michaud, L’Église et l’argent sous l’ancien régime (Paris, 1991). 20. In addition to Tallon, La France et le concile de Trente, 301–15, see Donald Nugent, Ecumenism in the Age of Reformation: the Colloquy of Poissy (Cambridge, MA, 1974), which is the only full-scale study. See the brief, more recent summaries in Nicolas Le Roux, Le Roi, la cour, l’état, de la Renaissance à l’absolutisme (Seyssel, 2013), ch. 7; Carpi, Guerres de religion, ch. 8, esp. 208–12; Boisson and Daussy, Les Protestants, 114–19. The talks foundered on the issue that had defeated every assembly, council or colloquy since the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 – the nature of the Eucharist. Even a smaller meeting of the leading figures from both sides at Poissy made little progress, and the full colloquy disowned their proposals when they were put to it for its acceptance. 21. Carroll, Martyrs and Murderers, ch. 5. See also Mario Turchetti, Concordia o tolleranza? François Bauduin (1520–1573) e i ‘moyenneurs’ (Geneva, 1984). 22. Tallon, France et le Concile de Trente, 346ff. 23. Philip Benedict, ‘The dynamics of Protestant militancy 1555–63’, in Benedict et al., eds, Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands 1555–1585 (Amsterdam, 1999), 39–40; Denis Crouzet, ‘Calvinism and the uses of the political and the religious (France, ca 1560–1572)’, ibid., 99–115. 24. As quoted by William J. Stankiewicz, Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-century France (Los Angeles, 1960), 17–18. 25. See the brief summary in Carpi, Guerres de religion, 212–16. Among the more comprehensive studies of L’Hôpital, see Denis Crouzet, Le Malheur et la sagesse. Michel de l’Hôpital, chancelier de France (Seyssel, 1998), and Loris Petris, La Plume et la tribune. Michel de l’Hôpital et ses discours (1559–1562) (Geneva, 2002). 26. For the most accurate text of the 1562 edict see ‘L’Édit de Nantes et ses antécédents (1562– 1598)’, edited by Bernard Barbiche et al at: http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/editsdepacification/ edit1. The quotation is from article 13. Italics here are mine. 27. Quoted in David Potter, ed., The French Wars of Religion, Selected Documents (Houndmills, 1997), 33.

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311

28. See the analysis of the successive edicts in N. M. Sutherland, The Huguenot Struggle for Recognition (New Haven, CT, and London, 1980), and the individual summaries in the appendix, ‘The edicts of religion 1525–1598’. 29. Philip Benedict, ‘Les Vicissitudes des églises réformées de France jusqu’en 1598’, in Michel Grandjean and Bernard Roussel, Co-exister dans l’intolérance (Paris and Geneva, 1998), 65, 30. Benedict, ‘Vicissitudes’, 53–73, for the calculations. Olivier Christin, La Paix de religion. L’autonomisation de la raison politique au xvie siècle (Paris, 1997), for the mechanisms of religious peace. Pierre-Jean Souriac, Une guerre civile. Affrontements religieux et militaires en Midi toulousain (1562–1596) (Seyssel, 2008), for an excellent regional study of the military and political conflicts. 31. Mark Greengrass, ‘La Grande Cassure; violence and the French Reformation’, in Robert von Friedeberg and Luise Schorn-Schütte, eds, Politik und Religion: Eigenlogik oder Verzahnung? (Munich, 2007), 71–92, at 89. 32. Mark Greengrass, Governing Passions. Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom 1576–1585 (Oxford, 2007), is the most comprehensive study of these problems. See also Jérémie Foa, ‘Making peace: the commissions for enforcing the pacification edicts in the reign of Charles IX (1560–1574)’, French History, 18 (2004), 256–74; idem and Ronan de Calan, ‘Paradoxes sur le commissaire. L’exécution de la politique religieuse de Charles IX (1560–1574)’, Histoire, Économie, Société, 27 (2008), 3–19. 33. Penny Roberts, ‘Royal authority and justice during the French religious wars’, Past and Present 184 (2004), 3–32, at 12. 34. Quoted in Richard Bonney, ‘Obstacles to religious pluralism in early modern France’, in Keith Cameron, Mark Greengrass and Penny Roberts, eds, The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France (Frankfurt, 2000), 216, n. 41. See also ibid., p. 5, n. 1. 35. See István Bejczy, ‘Tolerantia, a medieval concept’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 58 (1997), 365–84. In practice, France had no Muslims, and it had expelled its Jews in 1306, but this did not prevent it in the early 1560s from reaching for ideas of tolerantia which circulated in intellectual circles. 36. See the discussion in Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred. Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700 (Manchester, 2006), ch. 5, ‘Loving one’s neighbour: tolerance in principle and practice’. 37. Loris Petris, ‘Faith and religious policy in Michel de l’Hôpital’s civic evangelism’, in Cameron, Greengrass, Roberts, The Adventure of Religious Pluralism, 129–42. 38. On the uncommitted and non-confessional options of these decades, see the exhaustive study by Thierry Wanegffelen, Ni Rome ni Genève. Des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au xvie siècle (Paris, 1997). 39. See Michel Péronnet, ‘Religion prétendue réformée’, in Lucien Bély, ed., Dictionnaire de l’ancien régime (Paris, 1996), 1077. 40. See http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/editsdepacification for the most scholarly edition of these edicts by Bernard Barbiche. 41. Benedict, ‘Vicissitudes’, tables 1–5 for the chronology. 42. Crouzet, Guerriers de dieu, ii, chs 13–15 in particular; Carpi, Guerres de religion, part 3. 43. See Carpi, Guerres de religion, chs 13–14. 44. James B. Wood, The King’s Army. Warfare, Soldiers and Society during the Wars of Religion in France 1562–1576 (Cambridge, 1996), for the best discussion of the military problems facing the monarchy. 45. See Bertrand Haan, L’Amitié entre princes. Une alliance franco-espagnole au temps des guerres de religion (1560–1572) (Paris, 2011); Jouanna, La Saint-Barthélemy, ch. 2. 46. See Sutherland, Huguenot Struggle, for a detailed exposition of the successive settlements. 47. See Mack P. Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1986); Arlette Jouanna, Le Devoir de révolte. La noblesse française et la gestation de l’état moderne (1559–1661) (Paris, 1989), ch. 6, ‘La guerre des Malcontents’; idem, La Saint-Barthélemy, ch. 8, ‘Les lectures politiques du malheur français’; Carpi, Guerres de religion, 208–19, for a brief survey. 48. Edmond M. Beame, ‘The politiques and the historians’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 54 (1993), 355–79, for a valuable guide to the successive meanings and affiliations of the term used by contemporaries and historians.

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to pp. 31–8

49. In addition to Beame, ‘Politiques and the historians’, see Mario Turchetti, ‘Une question mal posée: l’origine et l’identité des politiques au temps des guerres de religion’, in Thierry Wanegffelen, ed., De Michel de l’Hôpital à l’édit de Nantes. Politique et religion face aux églises (Clermont, 2002), 357–90; idem, ‘Middle parties in France during the wars of religion’, in Benedict et al., Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands, 165–83. See also Nancy L. Roelker, One king, one faith: the parlement of Paris and the religious reformations of the sixteenth century (Los Angeles, 1996), 326–8. 50. See Nicolas Le Roux, Un régicide au nom de Dieu (Paris, 2006); idem, ‘Les deux morts de Henri III’, in Le Roi, la cour, l’état, ch. 13. For the broader context, French and European, of regicide, see Monique Cottret, Tuer le tyran? Le tyrannicide dans l’Europe moderne (Paris, 2009), esp. chs 5–6. 51. Denis Crouzet, ‘Violence and the state in sixteenth-century France’, in Marguerite Ragnow and William D. Phillips, jr., eds, Religious Conflict and Accommodation in the Early Modern World (Minnesota, 2011), 83–99, at 83–8. 52. Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, CT, and London, 2009), 58–60. 53. Ibid., 316–17. 54. For a brief survey of Protestantism at the royal court, see Le Roux, Le Roi, la cour, l’état, 114–20. Jean Boutier, Alain Dewerpe and Daniel Nordman, Un tour de France royal. Le voyage de Charles IX (1564–1566) (Paris, 1984). 55. Jouanna, La Saint-Barthélemy, chs 1–2, for a balanced analysis of Coligny’s position in the crucial period from mid-1570 to 1572. 56. Crouzet, ‘Violence and the state in sixteenth-century France’, 88–96. 57. Carpi, Guerres de religion, chs 14 (‘Le problème Henri III’) and 15 (‘Une oeuvre en demi-teinte’). 58. Le Roux, Un régicide au nom de Dieu, 72–4. 59. Crouzet, Guerriers de Dieu, ii, chs 16–17. 60. David Bell, ‘Unmasking a king: the political uses of popular literature under the French Catholic League, 1588–89’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 20 (1989), 371–86; Annie Duprat, ‘La Caricature, arme au poing: l’assassinat de Henri III’, Sociétés et Représentations, 10 (2002), 103–16; Le Roux, Un régicide, 90ff.; Sydney Anglo, ‘Henri III: some determinants of vituperation’, in Cameron, ed., From Valois to Bourbon, 5–20, for the wider context; David Potter, ‘Kingship in the wars of religion: the reputation of Henri III of France’, European History Quarterly, 25 (1995), 485–528. 61. Le Roux, Un régicide, 312–15. 62. Neglected or ridiculed for centuries, the Catholic League has, with a few exceptions, only received serious historical attention in the past generation. See in particular Crouzet, Guerriers de dieu, chs 17–19; Elie Barnavi, Le Parti de dieu. Étude sociale et politique des chefs de la Ligue parisienne 1585–1594 (Louvain, 1980); Jean-Marie Constant, La Ligue (Paris, 1996); Carpi, Guerres de religion, chs 19–20. 63. The best account is in Michael Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV. Politics, Power and Religious Belief in Early Modern France (Cambridge, MA, 1993), chs 1–2. 64. Ibid., 35. 65. In addition to Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, see N. M. Sutherland, Henry IV of France and the Politics of Religion, 1572–1596, 2 vols (Bristol, 2002), and Ronald S. Love, Blood and Religion. The Conscience of Henri IV 1553–1593 (Montreal, 1993). 66. Mark Greengrass, France in the Age of Henri IV, 2nd edn (London, 1995), 75–6. 67. Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, chs 4–5. 68. Greengrass, Henri IV, 70–2. Strictly speaking, the estates were to elect a successor to ‘King’ Charles X, uncle of Henri IV whom the Catholic League had recognised as king after Henri III’s assassination and who had died in captivity in 1590. 69. Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, esp. chs 6–7; Pierre, Monarchie ecclésiale, 302–11; Michel de Waele, Réconcilier les français (Laval, 2010), ch. 6; Greengrass, Henri IV, 75–82. See also Mark Greengrass, ‘The public context of the abjuration of Henri IV’, in Cameron, ed., From Valois to Bourbon, 107–26. 70. Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, 159ff.; de Waele, Réconcilier les Français, 138–9, 140. 71. Marie-France Renoux-Zagamé, Du droit de Dieu au droit de l’homme (Paris, 2003), part ii, especially the chapter on ‘Ligueurs contre politiques’, 270–93. 72. De Waele, Réconcilier les Français, 131–2.

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313

73. See J. H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship and Empire: the Idea of Monarchy 1400–1525 (Oxford, 1992), 134–44, for an instance of this in 1511–12. 74. On the absolution, see Alan Tallon, ‘Henri IV and the papacy after the League’, in Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson, eds, Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France (Houndmills, 2009), 21–41. 75. See the analysis in Sutherland, Henri IV, ii, 554ff. 76. In addition to Tallon, ‘Henri IV and the papacy’, see Sutherland, Henri IV, ii. 586–8, for the text of the articles under discussion. 77. Sylvie Daubresse, ‘Autour de l’arrêt Le Maistre’, in Olivier Descamps et al., eds, Le Parlement et sa cour (Paris, 2012), 149–70; Michel de Waele, ‘La Fin des guerres de religion et l’exclusion des femmes de la vie politique française’, French Historical Studies, 29 (2006), 199–230; Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, 133; Eli Barnavi, ‘Mythes et réalité historique: le cas de la loi salique’, Histoire, Économie, Société, 3 (1984), 323–37. 78. See Hugues Daussy, Les Huguenots et le roi. Le combat politique de Philippe Duplessis-Mornay (1572–1600) (Geneva, 2002), 589–95, ‘Le sacrifice de Fontainebleau’. The ‘sacrifice’ refers to the fate of Mornay. See also Pierre, Monarchie ecclésiale, 313–16. For later Catholic perceptions of this moment, Barbara Diefendorf, ‘Henri IV, the dévots and the making of a French Catholic Reformation’, in Forrestal and Nelson, eds, Politics and Religion, 157–79, at 174. 79. Michael Wolfe, ‘The conversion of Henri IV and the origins of Bourbon absolutism’, Historical Reflexions, 14 (1987), 287–309. 80. Quotation from Denis Crouzet, ‘Henri IV, king of reason?’, in Cameron, ed, From Valois to Bourbon, 73–106, quotation at p. 73. For a more detailed analysis, see Crouzet, Guerriers de Dieu, ii, ch. 20, ‘Face à l’angoisse collective, le roi de la raison’, and, more recently, the same author’s Dieu en ses royaumes. Une histoire des guerres de religion (Seyssel, 2008), ch.17, ‘La royauté du désangoissement’. 81. Christin, La Paix de religion, 203–5. 82. Monod, The Power of Kings, 33–6, 69–80, 110–21. 83. Jouanna, Pouvoir absolu, ch.13, ‘Henri IV, le roi choisi par Dieu’. 84. Ibid., 308–16, 321–2. Chapter 2: Disputes and Settlements 1. Robert Descimon and José Javier Ruiz Ibañez, Les Ligueurs de l’exil. Le refuge catholique français après 1594 (Seyssel, 2005), esp. introduction and ch. 1. 2. Greengrass, Henri IV, 89–98. See also the wide-ranging essay by Michael Wolfe, ‘Protestant reactions to the conversion of Henri IV’, in idem, ed., Changing Identities in Early Modern France (Durham, NC, 1997), 371–92. 3. Jouanna, Pouvoir absolu, 282–6. 4. Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, 112–14. 5. Jouanna, Pouvoir absolu, 298–9. 6. In addition to Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, 72–80, see Pierre, Monarchie ecclésiale, ch. 10, ‘Convertir le roi et sa cour’. 7. Frederic J. Baumgartner, ‘Crisis in the French episcopacy: the bishops and the succession of Henri IV’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 20 (1979), 276–301. See also Joseph Bergin, ‘Connaitre les évêques de France au temps de la Ligue catholique. Sur un inédit de 1591’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 96 (2010), 343–72. The situation in 1591 shows that committed Leaguers were not in the majority, leading to the assumption that the number of Leaguers diminished further by 1593. 8. Le Roux, Le Roi, la cour, l’état, 291–3. 9. Michel de Waele, ‘Autorité, légitimité, fidélité: le Languedoc ligueur et la reconnaissance d’Henri IV’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 53 (2006), 5–34. 10. As quoted in de Waele, Réconcilier les Français, p. 151; see also Michael Wolfe, ‘Amnesty and oubliance at the end of the French wars of religion’, Cahiers d’Histoire (Montreal), 16 (1996), 60. 11. For the period after 1560, see Arlette Jouanna, ‘ “Capituler avec son prince”: la question de la contractualisation de la loi au xvie siècle’, in Paul-Alexis Mellet, ed., Et de sa bouche sortait un glaive. Les monarchomaques au xvie siècle (Geneva, 2006), 131–43.

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12. Many of these ‘treaties’ were published by the historiographer royal, Pierre Matthieu, Recueil des edicts et articles accordez par le Roy Henry IIII pour la reünion des ses subiets (n.p., 1606). For the thirty-nine articles negotiated by the town of Beauvais, see ibid., fos 65v–75r, 22 Aug. 1594, and the much shorter ‘capitulation’ of Laon which Henri IV had taken by siege, ibid., fos 58v–60r, 22 July 1594. See also Michel Cassan, ‘La Réduction des villes ligueuses à l’obéissance’, Nouvelle Revue du XVIe Siècle, 22 (2004), 159–74. 13. de Waele, Réconcilier les Français, 191–2; Carpi, Guerres de religion, 618. 14. de Waele, Réconcilier les Français, 238. 15. Annette Finley-Croswhite, Henry IV and the Towns. The Pursuit of Legitimacy in French Urban Society 1589–1610 (Cambridge, 1999), esp. chs 4–8. 16. Diane C. Margolf, Religion and Royal Justice in Early Modern France, The Paris Chambre de l’Édit 1598–1665 (Kirksville, MO, 2003), ch. 3, ‘Le remède de la sage oubliance’, which focuses on the practical problems posed by the oubliance injunction. See ibid., p. 77, n. 6, for further references. 17. On the claim that the king’s purchase of his subjects’ loyalty cost 32 million livres, see Richard Bonney, The King’s Debts. Finance and Politics in France 1589–1661 (Oxford, 1982), 44. In many cases, the king was cancelling the debts and unpaid taxes of the towns in question. See also Philippe Hamon, ‘Sous Henri IV. Une “reconstruction financière”?’, in Michel de Waele, ed., Lendemains de guerre. Réconciliations et restaurations en France sous Henri IV (Laval, Quebec, 2011), 127–62. 18. Quoted in Greengrass, Henri IV, 87. 19. See Tallon, ‘Henri IV and the papacy’, 21–41, esp. 31ff.; de Waele, Réconcilier les Français, 142–8. The Leaguers in Languedoc managed to block negotiations for a long time by demanding a papal absolution before agreeing to recognise Henri IV as king. 20. On the speech of 6 June 1598 by the premier président, Harlay, see de Waele, Réconcilier les Français, 254. On Henri IV’s use of clemency from 1589 onwards, and not merely after his conversion, see de Waele, ‘Clémence royale et fidélités françaises à la fin des guerres de religion’, Historical Reflections, 24 (1998), 231–52. 21. See Greengrass, Henri IV, 93ff.; Boisson and Daussy, Les Protestants, 133–40. 22. Carpi, Guerres de religion, 598, ‘percé de douleur jusqu’à l’âme’. 23. Patrick Cabanel, Histoire des protestants en France xvie–xxie siècle (Paris, 2012), 326–32; Benedict, ‘Vicissitudes’, 65–6. 24. Greengrass, Henri IV, 97–8. The terms of the treaty of Bergerac and the Edict of Poitiers which followed it were less generous than the Peace of Monsieur (1576), which had produced a Catholic backlash, leading to its renegotiation in 1577. After 1591, Protestant worship was permitted wherever it existed in 1577, and beyond that in one town per bailliage. See Cabanel, Protestants en France, 327–8. 25. Wolfe, Conversion of Henri IV, 136. 26. Greengrass, Henri IV, 95–7. 27. Barbara Diefendorf, ‘Waging peace. Memory, identity and the edict of Nantes’, in Kathleen Perry Long, ed., Religious Differences in France, Past and Present (Kirksville, MO, 2006), 19–49, at 30. 28. As quoted in Jouanna et al., Histoire et dictionnaire des guerres de religion, 410. 29. De Waele, Réconcilier les Français, 179–84; Michael Wolfe, ‘Prélude à la paix: le siège d’Amiens (1597) et ses conséquences militaires et diplomatiques’, in Jean-François Labourdette et al., eds, Le Traité de Vervins (Paris, 2000), 61–79. 30. Pierre-Jean Souriac, ‘Une solution armée de coexistence. Les places de sûreté protestantes comme élément de pacification des guerres de religion’, in La Coexistence confessionnelle à l’épreuve. Études sur les relations entre protestants et catholiques dans la France moderne, Chrétiens et sociétés, Documents et Mémoires, no. 9, ed. Didier Boisson and Yves Krumenacker (Lyon, 2009), 51–72, quotation at p. 58. 31. Jouanna et al., Guerres de religion, 407. 32. See the text of the edict, secret articles and the two brevets, at: http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/ editsdepacification/edit1. English-language versions are in Roland Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry IV . The Tyrannicide Problem and the Consolidation of the French Absolute Monarchy in the Early 17th Century (English trans. London, 1973), 294–344. Richard M. Golden, ed., The Huguenot Connection. The Edict of Nantes, its Revocation and

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33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

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315

Early French Emigration to South Carolina (Dordrecht, 1988), 86–139, contains the edict and the secret articles, but not the brevets. Bernard Barbiche, ‘L’Édit de Nantes et son enregistrement: génèse et publication d’une loi royale’, in Paul Mironneau and Isabelle Pébay-Clottes, eds, Paix des armes, paix des âmes (Paris, 2000), 251–60. Greengrass, Henri IV, 104. De Waele, Réconcilier les Français, 249–50. Luc Daireaux, ‘Réduire les Huguenots’. Protestants et pouvoirs en Normandie au xviie siècle (Paris, 2010), 116–17. Holt, French Wars of Religion, 164–5. On the role of the grands in particular, see Henri Zuber, ‘La Noblesse protestante (1584–1598). Histoire politique des rapports entre Henri IV et les grands réformés’, in Avènement d’Henri IV. Le roi et la reconstruction du royaume (Pau, 1990), 73–91. Penny Roberts, ‘Huguenot petitioning during the wars of religion’, in Raymond Mentzer and Andrew Spicer, eds, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World 1559–1685 (Cambridge, 2002), 62–77, at 68. See also Mentzer, ‘The Edict of Nantes and its institutions’, ibid., 98–116, at 107–8; Margolf, Religion and Royal Justice, 5ff. Margolf, Religion and Royal Justice, 12. Mentzer, ‘Edict of Nantes and its institutions’, 106. The geography of the jurisdiction over the chambres was itself complicated. That of Grenoble included Provence as well as Dauphiné, while Protestants within the Dijon parlement’s jurisdiction could appeal to the parlements of Paris or Grenoble. There was no chambre in Brittany. Daireaux, ‘Réduire les Huguenots’, 117–26, shows that Rouen was the first parlement after Paris to register the edict, but also that it refused to register the ‘articles secrets’ and imposed restrictions on the articles that it did register (ibid., 121–2). Greengrass, Henri IV, 108–11; Daireaux, ‘Réduire les Huguenots’, 128–39. See also Daniel Hickey, ‘Enforcing the Edict of Nantes: the 1599 commissions and the local élites in Dauphiné and Poitou-Aunis’, in Keith Cameron, ed., The Adventure of Religious Pluralism in Early Modern France (Frankfurt, 2000), 65–83, for evidence of how difficult it was to find solutions when the edict’s articles were often so mutually contradictory or too general to fit local realities. Frederic J. Baumgartner, ‘The Catholic opposition to the Edict of Nantes, 1598–1599’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 40 (1978), 526. Ibid., 525–36. See also Barbara Diefendorf, ‘Entre la Ligue et les dévots: les ultra-catholiques français face à la paix de Vervins’, in Jean-François Labourdette et al., Le Traité de Vervins (Paris, 2000), 431–53. Thierry Issartel, Les Chemins de la tolérance en Béarn (xvie–xviie) (Biarritz, 1999), 51–82; Mark Greengrass, ‘The Calvinist experiment in Béarn’, in Andre Pettegree et al., eds, Calvinism in Europe 1540–1620 (Cambridge, 1994), 119–42; Christian Desplat, ‘Une paix de religion oubliée: l’édit de Fontainebleau (1599)’, in L’Édit de Nantes (Paris, 1998), 67–77. Quoted in Desplat, ‘Une paix de religion oubliée’, 73. Tallon, La France et le concile de Trente, 794–807. The classic account is Victor Martin, Le Gallicanisme et la réforme catholique. Essai historique sur l’introduction en France des décrets du concile de Trente (1563–1615) (Paris, 1919). For a brief recent summary, see Correspondance du nonce en France Gasparo Silingardi, évêque de Modène (1599–1601), ed. Bertrand Haan (Rome, 2002), ‘Introduction’, 153–69. Pierre Blet, Le Clergé de France et la monarchie 1615–1666, 2 vols (Rome, 1959), i, introduction, ch. 4. Eric Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy. Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1594–1615) (Aldershot, 2005), for a detailed reinterpretation of events often presented in a partisan or poorly informed manner. John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 287–91. For the Jesuits’ experiences in France from c. 1550 to 1580, see A. Lynn Martin, The Jesuit Mind. The Mentality of an Élite in Sixteenth-century France (Ithaca, NY, 1988). Michel de Waele, Les Relations entre le parlement de Paris et Henri IV (Paris, 2000), 318–20. A. Lynn Martin, Henry III and the Jesuit Politicians (Geneva, 1973). For the European context, see Robert Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years’ War. Kings, Courtiers and Confessors (Cambridge, 2003), ch. 1. De Waele, Parlement de Paris et Henri IV, 320, 345ff. (esp. 350).

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55. In addition to Nelson, Jesuits and the Monarchy, ch. 1, see Michel de Waele, ‘Pour la sauvegarde du roi et du royaume. L’expulsion des Jésuites de France à la fin des guerres de religion’, Canadian Journal of History, 29 (1994), 268–80, esp. 270ff. 56. See the analysis by Robert Descimon, ‘Chastel’s attempted regicide (27 December 1594) and its subsequent transformation into an “affair” ’, in Forrestal and Nelson, eds, Politics and Religion, 86–104. 57. Nelson, Jesuits and the Monarchy, ch. 2, for the most extensive account of the expulsion. See also de Waele, Le Relations entre le parlement de Paris et Henri IV, 345–54. 58. Quoted in Cabanel, Protestants en France, 327. This missive was written a week after the famous face-to-face harangue of early Feb. 1599. 59. Nelson, Jesuits and the monarchy, ch. 3, ‘Recall’; de Waele, Parlement de Paris et Henri IV, 382–6. 60. See Henri IV’s letter of 4 Oct. 1599 to his ambassador in Rome in Correspondance du nonce Gasparo Silingardi, 567–70, esp. 569–70, indicating the need for further consultation and to avoid hasty judgements on the Jesuit question. 61. Nelson, Jesuits and the Monarchy, 73–6, 123. 62. See ibid., 99 (and n. 4), 107. 63. Briggs, Communities of Belief, 185–6, who rightly notes that Henri IV’s efforts to convert Sully were misguided: as a Protestant Sully was more valuable politically than as yet another convert. Chapter 3: Gallican Stirs 1. Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion 1562–1629 (Cambridge, 1995), 168–9. 2. Mack P. Holt, L’Évolution des “politiques” face aux églises’, in Thierry Wanegffelen, ed., De Michel de l’Hospital à l’édit de Nantes (Clermont-Ferrand, 2002), 591–607. 3. Pierre, Monarchie ecclésiale, 302–4. In the 1590s, the rumours of a French patriarchate focused on Renaud de Beaune, who was a key figure in Henri IV’s conversion: see Frederic J. Baumgartner, ‘Renaud de Beaune, politique prelate’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 9 (1978), 99–114; in the late 1630s, the focus was on Richelieu’s ambitions: see Pierre Blet, Richelieu et l’église (Versailles, 2007), ch. 10, ‘Au temps du nonce Scotti’. 4. Tallon, La France et le concile de Trente, 801ff. 5. Parsons, Church in the Republic, ch. 6. 6. See Briggs, ‘Church and state’, in idem, Communities of belief, 189, 198. 7. See the brief overview by Dominique Julia, ‘Les Institutions et les hommes’, in Jacques Verger, ed., Histoire des universités en France (Toulouse, 1986), 141–97; Julia and Revel, ‘Les Étudiants et leurs études dans la France moderne’, a book-length study with valuable chapters on law and theology faculties and students. 8. Jouanna, La Saint-Barthélemy, 71. 9. Wolfe, ‘Amnesty and oubliance’, 45–68, at 58; Amalou, ‘Entre réforme du royaume et enjeux dynastiques’, 145–66. 10. Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1978), ii, 117–23, 177; Burns, Lordship, Kingship and Empire, 141. 11. L. W. B. Brockliss, French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1987), 298–9. 12. Ibid., 267–9. 13. See Parsons, Church in the Republic, esp. ch. 3, ‘Gallicanism in the wars of religion’. 14. J. K. Powis, ‘Gallican liberties and the politics of later sixteenth-century France’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 515–30. 15. Jouanna, Pouvoir absolu, 284; see idem, ‘Les Ambiguïtés des politiques face à la Sainte Ligue’, in Thierry Wanegffelen, ed., De Michel de l’Hôpital à l’édit de Nantes. Politique et religion face aux églises, 475–93, at 475–80. 16. Mack P. Holt, ‘La Paix de Vervins et l’édit de Nantes: une victoire des politiques’, in Labourdette et al., eds, Le Traité de Vervins, 297–308, esp. 298–305. 17. See Michel de Waele, Les Relations entre le parlement de Paris et Henri IV (Paris, 2000), esp. ch. 3. 18. See Sylvio Hermann de Franceschi, La Crise théologico-politique du premier âge baroque. Antiromanisme doctrinal, pouvoir pastoral, et raison du prince. Le Saint-Siège au prisme français (1607–1627) (Rome, 2009), who makes this point on several occasions.

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19. Tallon, Conscience nationale, part ii, chs 1–2. 20. Both the Venetian and the English conflicts have an extensive historiography, which can be followed in the major modern studies of the Venetian interdict, William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defence of Republican Liberty (Berkeley, 1968), and Sylvio Hermann de Franceschi, Raison d’église et d’état. La France et l’Interdit vénitien: aspects diplomatiques et doctrinaux (Paris, 2009). See idem Chrise théologico-politique, chs 1, 5, 7, 8, for enlightening comparisons between the Jacobean oath of allegiance and developments in France. For other perspectives on both conflicts, see Stefania Tutino, The Empire of Souls. Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford, 2010), esp. chs 3–5. For the English political context, see Johann P. Somerville, Royalists and patriots. Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640, 2nd edn (London, 1999), esp. ch. 6, ‘The church’; idem, ‘Papalist political thought’, in Ethan Shagan, ed., Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’. Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), 162–84. 21. Mousnier, Assassination of Henry IV, esp. chs 5–7; de Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, esp. ch. 3. 22. Parsons, The Church in the Republic, 124–31, for a succinct discussion of the context of Pithou’s work. See also Jérôme Delatour, ‘De Pithou à Dupuy: un siècle de religion politique’, in Marie-Magdelaine Fragonard and Pierre-E. Leroy, eds, Les Pithou, les lettres et la paix du royaume (Champion, 2003), 327–52. On Pasquier, see Claude Sutto, ‘Étienne Pasquier et les libertés de l’église gallicane’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Amérique Française, 23 (1969), 246–84, and his edition of Pasquier, Catéchisme des Jésuites (Sherbrooke, 1982). 23. Since 1363 the bull In Coena Domini was issued regularly by the papacy against, inter alia, those who infringed ecclesiastical liberties or appealed to a general council of the church; the penalties attached included censure and even excommunication, from which only the Pope could grant absolution. 24. In addition to Parsons, Church in the republic, see Powis, ‘Gallican liberties’, 515–30; Claude Sutto, ‘Tradition et innovation, réalisme et utopie: l’idée gallicane à la fin du xvie et au début du xviie siècle’, Renaissance et Réforme, 20 (1994), 278–97. 25. There is no full-scale modern study of Richer since P.-E. Puyol (1876), but in addition to de Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 319–21, see Édmond Préclin, ‘Édmond Richer, sa vie, son oeuvre. Le richérisme’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne 5 (1930), 241–69, 321–36; Monique Cottret, ‘Édmond Richer (1559–1631): le politique et le sacré’, in Henri Méchoulan, ed., L’État baroque (Paris, 1985), 159–77. 26. De Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 874–7. 27. The classic study is Édmond Préclin, Les Jansénistes du xviiie siècle et la constitution civile du clergé. Le développement du richérisme, sa propagation dans le bas clergé (Paris, 1929). For a seventeenth-century example of such Richerism in action, see Richard M. Golden, The Godly Rebellion. Parisian Curés and the Religious Fronde 1652–62 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981), ch. 2, ‘ A new order in the church’. 28. The most systematic analysis is that in de Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, esp. chs 3–5. 29. Quoted in Sylvio Hermann de Franceschi, ‘Paolo Sarpi et Fulgenzio Micanzio: l’extrémisme catholique anti-romain du début du xviie siècle’, in idem, ed., Antiromanisme doctrinal et romanité ecclésiale dans le catholicisme post-tridentin (Lyon, 2008), 45–71, at 57 n. 37. 30. For a brief introduction to Bellarmine and translation of a selection of his major writings, see Stefania Tutino, ed., Robert Bellarmine, On Temporal and Spiritual Authority (Indianapolis, 2012). 31. Quoted in Harro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought. The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540– 1630 (Cambridge, 2004), 351. 32. In addition to de Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, esp. ch. 6, see Tutino, Empire of Souls, esp. ch. 1, ‘The foundations of Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta’. 33. Tutino, Empire of Souls, ch. 5. 34. Ibid., 157–8. 35. Ibid., chs 3–6. Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, ch. 13. 36. Mousnier, Assassination of Henry IV, ch. 7, on the successive would-be regicides from Clément onwards. 37. Ibid. This is the classic study, whose subtitle, The Tyrannicide Problem and the Consolidation of the French Absolute Monarchy in the Early Seventeenth Century, shows that it ranges more widely than the regicide itself. See also Cottret, Tuer le tyran? chs 6–7, on the context of the

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38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

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to pp. 73–82

1610 regicide, and Hélène Duccini, Faire voir, faire croire. L’opinion publique sous Louis XIII (Seyssel, 2003), 70–88, who discusses the images and texts generated by the regicide. Michel Cassan, La Grande Peur de 1610. Les Français et l’assassinat de Henri IV (Seyssel, 2009), examines the impact of, and local responses to, the news of the assassination throughout France. De Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 233ff. Jean Petit (? – 1411) defended the assassination of Louis d’Orléans, brother of Charles VI, in 1407, and his arguments, which were attacked by Gerson among others, were condemned by the university in 1413 and the Council of Constance in 1415. See Cottret, Tuer le tyran?, 28–31; Mario Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide de l’antiquité à nos jours (Paris, 2001), 320–28. Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ii, 345–7; Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, ch. 13; Fréderic Gabriel, ‘An tyrannum opprimere fas sit? Construction d’un lieu commun: la réception française du De rege et regis institutione de Juan de Mariana (Tolède, 1599)’, in Antoine Fabre and Catherine Maire, eds, Les Antijésuites (Rennes, 2010), 241–63. De Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, esp. ch. 8. A translation of the 1610 treatise on papal temporal power is in Bellarmine, On Temporal and Spiritual Authority, ed. Tutino, 121–405. Nelson, Jesuits and the Monarchy, 172ff., on the ramifications of this question. See Duccini, Faire voir, faire croire, 88–102, for the variety of the attacks on the Jesuits. Nelson, Jesuits and the Monarchy, 168–9. See Pierre Blet, ‘Jésuites et libertés gallicanes en 1611’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Jesu, 24 (1955), 165–88, at 167–8 for the text of Servin’s conditions. Ibid., 174, for the final text that the Jesuits were required to sign. Nelson, Jesuits and the Monarchy, 153–4; de Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 394–400. Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years’ War, 13–15. De Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 410–13. This is brilliantly analysed by de Franceschi, ibid., 883–91, and idem, ‘Gallicanisme, antirichérisme et reconnaissance de la romanité ecclésiale. La dispute entre le cardinal Bellarmin et le théologien parisien André Duval (1614)’, in Jean-Louis Quantin and JeanClaude Waquet, eds, Papes, princes et savants en Europe (Geneva, 2007), 97–121. See also the discussion in Tutino, Empire of Souls, 183–91. In addition to Mousnier, Assassination of Henry IV, chs 8–10, see J. Michael Hayden, France and the Estates-General of 1614 (Cambridge, 1974), ch. 8, and Jean-François Dubost, Marie de Médicis, la reine dévoilée (Paris, 2009), esp. ch. 22, ‘Marie et les catholiques’. Hayden, France and the Estates-General of 1614, ch. 4, ‘The revolt of the princes’; ch. 5, ‘Elections and deputies’. Duccini, Faire voir, faire croire, 153–66, 191–268, on the publications occasioned by the Estates-General. See J. Russell Major, Representative Government in Early Modern France (New Haven, CT, 1980), for the most detailed and systematic study of the presence and value of estates, general and provincial, in the early modern monarchy (for his comments on 1614, see pp. 397ff.). Hayden, France and the Estates-General of 1614, 131–2 for the text. Hayden contextualises the proposal and its fate in 1614 ibid., 132–48. Ibid., 96–7 and appendix 3, 266–83, for a complete list of deputies. Ibid., 136–7, where Hayden disagrees with Blet’s views on this point in his ‘L’Article du tiers aux États Généraux de 1614’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 2 (1955), 81–106. Hayden, France and the Estates-General, 133–4, for this point; Parsons, Church in the Republic, 259. Eric W. Nelson, ‘Defining the fundamental laws of France: the proposed first article of the third estate at the French Estates-General of 1614’, English Historical Review, 115 (2000), 1216–30, at 1228. Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, 332–7, for a concise examination of Suarez’s treatise; de Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 472–86, for the wider contemporary intellectual and political context. The most detailed account of the confrontation over the contentious article is in Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, ch. 2, ‘Le pape peut-il deposer le roi?’, 40–82.

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62. On Martin Becan (1563–1624), theologian and confessor to Emperor Ferdinand II, see Tutino, Empire of souls, 212–60. 63. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, 56ff; de Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 891–2; Hayden, France and the Estates-General, 140. 64. Hayden, France and the Estates-General, 132. 65. Joseph Bergin, The Rise of Richelieu (New Haven, CT, and London, 1991), 131–3; Blet, Richelieu et l’église, 19–21. 66. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, 75–6. 67. Ibid., i, ch. 3, ‘Les cahiers du clergé et la fin des états’; Hayden, France and the Estates-General, ch. 10, ‘The cahiers’, for a comprehensive account of the cahiers of all three estates. 68. The fullest analysis of this problem is in Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, 88–99. 69. Hayden, France and the Estates-General, 51–2. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, ch. 4, has the most detailed account of the background to and debates on the reception of Trent at both the Estates-General and the assembly of clergy that followed. 70. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, 123–4. 71. Ibid., i, 117, for the text of article 1 of the clergy’s cahier at the Estates-General; ibid., 129, for the assembly’s declaration receiving Trent’s decrees, 7 July 1615. The latter declaration was to be circulated with the cahier article appended to it, which presumably meant that diocesan synods and provincial councils could take account of the reference that it contained to the gallican liberties. 72. See Mousnier, Assassination of Henry IV, ch. 10, ‘The strengthening of absolutism’, on this question. 73. Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld, 55–61. 74. Ibid., 62–5. Chapter 4: The Dévot Impulse 1. Descimon and Ruiz Ibañez, Les Ligueurs de l’exil, 21ff.; Wolfe, ‘Amnesty and oubliance’, 45–68. Diefendorf, ‘Waging peace’, 47. 2. Robert Descimon, Qui étaient les Seize? Mythes et réalités de la Ligue parisienne (Paris, 1983), esp. ch. 3. 3. Denis Richet, ‘Aspects socio-culturels des conflits religieux à Paris dans la seconde moitié du xvie siècle’, in idem, De la Réforme à la Révolution, 35–6. Such a thesis had already been suggested by Marguerite Pecquet, ‘Des compagnies des pénitents à la Compagnie du SaintSacrement’, XVIIe Siècle 69 (1965), 3–36, esp. 26–9. 4. Michel Cassan, Le Temps des guerres de religion: le cas du Limousin (vers 1530–vers 1630) (Paris, 1996), 337ff. 5. Jean Dagens, Bérulle et les origines de la restauration catholique 1575–1611 (Paris, 1952), is the classic study, while Bérulle’s wide-ranging influence in later years is well captured in Jean Orcibal, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de Saint-Cyran, et son temps 1581–1638 (Les Origines du jansénisme, ii), (Paris, 1948). On his political theology, see Stéphane-Marie Morgain, La Théologie politique de Pierre de Bérulle (1598–1629) (Paris, 2001). 6. Benoist Pierre, Le Père Joseph. L’Éminence grise de Richelieu (Paris, 2007), esp. chs 2–3. 7. Barbara B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity. Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford, 2004), esp. ch. 3, ‘Mademoiselle Acarie’s circle’. 8. Robert A. Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse, 1463–1789 (Ithaca, NY, 1989), chs 5–6. 9. Louis Châtellier, Europe of the Devout (Cambridge, 1989), 47, studies the Jesuits’ Europewide Marian sodalities which mobilised Jesuit alumni from a wide range of professions and trades to promote spiritual renewal and ‘social’ action. 10. See Olivier Poncet and Alain Tallon, ‘Dévots et politique au xviie siècle’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 88 (2002), 221, ‘la réalité designée ainsi est complexe et multiple, voire contradictoire’. 11. Robert Sauzet, Au grand siècle des âmes. Guerre sainte et paix chrétienne en France au xviie siècle (Paris, 2007), chs 1–3. Claude Michaud, ‘D’une croisade à l’autre, ou de François de la Noue au duc de Mercoeur’, in Jean-François Labourdette et al., eds, Le Traité de Vervins (Paris, 2000), 457–72. 12. Barbara Diefendorf, ‘Henri IV and the French Catholic reformation’, in Forrestal and Nelson, eds, Politics and Religion, 157–79, suggests such a reading of royal support for reform.

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13. See Heinz Schilling, ed., Konfessioneller Fundamentalismus. Religion als politischer Faktor im europäischen Mächtesystem um 1600 (Munich, 2007), for the wider European situation in the early seventeenth century. 14. Hayden, France and the Estates-General of 1614, 51–2. 15. Dubost, Marie de Médicis, la reine dévoilée, part 3, is the best guide here. 16. Hayden, France and the Estates-General of 1614, 47. 17. Dubost, Marie de Médicis, 451–8. 18. Ibid., ch. 19, for an effective summary. 19. For the context, see Hayden, France and the Estates-General of 1614, ch. 3, ‘French foreign policy 1598–1615; Dubost, Marie de Médicis, ch. 19, ‘La diplomatie de la paix’, esp. p. 395ff.; Le Roux, Le Roi, la cour, l’état, 337–40. 20. See Bertrand Haan, ‘La Paix en question. Le valimiento de Lerma à l’épreuve d’un modus vivendi avec la France’, XVIIe Siècle, 64 (2012), 473–85, esp. 478ff. 21. Duccini, Faire voir, faire croire, 117–22, 177–90, for the debates and the iconography surrounding the marriages. See also Alexandre Y. Haran, Le Lys et le globe. Messianisme dynastique et rêve impérial en France aux xvie et xviie siècles (Seyssel, 2000), 250–4, ‘Une constante: la haine de l’Espagne’. 22. William F. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (Princeton, NJ, 1972), 391–3, quotation at 393. Sauzet, Au grand siècle des âmes, 195–7, for one such effort, from 1638 and commissioned by Richelieu, a treatise entitled En quoi la piété des François diffère de celle des Espagnols dans une profession de la mesme religion. See also Sauzet, ‘Religion et politique au xviie siècle. Anthime-Denis Cohon, évêque de Nîmes, serviteur de Dieu, du roi et de la patrie’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France 98 (2012), 67–81, at 76–9. 23. Dubost, Marie del’ Médicis, 407. 24. See Benoist Pierre, Le Sceptre et la bure. La Congrégation des Feuillants dans l’affirmation des états et des pouvoirs princiers (vers 1560 – vers 1660) (Paris, 2006), for an important case study. 25. Pierre, Monarchie ecclésiale, ch. 12, ‘Le roi dévot et la restauration de la monarchie ecclésiale’. 26. Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld, 55ff. 27. A. D. Wright, Catholicism and Spanish Society under the Reign of Philip II, 1555–1598, and Philip III, 1598–1621 (Lampeter, 1991); Isabelle Poutrin, ‘Cas de conscience et affaires d’état: le ministère du confesseur royal en Espagne sous Philippe III’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 53 (2006), 7–28; Nicole Reinhardt, ‘Spin doctor of conscience? The royal confessor and the Christian prince’, Renaissance Studies, 23 (2009), 568–90. 28. Pierre, Monarchie ecclésiale, 357–60, ‘La galerie des prélats illustres’. 29. Dubost, Marie de Médicis, 524. 30. Sharon Kettering, Power and Reputation at the Court of Louis XIII. The Career of Charles d’Albert, Duc de Luynes (1578–1621) (Manchester, 2008), is the best study of Luynes’s ministériat. 31. Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld, 62–4. 32. Ibid., chs 6–10. 33. See A. Lloyd Moote, ‘Richelieu as chief minister: a comparative study of the favourite in early seventeenth-century politics’, in Joseph Bergin and Laurence Brockliss, eds, Richelieu and his Age (Oxford, 1992), 13–43; Joseph Bergin, ‘Ministériat, ministers and monarchy in seventeenth-century France’, in Anthony McElligott et al., eds, Power in History (Dublin, 2011), 209–30. 34. Bergin, The Rise of Richelieu, ch. 6, ‘Games of patience’. 35. See Dubost, Marie de Médicis, ch. 33. 36. Pierre, Père Joseph, 148–59. 37. See J. H. Elliott, The Count Duke of Olivares (New Haven, CT, and London, 1986), 203–14; Glyn Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta (New Haven, CT, and London, 2003). 38. Bergin, The Rise of Richelieu, 255–6 (and references). See also Blet, Richelieu et l’église, 61–78, and the well-documented study by A. F. Allison, ‘Richard Smith, Richelieu and the French marriage’, Recusant History, 7 (1964), 148–211. 39. W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997), 352–6. The promise in question was a private rather than a public one. 40. Loïc Benassis, ‘Le Mariage franco-anglais. Politique étrangère et rivalités de cour, 1624–1625’, Revue d’Histoire Diplomatique, 120 (2006), 205–26, on the difficulty of identifying consistent

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

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‘parties’ or ‘factions’ in the courts of London or Paris concerning the English marriage, and the unexpected alliances ‘contre nature’ involving Puritans or dévots within their respective courts. A. Lloyd Moote, Louis XIII the Just (Los Angeles and London, 1989), 130–1, 135, 182–3. Jan-Friedrich Missfelder, Das Andere der Monarchie: La Rochelle und die Idee der ‘monarchie absolue’ in Frankreich 1568–1630 (Munich, 2012), 245ff. Pierre, Père Joseph, ch. 7, passim. Pierre Grillon, ed., Les Papiers de Richelieu, iv (Paris, 1980), doc. no. 11, 13 Jan. 1629. Moote, Louis XIII, 202–4. See the extensive discussion of these questions and the polemics surrounding them in Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, part 3. Jean de Thoulouse, Le Mémorial de Jean de Thoulouse, prieur-vicaire de Saint-Victor de Paris, ed. Jean-Baptiste Capit, 2 vols (Turnhout, 2001–8), i, 102–4, 388–9, 424. Anthony D. Wright, The Divisions of French Catholicism 1629–1645. ‘The Parting of the Ways’ (Aldershot, 2011), ch. 4, ‘The progress of the dévots’, which follows these differences in considerable detail. Pierre, Monarchie ecclésiale, 348–9. Ibid., 364–84. Dubost, Marie de Médicis, chs 34–5. Georges Pagès, ‘Autour du grand orage, Richelieu et Marillac: deux politiques’, Revue Historique, 179 (1937), 63–97. Caroline Maillet-Rao, ‘Mathieu de Morgues and Michel de Marillac: the dévots and absolutism’, French History, 25 (2011), 279–97. Major, Representative Government in Early Modern France, ch. 14, ‘Richelieu and Marillac’, and ch. 16, ‘The triumph of Richelieu’, for the most extensive and forceful statement of this thesis. See the critique by Robin Briggs, ‘Richelieu and reform: rhetoric and political reality’, in Joseph Bergin and Laurence Brockliss, eds, Richelieu and his Age (Oxford, 1992), 71–97. Pagès, ‘Autour du grand orage’, 64–6. The figure is approximate since some of the articles deal with hospices, poorhouses and universities which were themselves partly church institutions. See F. A. Isambert et al., Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises (Paris, 1824–30), xvi, 223–342. Briggs, ‘Richelieu and reform’, 71–2, 74–5. Constant, Les Conjurateurs. Le premier liberalisme politique sous Richelieu (Paris, 1987), esp. ch. 6. Jean Orcibal, Jansénius d’Ypres (1585–1638) (Paris, 1989), 232–3. Ibid., 234ff., for a detailed analysis of the composition of the Mars gallicus and Jansen’s role in it. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 383–4. Gérard Ferreyrolles, ‘Jansénius politique: le Mars gallicus’, in idem, ed., Justice et force. Politiques au temps de Pascal (Paris, 1996), 95–108; Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 384–9. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 389–401. Damien Tricoire, Mit Gott rechnen. Katholische Reform und politisches Kalkül in Frankreich, Bayern und Polen-Litauen (Göttingen, 2013), 231. See Laurie Catteeuw, Censures et raisons d’état. Une histoire de la modernité politique (xvie– xviie siècle) (Paris, 2013), ch. 7, ‘L’affirmation d’une censure d’état à l’époque de Richelieu’. Ferreyrolles, ‘Jansénius politique’, 95. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, livre 2, ch. 5, ‘Un cas de conscience dynastique: le marriage de Monsieur’. See below, ch. 6. Orcibal, Saint-Cyran et son temps, ch. 10. Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years’ War, 183–99. See also Reinhardt, ‘Spin doctor of conscience?’, 568–90, esp. 584ff., who is particularly enlightening on the contemporary discussions of princely conscience in Catholic Europe, and especially post-Tridentine Spain. I would like to thank Nicole Reinhardt for many conversations on her continuing research into the role of confessors, and especially Caussin’s post-disgrace writings on the subject. Camille de Rochemonteix, Nicolas Caussin, confesseur de Louis XIII et le cardinal de Richelieu (Paris, 1911), which is more valuable for its documents than its analysis. See also Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years’ War, 193ff.

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71. Tricoire, Mit Gott rechnen, 231ff.; Alexandre Y. Haran, ‘Louis le Juste à travers les oraisons funèbres: roi-sauveur et monarque providentiel’, in Bernard Barbiche et al., eds, Pouvoirs, contestations et comportements dans l’Europe moderne (Paris, 2005), 247–62. 72. See Jean-François Dubost, ‘Anne d’Autriche, reine de France: mise en perspective et bilan politique du règne (1615–1666)’, and Joseph Bergin, ‘Anne d’Autriche et les dévots’, both in Chantal Grell, ed., Anne d’Autriche, infante d’Espagne et reine de France (Paris, 2009), 41–109, 187–207 respectively. 73. Michel de Certeau, ‘Politique et mystique, René d’Argenson (1596–1651)’, Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique, 39 (1963), 45–82, reprinted in idem, Le Lieu de l’autre (Paris, 2005), 265–99. 74. Châtellier, Europe of the Devout, 114. Châtellier is referring here to a later development, but his analysis applies to the 1630s generally. 75. Constant, Les Conjurateurs, esp. chs 3, 5. 76. Andrew E. Barnes, ‘ “Playing the part of angels”: The Company of the Holy Sacrament and the struggle for stability in early modern France’, in Myron Guttman and Philip Benedict, eds, Early Modern Europe, from Crisis to Stability (Newark, DE, 2006), 171. 77. The historiography of the Company is extensive. See Joseph Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change in France 1580–1730 (New Haven, CT, and London, 2009), 373–93, and the references there, esp. 373, n. 10. 78. René Rapin, Histoire du jansénisme depuis son origine jusqu’en 1644, ed. Emmanuel Domenech (Paris 1861), 177–80. It should be noted that Lauzon was a dévot and very proJesuit (Bonney, Political Change, 121), while Bergier is a more obscure figure. For Rapin, it was Bérulle, then supposedly under Saint-Cyran’s thumb, who was anxious to recruit the leading political and ministerial figures into his ‘compagnie’. Rapin thus views the idea as part of a wider Jansenist conspiracy to dominate the French church. For a discussion of Rapin as a historian, see Jean Orcibal, Les Origines du jansénisme (Louvain and Paris, 1947–48), iii, 34–40. 79. René de Voyer d’Argenson, Annales de la Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, ed. HO BeauchetFilleau (Paris, 1900), 10–15. 80. These uncertainties as to the Company’s name, format and objectives are admitted by Argenson’s Annales, 16–17. 81. The best analysis of the spirituality of the Company is in Alain Tallon, La Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. Spiritualité et société (Paris, 1991). 82. Ibid., 20–3. 83. Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change, 373–82. 84. From Raoul Allier, La Cable des dévots (Paris, 1902), to Jean-Pierre Gutton, Dévots et société au xvii siècle (Paris, 2004), all the major studies have itemised and studied the Company’s numerous activities. 85. Emmanuel Chill, ‘Tartuffe, religion and courtly culture’, French Historical Studies, 3 (1963), 151–83. 86. What follows is based on Catherine Martin, Les Compagnies de la propagation de la foi (1632–1685). Paris, Grenoble, Aix, Lyon Montpellier. Étude d’un réseau d’associations fondé en France au temps de Louis XIII pour lutter contre l’hérésie des origines à la révocation de l’édit de Nantes (Geneva, 2000), a title which amply describes the book’s scope and ambition. The Company’s formal title was the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. 87. The convents and institutions were known variously as the Nouvelles Catholiques or the Union Chrétienne in different parts of France. See Martin, Compagnies de la propagation de la foi, chs 4 and 7. 88. Ibid., 56–7. 89. Argenson, Annales, 171. See Correspondance de Fénelon, i: Fénelon, sa famille et ses débuts (Paris, 1972), ch. 4, ‘Le Marquis de Fénelon-Magnac’, 57–80, esp. 63ff. 90. Edmond Albe, ‘La Confrérie de la passion (contribution à l’étude de la Compagnie du SaintSacrement)’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 3 (1912), 644–70. See also Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change, 388–9. 91. Bonney, Political Change under Richelieu and Mazarin, 311–17. 92. Argenson, Annales, 183–92, for the scale of the Company’s activities during the year 1659. 93. Ibid., 174, 187–8. The Orleans chapter was one of the first to be established in 1632; that of Blois in 1636. 94. Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change, 378–82 (and maps).

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95. Argenson, Annales, 205. 96. Allier, Cabale des dévots, 337–9. One of those senior church figures complaining to Mazarin about the Company was Archbishop Harlay of Rouen who, under Louis XIV, would become the dominant clerical politician until his death in 1695. 97. On Fouquet’s extensive network and family connections to the Company, see Daniel Dessert, Fouquet (Paris, 1987), 47–53, 189–95. 98. Allier, Cabale des dévots, ch. 20, ‘Dissolution’. 99. These judgements are summarised in Hours, L’Église et la vie religieuse dans la France moderne, xvie–xviiie siècle (Paris, 2000), 231–2. 100. Gutton, Dévots et société au xviie siècle. Construire le ciel sur la terre. 101. See Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse, part 3, ‘Public life and the Counter-reformation’; Kathryn Norberg, Rich and Poor in Grenoble 1600–1820 (Los Angeles, 1985), esp. chs 4–5. 102. Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change, 381–5. 103. See Allier, Cabale des dévots, esp. chs 14–15. Chapter 5: The Richelieu Effect 1. J. H. Elliott, ‘A question of reputation? Spanish foreign policy in the seventeenth century’, Journal of Modern History, 55 (1983), 475–83. See also idem, Richelieu and Olivares, ch. 3, ‘Restoration and reform’. 2. Robert Stradling, Philip IV and the Government of Spain (Cambridge, 1988), 141ff. (and notes) for one such instance. 3. Nicole Reinhardt, ‘The king’s confessor: changing images’, in Michael Schaich, ed., Monarchy and Religion. The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-century Europe (Oxford, 2007), 153–85, for a wide-ranging analysis. 4. For a comparative study of these developments see Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years’ War. 5. Joseph Bergin, ‘The royal confessor and his rivals in seventeenth-century France’, French History, 21 (2007), 187–204 6. Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years’ War, 65–79, 97–9. 7. See the comparisons in Reinhardt, ‘Spin doctor of conscience?’, 568–90. 8. Bonney, Political Change, 3–10. 9. See Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years’ War, 69, on the identity of the author of the pamphlets, which has only been clearly established in recent times. See also de Franceschi, Crise thélogico-politique, 606–7. 10. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 121–2. See also Étienne Thuau, Raison d’état et pensée politique à l’époque de Richelieu (Paris 1966), 180ff., for a study of the controversies and pamphlets of the early years of Richelieu’s ministry. 11. Avertissement au roi très chrétien (Francheville, 1625), unpaginated. 12. See the account in Blet, clergé de France et monarchie, i, 335ff. 13. See Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 145–7, for a discussion of the bishop of Chartres’s Déclaration. In fact, Étampes began to read out his declaration to the assembly, but thinking that it was in line with their expectations, the deputies dispensed him from reading the full document, and it was only later that they realised the extent of their mistake. 14. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i. 338ff., for the most detailed version of the genesis of the censure and the conflicts which followed it. 15. The conflicts, confusion and ambiguities of 1625–26 are extensively documented in Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, 267–369. See also Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld, 67–77; Michael K. Becker, ‘Episcopal unrest: gallicanism in the 1625 assembly of clergy’, Church History, 43 (1974), 65–77. 16. Bergin, La Rochefoucauld, 73–4. 17. Blet, Richelieu et l’église, 43–4. 18. Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years’ War, 72–5; Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 157–62. 19. De Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 638–53; Blet, Richelieu et l’église, 44–52. 20. De Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 658ff. 21. Quoted in Blet, Richelieu et l’église, 52. 22. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, p. 360ff.

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23. De Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 703–6. 24. Christian Jouhaud, Les Pouvoirs de la littérature. Histoire d’un paradoxe (Paris, 2000), 50–75; idem, ‘La Méthode de François Garasse’, in Luce Giard and Louis de Vaucelles, eds, Les Jésuites à l’âge baroque 1540–1640 (Grenoble, 1996), 243–60; idem, ‘1626: les Jésuites parisiens dans l’oeil du cyclone’, in Bernard Barbiche, Jean-Pierre Poussou and Alain Tallon, eds, Pouvoirs, contestations et comportements dans l’Europe moderne (Paris, 2005), 185–99. 25. See Orcibal, Saint-Cyran et son temps, 260–78. 26. Ibid., 279–80; Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 160. 27. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 151–2. 28. De Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 592ff., ‘L’émergence chaotique d’un étatisme chrétien’; Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 128–41. 29. Le Catholique d’Estat, ou Discours politique des alliances du Roy tres-Chrestien contre les calomnies des ennemis de son Estat, dédié au Roy par le sieur Du Ferrier (Paris, 1625), as quoted and translated by Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 129, 131, 132. 30. De Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 637–44. 31. Ibid., 598ff.; idem, ‘La Génèse française du catholicisme d’état et son aboutissement au début du ministériat de Richelieu. Les catholiques zélés à l’épreuve de l’affaire Santarelli et la clôture de la controverse autour du pouvoir pontifical au temporel (1626–1627)’, Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de France (2001), 19–63. 32. See Martimort, Gallicanisme de Bossuet, 106, for the record of the questions and answers of the confrontation between Jesuits and parlementaires, 13 March 1626. 33. De Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 669–71, who summarises the contents of a letter to Richelieu of June 1626 signed by twenty-four Paris theologians led by André Duval. 34. See ch. 8, p. 184. 35. For what follows, see P.-E. Puyol, Edmont Richer. Étude historique et critique sur la rénovation du gallicanisme au commencement du xviie siècle, 2 vols (Paris, 1876), ii, passim, esp. 164–73, 204–15, 352–6; de Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 693–5. 36. Edmond Préclin, ‘Edmond Richer (1559–1631)’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne, 5 (1930), 241–69, 321–36. 37. Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld, 76. 38. Quoted in Pierre, Père Joseph, 394, n. 32. 39. Puyol, Richer, ii, 352–5. 40. Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France (Princeton, NJ, 1980), 176; Christian Jouhaud, ‘Religion and politics in France during the period of the Edict of Nantes’, in Kathleen P. Long, ed., Religious Differences in France, Past and Present (Kirksville, MO, 2006), 73–90, at 77–8. 41. Bonney, Political Change, 286ff.; Jouanna, Devoir de révolte, 239–42. 42. Pierre, Monarchie ecclésiale, 361ff. 43. Joseph Bergin, ‘Richelieu and his bishops? Ministerial power and episcopal patronage under Louis XIII’, in Joseph Bergin and Laurence Brockliss, eds, Richelieu and his Age (Oxford, 1992), 175–202; Joseph Bergin, The Making of the French Episcopate 1589–1661 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1996), 242–3. 44. Wright, Divisions of French Catholicism, ch. 4 (i), ‘Richelieu’s leading example’, 33–56, for wider context. 45. The major modern studies are those of Thuau, Raison d’état et pensée politique à l’époque de Richelieu, and Church, Richelieu and Reason of State. The anti-Machiavellian tradition has been examined by Robert Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince. Anti-Machiavellism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), but none of the major authors considered in his study was French. 46. Françoise Hildesheimer, Relectures de Richelieu (Paris, 2000), esp. chs 2–3; idem, ‘Richelieu, cardinal-ministre’, Comptes-rendus des Séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (2006), 365–83, where Richelieu the raisonneur is distinguished from the Cartesian that he has often been assumed to have been. 47. Jouhaud, ‘Religion and politics in France’, 80–1. 48. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 116–20 (Fancan); 236–52, 436–44 (Balzac). Balzac is the key figure in Jouhaud, Pouvoirs de la littérature, which focuses essentially on his authorial strategies.

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49. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 459–60. 50. Ibid., 450; Thuau, Raison d’état et pensée politique, 318–34. Naudé’s Considérations politiques sur les coups d’état (1639) was not commissioned by Richelieu; it was published anonymously and was deliberately limited in its circulation. 51. Parsons, Church in the Republic, 98–100; Martimort, Gallicanisme de Bossuet, 87–99. 52. Gabriel Demante, ‘Histoire de la publication des livres de Pierre du Puy sur les libertés de l’église gallicane’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 5 (1843–4), 585–606. 53. Jérôme Delatour, ‘De Pithou à Dupuy’, 329–52; idem, ‘Le Cabinet des frères Dupuy’, Revue d’Histoire des Facultés de Droit et de la Science Juridique, 25–6 (2005–06), 157–200. See also Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 361ff. 54. For the text of the letter, see Blet, Richelieu et l’église, 268. 55. Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld, 77–8; Blet, Richelieu et l’église, 267–9. 56. See Demante, ‘Histoire’, 593, for Dupuy’s furious letter protesting against the behaviour of the Sainte-Geneviève assembly and, implicitly, the failure to defend the crown’s rights. 57. Martimort, Gallicanisme de Bossuet, ch. 7, ‘La France peut-elle tomber dans le schisme?’; Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 405–7. 58. Correspondance du nonce en France Ranuccio Scotti 1639–41, ed. Pierre Blet (Rome, 1965), for a view of the crisis by the papal diplomat who was prone to believe the worst about Richelieu’s intentions; the editor’s commentary on Scotti is at 45–51. See also Blet, Richelieu et l’église, ch. 10, ‘Au temps du nonce Scotti’. It is also possible that Richelieu’s efforts to reunite French Catholics and Protestants played a part in spreading rumours about a patriarchate, given the difficulty of gaining papal support for a reunion (see ch. 10, 238). 59. See Jean Orcibal, Origines du jansénisme, iii (Paris, 1948), 108–46, appendix 4, ‘Le patriarchat de Richelieu devant l’opinion’; Blet, Richelieu et l’église, 273ff. One of the concessions sought by Richelieu was a cardinal’s hat for Mazarin. 60. Pierre Blet, ‘La Congrégation des affaires de France de 1640’, in Mélanges Eugène Tisserant, 7 vols (Vatican City, 1964), iv, 59–105. 61. Demante, ‘Histoire’, 594–5. 62. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, 407–8. 63. There is no modern study of Marca to replace that of François Gaquère, Pierre de Marca (1594–1662), sa vie, ses oeuvres, son gallicanisme (Paris, 1932), which is unremittingly hostile to both gallicans and Jansenists. The doctoral dissertation by Thierry Issartel, ‘Politique, érudition et religion au grand siècle: autour de Pierre de Marca (1594–1662)’, 2 vols (Université de Pau, 2000), remains unpublished, but its author has generously allowed me to consult his work. 64. Gaquère, Pierre de Marca, chs 7–8, which deal with the composition and contents of the Concordia, while subsequent chapters consider Marca’s gallicanism in other texts and contexts. 65. Issartel, ‘Politique, érudition et religion’, ii, 544: ‘Monsieur de Marca . . . prend sujet pour écrire sur ce qu’en a dit Optatus, et faire voir que le Traité des libertés de l’église gallicane n’est pas le précurseur d’un schisme, au contraire, que ce sont maximes, usages qui ont toujours été approuvés par le Saint-Siège et maintenus par toute l’église gallicane lors que l’on les a voulu blesser . . .’. 66. Gaquère, Pierre de Marca, ch. 11, on the Roman censure and Marca’s retraction of 1647. For the French context here, see Bergin, Making of the French Episcopate, 85–6, 501–5. 67. See the evidence for his numerous activities in Gaquère, Pierre de Marca, esp. chs 12–18. 68. Gaquère, Pierre de Marca, 222–9. 69. See de Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 600–1. 70. Omer Talon, Mémoires, ed. J. F. Michaud and J. J. F. Poujoulat (Paris, 1839), 420. See also the comments in Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 416–17. 71. Françoise Hildesheimer, ‘Richelieu et Les Libertés de l’Église gallicane, ou le ressentiment du clergé de France’, in Clergé, identité et fidélité catholiques. Mélanges à la mémoire de Michel Péronnet, vol. i, ed. Joel Fouïlleron and Henri Michel (Montpellier, 2006), 122–38. See also Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 288–90; Demante, ‘Histoire’, 603 and n. 1. The previous commission for a refutation of Dupuy was given to François Bosquet, bishop of Montpellier, whose work was never published and perhaps never finished, despite the urging of successive assemblies of clergy.

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Chapter 6: The Fiscal Nexus and its Ramifications 1. Sean T. Perrone, ‘Assemblies of the clergy in early modern Europe’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 22 (2002), 45–56; idem, ‘The Castilian assembly of the clergy in the sixteenth century,’ Parliaments, Estates, and Representation, 18 (1998), 53–70; idem, ‘Clerical opposition in Habsburg Castile’, European History Quarterly, 31 (2001), 323–52. 2. Jotham Parsons, ‘Assemblies of the French clergy from Philip the Fair to Louis XIII’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, 22 (2002), 1–16, quotation at pp.1–2. 3. Ibid., 1–8, for a brief account of these earlier assemblies. 4. See Penny Roberts, ‘La Monarchie consultative, mythe ou réalité: les états généraux et le “père du peuple”, 1560–1614’, in Michel de Waele, ed., Lendemains de guerre (Laval, Québec, 2011), 89–108. For the wider political context of this question, see Major, Representative Government in Renaissance France. 5. The standard history of the assemblies before 1615 is Louis Serbat, Les Assemblées du clergé de France: origines, organisation, développement (Paris, 1906). It can be supplemented by Parsons, Church in the Republic, ch. 6, ‘Assemblies of clergy and absolute monarchy’, and especially by Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, livre 1, chs 1–2 in particular. Blet’s work (including its two successor volumes on the age of Louis XIV) offers a detailed, thoroughly researched and sustained analysis of post-1615 assemblies, and has been widely used throughout the present study. 6. Parsons, ‘Assemblies of the French clergy’, 4–5. 7. Tallon, La France et le concile de Trente, esp. 415–17. 8. Frank Tallett, ‘Church, state, war and finance in early modern France’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 36 (1993), 19–21. 9. There is no modern study of the church’s finances or their contribution to the royal treasury under François I and Henri II, so that comparison between before and after 1560 can be somewhat impressionistic. The 1581 Secret des Finances estimated the clergy’s annual revenues at 18 million livres, but its basis in fact is debatable. 10. Michaud, L’Église et l’argent, 11–13. 11. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, livre 1, ch. 1, ‘L’organisation financière du clergé’, pp. 137–72, for a clear synthesis of the main developments. 12. See the classic interpretation of Victor Carrière, ‘Les Épreuves de l’église de France au xvie siècle’, Revue d’Histoire de l’ Église de France, 11 (1925), 167–201, 332–62; 12 (1926), 168–96, 315–41; 13 (1928), 433–65; 16 (1930), 337–72. The process of revision was launched by Ivan Cloulas, ‘Les Aliénations du temporel ecclésiastique sous Charles IX et Henri III (1563–1587)’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 44 (1958), 5–56. On the problems posed by the aliénations, see Claude Michaud, ‘Les Aliénations du temporel ecclésiastique dans la seconde moitié du xvie siècle: quelques problèmes de méthode’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 67 (1981), 61–82. 13. Michaud, L’Église et l’argent, 146, for the higher percentage; James B. Collins, review of Michaud, American Historical Review, 98 (1993), 175, for the lower one. See also Martin Wolfe, The Fiscal System of Renaissance France (New Haven, CT, 1972), 125–6. 14. Michaud, L’Église et l’argent, epilogue. 15. The most detailed analysis, on which the following passages are based, is that of Michaud, L’Église et l’argent, who focuses on the operations of the receivers-general of the clergy. There is also extensive material in Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, livre i, chs 1–3, pp. 137–233. 16. Parsons, Church in the Republic, 228–9; Greengrass, Governing Passions, 286ff. 17. Briggs, Communities of Belief, 193–4, for comments on the evolution of the assemblies. 18. Perrone, ‘Assemblies of clergy in early modern Europe’, 46–8. 19. For this process, see Michaud, L’Église et l’argent, despite the fact that its central focus is on the successive receivers-general. On the wider significance of the French experience of the venality of office, see Jean Nagle, Un orgueil français: la vénalité des offices sous l’ancien régime (Paris, 2008). 20. See Richard Bonney, The King’s Debts (Oxford, 1982), for a narrative history as well as analysis of the royal finances. Françoise Bayard, Le Monde des financiers au xviie siècle (Paris, 1988), for a complementary ‘structural’ analysis. 21. On the receivers-general see Michaud’s exhaustive L’Église et l’argent. The clergy’s ability to control the receiver-general, who was usually a powerfully connected financier, varied

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

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considerably over time, especially as some of them had parallel operations within the royal finances, but the principle of such control was never dropped. Richelieu was not the only minister who hoped to raise money by making the post of receiver-general venal, but he was forced to drop the idea. In addition to Parsons, ‘Assemblies of the French clergy’, see Michel Péronnet, ‘Naissance d’une institution: les assemblées du clergé’, in André Stegman, ed., Pouvoir et institutions en Europe au xvie siècle (Paris, 1987), 249–61. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, livre 1, ch. 4, on the don gratuit; ibid., ch. 4, on the ‘trois millions pour La Rochelle’ of 1628. Philippe Dieudonné, La Paix clementine (Leuven, 2003), ch. 2, ‘Vers la rebellion des dix-neuf évêques’; Joseph Bergin, Crown, Church and Episcopate under Louis XIV (New Haven, CT, and London, 2004), 218–21. See Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, 83–11, for the cahiers of the clergy at the 1614 Estates-General. For a comparsion with the cahiers of the nobility and the third estate, see Hayden, France and the Estates-General of 1614, chs 10–11. Parsons, Church in the Republic, 238–9. The main study of this question remains Martin, Gallicanisme et réforme catholique, which can be complemented by Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, introduction, ch. 4. See above, 56–7. In addition to Martin, Gallicanisme et réforme catholique, 364–94, see Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, 112–33; Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld, 51–5. Marc Venard, ‘Catholicism and resistance to the Reformation in France’, in Benedict et al., eds, Reformation, Revolt and Civil War, 140. The principal study of the ‘tridentinisation’ of France after 1563 remains Martin, Gallicanisme et réforme catholique. Pierre Blet, ‘Le Concordat de Bologne et la réforme tridentine’, Gregorianum, 45 (1964), 241–79; Bergin, Making of the French Episcopate, ch. 9, ‘The episcopate and the wars of religion’. Greengrass, Governing Passions, 93–101, 286ff. See also Daniel Hickey, ‘Le Rôle de l’état dans la réforme catholique: une inspection du diocèse de Poitiers lors des grands jours de 1634’, Revue Historique, 307 (2002), 939–61. Henry Phillips, Church and Culture in Seventeenth-century France (Cambridge, 1997). Such relations were only restored in 1595–96, when ‘normal’ business (concerning benefices and other graces and dispensations) was resumed – Poncet, La France et le pouvoir pontifical, 638ff. The following passages are based essentially on Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, livre I, ch. 4 and livre II, chs 1, 4, 6–7. Ibid., livre 1, ch. 4, ‘Le don gratuit de 1621’. Ibid., livre 2, ch. 4, ‘Trois millions pour La Rochelle’. See Bonney, The King’s Debts, 161ff., for a careful analysis of the condition of the royal finances and the crown’s needs. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, livre 2, chs 6–7, for the most detailed account of the 1635 and 1641 financial negotiations. Hildesheimer, ‘Richelieu et Les Libertés de l’église gallicane’, 122–38. This is based on Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, livre III, ch. 3; livre IV, ch. 1. Claude Michaud, ‘L’Église et l’épargne sous l’ancien régime: les rentes du clergé de France’, in Françoise Hildesheimer, ed., L’Épargne sous l’ancien régime (Paris, 2004), 37–44. Ibid., 38. In addition to Blet’s extensive discussion of the Louytre case and its ramifications in Clergé de France et monarchie, i, 296–329, see Becker, ‘Episcopal unrest’, 65–77. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, 317–19. Ibid., i, 329–34. The document contained 146 articles. For the wider context of Franco-Lorraine relations and their evolution in the direction of antagonism, see Rainer Babel, Zwischen Habsburg und Bourbon: Aussenpolitik une europaeische Stellung Karls IV. Von Lotharingen und Bar vom Regierungsantritt bis zum Exil (1624–1634) (Sigmaringen, 1989). See also Marie-Catherine Vignal-Souleyreau, ‘Religion et politique en Lorraine au tournant des xvie et xviie siècles’, Europa Moderna, 1 (2010), 51–90, esp. 77ff. The most detailed accounts of the marriage and its subsequent vicissitudes is Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, livre ii, ch. 5, ‘Le mariage de Monsieur’, 398–445; idem, Richelieu et l’église, 145–84.

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48. In fact, the consultation went much further than that, and numerous members of Parisbased religious orders also submitted opinions alongside the most prominent professors of the theology faculty: Blet, Richelieu et l’église, 171–2. 49. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 4–20. Individual decisions were reviewed and re-validated where it was thought appropriate. 50. Ibid., ii, 20–34. As Blet notes, the don gratuit was the only important decision made by the 1641 assembly, but the examination and re-validation of individual decisions was designed to make the point on the formal level. 51. Ibid., ii, 56–61. 52. Ibid., ii, livre 3, ch. 4, ‘La bataille pour Retz: echec à Mazarin’. 53. Ibid., ii, 17. 54. See Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld, ch. 3, for a more detailed discussion of this phenomenon. 55. Ibid., 78–9. 56. Blet, Richelieu et l’église, 240–1. 57. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, 382–3, 400. 58. Ibid., i, 487–9; ii, 14; Blet, Richelieu et l’église, 241–2. 59. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 4–7, quotes from Mazarin’s letter to the bishop of Béziers before the elections, and refers to a subsequent letter to the archbishop of Narbonne thanking him for his successful efforts. 60. Quoted ibid., ii, 8, Jacques Gaudin to Abel Servien, plenipotentiary at the Congress of Westphalia, 8 July 1645. 61. Bergin, Crown, Church and Episcopate, 300. For the previous half-century, see idem, Making of the French Episcopate, 289–91. 62. Briggs, Communities of Belief, 211–13. 63. Bergin, Crown, Church and Episcopate, 132–4. 64. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, 381. Nuncio Bagno was clearly disappointed by the convening of the 1628 assembly, since the next meeting was not due until 1630, by which time he probably expected to have returned to Rome. Chapter 7: Obedient Rebels? The Protestants from Nantes to Nîmes 1. In addition to de Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, see Patterson, James I and Christendom, esp. chs 3–5 for the wider international context. 2. Patterson, James I and Christendom, ch. 8. The French deputies to the synod were banned from attending by Louis XIII. These disputes were fiercest in the Netherlands, where they also had political consequences, with the house of Orange supporting the hard-line ‘predestinarians’ against the more ‘liberal’ Gomarists. 3. For a brief summary, see Jean-Robert Armogathe, L’Antéchrist à l’âge classique. Exégèse et politique (Paris, 2005), esp. 100–11. 4. Brian G. Armstrong, ‘Semper reformanda: the case of the French Reformed church 1559– 1620’, in W. Fred Graham, ed., Later Calvinism. International Perspectives (Kirksville, 1994), 118–40, at 130–4. 5. The most thorough study of this subject, which has produced widely varying calculations over the centuries, is Philip Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France 1600–85 (Philadelphia, 1991), reprinted in idem, The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Huguenots, 1600–85 (Aldershot, 2001), 34–120. See the commentary by Philippe Chareyre, ‘Démographie et minorités protestantes’, Bulletin de la Société Historique du Protestantisme Français, 148 (2002), 867–89. 6. Benedict, ‘Huguenot population’, in Faith and fortunes, 118. 7. See Robert Sauzet, Contre-Réforme et Réforme catholique en Bas-Languedoc: le diocèse de Nîmes de 1598 à 1694 (Louvain, 1979), esp. 255–8, 389–93, for an account of these missions and their lack of success in a region where Protestantism was particularly strong. 8. Greengrass, Henri IV, 114. 9. Boisson and Daussy, Protestants, 158–9, 179–80, 312. 10. James I aspired to such a role, and his activities at various times raised suspicion in French court circles, especially during the 1610s. See Patterson, James I and Christendom, chs 4–5, for his connections with Protestant theologians and scholars, and their political ramifications.

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11. Arthur L. Herman, ‘Protestant churches in a Catholic kingdom: political assemblies in the thought of Philippe Duplessis-Mornay’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 21 (1990), 543–57. 12. See James S. Valone, Huguenot Politics 1601–1622 (Lewiston, 1994), for a study based in part on the activities of the political assemblies. 13. See Barbiche, ‘L’Édit de Nantes et son enregistrement’, in Paix des armes, paix des âmes, 251–60. This restriction did not mean that every episcopal town was exempt from having a Protestant church within its walls after 1598, since wherever Protestant churches/services existed in 1596 they were automatically continued; the restriction applied only where the episcopal town would have become the second place where the Protestants could worship per bailliage. 14. See Daniel Hickey, ‘Un mécanisme pour la résolution des conflits: les commissions pour l’exécution de l’édit de Nantes et leurs initiatives à La Rochelle 1599–1617’, in de Waele, ed., Lendemains de guerre (Laval, 2011), 69–88, at 73–4. 15. Daniel Ligou, Le Protestantisme en France de 1598 à 1715 (Paris, 1968), 21–2. 16. Finley-Croswhite, Henry IV and the Towns, 106, for the edict’s fate in the Protestant cities. 17. See pp. 53–4, above, for these tribunals. 18. Barbiche, ‘L’Édit de Nantes et son enregistrement’, 251–60. 19. See Hickey, ‘Un mécanisme pour la résolution des conflits’, 69–88. Elisabeth Rabut, Le Roi, l’église et le temple. L’exécution de l’édit de Nantes en Dauphiné (Grenoble, 1987), for an edition of the commissioners’ report of their activity in a major province. 20. Boisson and Daussy, Les Protestants, 150–1. 21. Gregory Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-century France (Phildelphia, 1993); Keith P. Luria, Sacred Boundaries. Religious Co-existence and Conflict in Early Modern France (Washington, DC, 2005), xxiii–xxxviii. 22. In addition to Hanlon and Luria, see Raymond Mentzer, Blood and Belief (West Lafayette, IN, 1994). 23. The best introduction to these tribunals is Margolf, Religion and Royal Justice, Introduction and ch. 1. 24. Ibid., 33–4. 25. Ibid., ch. 3, ‘Le remède de la sage oubliance’. 26. Stéphane Capot, Justice et religion en Languedoc au temps de l’édit de Nantes. La chambre de l’édit de Castres (1579–1679) (Geneva, 1998), 318, ‘la chambre a rempli durablement les objectifs que le roi lui avait assignés’. 27. Greengrass, Henri IV, 230–2. 28. Françoise Chevalier, ‘Les Difficultés d’application de l’édit de Nantes, d’après les cahiers des plaintes (1599–1660)’, in Michel Grandjean and Bernard Roussel, eds, Co-exister dans l’intolérance (Geneva, 1998), 303–20; Boisson and Daussy, Les Protestants, 155. 29. Briggs, Communities of Belief, 185–6, who suggests that the king’s zeal for conversion was misjudged in the case of ministers like Sully, who were much more valuable as Huguenots than as converts. 30. Greengrass, Henri IV, 111. 31. Ibid., 257–8. 32. De Franceschi, Crise théologico-politique, 373ff., 815–19. 33. Ibid., 377–83. 34. See Cabanel, Protestants en France, 509–10. 35. Ligou, Protestantisme en France, 54–9, for a damning view of the rivalries and incapacity of the Huguenot nobility to work together. 36. Herman, ‘Protestant churches in a Catholic kingdom’, 543–57, which is derived in part from the author’s unpublished dissertation on the 1611 assembly at Saumur. 37. As quoted by Issartel, Chemins, 186–7. 38. Daireaux, ‘Réduire les Huguenots’, 146ff., and Bonney, Political Change, 386, for the use of commissioners in Normandy. On the Saumur assembly, see Dubost, Marie de Médicis, 312–18. The grandees who kept the lid on Huguenot politics at Saumur in 1612 were rewarded in due course by the regency government. 39. Ligou, Protestantisme en France, 63–5. 40. Bonney, Political Change, 388. 41. Greengrass, ‘The Calvinist experiment in Béarn’, 119–42; Issartel, Chemins, chs 1–2.

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to pp. 165–71

42. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, 99–107, 234ff. 43. See above, p. 56. 44. Marca’s Advis pour la reunion de la terre de Béarn à la couronne de France was published in 1615, but may have circulated in manuscript form at the 1614 Estates-General. See Issartel, Chemins, 85–6. 45. Issartel, Chemins, 84ff.; Ligou, Protestantisme en France, 69. 46. Christian Desplat, ‘Louis XIII and the union of Béarn to France’, in Mark Greengrass, ed., Conquest and Coalescence. The Shaping of the State in Early Modern Europe’ (London, 1991), 68–83. 47. Issartel, Chemins, 171–7, shows that considerable agitation continued in Béarn into 1621, where efforts to block the political changes imposed by the Louis XIII were protected by La Force, until his final removal as governor in March 1621. 48. Missfelder, Das Andere der Monarchie, 192. 49. See Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 177–89. 50. Alan James, ‘Huguenot militancy and the seventeenth-century wars of religion’, in Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer, eds, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World 1559–1685 (Cambridge, 2002), 213–14; Eckhardt Birnstiel and Pierre-Jean Souriac, ‘Les Places de sûreté protestantes: îlots de refuge ou réseau militaire?’, in L’Édit de Nantes, sûreté et éducation (Montauban, 1999), 127–49. 51. Bonney, Political Change, 385; A. D. Lublinskaya, French Absolutism, the Crucial Phase 1620–1629 (Cambridge, 1968), 210–11. 52. Bonney, Political Change, 387; Bergin, The Rise of Richelieu, 261–2. 53. Jan-Friedrich Missfelder, ‘Zum König konvertieren: zur politischen Funktion von Konversionsberichten im Frankreich des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts’, in Ute Lotz-Heumann et al., eds, Konversion und Konfession in der frühen Neuzeit (Gütersloh, 2007), 147–69, much of which is focused on the conversion of Lesdiguières and, especially, the pamphlets that it generated. 54. Missfelder, ‘Zum König konvertieren’, 164, quoting a pamphlet entitled Le Lys d’allégresse, et l’olive de reconciliation of 1622. That Lesdiguières was nearly eighty years old made no difference to this kind of argument. 55. Governors of security towns knew that they could negotiate advantageous terms for themselves and their clients if they showed that they were willing to surrender the towns without resistance. 56. See Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ii, esp. ch. 9. For the most recent and systematic analysis of the key texts, see Paul-Alexis Mellet, Les Traités monarchomaques. Confusion des temps, résistance armée et monarchie parfaite (Droz, 2007). See also Frederic J. Baumgartner, Radical Reactionaries. The Political Thought of the French Catholic League (Geneva, 1976). 57. Hartmut Kretzer, ‘Remarques sur le droit de résistance des calvinistes français au début du xviie siècle’, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, 123 (1977), 54–75, at 61ff. 58. There is no full-scale modern study of the synods, partly because their records have not been edited. See Boisson and Daussy, Les Protestants, 179–80, 183–4, and Ligou, Protestantisme en France, ch. 3, for brief details. 59. Brockliss, French Higher Education, 247–9. 60. Cabanel, Protestants en France, 476–500, for a broad summary of the history of these institutions across the seventeenth century. 61. The most detailed modern study of the academies and specifically their intellectual influence is Hartmut Kretzer, Calvinismus und französische Monarchie im 17 Jahrhundert. Die politische Lehre der Akademien Sedan und Saumur, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Pierre du Moulin, Moyse Amyraut und Pierre Jurieu (Berlin, 1975), 45–7. It focuses primarily on the northern academies, their most influential professors and their political doctrines, but also contains valuable material of wider interest. 62. See Patterson, James I and Christendom, 186–8, on the reservations over this point in the responses of Du Moulin and James I to Cardinal du Perron in 1615. Kretzer, Calvinismus und französische Monarchie, 236–49 (for Robert Boyd, professor at Saumur). 63. It was given wide circulation when published in the quasi-official Mercure François of 1622. See Kretzer, Calvinismus und französische Monarchie, 105–30, for an extensive analysis of

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64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

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Tilenus’s political thought and activities. There are brief comments on him in Stankiewicz, Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-century France, 84. See Patterson, James I and Christendom, 158–63, 181–91, for Du Moulin’s (and others’) relations with the king. The account in Kretzer, Calvinismus und französische Monarchie, 131–93, focuses primarily on his teaching and writings. Kretzer, Calvinismus und französische Monarchie, 165, n. 144. The text of the ‘Response de Monsieur du Moulin à la letter de Monsieur de Balzac’, originally published in 1637, is in Kretzer, Calvinismus und Monarchie, appendix 3, 434–5. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician. The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (London, 2006), 125–7, 154–9. See Issartel, Chemins, 88–102. See Major, Representative Government in Early Modern France, 446–59, for the local rapports de force between monarchy, conseil souverain and political estates. Missfelder, Das Andere der Monarchie, 195–7; Issartel, Chemins, 178. As quoted in Issartel, Chemins, 184–5. The Avertissement was published in the Mercure François in 1622, but was probably in circulation before then. Missfelder, Das Andere der Monarchie, 219–21. The term ‘people’ was not used in order to promote democratic or ‘popular’ rule, but as a political concept that would bar the way to tyrannical rule or, if that existed, to undo it. Ibid., 221. Agrippa d’Aubigné, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Eugène Reaume and Caussade (Paris, 1877), ii, 35–69, ‘Du debvoir mutual des roys et des subjects’. He claimed that he wrote it in response to questions (‘thèses’) sent to him from Guyenne and other parts of France on political authority, obedience and relations with rulers (35–7). See also Missfelder, Das Andere der Monarchie, 224. R. J. M. van de Schoor, The Irenical Theology of Théophile Brachet de La Milletière (1588–1665) (Leiden, 1995), 18–20; Kretzer, Calvinismus und französische Monarchie, 123–6, for a more detailed analysis of Brachet’s arguments; Stankiewicz, Politics and Religion in Seventeenthcentury France, 82–4, has very little to say on these writings. Kretzer, ‘Remarques sur le droit de résistance des calvinistes français au début du xviie siècle’, 72. Ibid., 66–74; Klaus Malettke, ‘Huguenotten und monarchische Absolutismus in Frankreich’, Francia, 5 (1987), 299–319, at 309–11. Cabanel, Protestants en France, 483–4. See Duccini, Faire voir, faire croire, 391–7, for the scale of the publications; Missfelder, Das Andere der Monarchie, 308–9. See also Cabanel, Protestants en France, 514–15. James, ‘Huguenot militancy and the wars of religion’, 216–18. As Missfelder, Das Andere der Monarchie, 236, asserts. Ibid., 203–4. Moote, Louis XIII, chs 6–9. Stéphane-Marie Morgain, ‘La Figure du prince chrétien chez Pierre de Bérulle’, Revue d’Éthique et de Théologie Morale, 227 (2003), 265–88, at 273. Missfelder, Das Andere der Monarchie, 293. Victor-Lucien Tapié, La France de Louis XIII et de Richelieu (Paris, 1967), 116–17. Brian Sandberg, ‘ “Re-establishing the true worship of God”. Divinity and religious violence in France after the Edict of Nantes’, Renaissance and Reformation, 29 (2005), 144, for the terms of a 1621 appeal to Toulouse for assistance. Jeffrey K. Sawyer, Printed Poison. Pamphlet Propaganda, Faction Politics and the Public Sphere in Early Seventeenth-century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), 94–5; Dubost, Marie de Médicis, 592; Ligou, Protestantisme en France, 66–70. Pierre, Père Joseph, 189–94. Morgain, ‘La Figure du prince chrétien chez Bérulle’, 288. See the same author’s La Théologie politique de Pierre de Bérulle, for the most complete account of Bérulle’s theology and mysticism in their political implications. Bérulle’s writings were dense and difficult, but the major source of his influence on contemporaries was his magnetic personality and his role as a counsellor to a large number of major figures, political and religious, from the early 1610s onwards.

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to pp. 177–84

92. Olivier Chaline, La Bataille de la montagne blanche (8 novembre 1620). Une mystique chez les guerriers (Paris, 2000), for the impact of this ‘miraculous’ victory across Catholic Europe. For the reactions of Père Joseph and some French dévots, see Pierre, Père Joseph, 151–5. 93. Wright, Divisions of French Catholicism, 44, 49. 94. Tallon, La Compagnie du Saint-Sacrament, 19–22; Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change, 374–75. 95. Duccini, Faire voir, faire croire, 415–27; Pierre, Père Joseph, 204–10. 96. Tricoire, Mit Gott rechnen, 217–19; Missfelder, Das Andere der Monarchie, 293, 309. 97. Pierre, Père Joseph, 202–4, 248–9. 98. See Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 186. 99. See Philippe Chareyre, ‘Trente ans après: de la paix à la grâce, l’édit de Nîmes, juillet 1629’, in Paix des armes, paix des âmes, 343–70, for a close analysis of the last phase of the wars in 1629. 100. Bonney, Political Change, 388–9; Cabanel, Protestants en France, 528–36. Rohan also signed a treaty with Spain promising financial help, but it came too late to influence events. 101. Chareyre, ‘Trente ans après’, 346. 102. Ibid., 347–53 and 358, for a table comparing the two sets of articles, the texts of which are printed on pp. 359–68. Chapter 8: Jansenist Dilemmas 1. Pierre, Père Joseph, 255 and n. 56. Richelieu’s confidence in him may also have enabled him to settle some of his own scores – with Saint-Cyran, for example. 2. The bibliography of the subject is immense. See Catherine Maire, ‘Port-Royal’, in Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory, vol. i (New York, 1996), 301–51, esp. 344–8, for a brief ‘critical bibliography’ of studies published before approx. 1990; also valuable is the bibliography (with comments) in William Doyle, Jansenism (Houndmills, 2000), 96–104. 3. Briggs, Communities of Belief, 228–9. 4. Jean Orcibal, ‘Jansénius et Rome’, in idem, Etudes d’histoire et de littérature religieuses, 875ff. 5. Bruno Neveu, Érudition et religion aux xviie et xviiie siècles (Paris, 1994), contains stimulating essays on the place of Augustinian thought in seventeenth-century France. For the wider significance of the Fathers of the Church, see the major work by Jean-Louis Quantin, Le Catholicisme classique et les Pères de l’Eglise. Un retour aux sources (1669–1713) (Louvain and Paris, 1996). 6. The term ‘Molinism’ relates to the work of the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, whose book on the ‘concord’ of divine grace and human free will of 1588 sparked major controversy and led to the prolonged Roman De auxiliis debates of 1598–1609. 7. See A. D. Wright, The Counter-Reformation. Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World (London, 1982), especially the introduction, ‘The Counter-Reformation and Augustinian Europe’, and ch. 6, ‘Catholic reform and Augustinianism’. 8. For a Europe-wide analysis of these influences, see Thomas O’Connor, Irish Jansenists 1600–70. Religion and Politics in Flanders, France, Ireland and Rome (Dublin, 2008), esp. chs 2, 5–6, 7. 9. For an extensive commentary on the supposed ‘complot de Bourgfontaine’ of 1621–22, see Jean Orcibal, Les Origines du jansénisme, iii: Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de SaintCyran et son temps (Paris, 1948), appendix 3, 84, n. 5. 10. Paolo Broggio, La teologia e la politica. Controversie dottrinali, Curia romana e monarchia spagnola tra Cinque e Seicento (Florence, 2009), ch. 2, ‘L’ausilio della grazia e la libertà umana: l’avvio delle grandi dispute intra-eccleiastiche’, 45–81. The term de Auxiliis refers to the assistance (auxilium) of divine grace in attaining salvation that was available to the average Christian, and beyond that to the degree to which individuals can, or cannot, do anything to help themselves towards salvation. It also refers to the whole question of whether God has predestined individuals to salvation or damnation. 11. Broggio, La teologia e la politica, ch. 3, ‘La controversia De auxiliis tra Madrid e Roma’, for a careful analysis of the significance of these confrontations and of the consequences of their inconclusiveness (see p. 129); O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 53–62; Wright, Counter-Reformation, 13–14. 12. Jacques Grès-Gayer, Le Jansénisme en Sorbonne 1643–1646 (Paris, 1996), 15.

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13. Albert de Meyer, Les Premières Controverses jansénistes en France (1640–1649) (Louvain, 1917), 29ff.; Grès-Gayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 15–16; O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 199. 14. Sedgwick, Travails of Conscience, 125. 15. Orcibal, Saint-Cyran et son temps, 334–75; O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, ch. 6. These controversies are also studied in detail in Anthony F. Allison, ‘Richard Smith’s gallican backers and Jesuit opponents’, Recusant History, 18 (1987), 329–401; 19 (1989), 234–85; 20 (1990), 164–206. 16. Jean-Pascal Gay, Morales en conflit. Théologie et polémique au grand siècle (1640–1700) (Paris, 2011), esp. 111–14. This is the most comprehensive account of the rise of casuistry and probabilism in France from the 1620s onwards. 17. Wright, Divisions of French Catholicism, 121–84, for a detailed account of the divisions in question. See also Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years’ War, ch. 6. 18. Meyer, Les Premières Controverses jansénistes, 86–120, ‘L’Augustinus’; O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 176. 19. See Orcibal, ‘Jansénius et Rome’, 880. 20. Lucien Ceyssens, ‘L’Anti-janséniste Isaac Habert (1598–1668)’, Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 42 (1972), 237–305; Meyer, Les Premières Controverses jansénistes, 139–42; Daniella Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism and Jansenism. Louis XIV and the Nuns of PortRoyal (Cambridge, 2011), 38–40. Habert, who had already written in support of Richelieu (see above, p. 129), was théologal (canon-theologian) of Notre-Dame, became bishop of Vabres during the 1640s, and actively solicited his fellow bishops’ support for the condemnation of the five propositions in 1650. 21. See above, ch. 6. 22. Meyer, Les Premières Controverses jansénistes, 121–37; Grès-Gayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 23. 23. Meyer, Les Premières Controverses jansénistes, 132–4; Grès-Gayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 24, n. 4. The suspicion was that the text of the bull had been altered by the strongly pro-Jesuit Inquisition ‘assessor’ in Rome, Francesco Albizzi, before it was published. See Lucien Ceyssens, Le Cardinal Francesco Albizzi (1593–1684). Un cas important dans l’histoire du jansénisme (Rome, 1977). 24. Meyer, Les Premières Controverses jansénistes, part 2, chs 3–6; Grès-Gayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 25–6. 25. O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 68–70, 201–10. 26. Gay, Morales en conflit, 132–3. In early 1643, the College of Clermont demanded its incorporation into the University of Paris: this would have enabled its students to acquire university degrees, which is precisely what the university had energetically opposed since the 1560s. 27. Sedgwick, Travails of Conscience, ch. 7, for a clear account of Arnauld’s early career; Meyer, Les Premières Controverses jansénistes, 222–43, deals specifically with Frequent communion; Grès-Gayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 32. 28. Françoise Hildesheimer, ‘Richelieu et le jansénisme, ou ce que l’attrition veut dire’, in Hartmut Lehmann et al., eds, Jansenismus, Quietismus, Pietismus (Göttingen, 2002), 11–39. 29. Meyer, Les Premières Controverses jansénistes, 422–36; Grès-Gayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 32, notes 4–5, for a list of the names. 30. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 175–6. 31. Meyer, Les Premières Controverses jansénistes, part 3, for the polemics of 1647–48; GrèsGayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 59–84, for detail on the dispute launched by Cornet in 1649 and its context. 32. Grès-Gayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 59ff., esp. 70–3; Pierre Blet, ‘Louis XIV et les papes aux prises avec le jansénisme’, Archivum Historiae Pontificiae, 31 (1993), 109–92; 32 (1994), 65–148 – see part i, 112–13, where the parlement’s intervention is regarded as partisan. 33. Grès-Gayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 71. 34. Ibid., 84. 35. See Gaquère, Pierre de Marca, 262–3, for one example of that campaign, the letters of solicitation and Marca’s replies to them. 36. Grès-Gayer, Gallicanisme de Sorbonne, 1–20; Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’, part i, 114–16, which includes a French translation of the petition to the Pope (115–16). 37. Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme (i)’, 114. 38. Grès-Gayer, Gallicanisme de Sorbonne, 98–9.

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334 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

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to pp. 190–7

Poncet, La France et le pouvoir pontifical, 9. Grès-Gayer, Gallicanisme de Sorbonne, 99ff., esp. 105–7. Ibid., 109–10. O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, ch. 7, esp. pp. 188–95, 332. The most documented and detailed account of how the Jansenist problem was handled in both France and Rome in the 1650s is in Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 175–220, 300–25, and the same author’s almost book-length, two-part article, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’. Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’ (i), 119–20. He succeeded the philo-Jansenist Charles de Montchal as archbishop of Toulouse in 1654. A modern study of Marca is lacking, but see Gaquère, Pierre de Marca, ch. 16, ‘Marca et le jansénisme’, who applauds his anti-Jansenism. Albert N. Hamscher, The Parlement of Paris after the Fronde 1653–1673 (Pittsburgh, PA, 1976), 109ff.; idem, ‘The Parlement of Paris and the social interpretation of early French Jansenism’, Catholic Historical Review, 63 (1977), 392–410, at 399–400. Grès-Gayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 120–3; Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’ (i), 120–3. Grès-Gayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 134, n. 6. Hamscher, Parlement after the Fronde, 112–13; idem, ‘Parlement of Paris and early French Jansenism’, 399; Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’ (i), 124. Grès-Gayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, ch. 3, for a detailed analysis and commentary. Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’ (i), 126ff. Paule Jansen, Le Cardinal Mazarin et le mouvement janséniste français 1653–1659 (Paris, 1967), 210–23, ‘Mémoire envoyé à Son Éminence par M de Marca, Archevêque de Toulouse, fait le 9 avril 1654’, in which Marca summarises the extensive debates held during the previous month. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 307–8. See Neveu, L’Erreur et son juge, ch. 3, ‘Ars censoria’. Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’ (i), 135–6. Ibid., 149–55. Sedgwick, Travails of conscience, 158; Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’ (i), 169, quoting Arnauld’s Lettre circulaire envoyée à messieurs les prélats. Hamscher, Parlement after the Fronde, 114–16; idem, ‘Parlement of Paris and early French Jansenism’, 402–3, 407. Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’ (i), 154–5. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 214–15 for the genesis of the formulary; Grès-Gayer, Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 137. Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’ (i), 153. Ibid., 149, 152; idem, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 304–5. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 303; idem, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’ (i), 163–4. The Holy Office in Rome was explicit in its instructions to prevent the assembly from thinking of itself as a national council. As Blet adds, ‘là pourtant, était le point crucial’. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 312. Ibid., ii, 304–5, n. 82. Ibid., ii, livre iii, ch. 4, ‘La bataille pour Retz: echec à Mazarin (1655–1657)’, pp. 120–74. Dieudonné, La Paix clémentine, 20–2. See Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’(i), 162ff. Ibid., 149, 152. Ibid., 169–91; Dieudonné, La Paix clémentine, ch. 1. Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism and Jansenism, 138. The bishops of Beauvais and Angers (Henri Arnauld, brother of Antoine) also refused to impose the formulary in 1661: see Dieudonné, La Paix clémentine, 48, nn. 188–9. Kostroun, Feminism, absolutism and Jansenism, 176–7; Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’(i), 178–82. Pavillon’s letter was suppressed by decree of the Paris parlement, and was the subject of an extensive exploration of church–state bonds by the avocat-général, Denis Talon, which angered the assembly of clergy of 1666. See also Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 326–7. Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism and Jansenism, 175–9.

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to pp. 197–202

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72. Dieudonné, La Paix clémentine, ch. 1, the best account of these years and the tortuous negotiations. See also Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’ (ii), passim, which deals with the period 1665 to 1669. 73. Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’ (ii), 87–9. 74. Philippe Dieudonné, ‘Ambitions gallicanes, résistances ultramontaines. Les lendemains turbulents de la paix clémentine (1669)’, in Jean-Louis Quantin and Jean-Claude Waquet, eds, Papes, princes et savants dans l’Europe moderne (Geneva, 2007), 219–35, at 222. 75. Detailed studies of these negotiations in Dieudonné, La Paix clémentine, chs 3–5; Blet, ‘Louis XIV, les papes et le jansénisme’ (ii), 65–148. 76. Gay, Morales en conflit, esp. chs 3–4, for the best presentation of these debates and their ‘publicity’. 77. Grès-Gayer, Gallicanisme en Sorbonne, 19. 78. Jean-Louis Quantin, ‘A godly Fronde? Jansenism and the mid-seventeenth-century crisis of the French monarchy’, French History, 25 (2011), 473–91, at 476. 79. Grès-Gayer, Gallicanisme en Sorbonne, 100–17. 80. See above, p. 150ff. 81. Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism and Jansenism, 102. 82. For the broad context of political expression during the Fronde, see Hubert Carrier, Le Labyrinthe de l’état. Essai sur le débat politique en France au temps de la Fronde (1648–1653) (Paris, 2004). The most penetrating discussion of Jansenism as a political problem in these years is Quantin, ‘A godly Fronde?’, 473–91. 83. See the commentary in René Taveneaux, Jansénisme et politique (Paris, 1965), 16; Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 263. 84. Quoted by Sedgwick, Travails, 159. The letter was a reply to Robert Arnauld d’Andilly. 85. The term, which was coined by Sainte-Beuve, has been the most fully developed by Golden, The Godly Rebellion. 86. Much of the following discussion is based on Quantin, ‘A Godly Fronde?’, which is the most extensive critique to date of the idea of such a Fronde. 87. Sedgwick, Travails, 143. 88. Hamscher, ‘Parlement of Paris and early French Jansenism’, 405ff. 89. Sedgwick, Travails, 141; Quantin, ‘A godly Fronde?’, 481–2. 90. Quantin, ‘A godly Fronde?’, 476. 91. Georges Lacour-Gayet, L’Éducation politique de Louis XIV, 2nd edn (Paris, 1923), remains the best account, although the question of the king’s religious education has not been satisfactorily addressed, a lacuna which has often led to unsubstantiated claims about his beliefs and behaviour. 92. See Maire, ‘Port-Royal’, 301–51. Much has been added since then, notably Jean Lesaulnier and Anthony McKenna, eds, Dictionnaire de Port-Royal (Paris, 2004), as well as the works quoted in the notes that follow here. 93. Louis Cognet, La Réforme de Port Royal (Paris, 1950), remains essential reading, while Sedgwick, The Travails of Conscience, provides a subtle account which connects Port-Royal and its reform to the society in which the Arnauld family moved. There is much valuable analysis in Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism and Jansenism, 24–60. After 1626, Angélique Arnauld left Port-Royal for almost a decade to found and lead, along with her spiritual director, Sébastien Zamet, bishop of Langres, a new religious order, the Institute of the Holy Sacrament. When that experiment collapsed in acrimony in 1635, she returned to PortRoyal. These events and disagreements subsequently became a source of criticism of PortRoyal as a nest of heresy. 94. Lesaulnier and McKenna, Dictionnaire de Port-Royal, 939–41, with a list of names; Sedgwick, Travails, 133. 95. Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism and Jansenism, 43–9. 96. Sedgwick, Travails, especially chs 5–6 and 8, presents the story from an Arnauld point of view, but that does not detract from its usefulness and insights, which are based on a close reading of the letters that family members wrote to each other. See also Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism and Jansenism, 73. 97. Sedgwick, Travails, 152. Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism and Jansenism, 44–9. In fact, the nuns of Port-Royal took communion far more frequently than might be inferred from the teaching of Saint-Cyran and Arnauld on the subject.

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to pp. 203–11

98. W. Ritchie Newton, Sociologie de la communauté de Port Royal (Paris, 1999), which is based on the author’s unpublished dissertation of 1975. See also Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism and Jansenism, 81–3. During the Fronde, Port-Royal took in very large numbers of nuns from convents/abbeys in the Paris region fleeing military violence; many of these nuns opted to join Port-Royal thereafter. 99. Until the mid-1620s, Port-Royal had belonged to the Cistercian order, but thereafter it became independent, placing itself directly under the archbishop of Paris’s authority. 100. Lesaulnier and McKenna, Dictionnaire de Port Royal, 801. His father was a household official to the cardinal and, during the late 1630s and early 1640s the future archbishop seems to have held ideas quite different to those of Richelieu, even claiming that he would defend Arnauld’s views against the cardinal. 101. Quantin, ‘A godly Fronde?’, 477. 102. This is the main thrust of Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism and Jansenism, chs 4–5. 103. Ibid., 164–9. Sedgwick, Travails, 181–3. 104. Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism and Jansenism, 119–37; Sedgwick, Travails, 191–2. 105. Jean-Louis Quantin, ‘De la rigueur au rigorisme: les Avvertenze ai confessori de Charles Borromée dans la France du xviie siècle’, Studia Borromaica, 20 (2006), 195–51; idem, ‘A Godly Fronde?’, 477–8. 106. For the example of wills made by bishops – but there are many others – see Joseph Bergin, ‘Les Évêques du grand siècle devant la mort’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 94 (2008), 263–81. 107. Jean Orcibal, ‘L’Idée de l’église chez les catholiques du xviie siècle’, in idem, Études d’histoire et de littérature religieuses (Paris, 1997), 337–55, at 353. Chapter 9: A New Gallican Age? 1. The French term grands jours refers to the occasional sessions held by the parlements outside their usual place of residence in order to deal with local disorders and restore the administration of justice. 2. The bibliography on this subject is immense, but see Bonney, Political Change, ch. 1, and Thierry Sarmant and Matthieu Stoll, Régner et gouverner. Louis XIV et ses ministres (Paris, 2010), chs 1–2. 3. See Bergin, ‘The royal confessor and his rivals in seventeenth-century France’, 187–204. 4. In the absence of a study of the royal religious education comparable to that on his political education in Lacour-Gayet, L’Éducation politique de Louis XIV, see Maral, Le Roi-soleil et Dieu, ch. 1. 5. Briggs, Communities of Belief, 211–16. 6. The only detailed study is that by Grès-Gayer, Le Gallicanisme de Sorbonne. 7. Ibid., 361. 8. Bergin, Crown, Church and Episcopate, 89–91, 96–102. 9. Harlay was made an honorary doctor at his own insistence on becoming archbishop, as it gave him a normal ‘entrée’ to the faculty. 10. Grès-Gayer, Gallicanisme de Sorbonne, 129–88, for a detailed study of these controversies. 11. Paul Sonnino, Louis XIV’s View of the Papacy (1661–1667) (Los Angeles, 1966), focuses on the negative elements of the Franco-papal relationship during the 1660s. The Corsican guard incident of 1662 was escalated into a full-scale affair, for which Alexander VII had to formally apologise to Louis XIV. 12. The most extensive study is by Grès-Gayer, Gallicanisme de Sorbonne, 69–128. 13. In addition to Grès-Gayer’s analysis (previous note), see Martimort, Gallicanisme de Bossuet, 216–54, and idem, Le Gallicanisme, 79–82, for the text and a brief analysis of the six articles. Le Tellier’s son, Charles-Maurice, the future archbishop of Reims (1671–1710), was a theology student in Paris at this juncture, so the minister’s interest in the faculty’s affairs had an added personal dimension (Grès-Gayer, Gallicanisme de Sorbonne, 104). 14. Grès-Gayer, Gallicanisme de Sorbonne, 110: ‘it was not a question of doctrinal exposition or of articles of faith, but of clarifying a number of individual points which were wrongly attributed to the faculty’. 15. Ibid., 69–128, for a detailed chronology and analysis of this ‘année charnière’ in the faculty’s history.

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16. Ibid., 129–88, provides a close analysis of these censures and their significance; Martimort, Gallicanisme de Bossuet, 236–73. For the wider significance of the censure of laxist morality, see Gay, Morales en conflit, 271–83. 17. See Hamscher, Parlement after the Fronde, 147–9. His father Omer Talon was steeped in the parlement’s political values, which he transmitted to his son via his testament moral of mid1652, republished in Joël Cornette, La Mélancolie du pouvoir. Omer Talon et le procès de la raison d’état (Paris, 1998), 415–22. 18. Grès-Gayer, Gallicanisme de Sorbonne, 103. 19. The French use of the word sacre for the coronation act was virtually an invitation to think of the king of France as a consecrated person with quasi-sacred, priestly authority. See Marc Bloch’s fundamental Les Rois thaumaturges: étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (Paris, 1924). 20. Talon’s speech is considered in detail in Blet, ‘Louis XIV et les papes et le jansénisme’ (i), 178–82. 21. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 330. 22. Ibid., ii, 330–2. 23. See Cornette, Mélancolie du pouvoir, part ii, and esp. 215–27. 24. In addition to Cornette, Mélancolie du pouvoir, 219–22 (‘Les grands jours, instruments de la réforme catholique’) see Hickey, ‘Le Rôle de l’état dans la réforme catholique’, 939–61. 25. The most famous account of the grands jours is that of Esprit Fléchier, future bishop of Nîmes, who accompanied one of the magistrates to Clermont: Mémoires de Fléchier sur les grands jours d’Auvergne en 1665, ed. Fernand Dauphin (Paris, 1930). See also Albert N. Hamscher, ‘Les Réformes judiciaires des grands jours d’Auvergne 1665–1666’, Cahiers d’Histoire, 21 (1976), 425–32; Olivier Chaline, Le Règne de Louis XIV (Paris, 2005), 496–9. A brief recent account from a local religious perspective is Bernard Dompnier, ‘Clermont en 1665: un diocèse à l’écart de la Réforme catholique?’, in Fléchier et les grands jours d’Auvergne (Tübingen, 2000), 33–53. 26. The clergy did not accept the king’s view that Talon had done enough in his response to their criticism to earn their clemency. 27. See Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 332–37. 28. Nicholas Lyon-Caen, ‘La Justice ecclésiastique en France à l’époque moderne. Laïcisation ou sécularisation?’, in Philippe Büttgen and Christophe Duhamelle, eds, Religion ou confession. Un bilan franco-allemand sur l’époque moderne (xvie–xviiie siècles) (Paris, 2010), 253–80, for some useful comments on this terra incognita. 29. For a clear historical explanation of the régale itself and the prehistory of the conflict up to the early 1670s, see Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i, 90–2; ii, 337–41; idem, Les Assemblées du clergé et Louis XIV de 1670 à 1693 (Rome, 1972), 117–31. 30. Paul Sonnino, ‘Louis XIV’s religious policy and his guerre de Hollande’, in Quantin and Waquet, eds, Papes, princes et savants dans l’Europe moderne, 191–200. 31. Even before Richelieu’s settlement of 1638, the crown had not taken the revenues of vacant bishoprics, which went in fact to the Sainte Chapelle. Richelieu ‘bought out’ the Sainte Chapelle in 1641, so that the revenues could be handed back to the incoming bishop. In 1673 it was proposed to retain a percentage of the revenues for use in supporting ex-pastors of the Protestant churches who had converted to Catholicism – this was the notorious ‘caisse des conversions’. See Blet, Assemblées du clergé et Louis XIV, 121–2. 32. See Gaquère, Pierre de Marca, 160–9. Marca had written several times about the régale before 1655. 33. The régale is mentioned once, but not discussed, in the Correspondance du nonce en France Fabrizio Spada (1674–1675), ed. Ségolène de Dainville-Barbiche (Rome, 1982), letter no. 992. 34. For the Roman and Jansenist connections, see Bruno Neveu, Sébastien-Joseph du Cambout de Pontchâteau et ses missions à Rome d’après sa correspondance et des documents inédits (Rome, 1969). Further evidence for these influences in the Correspondance du nonce en France Angelo Ranuzzi 1683–1688, ed. Bruno Neveu, 2 vols (Rome, 1973). 35. In addition to Blet, Assemblées du clergé et Louis XIV, see idem, ‘Le Camus et le conflit de la régale’, in Le Cardinal des montagnes. Étienne Le Camus évêque de Grenoble (Grenoble, 1974), 65–86, and idem, ‘Fidèles au pape, fidèles au roi’, in Hommage à Roland Mousnier. Clientèles et fidélités à l’époque moderne (Paris, 1981), 315–32, where Le Camus is compared with Archbishop Le Tellier of Reims.

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to pp. 217–27

36. Blet, Assemblées du clergé et Louis XIV, 131–40, for the turmoil in the dioceses of Alet and Pamiers. 37. Blandine Wagner, ‘Le Sceptre contra la crosse. La production favorable à la régale (1673– 1682)’, in Positions des thèses, École des Chartes, 2009 (http://theses.enc.sorbonne.fr/2009/ wagner). 38. This and subsequent paragraphs rely mainly on the exhaustive account of the assembly and the political and diplomatic manoeuvres of before and after 1682 in Blet, Assemblées du clergé et Louis XIV, chs 4–12, 15–16. 39. Martimort, Gallicanisme de Bossuet, 392–427, for an extended analysis of the sermon on church unity. This is the classic study of Bossuet’s ecclesiology. See also the comments on Bossuet’s thinking by Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition, 175–8. 40. Grès-Gayer, Gallicanisme de Sorbonne, 250ff. 41. Orcibal, Louis XIV contre Innocent XI. 8, n. 31. 42. One reason was that the assembly might proceed to attack the so-called ‘laxist’ moral theology of the day, since figures like Le Tellier and Bossuet were rigorists. 43. See Blet, Assemblées du clergé et Louis XIV, chs 14–15, for an account of the 1685 and 1690 assemblies of clergy which were denied the possibility of debating the problem of relations with Rome. 44. Bergin, Crown, Church and Episcopate, ch. 7, ‘a decade of crisis’, which focusses on the question of episcopal patronage during the decade after 1682. 45. Innocent XI decreed that he would not receive the ambassadors of states that refused to renounce these privileges, but Louis XIV was the only ruler who refused to comply. The new French ambassador to Rome in 1687, Lavardin, entered the city with a large retinue of armed men, for which he was excommunicated and the church of Saint-Louis-des-Français placed under a papal interdict. See Correspondance du nonce Angelo Ranuzzi, i, 146–57. 46. Pierre Blet, ‘Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège à la lumière de deux publications récentes’, Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 12 (1974), 309–37, at 319–24. 47. Orcibal, Louis XIV contre Innocent XI, 13–47, is the key study. 48. Grès-Gayer, Gallicanisme de Sorbonne, 314–16. 49. Orcibal, Louis XIV contre Innocent XI, 75–6, 82–8. Innocent XI also refused to endorse Louis XIV’s candidate for the archbishopric of Cologne in 1687, which was taken as a direct affront, and led to the French occupation of Avignon and threats of military intervention in Italy. 50. For the text of the letter of ‘satisfaction’ over the gallican articles, see Blet, Assemblées du clergé et Louis XIV, 570. 51. Ibid., 552–67, ‘Grammaire et diplomatie’, for a fascinating account of this imbroglio and the genesis of the contorted text that incoming bishops would sign. 52. Ibid., 573, for the text of the letter of 14 Sept. 1693. 53. Ibid., 576–8; idem, Le Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège de 1695 à 1715 (Vatican City, 1989), 4–12. 54. Marcel Lachiver, Les Années de misère (Paris, 1991), ch. 5, esp. 203–8. 55. François Bluche and Jean-François Solnon, La Véritable Hiérarchie sociale de l’ancienne France. Le tarif de la première capitation (1695) (Geneva, 1983). The clergy were formally exempted from the first payment of the capitation, but were expected to pay more via the don gratuit. 56. The target of the grumbling was Harlay, who pre-empted discussion and appeared too ready to fulfil the court’s demands for money. See Blet, Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège, 30–5. 57. Ibid., 37, for contemporary comments. 58. Ibid., 37–60, on the edict and its repercussions. Chapter 10: A Huguenot Half-century 1. Émile-G. Léonard, History of Protestantism, vol. ii (London, 1967; original French edn, 1961). The author’s views on the subject were not new in 1961. 2. Ligou, Protestantisme en France, 101. 3. Menna Prestwich, ‘The Huguenots under Richelieu and Mazarin 1629–1661: a golden age?’, in Irene Scouloudi, ed., Huguenots in Britain and their French Background (London, 1987),

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

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175–97. For a more specific presentation of the same argument, see idem, ‘Patronage and the Protestants in France, 1598–1661: architects and painters’, in Jean Mesnard and Roland Mousnier, eds, L’Âge d’or du mécenat 1598–1661 (Paris, 1985), 77–88. Daireaux, ‘Réduire les Huguenots’, 19–42, for a survey of the historiography. The two general deputies, initially proposed by the national assembly or synod, were reduced to one in 1644, and appointed unilaterally by the crown after the Fronde. See Boisson and Daussy, Les Protestants, 161, for the list of deputies 1601–85. The subject of rebellion – aristocratic, popular and urban – has been extensively studied. See Roland Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia and China (London, 1971), part i; William Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1997); Jean Nicolas, La Rébellion française 1661–1789 (Paris, 2002). Dictionnaire de biographie française, ed. J. Balteau et al. (Paris 1933– ), viii, cols 936–7, for a brief notice on Josué de Chavagnac, one of the most inveterate rebels of the 1630s. I owe the information on his military activities in the late 1630s and early 1640s to the unpublished Oxford doctoral dissertation of Charles Gregory on opposition to Richelieu from 1638 to 1642. Such dilemmas are a major theme in Raymond Mentzer, Blood and Belief, 72–80, which discusses the military careers of the southern Protestant family, the Lacgers from Castres. David Parrott, Richelieu’s Army (Cambridge, 2001), esp. 489–90, for Rohan, Bouillon and Turenne; idem, ‘Richelieu, the grands and the French army’, in Joseph Bergin and Laurence Brockliss, eds, Richelieu and his Age (Oxford, 1992), 135–75, esp. 170–1. Helmut Kötting, Die Ormée (1651–1653). Gestaltende Kräfte und Personenverbindungen der Bordelaiser Fronde (Münster, 1983), 127–36, 197–201, notes that the Huguenot churches’ synodal system made them antipathetic to the more ‘democratic’ or ‘republican’ character of English congregationalism. Amyraut’s political thought is analysed by Kretzer, Calvinismus und französische Monarchie, 282–363, esp. 314ff., who shows that in 1650 Amyraut was also striving to dissociate French Protestants from their English regicide counterparts. See Cabanel, Protestants en France, 491–2. Elisabeth Labrousse, ‘La Doctrine politique des Huguenots 1630–1685’, in eadem, Conscience et conviction. Études sur le xviie siècle (Oxford, 1996), 85. For the text of the declaration, Élie Benoist, Histoire de l’édit de Nantes, 5 vols (Delft, 1693–5), iii, part 1, 38. Bonney, Political Change, 397; idem, ‘La France après la paix de Westphalie’, in Lucien Bély, ed., L’Europe des traités de Westphalie (Paris, 2000), 147–62, at 152. Capot, Justice et religion, 83. See Philip A. Knachel, England and the Fronde (Ithaca, NY, 1967), ch. 9, ‘The partnership of Mazarin and Cromwell’. Capot, Justice et religion, 84–6. Bonney, Political Change, 398–9. According to the declaration, it had never been the crown’s intention to undo the status quo ante 1652 which, it was claimed, had merely reaffirmed decisions taken during Louis XIII’s reign. Luc Daireaux, ‘Réflexions sur la politique de “réduction” du roi-soleil, 1643–1685’, Bulletin Annuel de l’Institut d’Histoire de la Réformation, 31 (2009–10), 35–51; Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 360–1. Bonney, Political Change, 400. This analysis relies mainly on Bonney, Political Change, esp. part 1, which remains the most comprehensive study of the intendants. Ibid., ch. 6, ‘Political attitudes’, is the best guide here. A. D. Lublinskaya, Lettres et mémoires addressés au chancelier Séguier (1633–1649) (Moscow and Leningrad, 1966), no. 112, p. 140, letter to M. Ciron, 2 June 1645. The recipient of this letter was probably Jean-Baptiste de Ciron, who later became first president of the Toulouse parlement. Bonney, Political Change, 128–9, 395–6, for examples of Balthazar’s frequently misjudged and disastrous authoritarian behaviour as an intendant; it may well be that his accusations of revolt against the Huguenots were designed to disguise his own failings. Institutional co-operation with parlements was more problematic, since they were denied the right to register the intendants’ commissions, which in formal terms made them rivals rather than allies. See Bonney, Political Change, ch. 11, ‘The sovereign courts’.

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to pp. 232–7

25. See Alfred Rebelliau, ‘Un episode de l’histoire religieuse du xviie siècle. La Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement et les protestants’, Revue des Deux Mondes, n.s., 17 (1903), 103–35, esp. p. 125ff. 26. Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse 1463–1789, esp. ch. 6, which examines the relations between magistrates and dévots within the city and especially its law courts. The Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith did not develop in Toulouse or the south-western provinces generally. 27. For a detailed account of the assemblies’ successive interventions, see Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, i , 99–106, 235–54, 260–4, 370–98; ii, 342–88. 28. See Capot, Justice et religion, ch. 3; Eckhart Birnstiel, ‘Les Chambres mi-parties: les cadres institutionnelles d’une juridiction spéciale (1576–1679)’, in Jacques Poumarède and Jack Thomas, eds, Les Parlements de province (Toulouse, 1996), 121–38, who shows how marginal the chambres had always been owing to royal indecisiveness and parlementaire hostility towards them. 29. See the well-documented study by Odile Martin, La Conversion protestante à Lyon (1659–1687) (Geneva, 1986). 30. Bernard Dompnier, Le Vénin de l’hérésie, image du protestantisme et combat catholique au xviie siècle (Paris, 1985), ch. 8, ‘La reconquête des territoires et des âmes: la pastorale de conversion’. 31. Sauzet, Contre-réforme et réforme catholique en Bas-Languedoc, 279–96; idem, Les Cévennes catholiques. Histoire d’une fidélité, xvie–xxe siècles (Paris, 2002), esp. ch. 6. 32. Bonney, Political Change, 394–5. 33. Martin, Compagnies de la propagation de la foi, 448–50. 34. Cabanel, Protestants en France, 556–63. See also Janine Garrison, ‘Les “donneurs d’avis” et la révocation’, in Roger Zuber and Laurent Theis, eds, La Révocation de l’édit de Nantes et le protestantisme français en 1685 (Paris 1986), 135–45. The term ‘donneur d’avis’ suggests mercenary activities, since it was usually reserved for those who suggested new sources of revenue to the royal council which, if accepted, entitled their authors to a proportion of the funds raised. 35. Dompnier, Vénin de l’hérésie, 129; Allier, Cabale des dévots, 308. 36. Pierre Bernard, L’Explication de l’édit de Nantes par les autres édits de pacification, déclarations et arrêts de règlement (Paris, 1666): ‘la communauté ne peut estre divisée ny partagée, elle est toute catholique’. See a detailed discussion of his ‘maxims’ by Élie Benoist, Histoire de l’édit de Nantes, iii, vol. 1, 568–83. 37. Allier, Cabale des dévots, 304–8; André Benoist, ‘Jean Filleau, avocat du roi au présidial, et l’activisme anti-protestant dans la sénéchaussée de Poitiers (1632–1682)’, in Didier Poton and André Benoist, eds, Catholiques et protestants dans l’ouest de la France (Poitiers, 2006), 91–115. See also Cornette, Mélancolie du pouvoir, 216ff., who notes that ‘raison d’église’ was more effective in mobilising support for action than was ‘raison d’état’ in the 1630s. For the description of Filleau’s work, see Joël Cornette, Chronique du règne de Louis XIV (Paris, 1997), 176–7, which includes the text of certain ‘decisions’ and Filleau’s commentaries on them. See above, p. 213. 38. See Martin, Compagnies de la propagation de la foi, 486–8, 501–3. 39. See ch. 7 above. Patterson, James I and Christendom, esp. ch. 5, on the Synod of Tonneins, 1614. 40. Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 26–8; Bergin, The Rise of Richelieu, 100–1. 41. Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 47–64. 42. Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change, 289–90. 43. See Emile Kappler, Conférences théologiques entre catholiques et protestantes en France au xviie siècle (Paris, 2011), for the most systematic survey of the ‘controversies’. The study originally dates from 1980, and may well ignore many other ‘conférences’. See Cabanel, Protestants en France, 404ff, ‘Un “paradis pour controversistes” ’. 44. Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 83–4. Kappler calculates that at least 70 per cent of all ‘conférences’ were held before 1630. 45. Louis Desgraves, Répertoire des ouvrages de controverse entre catholiques et protestants en France (1598–1685), 2 vols (Geneva 1985), which identifies 7,171 titles in all. 46. Bruno Hübsch, Le Ministère des prêtres et des pasteurs. Histoire d’une controverse entre Catholiques et réformés français au début du xviie siècle (Lyon, 2010). This study, originally completed in 1966 and published posthumously, actually covers the period from 1598 to

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47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

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to pp. 237–43

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1648. It shows how far both churches were obliged to strengthen and clarify their (opposed) conceptions of ministry and, consequently, of the church itself. This gap is evident from a perusal of Desgraves, Répertoire des ouvrages de controverse (see n. 45 above). Jean Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants (Paris, 1951), 37–8; Ligou, Protestantisme en France, 182. Stéphane-Marie Morgain, ‘Une grande oeuvre théologique de Richelieu: la Méthode la plus facile et la plus assurée pour convertir ceux qui se sont séparés de l’église’, XVIIe Siècle, 58 (2006), 131–49, at pp. 136–8. See also Richelieu, La Méthode la plus facile et la plus assurée pour convertir ceux qui se sont séparés de l’église, ed. Stéphane-Marie Morgain and Françoise Hildesheimer (Paris, 2005). See Dompnier, Vénin de l’hérésie, 179–85, for a well-balanced evaluation of Véron. Jacques Solé, Le Débat entre protestants et catholiques français de 1598 à 1685, 4 vols (Paris, 1985), i, 63–9, is more hostile. For Véron’s activities in Normandy, see Daireaux, ‘Réduire les Huguenots’, 187–91. Other controversialists in Richelieu’s service included the Protestant converts Louis du Laurens, who later joined the Oratory, and Brachet de la Milletière, who participated in the La Rochelle assembly of 1620 and who would only formally convert to Catholicism in 1645 after being excommunicated by his own church Pierre Blet, ‘La Plan de Richelieu pour la réunion des protestants’, Gregorianum 48 (1967), 100–29, at pp. 101–4. Richelieu was apparently ready to obtain the agreement of Protestant pastors and others through financial or other means if necessary. Morgain, ‘Une grande oeuvre théologique de Richelieu’, 148–9. Blet, ‘La Plan de Richelieu’, 105–12. See above, p. 129, for Richelieu’s ambitions to become patriarch, and its possible connection to a reunion with the Protestants. See, on these questions, François Laplanche, Orthodoxie et prédication. L’oeuvre d’Amyraut et la querelle de la grâce universelle (Paris, 1965); Kretzer, Calvinismus und französiche Monarchie, 282ff. Hübsch, Le Ministère des prêtres et des pasteurs, shows how far both churches were obliged to strengthen and clarify their (opposed) conceptions of ministry and, consequently, of the church itself. The study by René Voeltzel, Vraie et fausse église selon les théologiens protestants français du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1956), broadly confirms the same point. See also Cabanel, Protestants en France, 434–8. Bonney, Political Change, 390–1. For the consulates and other local authorities in Languedoc, see William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-century France. State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1984), 66–76. Arie Theodorus van Deursen, Professions et métiers interdits. Un aspect de l’histoire de la révocation de l’édit de Nantes (Groningen, 1960), 254–5, which devotes a whole chapter (no. 10) to the subject. One of many ruses was to elect Catholics of neither influence nor wealth, who would be incapable of acting independently of the Protestant majority. Sauzet, Contre-réforme et réforme catholique, 275ff. Some measures affected a single town, such as Nîmes, but gradually became more general once successful there. See C. E. J. Caldicott, ‘L’Édit de Béziers (1632): shifts of policy towards the Huguenots under Richelieu’, in C. E. J. Caldicott, H. Gough and J.-P. Pittion, eds, The Huguenots and Ireland. Anatomy of an Emigration (Dun Laoghaire, 1987), 67–95. Sauzet, Contre-réforme et réforme catholique, 256–61, and esp. the graph of conversions, 260; Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France, esp. 75–8. Luria, Sacred Boundaries, xxviii–xxxi, for the author’s presentation of the thesis of three different confessional boundaries. Daireaux, ‘Réduire les Huguenots’, chs 4–6, for an exhaustive study based on extensive archival research. See Louis XIV, Mémoires pour l’instruction du dauphin, ed. Pierre Goubert (Paris, 1992), 79–82 (mémoires for 1661). The key passages of this text are translated into English in Lossky, Louis XIV and the French Monarchy, 200–1. Bonney, Political Change, 429; Ligou, Protestantisme en France, 118–19. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 361, 369. Luc Daireaux, ‘Un aiguillon de pouvoir royal? Les parlements et la repression antiprotestante, des années 1660 aux années 1680’, in Gauthier Aubert and Olivier Chaline, eds,

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68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92.

93.

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to pp. 243–50

Les Parlements de Louis XIV (Rennes, 2010), 261–75, at 266–7, for a list of the commissioners appointed during the early 1660s. Paul Gachon, Quelques préliminaires de la révocation de l’édit de Nantes en Languedoc (1661–1685) (Toulouse, 1899), 36–8, for the experience of Languedoc. Bonney, Political Change, 429–30, 436–8. Pérouas, Diocèse de La Rochelle, 300–5. Martin, Compagnies de la propagation de la foi, 450–3; Luc Daireaux, ‘Anatomie d’une “réduction”: Le Conseil du Roi et les protestants sous le règne de Louis XIV (1643–1685)’, in Didier Boisson and Yves Krumenacker, eds, Justice et protestantisme (Lyon, 2011), 51–80, at 58–9. Boisson and Daussy, Les Protestants, 210. Bonney, ‘La France après la paix de Westphalie’, 160–2, for the list of the commissioners down to 1685. Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 369–70. Isambert et al., Recueil général des lois françaises, xviii, 77–85, for the text of the 1666 declaration. See Blet, Clergé de France et monarchie, ii, 370–88, for the most detailed account of these developments, which extends well beyond the perspective of the assemblies of clergy. The principal reason for suspending anti-Huguenot measures was the prospect of war against the Dutch. See the wide-ranging analysis in Susan Rosa, “‘ll était possible aussi que cette conversion fût sincere”: Turenne’s conversion in context’, French Historical Studies, 18 (1994), 632–66. Turenne’s family-dynastic concerns are the focus of Leonhard Horowski, ‘Konversion und dynastische Strategie: Turenne und das Ende des französischen Hochadelscalvinismus’, in Lotz-Heumann et al., Konversion und Konfession in der frühen Neuzeit (Gütersloh, 2007), 171–211. Martimort, Gallicanisme de Bossuet, 281–90. See above, p. 219. See Solé, Le Débat entre protestants et catholiques, i, 100–2. Maimbourg’s contributions were mostly historical works that had a wide readership in their time. Quantin, Les Pères de l’église et le catholicisme classique, is the most comprehensive study of the Church Fathers and their significance for seventeenth-century French Catholicism. Quantin, ‘The fathers in seventeenth-century Roman Catholic theology’, in Irena Backus, ed., The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West, 2 vols (Leiden, 1997), ii, 951–86, at p. 974. Authorship was credited to Arnauld, because he was far better known and his ‘authority’ was more likely to sustain attack than Nicole could. Dompnier, Vénin de l’hérésie, 213–17. Blet, ‘Le Plan de Richelieu’, 112–29. The papal nuncio in Paris was severely reprimanded for seeming to commit the papacy to the plans in progress. Pierre Blet, Les Nonces du pape à la cour de Louis XIV (Paris, 2002), 69. Blet, Assemblées du clergé et Louis XIV, 456–8 for the sums involved and their use. Martin, Compagnies de la propagation de la foi, 339–49, who describes the Grenoble and, to a lesser extent, the Lyon chapter of the Propagation as ‘de véritables puissances financières’ (349). See Dompnier, Vénin de l’hérésie, 218. See Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants, ch. 2, ‘La Caisse des conversions’, and esp. appendix 1, pp. 169–76, letter from Pellisson to Innocent XI [May 1680], with a diocese-by-diocese list of the number of converts for 1676 to 1679. The figure for Grenoble was 4,250, out of a total of 10,048. Van Deursen, Professions et métiers interdits, 261, 347. See ibid., ch. 10, ‘L’administration des villes et des communes’, for the wider context of these shifts. Louis XIV, Mémoires, 192. Jack Thomas, ‘Rendre ceux de la RPR invisibles et muets: le parlement de Toulouse, les grands jours de Nîmes, et les protestants (1656–1682)’, in Nicole Lemaitre, ed., Religion et politique dans les sociétés du Midi (Paris, 2003), 105–22, at 108–11. See also Figure 1 and Tableau 1 (pp. 109–10) for the scale of the operation. See the memorandum defending the decrees of the grands jours – and the precedents on which they were based – addressed to Louis XIV on 1 June 1667 by the first president of the parlement and the grands jours, Gaspard de Fieubet, in Gachon, Quelques préliminaires, pièce justificative no. 23, lii–lxi.

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94. Thomas, ‘Rendre ceux de la RPR invisibles et muets’, 121. 95. Capot, Justice et religion, 93–4. Interestingly, the Catholic population of Castres (among them several members of the cathedral clergy) also protested against the removal, since the presence of a court and its magistrates within its walls was of economic value to the town. The use of threats of such removal was commonplace during this period, and not reserved for religious issues. 96. Birnstiel, ‘Les Chambres mi-parties’, annexe, 130–8, for a precise tableau of the life cycle of each chambre from birth to suppression. 97. Jean-Paul Pittion, ‘Les Académies réformées de l’édit de Nantes à la révocation’, in Roger Zuber and Laurent Theis, eds, La Révocation de l’édit de Nantes et le protestantisme français en 1685 (Paris, 1986), 187–207, esp. 197ff. 98. Isambert, Recueil général des anciennes lois, xviii, 199–204, for the articles of the declaration, 1 Feb. 1669. Chapter 11: To Fontainebleau and Beyond 1. John F. Bosher, ‘The Franco-Catholic danger 1660–1715’, in idem, Business and Religion in the Age of New France 1660–1760 (Toronto, 1994), 290. 2. Lossky, Louis XIV and the French Monarchy, ch. 9, ‘General crisis of Louis XIV’s reign’. Despite its contentious claim that Louis XIV suffered a mental breakdown during the 1680s (ch. 8, ‘Mounting confusion’), this study identifies the connections between foreign and domestic politics. See also idem, ‘The general European crisis of the 1680s’, European Studies Review 10 (1980), 177–97, for more European comparisons, esp. 195–6. 3. The best study of these circles is Neveu, Sébastien Joseph Cambout de Pontchâteau (1634– 1690) et ses missions à Rome. See also Lossky, Louis XIV and the French Monarchy, 206, 211. 4. Cabanel, Protestants de France, 563–72; Bernard Dompnier, Vénin de l’hérésie, esp. ch. 4; idem, ‘La Logique d’une destruction: l’église catholique, la royauté et les temples protestants’, in Révolution française et ‘vandalisme révolutionnaire’ (Paris 1992), 343–51. 5. Dompnier, Vénin de l’hérésie, ch. 7 for an overview of such efforts. 6. Elisabeth Labrousse, La Révocation de l’édit de Nantes (Paris, 1990), ch. 8, ‘L’agonie de la R.P.R’. 7. Isambert et al., Recueil des anciennes lois françaises, vol. 19, 205–9. Capot, Justice et religion, 95. 8. Daireaux, ‘Réduire les Huguenots’, 532–49. 9. See Dompnier, Vénin de l’hérésie, 112–15; Léonard, History of Protestantism, ii, 420, n. 3. Bernard’s Explication de l’édit de Nantes appeared in a substantial new edition in 1683. 10. See the extensive list of edicts, declarations and decrees of the king’s council relating to the professions from which the Huguenots were banned in van Deursen, Professions et métiers interdits, 362–6. 11. Ligou, Protestantisme en France, 221–2; Luria, Sacred Boundaries, 73ff.; Dompnier, Vénin de l’hérésie, 103–6, ‘Le pasteur, voilà l’ennemi’. 12. Blet, Assemblées du clergé et Louis XIV, 425, 428–9. By December 1678, peace had been signed with England and Holland, but not yet with the Empire. 13. Isambert et al., Recueil des anciennes lois françaises, vol. 19, 390–1, 15 June 1682. Van Deursen, Professions et métiers interdits, chs 7–9, deals with each of these professions. 14. Van Deursen, Professions et métiers interdits, chs 3–4, for the most detailed account of these measures and their significance. 15. Luria, Sacred Boundaries, ch. 4, ‘Divided families’. 16. John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-century France, 2 vols (Oxford, 1998), ii, 572; Labrousse, La Révocation, 175–6. It opened the door to ‘planting’ Catholics in Protestant temples so that the pastor and temple could be arraigned and punished. 17. Solange Deyon, ‘La Destruction des temples’, in Zuber and Theis, eds, Révocation et protestantisme français en 1685, 241–2; Daniel Ligou, ‘Un vandalisme oublié: la destruction des temples réformés par l’autorité au xviie siècle’, in Révolution française et ‘vandalisme révolutionnaire’ (Paris, 1992), 336–7; Jean Orcibal, ‘État présent des recherches sur la répartition géographique des “nouveaux catholiques” à la fin du xviie siècle’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 33 (1947), 62–107, at 65–6. 18. Ligou, ‘Un vandalisme oublié’, 337

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344 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

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to pp. 257–61

Dompnier, Vénin de l’hérésie, 232–4; Ligou, ‘Un vandalisme oublié’, 337. McManners, Church and Society, ii, 571. Deyon, ‘La Destruction des temples’, 249–50. Dompnier, ‘Logique d’une destruction’, 345ff.; Deyon, ‘La Destruction des temples’, 254–7. Pierre Blet, ‘Le Conseil d’état et les protestants, de 1680 à 1685’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 130 (1972), 131–62. These statistics are from a detailed list compiled by an anonymous author with access to the records of the royal council in late 1684; it was sent to Rome, possibly with a view to impressing on Innocent XI how much Louis XIV was then doing to make France a Catholic country. Blet, ‘Conseil d’état et les protestants’, 156 and n. 10, for the southern cities; for Normandy, Daireaux, ‘Réduire les Huguenots’, 543, 551–2. Daireaux, ‘Réduire les Huguenots’, 551–78. Dompnier, ‘Logique d’une destruction’, 345–6; Ligou, ‘Un vandalisme oublié’, 340–1. Lettres de Madame de Maintenon, ed Hans Bots and Eugénie Bots-Estourgie, vol. i (Paris, 2009), 386–7, letter to the comtesse de Saint-Géran, 24 Aug. 1681 (italics mine). The authenticity of this letter is in doubt, as it may have been invented by La Beaumelle, the original editor of Maintenon’s letters in the mid-eighteenth century. See Léonard, History of Protestantism, ii, 420. Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants, 69. Ibid., 70 and notes. Roy L. McCullough, Coercion, Conversion and Counterinsurgency in Louis XIV’s France (Leiden, 2007), 132. See Labrousse, Révocation, 177–81. For the genesis of the Avertissement pastoral, Blet, Assemblées du clergé et Louis XIV, 433–7. The language of the text itself left no doubt that what the Protestants had suffered up to 1682 might become much worse if they ignored the opportunity of reunion. The reply made by Jean Claude, the pastor of Charenton, was secretly circulated to other Protestant churches as a model to follow. Blet, Assemblées du clergé et Louis XIV, 463–6. See Robert Poujol, ‘Le Rôle des intendants dans les préliminaires de la révocation’, in Zuber and Theis, eds, Révocation et protestantisme français en 1685, 87–112. In the case of some intendants, such as Foucault, the quest for ministerial favour was a powerful motive to show their zeal via the dragonnades. Correspondance des intendants avec le contrôleur général des finances 1677–1689, ed. Annette Smedley-Weill, 3 vols (Paris 1989), ii, 314, for Foucault’s correspondence in mid-1685 on the subject of conversions. The intendants’ letters summarised in these volumes need to be supplemented by correspondence with other ministers more directly involved with the Huguenot question, such as Louvois or Colbert de Seignelay. Mémoires de Nicolas Joseph Foucault, ed. F. Baudry (Paris, 1862), 112–13. He proposed this tactic to Louis XIV in a private interview in August 1684 and a decree of February 1685 ordered it to be carried out. See Blet, Assemblées du clergé et Louis XIV, 440–1. Correspondance des intendants, i, 191 (Limoges); ii, 118–19 (Languedoc); 357–8 (Montauban); iii, 244 (Burgundy). See McCullough, Coercion, 153–78. See the table for Marsillargues in Boisson and Daussy, Les Protestants, 218. Philippe Joutard, ‘The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes: end or renewal of French Calvinism?’, in Menna Prestwich, ed., International Calvinism, 1541–1715 (Oxford, 1987), 342. In fact, Louvois seems to have done so in advance of the revocation itself, when he rebuked the intendant of La Rochelle for suggesting that the final article of the future edict would allow him to drop the use of force in persuading the Huguenots to convert. See Carolyn Chappell Lougee, ‘Cross purposes: the intendant of La Rochelle and Protestant policy at the revocation’, in Robert M. Schwartz and Robert A. Schneider, eds, Tocqueville and Beyond (Newark, NJ, and London, 2003), 155–71, at 160, for pre-revocation exchanges between Louvois and intendant Pierre Arnoul. Correspondance des intendants, i, 338–9, for letters on the subject from Marillac, intendant of Rouen, to Le Peletier, during Oct.–Nov. 1685. See also Daireaux, ‘Réduire les Huguenots’, 708–9; idem, ‘Louis XIV et les protestants normands: autour de la révocation de l’édit de Nantes’, Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire du Protestantisme Français (BSHPF) 158 (2012), 123–32; Boisson and Daussy, Les Protestants, 219.

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to pp. 262–71

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41. McCullough, Coercion, 150–2, 178. 42. Isambert et al., Recueil des anciennes lois françaises, vol. 19, no. 1192, pp. 530–4, Oct. 1685. The decision was apparently made in council on 17 October, the edict drafted and signed the next day, and registered by the Paris parlement on 22 October. 43. From the voluminous bibliography dealing with the decision itself, see Jean Orcibal, ‘Louis XIV and the Edict of Nantes’, in Ragnhild Hatton, ed., Louis XIV and Absolutism (London, 1976), 154–76. 44. Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants, 113–14; Yves Krumenacker, ‘Le Camus, Barillon, Rancé: trois artisans de la réforme catholique face à la révocation de l’édit de Nantes’, in Homo religiosus. Autour de Jean Delumeau (Paris, 1997), 388; McManners, Church and Society, ii, 585. 45. Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants, 140–3, 147–8. 46. For Le Camus’s letters recounting his own experiences of dealing with converts and his attitude during this period, see A. P. M. Ingold, ed., Lettres du Cardinal Le Camus, évêque et prince de Grenoble (Paris, 1892), 455ff. See also Blet, Assemblées du clergé et Louis XIV, 484–5. For the key passage of the papal brief and its reception by Louis XIV, see Blet, ‘Les Papes et la révocation’, in Zuber and Theis, eds, Révocation et protestantisme français en 1685, 269–70. 47. Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants, 130–4, esp. notes 24 and 41. 48. McManners, Church and Society, ii, 585. 49. Ligou, Protestantisme en France, 248–50. 50. Jean-Robert Armogathe, Croire en liberté. L’église catholique et la révocation de l’édit de Nantes (Paris, 1985), 96–7. 51. Jean Orcibal, Fénelon, sa famille et ses débuts, in Orcibal et al., eds, Correspondance de Fénelon, 18 vols (Paris 1972–2007), i, ch. 6, ‘Fénelon et les protestants’. 52. Bernard Chedozeau, Bossuet et les protestants: ‘la voix de charité’ et les distributions de livres aux nouveaux convertis (1685–1687) (Montpellier, 2002), for details on the kinds of books distributed and the scale of the operation. See also Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants, appendix 2, 177–80, ‘Livres distribués aux nouveaux catholiques (1685–1687)’. Up to one million volumes may have been printed for these missions. 53. Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants, 134–6, quotes extensively from letters objecting to the concessions being made to the former Protestants. 54. Henk Hillenaar, Fénelon et les Jésuites (The Hague, 1967), 38–47; Louis Pérouas, Le Diocèse de La Rochelle de 1648 à 1724 (Paris, 1964), 334–5; Orcibal, Fénelon, sa famille et ses débuts, 182–4. 55. Krumenacker, ‘Le Camus, Barillon, Rancé’, 388–90; Hillenaar, Fénelon et les Jésuites, 45–6; McManners, Church and Society, ii, 585; Pérouas, Diocèse de La Rochelle, 335–6; Ligou, Protestantisme en France, 250. 56. Robert Sauzet, ‘Les Évêques du Bas-Languedoc et la révocation’, in Zuber and Theis, eds, Révocation et le protestantisme français en 1685, 75–86. 57. Jean Lemoine, ed., Mémoires des évêques sur la conduite à tenir à l’égard des réformés (1698) (Paris, 1902), 201, mémoire to Archbishop Noailles of Paris, 1698. 58. See Isabel Poutrin, Convertir les musulmans. Espagne 1491–1609 (Paris, 2012), for a fine study of the Morisco problem. 59. For an extensive discussion of the emigration and its historiography, see Cabanel, Protestants en France, 629–35; 709–59; Boisson and Daussy, Les Protestants, 232. 60. Kretzer, Calvinismus und französische Monarchie, ch. 6, deals extensively with Jurieu’s political thought before and after his exile. 61. Cabanel, Protestants en France, ch. 7, esp. 659–72; Boisson and Daussy Les Protestants, 228–9. 62. Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols (The Hague, 1963), remains the most influential interpretation of its subject. A similarly comprehensive study of Jurieu does not exist, but see Kretzer, Calvinismus und französische Monarchie, chs 4 (section 7) and 6. 63. McCullough, Coercion, 157–60; Cabanel, Protestants en France, 672–5. 64. Pérouas, Diocèse de la Rochelle, 351. 65. Cabanel, Protestants en France, 679–82; McCullough, Coercion, 162ff. 66. Sauzet, Les Cévennes catholiques, chs 7–8, for one of the few accounts of the revolt from a Catholic vantage-point. Cabanel, Protestants en France, 697–704, 884–6, is illuminating.

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NOTES

to pp. 271–80

67. W. Gregory Monahan, ‘Between two thieves: the Protestant nobility and the war of the Camisards’, French Historical Studies, 30 (2007), 537–58, esp. 557–8, for the dilemmas of the local Protestant nobility and contemporary misconceptions of their position. 68. Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban, Les Oisivetés de Monsieur de Vauban, ed. Michelle Virol (Seyssel, 2007), ‘Mémoire pour le rappel des Huguenots’, 83–123 (with introduction by Joël Cornette, 73–81). This text, first composed in 1689, was revised in 1693; Orcibal, Louis XIV et les protestants, 156. 69. Pérouas, Diocèse de la Rochelle, 397–9. 70. The following analysis is based primarily on the documents assembled by Lemoine, ed., Mémoires des évêques sur la conduite à tenir à l’égard des réformés (1698). All twenty-five episcopal avis are published in full, but the volume contains numerous letters and memoranda from other participants in the year-long consultation. 71. Ibid., xi–xii. Others, and especially Bâville, agreed on the need for clarification at this juncture: see ibid., no. xvi, 319–21, Bâville to the duc de Beauvillier, 16 Nov. 1698. Bâville was also defending his rigorous pursuit of Protestant dissent in Languedoc, and was regarded by Pontchartrain and his entourage as making the problem worse rather than better. 72. Ibid., xxxviii–xxxix, and appendixes nos XVII–XXV. 73. Jean-Robert Armogathe and Philippe Joutard, ‘Basville et la consultation de 1698, d’après sa correspondance avec l’évèque Fléchier et son frère, le président Lamoignon’, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuses, 52 (1972), 157–84. 74. Ibid., 160. 75. Lemoine, ed., Mémoires sur les réformés, appendix no. XXVII, 361–4. 76. Ibid., 1–7, at 7. 77. Isambert, Recueil des anciennes lois françaises, vol. 20, no. 1661, 313–19; also in Lemoine, Mémoires sur les réformés, appendix no. XXXIII, 384–90. 78. Ibid., appendix no. XXXIV, 390–401, ‘Mémoire du roy pour servir d’instruction aux intendants et commissaires départis dans les provinces et généralités du royaume’, 7 Jan. 1699. 79. Ibid., 397–9, for extended instructions on educating children as Catholics. 80. Cabanel, Protestants en France, 601–2. 81. McCullough, Coercion, 128–32, 144. 82. Cabanel, Protestants en France, 769; McCullough, Coercion, 151. 83. Lemoine, Mémoires sur les réformés, appendix no. XXXVII, 406–7. This ‘mémoire secret’ begins as follows: ‘il y a des choses qui n’ont pu être mises ni dans l’édit ni dans l’instruction, ou parce qu’elles doivent être encore plus secrètes que ne le sera même cette instruction, ou parce qu’il est bon de le remettre en un autre temps’. 84. McManners, Church and Society, ii, ch. 45, ‘Cruelty and compromise 1700–1774’, for the vagaries of that Protestant recovery and the continuity of persecution by the crown. Also useful are Cabanel, Protestants en France, ch. 10, ‘Du Désert à la Révolution’, and Boisson and Daussy, Les Protestants, ch. 9, ‘La survie d’une minorité religieuse’. Chapter 12: Enemies Within? 1. Briggs, Communities of Belief, 211ff. 2. Dieudonné, ‘Ambitions gallicanes, résistances ultramontaines’, 232–3. The death of the peace’s architect, Lionne, in 1671 was another crucial reason for the failure to proceed. 3. Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism and Jansenism, 196–7. 4. Harry G. Judge, ‘The Congregation of the Oratory in France in the late seventeenth century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 12 (1961), 46–55, esp. 51–5. 5. Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse, 209–18, for the history of the congregation and its connections to local dévots, Jansenist or not. 6. Lossky, Louis XIV, 211–12. 7. The most detailed studies are J. G. A. Tans, Pasquier Quesnel et les Pays-Bas (Paris, 1960); Émile Jacques, Les Années d’exil d’Antoine Arnauld (1769–1694) (Louvain, 1976). 8. Jacques Le Brun, Le Pur Amour de Platon à Lacan (Paris, 2002), much of which is devoted to a study of Fénelon, and especially to the theme of the ‘pure love’ of God. See also Jean-Robert Armogathe, Le Quiétisme (Paris, 1973), for a brief overview of the phenomenon across several centuries. For the post-sixteenth-century background, see Sophie Houdard, Les

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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to pp. 280–4

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Invasions mystiques. Spiritualités, hétérodoxies et censures au début de l’époque moderne (Paris, 2008). Neveu, L’Erreur et son juge, 473–6; Jean Orcibal, ‘Le Cardinal Le Camus, témoin au procès du Madame Guyon’, in idem, Études d’histoire et de littérature religieuses, 798–817, esp. 805–7; Le Brun, Pur Amour, 117–20. Louis Cognet, Crépuscule des mystiques, Bossuet–Fénelon (Paris 1958, repr. 1991), chs 2–3; Ely Carcassonne, Fénelon, l’homme et l’oeuvre (Paris, 1946), ch. 2, ‘Madame Guyon et le quiétisme’. Orcibal, Correspondance de Fénelon, i, 191–6, ‘La nomination de Fénelon au préceptorat’; ibid., ii, no. 96, pp. 141–8, at 146, Fénelon to Maintenon [Jan 1690?]. The verb used by Fénelon is ‘obséder’ in its Latin-derived military meaning. Cognet, Crépuscule, 97ff. Ibid., ch. 4. Le Brun, Pur Amour, 164–73; Irenée Noye, ‘Un juge défiant? Monsieur Tronson devant le mysticisme’, in F.-X. Cuche and J. Le Brun, eds, Fénelon, mystique et politique (1699–1999) (Paris, 2004), 115–24. Maintenon’s confidant, Bishop Godet des Marais of Chartres (in whose diocese Saint-Cyr was situated), also participated, but not ‘officially’, in the conferences at Issy. The best analysis of Bossuet’s thought here is Jacques Le Brun, La Spiritualité de Bossuet (Paris, 1972), who shows the limitations of Bossuet’s intellectualist approach in the confrontation with Guyon. See also the remarkable Orcibal, ‘Mme Guyon devant ses juges’, in idem, Études d’histoire et de littérature religieuses, 819–34. Cognet, Crépuscule, ch. 5; Le Brun, Pur Amour, 173–6. Cognet, Crépuscule , 235ff.; Orcibal, ‘Mme Guyon devant ses juges’, 824–34. Le Brun, Pur Amour, 176–208. The Explications des maximes des saints began life as the ‘Explication des articles d’Issy’. Béatrice Guion, ‘Fénelon et Nicole: l’impossible dialogue autour de l’Explication des maximes des saints’, in Cuche and Le Brun, eds, Fénelon, mystique et politique, 49–64. See Neveu, L’Erreur et son juge, on the forms of censure available around 1700, which made ‘erroneous’ much less serious a charge than ‘heretical’ or ‘tending towards heresy’. Cognet, Crépuscule, ch. 6. Cognet’s study ends on the eve of the publication of the Maximes des saints in January 1697. For the subsequent developments, the Roman episode included, see Blet, Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège, 61–106; Hillenaar, Fénelon et les Jésuites, chs 2–3; Carcassonne, Fénelon, l’homme et l’oeuvre, 57–74; Orcibal, ‘Mme Guyon devant ses juges’, 826ff.; Jacques Le Brun, ‘La Condamnation de l’Explication des maximes des saints et la publication du Télémaque au jour le jour’, in Cuche and Le Brun, eds, Fénelon, mystique et politique, 125–36. See again Orcibal, ‘Mme Guyon devant ses juges’, esp. 826–34. The spirituality of de Sales created embarrassing problems for Bossuet in his opposition to Guyon and Fénelon. For the most emphatic expression of this interpretation, see Raymond Schmittlein, L’Aspect politique du différend Bossuet–Fénelon (Baden-Baden, 1954), who left little room for any other aspects of the quarrel. See the full-scale study of François-Xavier Cuche, Une pensée sociale catholique. Fleury, La Bruyère, Fénelon (Paris, 1991). It was Bossuet who gave the circle the name of ‘little council’. See also Alexandre Dupilet, La Régence absolue. Philippe d’Orléans et la polysynodie (1715–1718) (Seyssel, 2011), 47–8, for the same point about the character of Fénelon’s thinking. Correspondance de Fénelon, ii, no. 249, 274–80, letter of Dec. 1693?; it can also be found in Fénelon, Oeuvres, ed. Jacques Le Brun, 2 vols (Pléiade edn, Paris, 1982–97), i, 543–51. Dupilet, La Régence absolue, 61; Hillenaar, Fénelon et les Jésuites, 57, n. 1. Denis Richet, ‘Fénelon contre Bossuet: la querelle du quiétisme’, in idem, De la réforme à la révolution (Paris, 1991), 119–39, at 135. Dupilet, Régence absolue, 60. The literature on Fénelon’s political thinking, with its moral and religious dimensions, is substantial. See Bruno Neveu, ‘Futurs rois chrétiens’, and Jacques Le Brun, ‘Du privé au public. L’éducation du prince selon Fénelon’, in Ran Halévi, ed, Le Savoir du prince, du moyen âge aux lumières (Paris, 2002), 197–233 and 235–60 respectively. A brief survey in Charles Engrand, ‘Les Préoccupations politiques de Fénelon’, in Gilles Deregnaucourt and Philippe

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30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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to pp. 284–91

Guignet, eds, Fénelon, évêque et pasteur en son temps 1695–1715 (Lille, 1996), 233–42. Also useful, despite its age, is Carcassonne, Fénelon, ch. 4, ‘L’éducateur et le politique’. Dupilet, La Régence absolue, 38–49. See also Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV. The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1965), examines currents of thought that he describes as mercantilist, Christian agrarianist and utilitarian. Orcibal, Correspondance de Fénelon, i, 193, refers to Nouvelles ecclésiastiques which circulated in manuscript form before 1728. Hillenaar, Fénelon et les Jésuites, chs 2–3, for the most extensive examination of these alignments. Henk Hillenaar, ‘Fénelon et le jansénisme’, in idem, ed., Nouvel état présent des travaux sur Fénelon (Amsterdam, 2000), 25–44; idem, ‘L’Augustinisme de Fénelon face à L’augustinisme des jansénistes’, in Hartmut Lehmann et al., eds, Jansenismus, Quietismus, Pietismus (Göttingen, 2002), 40–53. Bergin, Church, Society and Religious Change, 268. The most comprehensive study of these developments is by Gay, Morales en conflit. Théologie et polémique au grand siècle. See also Jean-Louis Quantin, Le Rigorisme chrétien (Paris, 2001). For a wider European panorama, see the sketch in Histoire du christianisme, eds J.-M. Mayeur et al. ix (Paris, 1997), part 4, ch. 3, ‘Christianisme et morale’. Laurence Brockliss, ‘The Lettres provinciales as a Jansenist calumny. Pascal and moral theology in mid-seventeenth century France’, Seventeenth Century French Studies, 8 (1986), 5–22; Quantin, ‘De la rigueur au rigorisme’, 195–251. Jean-Pascal Gay, Jesuit Civil Wars. Theology, Politics and Government under Tirso Gonzalez (1687–1705) (Farnham, Surrey, 2012). Grès-Gayer, D’un jansénisme à l’autre, 15–17. Abbé Le Gendre, Mémoires, ed. M. Roux (Paris, 1863), 113. Gay, Morales en conflit, 47–101, ‘La censure du laxisme par l’assemblée générale du clergé de France de 1700’, situates the censure in its context. See also Blet, Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège, ‘L’assemblée de 1700’, esp. 134–50 for the political and diplomatic context of the debates in the assembly. See Grès-Gayer, D’un jansénisme à l’autre, ch. 2, 155–240, ‘La Faculté et la Chine’, for the discussions of the Chinese rites in the Paris theology faculty. Sylvio Hermann de Franceschi, ‘Le Jansénisme face à la tentation thomiste. Antoine Arnauld et le thomisme de gratia après les cinq articles de 1663’, Revue Thomiste, 109 (2009), 5–54. Maintenon, Lettres, iii, nos 35–40 and 44, letters to Noailles, June–Aug. 1698, which show how aware she was of the danger of Jansenism raising its head during the quietist dispute. Grès-Gayer, D’un jansénisme à l’autre, 246–68, for a detailed account of the genesis and treatment of the cas by the Paris theology faculty. Lucien Ceyssens, ‘Les Papiers de Quesnel saisis à Bruxelles et transportés à Paris en 1703 et 1704’, Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 44 (1949), 508–51. Quesnel was arrested in Brussels in 1703 (but escaped soon afterwards) and his papers were seized and transported to France, where they were used both by Argenson, the Paris lieutenant général de police, to arrest Quesnel’s correspondents involved with the Jansenist ‘party’, and by the Jesuits to prepare the interrogation of suspects by Argenson or to bring to the attention of La Chaise or Louis XIV himself. See also Marcel Thomas, ‘Une épave des papiers du P. Quesnel’, Revue d’Histoire de l’Église de France, 39 (1953), 64–71, for the subsequent vicissitudes of the Quesnel archive. Blet, Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège, 191–213, for the most detailed history of the genesis of the 1705 bull. Grès-Gayer, D’un jansénisme à l’autre, 278–9. Blet, Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège, 224–43. Ibid., 206, quoting a letter of 7 May 1705 to the French ambassador in Rome. Ibid., 242–3. Ibid., 200–11, for a close analysis of the genesis of the text of Vineam Domini, and the successive proposals for its wording. See Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism and Jansenism, 206–38. Lucien Ceyssens, ‘Le Père Michel Le Tellier (1643–1719)’, in idem, Autour de l’Unigenitus (Louvain, 1987), 330–400; Hillenaar, Fénelon et les Jésuites, 254ff.

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54. Maral, Le Roi-soleil et Dieu, 167. 55. There is no reliable modern study of Noailles, but there is a useful summary of his actions in relation to Quesnel and Jansenism in Catherine Maire, De la cause de dieu à la cause de la nation. Le jansénisme au xviiie siècle (Paris, 1998), ch. 2, ‘Noailles, ou le gallicanisme épiscopal pris au piège’. For other views of Noailles, see Ceyssens, ‘Le Cardinal de Noailles (1651–1728)’, in idem, Autour de l’Unigenitus, 649–733; Briggs, Communities of Belief, 214–16. 56. The most extensive account of these years, and the role of Noailles in them, is in Blet, Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège, 245–357. 57. Ibid., 359–74. 58. Ibid., 377–89. 59. See Fénelon’s correspondence from 1710 onwards with Père Tellier and others, at court and in Rome, in Correspondance, vols 14–17, passim. Hillenaar, Fénelon et les Jésuites, ch. 5, ‘Une amitié de combat (1700–1715)’, remains the best exposition of his relations with the Jesuits, one of mutual interest rather than of shared convictions. Ceyssens, Autour de l’Unigenitus, 333–400, is the only substantial account of Tellier’s career. 60. Hillenaar, Fénelon et les Jésuites, 260–70; Jacques Grès-Gayer, ‘The Unigenitus of Clement XI: a fresh look at the issues’, Theological Studies, 49 (1988), 264–5. 61. Blet, Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège, 359–62. 62. Maire, De la cause de dieu à la cause de la nation, 54–8, ‘Genèse d’un livre’. 63. Blet, Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège, 377–427, for a detailed account of the diplomacy (and arguments) involved. 64. Grès-Gayer, ‘The Unigenitus of Clement XI’, 277. 65. Louis Cognet, Le Jansénisme (Paris, 1961), 99. 66. See McManners, Church and Society, ii, 370–7. Several propositions, especially nos 91 and 92, had implications for political obedience – the suffering of unjust censures, the imposition of unnecessary oaths, doing one’s duty under the threat of sanctions, and so on – which worried the magistrates of the parlements in particular. 67. McManners, Church and Society, ii, 370. 68. Maire, De la cause de Dieu à la cause de la nation, ch. 4, ‘La machine propagandiste’, esp. the table on p. 136, and ch. 5, ‘La librairie clandestine’. 69. Blet, Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège, 423. The ambassador, Cardinal Trémouille, initially had no concerns about the bull’s contents, and only gradually realised that it might create problems. This was a common response among those who, in Rome or Paris, first read the document. 70. Ibid., 423–4, 427; Monique Cottret, ‘La Querelle janséniste’, in Histoire du christianisme, ix, 382, for Torcy’s reaction. 71. Maire, De la cause de dieu à la cause de la nation, 10. 72. Van Kley, Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 74; Cottret, ‘Querelle janséniste’, in Histoire du christianisme, ix, 382. 73. Blet, Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège, 424–6; McManners, Church and Society, ii, 380. 74. Blet, Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège, ch. 17, ‘L’Unigenitus devant les évêques’. 75. The assembly of prelates drafted a pastoral instruction which was designed for use by each bishop when he ‘received’ Unigenitus in his diocese. The purpose was to ensure the uniformity of the process and to avoid additional confusion arising from divergent personal declarations. 76. McManners, Church and Society, ii, 380–1; Maral, Louis XIV et Dieu, 174; Wolfgang Mager, ‘Die Anzweifelung des oberhirtlichen Kirchenregiments im Widerstand des jansenistischen Lagers gegen die Annerkennung der Bull Unigenitus (1713) in Frankreich – ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte des modernen Konstitutionalismus’, in Neithard Bulst, ed., Politik unk Kommunikation (Frankfurt, 2009), 147–249, at 171, n. 70. Their target was proposition 91, which concerned obedience under the threat of excommunication. 77. McManners, Church and Society, ii, 379–80. 78. Blet, Clergé de France, Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège, chs 18–19, for a blow-by-blow account of these negotiations and conflicts. 79. Ibid., chs 21–22. 80. Ibid., 617–18.

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to pp. 296–306

81. The bibliography of the subject is vast. See McManners, Church and Society, ii, ch. 37 (‘The appeal to a general council’) and ch. 38 (‘From the Regent to Fleury’), for a narrative account. See also Peter R. Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Régime France 1720–45 (London, 1996), part 2. 82. See Monique Cottret, Jansénisme et lumières. Pour un autre xviiie siècle (Paris, 1998), ch. 9, ‘Militantismes: variations autour de la notion d’appel’; Dominique and Marie-Claude Dinet, ‘Les Appelants contre la bulle Unigenitus d’après Gabriel-Nicolas Nivelle’, Histoire, Économie, Société, 9 (1990), 365–89. 83. Grès-Gayer, ‘The Unigenitus of Clement XI’, 273–4. 84. Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Régime France, is a close study of Fleury’s years as chief minister, on which see esp. chs 9–12; McManners, Church and Society, ii, chs 38 and 40, for an extensive account of the Fleury repression. 85. See Tans, Pasquier Quesnel et les Pays-Bas; Toon Quaghebeur, ‘The reception of Unigenitus in the faculty of theology at Louvain, 1713–1719’, Catholic Historical Review, 93 (2007), 265–99. 86. Marie-José Michel, Jansénisme et Paris (Paris, 2000), 199–200. 87. Le Gendre, Mémoires, 298. The confessor’s admission was in reply to Le Gendre whose preference was for a limited number of censures. 88. See Briggs, ‘A moving target: Jansenists and their enemies in France’, in Bonney and Trim, eds, The Development of Religious Pluralism 129–52; and Jean-Louis Quantin, ‘Avant et après l’Unigenitus: sur les mutations du jansénisme dans la France du xviie siècle’, in Daniel Tollet, ed., Le Jansénisme et la franc-maçonnerie en Europe centrale aux xviie et xviiie siècles (Paris, 2002), 159–82. Conclusion 1. As quoted in Histoire du christianisme, ix, 383, ‘nous sommes dans un pays où l’on passe sans milieu d’une extrémité à l’autre, où l’on ne saurait trop s’attacher à gagner d’abord les coeurs’. 2. Michel Antoine, Le Conseil du roi sous Louis XV (Geneva, 1970), 447. 3. See Van Kley, Religious Origins of the French Revolution, for the most forceful statement of that case. The book’s thesis caused some stir among historical circles in France, where the notion of the Revolution having religious origins was somewhat alien. 4. See Sarmant and Stoll, Régner et gouverner. Louis XIV et ses ministres, esp. part 1, for a study that is heavily based on evidence of governing practices from the 1680s. 5. The term ‘working towards Louis XIV’ is borrowed, with due recognition of the enormous differences involved, from that of ‘working towards the Führer’ coined by Ian Kershaw, ‘ “Working towards the Führer”. Reflections on the nature of the Hitler dictatorship’, Journal of Contemporary European History, 2 (1993), 103–18. 6. Sarmant and Stoll, Régner et gouverner, 564, evoke a ‘débat trop policé ou trop uniforme’ and conclude that ‘les questions de fond ne sont jamais posées’. 7. See Orest Ranum, ‘Courtesy, absolutism and the rise of the French state 1630–1660’, Journal of Modern History, 52 (1980), 426–51. 8. Lyon-Caen, ‘La Justice ecclésiastique en France’, 279–80. 9. Françoise Hildesheimer, ‘De la conservation à l’impression: les archives du clergé de France’, Histoire et Archives, 8 (2000), 59–100. For the composition and content of the archives, see appendix 2, 83–9. 10. Olivier Poncet, ‘L’Histoire des évêques saisie par l’érudition (xviie–xviiie siècles)’, in François Bougard and Michel Sot, eds, Liber, gesta, histoire. Écrire l’histoire des évêques et des papes, de l’antiquité au xxie siècle (Turnhout, 2009), 407–36, which contains an invaluable chronological appendix (426–34) of the principal publications from 1597 onwards; idem, ‘La Gallia christiana (1656) des frères Sainte-Marthe, une entreprise gallicane?’, Revue d’Histoire des Religions, 226 (2009), 375–97. Saint-Cyran’s very Jansenist nephew, Barcos, also objected to the eulogy, claiming that it was the very opposite of his uncle’s modesty.

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INDEX

Note. Some entries in this index correspond to themes dealt with extensively within successive chapters. When particular topics have been treated in detail, page entries printed in bold type indicate where they appear in the book. Themes that appear on virtually every page (religion, church, politics, etc.) have not been indexed.

Acarie, Barbe, 87–8, 92. See dévot(e)s Ad Sacram, papal bull, 193–4 Admonitio ad regem, 115–16, 120 agents-généraux of clergy, 137, 139, 154, 304 Aubigné, Agrippa d’, 163, 174 Aguesseau, Henri-François d’, 261 Ailly, Pierre d’, cardinal, 8 Aix, 232, 244; parlement of, 54, 60, 160. See chambres de l’édit, Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith Albigensians, 18, 273 Albizzi, Francesco, cardinal, 199 Alençon, 241, 261 Alès, bishop of, 267; peace of 178–9; Protestant national synod of, 171 Alexander VII, pope, 193, 207 aliénations, 136, 137, 146 Allier, Raoul, historian, 110 Almain, Jacques, 66, 69 Alsace, 257 Amyraut, Moïse, 229, 239 Anduze, 178 Anglican(-ism), 7, 16, 72, 90, 212, 239. See James I, oath of allegiance Anne of Austria, 102, 103, 104, 109, 111, 188, 199, 208 Antichrist, 156, 163, 171, 174, 239 Antoine, Michel, historian, 299 appel comme d’abus, 11, 194 Aquinas, Thomas, 287. See Thomist Argenson, René de Voyer, d’, 103–4 Arnauld family, 201–2. See Port-Royal

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Arnauld d’Andilly, Robert, 201 Arnauld, Angélique, abbess of Port-Royal, 202 Arnauld, Antoine, 185, 187, 188, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198, 199, 201, 202, 204, 205, 207, 209, 245, 246, 253, 279, 286, 287–8, 292, 296. See droit/fait distinction, Jansenism Arnauld, Antoine, lawyer, 59, 68, 74, 80, 211 Arnauld, Henri, bishop of Angers, 204 Arroy, Besian, 101 assemblies of clergy, 133–55, 162; authority/ status of assemblies, 194–5, 196–7 , 238, 287, 290, 298; clash with Richelieu, 145–6, 147, 148, 151; deputies and elections to, 138, 152–4, 307; dominated by Harlay, 279, 305; financial basis of, 135–8, 305; gallican evolution of, 305–6; grant décimes/dons gratuits, 135–8, 144–6, 224–5; and Jansenist question, 189, 191, 193, 196–7, 204, 290, 294, 295; and moral laxism, 287, 289; as national council of gallican church, 194-5, 210, 304–5; organisation of, 136–41; origins and growth of, 8, 12, 13, 22, 133–5; papal views of, 154–5; and Protestants, 165, 230, 232–4, 238, 245, 248, 256, 257, 260, 305; regularity of 139–40; role in defining church-state relations, 298, 304–5; at Sainte-Genevieve, 128–9, 152, 181; scope of, 14; and secular jurisdiction, 9, 83, 141–3, 213–15; and Trent’s decrees, 56, 58; utility of 17, 65, 68. See décimes; dons gratuit; Harlay, Richelieu

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assembly of clergy (1625), 115–18, 119, 120, 147; (1635), 148–50, 185; (1641), 150–1, 153; (1645), 151, 153, 154; (1651), 151; (1655–7), 193–5, 257; (1660), 131, 195, 243; (1682), 1, 2, 218–21, 223, 260, 287; (1685), 260; (1695), 224; (1700), 285, 287; (1705), 290, 291; (1714–15), 294–5, 307 assembly of notables, 17, 92, 142, 144 Auger, Edmond, Jesuit, 58 Augustine, saint, 182, 183, 186, 188, 190, 205, 263, 297; disciples of, 183, 286 Augustinianism, 181–6, 188, 253, 287, 297; ‘political’, 101. See Jansenism Augustinus, 129, 181, 186, 187, 188, 192, 193, 205, 287, 288, 293, 297. See Jansen Aunis-Saintonge, 234, 265 Austrian lands, 54 Auvergne, grands jours in, 206, 212, 213, 214 Baius, Michael, 186 Balthazar, Jean de, 231, 232 Bargellini, Pietro, papal nuncio, 197 Basle, council of, 8, 13 Bavaria, 103, 115 Bâville, Nicolas de Lamoignon de, 259, 261, 267, 272 Bayle, Pierre, 268 Béarn, Calvinism in, 165; confessional divide in, 165–6; dragonnades in, 261; monarchmach ideas in, 171–3; restoration of Catholicism in, 39, 56, 94, 144–5, 157, 165–6; union with France, 165, 175, 178, 257. See Henri IV, Louis XIII, monarchomach Beauvillier, Paul, duke of, 280, 283, 284 Becan, Martin, Jesuit, 72, 82 Bellarmine, Robert, cardinal, ecclesiology of, 71–3, 74, 77, 82, 117, 118, 122, 131, 156, 171, 172 Benedict, Philip, historian, 25 Benoist, René, 62 Bérauld, Pierre, lawyer, 174 Bergier, canon, 105 Bernard, Pierre, lawyer, 234, 235 Bérulle, Pierre de, cardinal, 283; Augustinianism of, 188, 297; as dévot leader, 87, 88, 92, 93, 95–6, 98, 100, 104, 105, 122; political thought of, 103, 116, 120, 176–7 Beza, Théodore, 22, 24, 27, 33, 173 Blet, Pierre, historian, 114, 153 Bochart de Champigny, Jean V, 105 Bochart de Champigny, Jean VI, 244 Bomier, Pierre, 244 Boniface VIII, pope, 8 bons catholiques, 94 bons français, 94, 99, 122 Bonzi, Pierre de, cardinal, 267

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Bordeaux, chambre de l’édit, 54, 250; Fronde in, 229; parlement of, 60, 160, 173, 254 Borromeo, Carlo, cardinal, 147, 286; instructions to confessors, 204 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 209, 218; Augustinianism of, 287; and conversion of Turenne, 245–6; and Fénelon, 278, 279, 281, 283, 284–5, 301, 306; and four gallican articles, 220, 246; gallicanism of, 210, 219–20; and Protestants, 245–7, 273; and quietism, 281–3, 284–5; on unity of church, 219 Boucher, Jean, 37–8, 66 Bouillon, Fréderic-Maurice de la Tour, duke of 163, 168, 171, 229 Bourbon-Albret, dynasty of, 33 Bourges, 46 Brachet de la Milletière, Théophile, 173, 238 Brisacier, Jean, Jesuit, 202 Briggs, Robin, historian, 99, 209, 278 Buckingham, George Villiers, duke of, 300 Burgundy, Louis, duke of, 280 Caen, 241, 258, 261 Caldicott, Edric, historian, 240 Calvin, Jean, 22, 27, 32–3, 173 Calvinism, ecclesiology of, 23, 32–3, 239 Camisards, revolt of, 229, 270, 275–6 Capuchins, 58, 87, 96, 112, 131, 177, 233, 265 Carthusians, 87 cas de conscience, 288–9, 297 Cassan, Michel 87 Castellio, Sebastian, 27 Castres, 67, 160, 161, 249, 250; chambre de l’édit in, 232 Catherine de Medici, 22, 24, 33, 135 Catholic League, 13, 20, 25, 29, 31, 34, 36–7, 40, 44, 45, 49, 57, 58, 65, 66, 69, 77, 86–7, 128, 170. See Holy Union, 36, 66 Catholic Leaguers, 36–7, 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56, 67, 86–7, 89, 104 Catholic missions, in Protestant areas, 157, 177–8, 233, 236, 265–7, 278 Catholic reform, argument against Protestantism, 235, 285 Catholique/catholicisme d’estat, 118, 120–2. See Richelieu Caulet, Étienne, bishop of Pamiers, 216–17, 220, 259, 279 Caussin, Nicolas, royal confessor, 102, 114, 207 Certeau, Michel de, historian, 103 Cévennes, 178, 228, 240, 270–1, 276 Châlons, 67, 281, 285 chambres, de l’édit, 54, 160–1, 232–3, 243, 249, 250, 254; mi-parties, 53–4, 159, 160–1, 249–50. See Edict of Nantes

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Champagne and Brie, 47 Charenton, 46, 238 Charles I, king of England, 95, 96, 112, 229 Charles IX, 26, 30, 33, 65, 144 Charles V, Holy Roman emperor, 135 Chartres, 38, 116, 147 Châtel, Jean, 59, 73 Chevreuse, Charles-Honoré, duke of, 280, 283, 284 Childeric II, king of Franks, 34 Chinese rites, 287 Christin, Olivier, historian, 41 Ciron, Gabriel de, 279 Claude, Jean, 239 Clement IX, pope, 197 Clement VIII, pope, 39, 51, 56, 57, 165, 184 Clement XI, pope, 292, 293, 294, 307 Clément, Jacques, 59 Clermont, college of, 65, 74–5 Clovis, king of Franks, 5, 37 Code Michau, 99, 224. See Marillac Cognet, Louis, historian, 283, 293 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 100, 110, 208, 209–10, 260, 280 Coligny, Admiral, 33 Company of the Holy Sacrament, 103, 105–11, 177, 232, 243, 244, 248 conciliarist(-ism), ideas of church, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 69–70, 123, 124, 182, 303–4. See Gerson, Richer Concini, Concino, 93 Concordat of Bologna, 9, 10, 39, 57, 66, 71, 143, 149, 222, 304 Condé, Henri I, 178 Condé, Henri II, 39, 78, 164, 168 Condé, Louis I, 33 Condé, Louis II (le grand), 229 Confession of Augsburg, 22 Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith, 107, 232–3, 235, 244, 248 conseil de conscience, 207 Constance, council of, 8, 13, 130, 134 consulats, 240, enforcing bi-partisanship in, 234, 240 Conti, Armand, prince of, 109 controversies, inter-confessional, 156, 236–9 Contzen, Adam, Jesuit, 115 conversion fund, 248–9. See Le Camus, Pelisson, Protestants Cornet, Nicolas, 188 Coton, Pierre, royal confessor, 62, 74, 163 Cour Sainte, 102. See Caussin Court, Antoine, and revival of Protestantism, 276 Cromwell(-ian), 230

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Crouzet, Denis, historian, 32, 41 cuius regio, eius religio, 64, 157, 174 Cum nuper, papal brief, 289 Cum Occasione, papal bull, 190–3, 194, 195. See Jansenism Daillé, Jean, 239 Daneau, Lambert, 172 Daughters of the Infancy of Christ, 279 Dauphiné, destruction of temples in, 244; dragonnades in, 261; Protestants in 24, 168, 234, 241, 244, 257, 261, 270. De Auxiliis, 184, 190. See Augustinianism, Jansenism On the consensus of hierarchy and monarchy, 129–30. See Marca De Paul, Vincent, 92, 104, 107 De Sales, François, 187, 283 décimes, 135, 137, 138, 139, 144, 146 dévote, 87, 109, 208. See Acarie, Anne of Austria dévots, 34, 86–111, 202; conflicts with Richelieu, 104, 126, 176, 180, 181, 185; and foreign relations, 112, 121, 167, 177; fragmentation of, 97–8; and Jansenism, 279, 297; and monarchy, 306; parti des, 89, 111; and Protestants, 177–8, 234, 235, 241, 244. See Bérulle, Saint-Cyran, Catholic League, Port-Royal Dijon, parlement of, 54, 58, 59, 160, 219 doléances, 78, 140, 143, 147, 162, 163, 165, 212 Dominicans, 58, 59, 81, 112, 288 don gratuit, 137, 140, 144–6, 150, 151, 224. See assembly of clergy Donatists, 266, 273 Doni d’Attichy, Louis, bishop of Autun, 131 dragonnades, 241, 256, 259–60, 261–2, 264, 269, 272, 274. See Protestants Drelincourt, Charles, 239 droit/fait distinction, 192, 203 Du Laurens, Louis, 238 Du Moulin, Pierre, 163, 171–2, 239, 268 Du Perron, Jacques Davy, cardinal, 39, 40, 70, 77, 82, 92, 128, 219 Du Tillet, Jean, 11 Du Vair, Guillaume, 37, 67 Dubois, Guillaume, cardinal, 15 duelling, campaign against, 108 Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe, 40, 48, 158, 163, 170, 171, 173, 325 Dupuy brothers, 8, 68, 129, 130, 131; Pierre, 128, 152, 181 Dutch Republic, 54; Protestant refuge in, 268; war with, 216, 252. See Spanish Netherlands Duval, André, 66, 70, 77, 122, 125, 185 dynastic marriage, 90–1, 95–6, 164

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ecclesiology/ecclesiological positions, 7–8, 12–13, 23, 66, 70–3, 74, 119–20, 122, 123–4, 126, 131, 134, 182, 184, 189, 219–20, 288, 298. See Bellarmine, gallican, papacy, Richelieu, Richer, ultramontane Edict of Amboise (1563), 28 Edict of Béziers (1632), 240 Edict of Châteaubriand (1551), 19 Edict of Écouen (1559), 21 Edict of Fontainebleau (1599), 56, 144, 165; (1685), 258, 262, 263, 267; not for revocation, 272; widely approved 263 Edict of Mantes (1591), 48 Edict of Melun, 57 Edict of Nantes (1598), 3, 16, 28, 45, 165, 208, 240; assemblies of clergy and, 141, 305; Catholic responses to, 55, 64; dévots and, 232–5; rigorous interpretation of, 231–5, 241–2, 243–4, 245, 251; nature and content of, 50, 51–4, 157, 178–9; negotiation of, 49–50; parlements and, 60–1, 158–9; Protestants under, 56, 156, 240, 256; renewal of, 162; revocation of, 3, 208, 221, 227, 253, 256, 261, 292, 301, 302, 307; status of, 45, 50–1, 54, 173, 253. See Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Richelieu Edict of Nîmes (1629), 96–7, 178–9 Edict of Poitiers (1577), 48, 50 Edict of Roussillon (1564), 27 Edict of Saint-Germain (1562), 24 Elbène, Alphonse d’, bishop of Albi, 151 England, 5, 12, 15, 42, 185, 230, 235; break with Rome/schism 1, 82; Catholics (-ism) in, 71, 95, 114, 156, 183; dynastic match with (1625), 90, 94–6, 112; oath of allegiance, 67, 81; and Protestants, 230, 268. See Anglican, Bérulle, Charles I, Cromwellian, dévots, Henriette-Marie, James I, Richelieu Enlightenment, 266, 268, 300 episcopate, 14, 57, 83, 125, 142–3, 189, 220, 304; and gallican crisis of 1680s, 223 erastian, 170 Estates-General, 65, 134, 135, 137, 138, 140, 144; of 1560–1, 17, 22, 136; of 1588, 35; of Catholic League (1593), 37–8, 44–5, 57; of 1614, 58, 76, 78–85, 92, 116–17, 140, 141, 153, 303 Estrées, César d’ cardinal, 221 Étampes, Léonor d’, bishop of Chartres, 116–17, 123, 147–8, 152 Fancan, François Langlois de, 120, 127 Fathers of the Church, 183, 205, 219 Fénelon, Antoine de La Mothe-Salignac de, 108 Fénelon, François de La Mothe-Salignac de, 108, 265, 266, 267, 278, 279, 280–5, 290, 291, 292, 293, 295, 301, 307

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Fenouillet, Pierre de, bishop of Montpellier, 150 Ferdinand II, emperor, 94 Ferrier, Jéremie, 120–1 Ferry, Paul, 246 Feuillants, 58 Filleau, Jean 234–5, 244 Fléchier, Esprit, bishop of Nîmes, 267, 283 Fleury, Hercule, cardinal, 15, 296, 300 Foucault, Nicolas-Joseph, 259, 261 Foucquet, Nicolas, 110 Franciscans, 58 François I, 9, 13, 15, 18, 19, 32, 33, 135, 139 Frequent communion, 187, 204, 287, 296. See Arnauld Fronde, 108, 109, 130, 131, 146, 188–9, 190, 191, 199, 200–1, 202–3, 207, 208, 228, 229–30, 231, 240, 300. See Mazarin, Port-Royal, Protestants fundamental law, 40, 253. See Salic law Gallia christiana, 4, 305–6, 336 gallican articles, 1, 2, 8, 12–13, 14, 192, 206, 209, 210, 217–18, 219, 220, 223, 282, 302; church, 4, 6, 7, 8, 12–13, 17, 23, 65, 77, 128, 131, 148, 188, 192, 218, 287, 298, 299, 305, 306; liberties, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 57, 65, 67, 68–9, 75, 84, 128, 129, 130, 142, 152, 181, 194, 200, 211, 217, 295; maxims, 9, 74, 154, 191, 223, 289; rejects papal infallibility, 221; tradition, 10, 121 gallican church, national council of, 17, 22, 38, 49, 144, 147, 155, 191, 192, 194, 210, 218, 291, 295, 304 gallicanism, 6, 7, 9, 13, 14, 70–1, 79, 80, 122, 130, 214, 219 gallicans, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14, 23, 38, 59, 61, 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 90, 91, 119, 122, 131, 142, 185, 196, 210, 215, 235, 239, 246, 289, 293, 296, 298, 302, 307 Gap, Protestant synod of, 156, 171 Garasse, François, Jesuit, 119 Gaston d’Orléans, 102, 104, 109, 148, 1 49, 150 general council of the church, 2, 3, 222, 296; appeal to future general council, 1, 2, 3, 8, 222 Geneva, 20, 22, 27, 89, 174, 175; its orthodoxy, 16, 20, 21, 23, 27, 171, 239 Gerson, Jean, 8, 13, 69, 70, 134 God’s anointed, king as, 41, 121, 176 Godeau, Antoine, 192 Gondi, family, 104. See Retz Gondrin, Henri-Louis de, archbishop of Sens, 192, 193, 273 Gonzalez, Tyrso, Jesuit, 286

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grands jours, 143, 213–14, 235, 249 great schism, 2, 3, 7, 8, 134, 222 Greengrass, Mark, historian, 51, 143 Grenoble, bishop of, 248, 249, 259, 263, 266; chambre mi-partie, 54, 250; chapter of Company of Holy Sacrament, 107, 111, 232, 244, 248; conversion of Protestants, 248–9; parlement of, 58, 59–60, 160, 254. See Le Camus Grisons, 167 Grotius, Hugo, 239 Guez de Balzac, Jean-Louis, 127 Guise, Charles, duke of, 46 Guises, 22, 34, 35, 38, 58, 65, 66, 67, 87 Gunpowder Plot, 67, 71 Gutton, Jean-Pierre, historian, 110 Guyon, Mme, Jeanne Bouvier de la Mothe, 280–2 Habert, Isaac, 129–30, 186 Habert, Louis, 292 Harlay, François, archbishop of Paris, 154, 209, 210, 216, 218, 224, 265, 278–9, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286–7, 291, 305, 306–7 Hébert, François, 285 Henri II, 18, 21, 135, 139 Henri III, 26, 29, 31, 33–5, 36–7, 41, 58–9, 66–7, 71, 142, 144 Henri IV, 36–51, 65, 67, 71, 87, 92, 93, 136, 164, 168, 170, 185, 300; absolution of, 38–40; assassination of, 44, 68, 74, 75, 76, 84, 90, 162, 163, 169, 170; and Béarn, 56, 165–6; and Catholic League, 45–8; concessions to Catholics, 44–8, 55–8, 86–7; conversion of, 36, 37–8, 65, 82, 144, 157; and council of Trent decrees, 39–49, 56–8, 83, 142; and gallicans, 62, 68, 73; and Jesuits, 58–63; and nobility, 89, 157–8, 169; and parlements, 54, 55, 57, 60–1,158; and Protestants, 28, 48–55, 156, 157–8, 161–2, 169, 172, 173, 257; religion of, 32, 33, 35–6, 64; and Spain, 90 Henri of Navarre, 32, 65, 67 Henriette-Marie, 95, 96 Henry VIII, 1, 13, 15, 220 Hersent, Charles, oratorian, 129 Holy Office, 73, 195, 197 Holy Roman Empire, 4, 5, 97, 229, 252 Holy Union, 36, 66. See Catholic League Hôpital, Michel de l’, 24, 25, 26, 31 hôpitaux-généraux, 109, 111 Hotman, François, 170, 172 Hundred Years War, 134 Hungary, 89 Imitation of Christ, 103 In Coena Domini, papal bull, 2, 3, 69, 222

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In Eminenti, 186, 190 Innocent X, pope, 192, 193, 293, 294 Innocent XI, pope, 286; and régale conflict with Louis XIV, 1–3, 11, 217–18, 221–2, 223, 226, 252, 253, 260, 277, 280; and revocation of edict of Nantes, 3, 263 Innocent XII, and Louis XIV, 2, 223, 226; and quietism, 282 Inquisition, 18, 39, 92, 184, 186, 199 Institutes of the Christian religion, 32. See Calvin Instruction on the various states of prayer, 282. See Bossuet intendants, 231, 232, 240, 241, 259, 264, 270, 272, 274, 284 Introduction to the devout life, 187. See De Sales Issy, conferences of, 281, 284, 301. See Bossuet, Fénelon, quietism Italy, 19, 20, 97, 131, 178 James I, 67, 70, 71, 74, 81, 95, 112, 117, 156, 170, 171–2, 183, 230, 235 Jan of Leiden, 174 Jansen, Cornelius, 100–1, 126, 129, 181, 183–4, 185–6, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 195–6, 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 287, 288, 297, 305–6. See Augustinus, Augustinianism, Cum occasione, Louvain, Mars gallicus, Saint-Cyran Jansenism/-ist(s), 123, 131, 181–205, 210, 215, 222, 223, 227, 287–98, 302, 305, 306; attack Protestants, 247, 253, 263; as Augustinians, 101, 185, 186, 187, 188, 206, 245–6, 247, 253, 266, 279, 286, 287, 294, 297; Bossuet and, 219; condemned by papacy, 190–3, 290–1, 292–5, 296–7; conflict suspended, 251, 277; five propositions of, 190, 192, 193, 195, 196, 198, 203, 209, 210, 288, 293; formulary against, 194, 195, 196, 197–8, 203, 204, 207, 216, 230, 278, 287, 288; impact of, 16, 140, 144, 151, 155, 214, 215, 217, 218, 239, 253, 266, 270, 277, 296–7; as moving target, 297–8; networks/ party of, 288, 292, 297; origins of, 182; as phantom, 206; and quietism, 282, 284–5; ‘refuge’ abroad, 253, 279; ‘respectful silence’ option over condemnation, 198, 288, 289, 290–1, 292; revival of, 278, 279, 280; second crisis of, 285–6, 287; viewed as rebels, 199. See Arnauld, Cum occasione, droit/fait disctintion; Jesuits, Louis XIV, Marca, Mazarin, Noailles, Peace of the church, Port-Royal, Unigenitus Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre, 35, 56, 165

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Jesuits, 88, 265, 279; abandon religious controversies, 247; accused of moral laxism, 200, 278, 286–7, 288; as agents of Spain, 59, 174; anti-Augustinian positions of, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 208; anti-Protestant activities of, 177, 233, 234, 251; attack Oratory, 98, 279; black legend of, 59; casuistry of, 286; defend Fénelon, 278; as educators, 63, 65, 75; expulsion in 1594, 39, 58–60; hostility to Noailles, 291; insecurity of, 113; pro-Roman stance of, 65–6, 72–3, 74, 80, 81, 122, 210, 291; protected by Richelieu, 114, 131, 185; recalled by Henri IV, 39, 60–2, 67; role in quietist affair, 278, 285; as royal confessors, 15, 113–14; and university of Paris, 74–7; works of controversy, 115, 117–19. See Bellarmine, Garasse, Jansenists, royal confessors, Vitelleschi Joan of Arc, 18 Joyeuse, François, cardinal, 82 Joyeuse, Anne, duke of, 46 Julius III, pope, 19 juridification, 53 Jurieu, Pierre, 268, 270 Kerver, Hyacinthe, Capuchin,107 king, as God’s anointed, 41, 121, 176 La Bruyère, Jean de, 283 La Chaize, François d’Aix de, royal confessor, 283, 291 La Flèche, Jesuit college of, 62. See Henri IV La Force, Jacques Nompar de Caumont, duke, 56, 165, 173 La Rochefoucauld, François, cardinal, 82, 92, 93, 113, 117, 123, 128, 152 La Rochelle, 244, 270; assembly of 1620, 157, 166, 171, 173, 174–5, 238; confession of, 156; Protestant bastion, 30, 96, 159, 167, 241, 258; revolt/fall of (1627–8), 96, 145, 167, 177–8, 179, 180, 227 La Vieuville, Charles de Coskaer, duke, 114 Languedoc, 46, 109, 161, 261; bishops hostile to Protestants, 267, 273; Protestant assemblies in, 269; Protestants/ism in, 24, 161, 178, 231, 233, 240, 241, 243, 244, 250, 257, 266, 272; revolt in, 148, 178, 228, 238. See Bâville, Montmorency, Nîmes, parlement, Toulouse Laud, William, archbishop of Canterbury, 15 Lauzon, Jean de, 105 laxism, moral, 198, 211, 278, 286–7, 289. See casuistry, Jansenists, Jesuits, rigorism Le Camus, Étienne, cardinal, 210, 248–9, 259, 263, 266 Le Maître, Antoine, 202

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Le Tellier, Michel, chancellor of France, 208, 211, 218, 259, 274 Le Tellier, Charles-Maurice, archbishop of Reims, 209, 218, 284, 285, 287, 306 Le Tellier, family, 218, 260 Le Valois, Charles, Jesuit, 285 Leo X, pope, 9 Léonard, Emile-G, historian, 227 Leschassier, Jacques, 68 Lescot, Jacques, 125 Lescun, Jean-Paul de, 173, 174 Lesdiguières, François de Bonne, duke of, 163, 168, 169 Lessius, Leonard, 72 lettres de cachet, 145, 277, 289, 290 Lionne, Hugues de, 197, 208 lit de justice, 54, 194 Loménie de Brienne, Étienne, cardinal, 15 Longueville, Anne de Bourbon, duchess of 252, 278 Lorraine, Charles de Lorraine-Guise, cardinal of, 15, 22, 92, 138 Louis IX, saint, 103, 177. See Saint Louis Louis XIII, 41, 74, 78, 84, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 101, 115, 118, 120, 123, 127, 144, 145, 305; against Habsburgs, 101; and Béarn, 56, 166; and brother’s marriage, 148–50; and Company of Holy Sacrament, 106, 107; and confessors, 102–3, 113–14; as dévot monarch, 121, 176–7, 236; ‘Just’, 103, 175; ‘protector’ of Protestant churches, 158; and Protestants, 96, 97, 120, 166–8, 174, 175–6, 177, 238, 240, 257, 305. See Gaston d’Orléans, Marie de Medici, Richelieu Louis XIV, 14, 15, 100, 103, 108, 131, 139, 146, 147, 150, 159, 168, 198, 245, 254, 276, 303, 304, 306; anti-dévot, 110, 111; and assemblies of clergy, 154, 215, 218–21, 230, 231, 234, 242–3, 248, 251, 253, 260, 262, 265, 271–3; and bishops/clergy, 151, 154, 203, 207–8, 209, 213–14; conflicts with papacy, 1–3, 11, 69, 205, 207, 210–11, 215–23, 253; criticisms of, 197, 204, 206, 211, 262, 268; and Jansenists, 155, 182, 191, 194, 195–6, 197, 198, 201, 280, 289, 290, 291–2, 293–5; makes concessions to Rome, 223–4, 226; Mémoires of, 249; and Protestants, 227, 230, 231, 234, 242–3, 248, 251, 253, 260, 262, 265, 271–3; and quietist affair, 279, 281, 282–4; religious education of, 208–9; revokes Edict of Nantes, 256, 262–3, 267, 305; style of rule of, 277, 201, 207–8, 299, 301, 302; wars of, 224, 246, 252, 270, 271, 284 Louis XV, 276, 284, 299, 300 Louis XVI, 34

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Louvain, university of, 149, 183–4, 186, 187, 297 Louvois, François Le Tellier de, 259, 261, 264, 266, 267, 274 Luria, Keith, historian, 241 Lutheran(-ism), 9, 16, 18, 21, 22, 245 Luynes, Charles d’Albert, duke of 93, 175–6 Lyon, council of, 215 magisterium, 13, 189, 209, 282, 287 Maimbourg, Louis de, Jesuit, 247 Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigné, madame de, 258, 272, 280–1, 283, 285, 291, 301 Mair, John, 66, 69 Malcontents, 29, 31 Marca, Pierre de, 130–1, 165, 191, 194–5, 210, 216, 217. See gallicansim, Jansenism, Mazarin, Richelieu Marguerite de Valois, 65. See Henri IV Mariana, Juan de, Jesuit, 74, 82 Marie de Medici, 63, 74, 76, 78, 89, 93, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 104, 113, 114, 148, 162, 163, 164, 166, 176, 186, 236 Marillac, Louis, marshal, 131 Marillac, Louise de, 92, 107 Marillac, Michel de, 98, 99, 100, 105, 112, 131. See Code Michau, dévots, Marie de Medici, Richelieu Marillac, René de, 259, 272, 274 Mars gallicus, 100–2, 126, Marsillargues, 261 Maurist-Benedictines, 247 Maxims of the saints, 282. See Fénelon Mayerne, Louis Turquet de, 172 Mazarin, as minister, 15, 93, 109, 111, 113, 127, 130, 131, 132, 188, 190, 300–1; and assemblies of clergy, 146, 151, 152, 153–4, 224; and Company of Holy Sacrament, 108, 109–10, 243; and dévots, 105, 108, 111; educates Louis XIV, 208; and Jansensism, 191–2, 193–4, 195–6, 199, 212, 294; Port-Royal attacks on, 201–3; and Protestants, 230, 234, 239, 240, 242–3, 245, 251, 257; religion of, 188; and Retz, 200–1 Meaux, 38 Mercoeur, duke of 89 Meynier, Bernard, Jesuit, 234, 244 ministériat, 100, 111, 124, 130, 207 Molière, 88, 107, 110 Molina, Luis de, Jesuit, 184 Molinos, Miguel de, 280 monarchomach, ideas, 170, 172–4 monarchy, conceptions of authority of, 5, 11, 12, 31, 32, 38, 41–2, 43, 46, 54, 64, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75, 78–81, 85, 97, 99,

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101, 102–3, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 124, 127, 141, 148, 163, 170, 171, 173–4, 175, 176, 179, 198, 206, 210–11, 212–13, 215, 217, 224, 229, 232, 268, 296, 301, 303, 306 Monluc, Blaise de, 22 Montaigne, Michel de, 26, 27, 300 Montauban, 30, 167, 174, 251, 258, 259; academy of, 171 Montchal, Charles de, archbishop of Toulouse, 151, 153 Montmorency, Henri II, duke of, 240 Montpellier, 167, 232, 240, 241, 258. See Fenouillet, bishop of, 150 moral-pastoral theology, 184, 185, 286 Morély, Jean de, 23 Morgues, Mathieu de, 120 Moriscos, 267 moyenneurs, 22 Müntzer, Thomas, 174 mutual obligation, political theory of, 173 Mysteria politica, 115, 120 Narbonne, archbishop of, 220 national council of gallican church, 17, 22, 38, 49, 144, 147, 155, 191–2, 194, 210, 218, 291, 295, 304 Naudé, Gabriel, 127 Nevers, Louis de Gonzague, duke of 89 Nicole, Pierre, 245, 247, 282, 285 Nijmegen, treaty of, 252 Nîmes, 156, 249; academy of, 171, 251; bishop of, 267; edict of, 178–9, 262; grands jours at, 250; Huguenot stronghold, 178, 241, 250, 255 Nine Years War, 224, 270, 271, 284. See War of League of Augsburg Noailles, Louis-Antoine, cardinal, 210, 287, 307; and former Protestants, 272–3; and quietist affair, 281, 285, and second Jansenist crisis, 289, 290, 290–1, 292–3, 294–5 Normandy, Protestants in, 52, 241–2, 261–2. See Alençon, Caen, Dieppe, Rouen parlement oath of allegiance, 61, 62, 67, 71, 81, 117, 156, 183. See England, James I Olivares, duke of, 112 ‘one faith, one king, one law’, 17, 25 Optatus gallus, 129. See Hersent Orange, Protestant academy at, 171 Oratory, 98, 104, 186, 238, 247, 279, 297. See Bérulle, Harlay, Jansenism, Quesnel Ordinance of Blois, 57, 142, 224 Orthez, Protestant academy at, 172 oubliance, 29, 47, 86, 160, 161, 299

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pacification, edicts of, 25, 39, 45–6, 49–50, 51, 53, 56, 57, 159, 178; process of, 26, 41, 47–8, 50, 52, 53 Pagès, Georges, historian, 99 papacy, 16, 23, 76, 125, 172, 300, 302; and assemblies of clergy, 141, 145, 146, 155, 181, 196, 224–5; authority of asserted/ criticised, 7, 8, 10, 13, 17, 59, 67, 69–70, 71–3, 74, 80, 82, 125, 128, 130, 133, 147, 155, 163, 183, 184, 190, 196, 197–8, 199, 209, 210, 219, 306; Bossuet and, 219–20; conflict with Venice, 71–3; and decrees of Trent, 56–7, 84; and gallican church, 12, 130, 210–11, 218–20; gallicans and, 38, 56–7, 58, 66, 69–70, 115, 119, 121; and Henri IV, 38, 39–40, 45, 55, 62; infallibility of debated, 210, 211, 220, 221; and Jansenism, 184, 186, 189–92, 195, 199, 289–90, 292–4, 295, 298, 302, 307; Jesuits and, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 72, 75; Marie de Medici and, 89–90; and moral laxism, 211, 286; nuncios in France, 58, 89, 118, 128, 153, 186, 197, 209, 238, 290; and Paris theology faculty, 13–14, 209–10, 211, 214, 287; relations with French monarchy, 2–3, 4, 5, 8–9, 10, 38–9, 114, 125, 129, 131, 133, 134, 137, 182, 195–6, 198–9, 207, 210, 214, 216–17, 218–19, 221–4, 256, 296, 300, 302; and reunion of French Protestants, 248; supporters within France, 57, 58, 65, 70, 71. See Bellarmine, conciliarist, gallican, Richer, Richelieu, ultramontane Paris, archbishop of 106, 128, 197, 207. See Gondi, Harlay, Noailles, Péréfixe, Retz Paris, parlement of, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 20, 40, 49, 50, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74–5, 76, 80, 81, 82, 100, 110, 116–17, 119, 122, 128, 129, 131, 140, 141, 145, 148, 151, 158, 159, 160, 189, 192, 194, 200, 206, 207, 209, 211–12, 213–14, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 222, 289, 294, 295, 300, 302 Paris, theology faculty (‘Sorbonne’), 222, 298; censured by Rome, 214; censures by 115, 118, 119; gallican position of 9, 10, 37–8, 69–70, 75–6, 124, 220; and heresy, 18, 19; impact of Catholic League on, 69–70; and Jansenism, 186–9, 191, 193, 203; libertas docendi, 14, 209; magisterium of, 13, 209–10; Richelieu and, 115, 125; status, 13–14, 65–6, 286, 289, 295; six gallican articles of (1663), 203, 206, 210, 217; ultramontanes in 70, 122, 123; and Unigenitus, 295. See Harlay, Jesuits, Noailles, university of Paris parlement(s), 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 20, 40, 46, 49, 50, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74, 76, 80, 81, 82, 100, 110, 116, 117, 118, 122, 128, 129, 130, 131, 140, 141, 145,

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148, 151, 152, 160, 173, 189, 191, 194, 200, 206, 207, 209, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 219, 220, 222, 232, 249, 289, 294, 295, 300, 302; and assemblies of clergy, 14 parti des dévots, 89, 111. See dévots Pascal, Blaise, 122, 193, 195, 198, 286, 288, 291 Pasquier, Étienne, 11, 59, 67, 68 Paul V, pope, 69, 71, 77, 184 Pavillon, Nicolas, bishop of Alet, 197, 204, 206, 211, 212, 216, 217, 220, 225, 279, 306 Pays de Gex, 257 Peace of Bergerac, 48 Peace of Monsieur, 27 Peace of the Church, 197, 204, 246, 247, 251, 253, 278, 286, 287, 288, 291 Pelagian/ism, 184, 186 Pellisson-Fontanier, Paul, 248, 259, 283 Père Joseph, Capuchin, 87, 93, 94, 96, 107, 120, 123, 176, 177, 181, 236 Péréfixe, Hardouin de, archbishop of Paris, 203, 204, 208, 210, 290 Perpetuity of the faith of the Catholic church concerning the Eucharist, 247 Petit, Jean, 74, 82 Petrucci, Pier Matteo, cardinal 280 Petrus Aurelius, 185, 306. See Saint-Cyran Philip IV ‘the Fair’, king of France 8, 11 Philippe d’Orléans, 295, 299 Phillips, Henry, historian, 143 Pithou, Pierre, 11, 68, 69, 70, 71, 128 Placards, affair of, 19 Poissy, colloquy of, 22–3, 32, 33, 58, 141, 238; contract of, 135–6, 137, 144, 145, 146; estates general at, 22, 135 Poitou, 215, 242, 261; dragonnades in, 259, 261; missions in, 177, 259; Protestant assemblies, 269–70, 272; Protestants of, 236, 241 Poland, 54, 297 politiques, 31, 35, 37, 38, 42, 43–4, 67, 68, 87, 170, 210. See monarchy Pontchartrain, chancellor, 272, 283, 284, 301 Port-Royal/ Port-Royal-des-Champs, action against, 206, 252, 254, 278–9; defies authorities, 182, 203–4; destruction of, 290–1; during Fronde, 199, 202; nuns of, 185, 197, 198, 204, 279; petites écoles, 200, 203; reform of, 185, 201–2; solitaires of 201, 202, 203. See Arnauld, Longueville, Saint-Cyran, Péréfixe Port-Royalist(s), 247, 248, 287. Portugal, 19 Pragmatic Sanction, 70 prélats d’état, 15 Prestwich, Menna, historian, 227 Priézac, Daniel, 127 privados, 114

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Protestants (-ism), 83, 86, 91, 126, 156–80, 213, 227–76; academies, 171, 236; after 1685, 264–76; aristocratic leaders, 157, 169, 228–9, 271; as gallicans, 10–11; attacked by Port-Royalists, 247; in Béarn, 56, 165, 173; closure of academies of, 251, 255; conversions to, 22, 233; conversion from to Catholicism, 95, 157, 162, 168–9, 221, 229, 233, 234, 236, 239, 241, 245–6, 248, 249, 253, 256, 259, 261–2, 263, 264, 265, 266, 269, 273, 274, 277–8; demography of, 157; destruction of, 257–8, 259, 261, 262; dévot hostility towards, 88, 95, 96–7, 98–9, 107, 111; early history of, 17–29, 30–1, 297; emigration of, 267; and Henri of Navarre/IV, 35–7, 41, 43–4, 43–4, 45, 46, 48–52, 63; ideas of obedience/ resistance to rulers, 29, 32–3, 170, 171–2, 174, 179, 229–30, 306; Louis XIV and, 208–9, 242–76 passim, 284; loyalism of, 169, 199, 229, 242, 269, ministers/pastors, 23, 28, 37, 52, 158, 162, 163, 171, 174, 237, 238, 241, 242, 245, 248, 249, 255, 256, 260, 263, 268, 269, 270, 271, 276; national/ political assemblies, 50, 53, 157, 162, 163, 164, 166, 178; national synods, 157, 170, 174, 238; persecution/repression of, 182, 250, 251, 254–6, 257–8, 259–60, 264–5, 269–70, 270–1, 276, 300; prédicants, 269; ‘prophesying’ movements in, 268, 270, 271, 275, 294; ‘Refuge’, 268–9, 270, 272, 276; resistance under Louis XIV, 261–2, 264, 269, 270, 272, 273, 307; revival of, 276; suppressed in 1685, 262–4; status under edict of Nantes, 3, 48–53, 55, 56, 111, 141, 156, 158, 240, 256; temples, 52, 242, 244, 254, 256–8, 262, 301; Vauban on, 283; viewed as rebels/schismatics, 242, 247, 253; wars of, 96, 145, 166–7, 178, 179; in wars of religion, 33–6. See edict of Nantes, monarchomachs, wars of religion Protestant Reformation, 4, 58, 112, 183, 233, 242, 246 provincial intendants, role in Protestant affairs, 231–2, 240, 241, 243, 245, 259, 261, 264, 265, 270, 272–3, 274–5 Puritans, 90, 95, 199 Quesnel, Pasquier, Oratorian, 279, 289, 291, 292, 294, 296, 297. See Jansenism, Réflexions morales, Unigenitus Quietism, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 294, 301. See Bossuet, Fénelon, Guyon Rabardeau, Michel, Jesuit, 129 Racine, Jean, 200, 279, 291 raison d’état, 102, 109–10, 112, 115

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377

Rapin, René, historian, 105 Ravaillac, François, 73 receiver-general of clergy, 137, 139 recherches de noblesse, 243 Récollets, 87, 265 Réflexions morales, 291, 292, 293, 296. See Quesnel, Unigenitus régale, 1, 2, 3, 11, 69, 155, 215, 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 223, 224, 248, 253, 259, 302, 303, 305. See gallican, Innocent XI, Louis XIV, Regiminis Apostolici, papal bull, 195 Reims, coronation at, 6, 38. See Le Tellier religion royale, 6, 32, 34 religious coexistence, 24, 25–6, 31, 44, 47, 53, 54, 64, 141, 159, 160, 161–2, 165, 179–80, 232, 233, 235, 241, 243, 256. See L’Hôpital, toleration Rennes, parlement of, 60, 160 Renty, Gaston de, 107 Retz II, Paul de Gondi, cardinal, 151, 195, 200–1, 210 Retz, Henri de Gondi, cardinal 93, 113 revocation. See edict of Fontainebleau, edict of Nantes Richelieu, Alphonse du Plessis, cardinal, 153 Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal, 112–32; anti-Augustinian theological leanings, 125–6; and assemblies of clergy, 144, 145–6, 147–8, 149–51, 152, 153, 154, 193, 199, 224, 305; clash with Caussin, 102–3; and Company of Holy Sacrament, 105, 106; conspiracies against, 104; dealings with Protestants, 52, 96–7, 157, 167–8, 175–6, 177, 178, 179–80, 228, 230, 242, 257, 300; dévot dislike of, 97, 98, 99, 100–1, 104–5, 176, 185; and dévots, 126, 176, 181; ecclesiological ideas of, 131; and England, 95; at 1614 Estates-General, 83, 85, 91; and grand orage, 99, 100; handling of religious conflicts, 305; hostility towards Jansenists, 186, 202; and Marie de Medici, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 114, 176; as minister, 15, 65, 92, 93, 95, 100, 188, 191, 209,300–1; and pamphleteering, 100–2; and papacy, 122, 129, 130, 131, 149, 187, 237, 239; patron of dévots, 94, 98, 100, 111; plans for religious reunion with Protestants, 236, 237–9, 245, 248; Political testament of 126; Protestant allies abroad, 114–15, 126; power in French church, 181; and raison d’état, 102, 126; and the régale, 216; reputation as Machiavellian, 125; as would-be patriarch of France, 129, 239 Richer, Édmond, 13, 66, 68, 69–71, 73–6, 77, 82, 123–4, 128, 199, 200 Richerism, 71, 182, 200 Richet, Denis, historian, 87 Rieux, bishop of Saint-Pol-de-Léon, 151

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right to resist tyranny/misrule, ideas of, 9, 29, 70, 116, 171–2, 174, 230. See monarchomachs, monarchy, Protestants rigorism, moral, 198, 204, 285–7, 288–9, 297. See Jansensism/ts, Jesuits, moral laxism Rohan, Henri, duke of, 163, 166, 178, 172, 179, 229 Rouen, 241, 250; archbishop of, 154, 209, 278; edict of (1603), 61–2; parlement of, 54, 58, 59, 159, 160, 242; Protestants in, 258, 274. See Harlay, Jesuits royal confessors, 15, 62, 92, 102–3, 113–14, 207, 208, 216, 291, 292, 295, 297. See Caussin, Coton, La Chaize, Séguiran, Suffren, Tellier RPR (religion prétendue réformée), 27, 28, 29, 228, 248, 254, 263. See Protestants Saint-Cyr, convent and school, 281. See Maintenon Saint-Cyran, Jean Duvergier, abbé, 92, 93, 100, 102, 105, 119, 184, 185, 186–7, 188, 202, 279, 286, 305–6. See dévots, Jansenism Saint-Denis, abbey of 34, 37, 45 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, historian,187 Sainte-Geneviève, assemblies of clergy, 128–9, 152, 181. See assemblies of clergy Saint-Germain, declaration of (1652), 230, 234, 240, 245, 251. See Mazarin, Protestants Saint-Pol-de-Léon, see Rieux, 148 Saint-Sulpice seminary, 281 Salamanca, university of, 184 Salic law, 40, 78 Santarelli, Antonio, Jesuit, 117–19 Sardica, council of (344), 8 Sarlat, 46 Sarpi, Paolo, 71 Saumur, academy of, 171 Sauve, 178 scrofula, 6, 101 security towns, Protestant, 30, 50, 51, 52, 56, 167, 169, 179, 228, 231 Sedan, 257; academy of, 171, 251, 268; Protestants in, 274 Séguenot, Claude, oratorian, 186 Ségueran, Gaspard, royal confessor, 113 Séguier, Pierre, chancellor of France, 128, 130, 208 Seignelay, Colbert de, Jean-Baptiste, 264, 266 Sens, provincial council of (1612), 77, 128; archbishop of 153, 192, 193. See Du Perron, Gondrin Servetus, Michel, 27 Servin, Louis, 11, 74–5 Seyssel, Claude de, 127 Sicily, 5 Sixtus V, pope, 36 Smith, Richard, theologian, 95

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Soubise, Benjamin de Rohan, duke of, Soubise, 166, 168, 172 Spain, and Catholic League, 43, 67; inquisition in, 19–20, 184; Jansenism, 183–4, 190–1, 297; monarchy of, 92, 112–13, 155, 304; relations with France, 44, 49, 78, 89–90, 90–1, 95, 97, 114, 122, 164, 252; religious influences of, 88, 183–4, 280, 297; and wars of religion, 30, 36, 39, 44, 49; Spanish Netherlands, 43, 100, 253, 279; and Jansenism, 183–4, 190–1, 297. See Arnauld, Jansen, Louvain, Molina, Molinos, Quesnel, Suprema St Bartholomew’s Day, massacre of 21, 29, 33, 34, 35 St Jerome, 5 St Louis, 5, 18, 177. See Louis IX St Michel, 5, 177 Strayer, Joseph, historian, 4 Suarez, Francisco, Jesuit, 72, 81 Suffren, Jean, royal confessor,114 Suger, Abbot, 92 Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, duke of 47, 63, 163, 168 Suprema (Spanish inquisition), 20 Switzerland, 17, 268, 276 Syllabus of errors (1864), 293 Synod of Dort, 156, 171 Synod of the ‘Desert’, 276 Tallon, Alain, historian 7, 110 Talon, Denis, 206, 211–14, 303 Talon, Omer, 131 Tartuffe, 88, 107, 110 Taveneaux, René, historian, 110 Télémaque, 284 Tellier, Michel, royal confessor, 291, 292, 297 Thirty Years War, 94, 99, 100, 112, 145, 229 Thomist, 288. See Aquinas Thou, Jaques-Auguste de, 55, 67, 68 Tilenus, Daniel, 171, 172, 173–4 toleration, 24, 26, 29, 31, 64, 95–6, 97, 111, 232. See religious coexistence Torcy, Colbert de, Jean-Baptiste, 294 Toulouse, 184, 279; archbishop of, 191, 220, see Marca, Montchal; Catholic bastion, 35, 44, 46, 111, 176, 232; chambre de l’édit, 54, 250; parlement of, 18, 19, 46, 54, 60, 67, 160, 222, 249–50, 254 Tours, 67 Treatise on heresy, 117. See Santarelli Trent, council of, 7, 11, 13, 19, 22, 23, 26, 39, 56, 71, 85, 92, 140, 149, 182, 198; decrees of, 65, 66, 83, 90, 142, 162, 226, 246; reception of decrees, 83; ritual of, 265 Tronson, Louis, 281, 285 Troyes, 46, 47

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Turenne, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, conversion to Catholicism, 229, 245–6, 248 tyranny/tyrants 29, 34, 61, 74, 81, 100, 116, 150, 170, 174; justifications of killing of, 29, 59, 74, 81 Ubaldini, Roberto, papal nuncio, 89 ultramontane, ecclesiology, 12, 211; sentiments in France, 58, 77, 89–90, 93, 123, 148, 210, 215, 284, 291. See Duval, Jesuits, papacy Unigenitus, papal bull, 291, 293–5, 296–7, 302, 307; reception of, 294–5, 296–7. See Clement XI, Jansenism, Louis XIV, Tellier University of Paris, 8, 58; conflict with Jesuits, 74–5, 187. See Jesuits, Paris faculty of theology Urban VIII, pope, 188 Valtelline, 97, 114, 167 Vauban, Sébastien Le Prêtre, marshal, 301; on Protestants, 271–2, 274, 283 vénalité, 139, 334

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Venice, republic of, 60, 103; gallican affinity to, 68, 71, 73; papal interdict against 8, 67, 69 Ventadour, Henri de Lévis, duke of, 105, 177 Véron, François, 238, 239 Versailles, 285; as political capital, 266, 280, 284, 289 Vineam Domini, papal bull, 289, 290–1, 292, 294 Virgin Mary, 103 Vitelleschi, Mutio, Jesuit, 114 Vivarais, 240, 270 wars of religion, 5, 6, 8, 11, 18, 21, 25, 29, 42, 45, 56, 58, 66, 68, 73, 77, 78, 84, 86, 88, 90, 94, 101, 122, 123, 126, 127, 136, 141, 142, 143, 146, 163, 168, 229, 235, 271, 300, 306 Wittenberg, 89 Wolsey, Thomas, cardinal, 15 Ysambert, Nicolas, 125 Zwinglianism, 16

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