Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France

Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France Also by Alison Forrestal: CATHOLIC SYNODS IN IRELAND, 1600–1690 FATHERS...

Author: Alison Forrestal | Eric Nelson

70 downloads 1900 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France

Also by Alison Forrestal: CATHOLIC SYNODS IN IRELAND, 1600–1690 FATHERS, PASTORS AND KINGS: Visions of Episcopacy in Seventeenth-Century France

Also by Eric Nelson: THE JESUITS AND THE MONARCHY: Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590–1615)

Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France Edited by

Alison Forrestal Lecturer in Early Modern History, National University of Ireland, Galway

Eric Nelson Assistant Professor of History, Missouri State University

Editorial matter, selection and Introduction © Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson 2009 All remaining chapters © their respective authors 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN-13: 978–0–230–52139–1 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–52139–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 18

9 17

8 16

7 15

6 5 14 13

4 12

3 11

2 1 10 09

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on Contributors

viii

Introduction Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson

Part I

1

Crown, Church and Ultramontanism

1 Henri IV and the Papacy after the League Alain Tallon 2 Adjusting to Peace: The Observant Franciscans of Paris and the Reign of Henri IV Megan Armstrong

21

42

Part II Contentious Words and Deeds: History and the Construction of Memory 3 Exegesis as Public Performance: Controversialist Debate and Politics at the Conference of Fontainebleau (1600) Michael Wolfe

65

4 Chastel’s Attempted Regicide (27 December 1594) and its Subsequent Transformation into an ‘Affair’ Robert Descimon

86

Part III Clemency and Conﬂict: The Bourbon Style of Government 5 Royal Authority and the Pursuit of a Lasting Religious Settlement: Henri IV and the Emergence of the Bourbon Monarchy Eric Nelson 6 Conﬂict Resolution under the First Bourbons Michel De Waele v

107 132

vi

Contents

Part IV Catholic Activism to the Richelieu Years 7 Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation Barbara Diefendorf 8 Vincent de Paul: The Making of a Catholic Dévot Alison Forrestal

157 180

Part V The Politics of Religion in the Provinces 9 The Origins of Counter Reform Piety in Nantes: The Catholic League and its Aftermath (1585–1617) Elizabeth Tingle

203

10 Obedience to the King and Attachment to Tradition: Senlis under the Early Bourbons (1598–1643) Thierry Amalou

221

Epilogue Régime Change: Restoration, Reconstruction and Reformation Mark Greengrass

246

Index

261

Acknowledgements

This volume originated in a conversation that took place in the convivial atmosphere of the annual conference of the Society for the Study of French History in 2002. In bringing it to fruition, we have beneﬁted from the advice and support of many colleagues in French History, but special thanks are due to several friends who have cheerfully responded to queries and offered advice on editorial dilemmas. In particular, we would like to recognise the contributions made by Joe Bergin and Jotham Parsons, both of whom gave constructive criticism at crucial points, and Jane Conroy, whose linguistic expertise was extremely valuable. We offer thanks also to our contributors, who proved very good sports throughout the preparation of the collection. We also acknowledge the generous ﬁnancial support of the National University of Ireland, Galway, whose ‘Grant in Aid of Publication’ signiﬁcantly eased the burdens of translation and indexing. Finally, as is customary but nonetheless heartfelt, we would like to thank Alice Nelson and Dave Gillard for their patience and understanding throughout the process of production.

vii

Notes on Contributors

Thierry Amalou is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne. He recently published Une concorde urbaine. Senlis au temps des réformes (vers 1520–vers 1580) and Le Lys et la mitre. Loyalisme monarchique et pouvoir épiscopal pendant les guerres de Religion, and is currently writing an history of preaching during the wars of Religion. Megan Armstrong is Associate Professor of History at McMaster University. Her publications include The Politics of Piety: Franciscan Preachers and the French Wars of Religion 1560–1600. She is presently completing a comparative study of early modern Franciscan missions. Robert Descimon is Directeur d’études at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris). Recently published books include Les ligueurs de l’exil. Le refuge catholique français après 1594 (with José Javier Ruiz Ibáñez). He is currently preparing a study of the Parisian nobility of the robe (with Elie Haddad). Michel De Waele is Professor of History at the Université Laval, Quebec. He is the author of Les relations entre le Parlement de Paris et Henri IV and Québec, Champlain, le Monde, and is currently working on a book on the national reconciliation policy of Henri IV. Barbara Diefendorf is Professor of History at Boston University. Recently published books include The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: A Brief History with Documents and From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris. She is currently completing a study of the paths through which the Catholic Reformation spread in France. Alison Forrestal is Lecturer in Early Modern History at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her books include Fathers, Pastors, Kings: Visions of Episcopacy in Seventeenth-Century France and Catholic Synods in Ireland, 1600–1690. She is now writing a biographical study of Vincent de Paul. viii

Notes on Contributors ix

Mark Greengrass is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Shefﬁeld. He recently published Governing Passions. Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom, 1576–1585, and is now working on the politics of communication in sixteenth-century France. Eric Nelson is Assistant Professor of History at Missouri State University. His ﬁrst monograph, entitled The Jesuits and the Monarchy: Politics and Religion in Early Modern France (1590–1615), appeared in 2005. He is currently preparing a study of the sacred landscape of the upper Loire valley from the ﬁfteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Alain Tallon is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). Among other works, he has published Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au XVIe siècle and directed with Philip Benedict and Silvana Seidel Menchi La Réforme en France et en Italie: contacts, contrastes, comparaisons. His current research concerns the relations between politics and early modern catholicism, especially in France and Italy. Elizabeth Tingle in Senior Lecturer in Early Modern European History at the University of Plymouth. She recently published Authority and Society in Nantes during the French Wars of Religion 1558–1598, and is now examining the doctrine of purgatory and practices of intercession in Brittany during the Catholic Reformation. Michael Wolfe is Professor of History at St. John’s University, New York. His most recent books are The Conversion of Henri IV: Politics, Power and Religious Belief in Early Modern France and Changing Identities in Early Modern France (ed). He is currently completing a companion study on building and living with fortiﬁcations in urban France between 1450 and 1650.

This publication was grant-aided by the Publications Fund of National University of Ireland, Galway.

Introduction Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson

Just over a decade after King Henri IV issued the Edict of Nantes (1598), the political and social complexion of France appeared radiant. The events surrounding Henri’s inauguration as king in July 1594 and his death in 1610 demonstrate the shift in public mood and political climate that had occurred in these years. Viliﬁed from pulpits in the early 1590s as the epitome of duplicity and heresy, the assassinated king was in 1610 the focus of adulation and his death was lamented as the eldest son of the Catholic church, the father and saviour of the French realm. The late king appeared to have accomplished what seemed near impossible when the last Valois king, Henri III, died by the thrust of an assassin’s dagger in 1589; in his short reign, he had halted the turbulence and carnage wrought by over three decades of civil war and passed a stable government to his successors. However, the mythology of Henri’s reign, its roots planted so effusively and unanimously in his funeral tributes, obscures the complex interplay of authority and reconciliation that were required to secure the realm that ‘emerged as the most powerful state in Europe in the century following the accession of Henri IV.’1 Furthermore, the legend of Henri’s easy assertion of power rapidly passed into the historical tradition, so that its distorted view of events generally assumed that his reign formed the only signiﬁcant period of Bourbon rule before the ministry of Richelieu and that this relatively short period offered the complete story of post-war recovery.2 In fact, it should be regarded as just one segment of a lengthy process of transition that began in 1589 with Henri’s accession and concluded with the successful royal campaigns to dismantle Huguenot strongholds in the provinces during the 1620s. From this perspective, the Wars of Religion also concluded only at the point when the Crown succeeded in crushing Huguenot military power and drew the 1

2

Introduction

semi-autonomous Huguenot population under its immediate authority.3 Stretching the wars of religion beyond 1598 and even 1610 does not devalue the achievements of the ﬁrst Bourbon monarch, for the reign of Henri IV brought a signiﬁcant promise of stability to the political and religious environments of France. He dramatically defeated the political opposition of the Catholic League through a blend of force and appeasement, and established a denominational co-existence in the kingdom that lasted until 1685. Annette Finley-Croswhite’s study, for example, of the king’s relations with League, royalist and Huguenot towns demonstrates convincingly that he managed to legitimize his accession to the throne using a policy of collaboration through clientage, which became an integral facet of his art of rule. He created a base of loyalty that was not only politically expedient but also a powerful recognition of the authority of the ruler over the ruled, in part through frequent interventions in municipal elections and the renewal of charter privileges in towns such as Amiens and Nantes.4 Yet, the reality of Henri’s rule could not possibly match the supposed facts of the legend. He based so much of his reign on a cultivated consensus, which sought to avoid contentious issues, that Mark Greengrass concludes that it was characterized by ‘an air of relativism’, prudent but necessary.5 Indeed, the consensus was fragile. While many of Henri’s aristocratic Leaguer opponents such as the duc de Mayenne, leader of the Guise faction, never openly rebelled against him, the potential for further factional strife remained throughout his reign. In 1602, the king dealt harshly with the rebellion of his former comrade-in-arms, the duc de Biron, and in 1606 marched on the stronghold of Sedan to chasten the duc de Bouillon. In practice, therefore, stability was not an ideal that could be quickly and painlessly achieved and, after 1610, the regent Marie de Medici and the young Louis XIII encountered considerable domestic reverberations originating in the civil wars. The revolt in 1614 of Condé, supported by Huguenot nobles, the Gallican article of the third estate at the 1614 Estates General, and the royal campaign to conquer the Huguenot province of Béarn in 1617–20, for instance, owed much to the political ﬁssures created during the wars and threatened to undo the Crown’s efforts to contain opposition and solidify its authority. Henri IV’s unwillingness to adopt a root and branch approach to reform and reorder meant that during the 1620s the government of Louis XIII had to deal with similar difﬁculties of noble faction, criticism from the emerging Dévot wing of the Catholic Reformation, and Huguenot autonomy. The potential for civil unrest and religious disputes remained very high after 1610, with the result that the stability of the realm regularly looked to be in jeopardy.

Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson 3

Undoubtedly, therefore, a search for political stability and maturity characterized the Bourbon regime before and after the death of its ﬁrst king. It was a period of transition from civil war to redeﬁned ambitions of absolutist authority, undertaken by Henri and continued apace by his successors. A key element of this redeﬁnition of royal power lay in the relationships that the monarchy pursued with the zealous proponents of Catholic reform, itself part of a broader phenomenon of international Catholic recovery and expansion. The links between Crown and church grew closer in the 1600s as Henri IV sought to conﬁrm the loyalty of his former opponents and simultaneously seize his role as the eldest and devoted son of the Catholic church. As Eric Nelson illustrates, this was ﬂamboyantly evident in the king’s patronage of the Society of Jesus, which was reintegrated into French public life in 1603 after its humiliating ban from northern and eastern France by the Gallican Parlements of Paris, Rouen, Dijon and Rennes in 1594. The Jesuits’ rehabilitation was a direct consequence of Henri IV’s successful pursuit of arcana imperii, a potent blend of inscrutable royal authority, reason and clemency that proved mutually beneﬁcial to the new monarch and returning Society.6 Despite Marie de Medici’s reissue and subsequent reconﬁrmations of the Edict of Nantes and her refusal to press for the enshrinement of the decrees of the Council of Trent at the Estates General in 1614, she and her son continued to display considerable favour to the Dévots of the Catholic cause. It was never likely that either would fully endorse the Dévots’ political theology, given the equally persuasive force of Gallican sentiment within the political establishment, but they seized opportunities to associate the monarchy closely with the new religious orders, charitable foundations, and missions that formed the pillars of reform. Scholars of the Bourbon regime recognized from the early 1990s that the opening decades of Bourbon rule formed a crucible in which two of the most signiﬁcant developments in ancien régime France took shape: the absolutist ambitions of the Bourbon monarchy and the establishment of the French Catholic Reformation. In terms of political authority, this does not suggest that the Bourbons completely broke with the reform efforts of the late Valois rulers, especially those of Henri III. The recent work of Mark Greengrass on the opening decade of Henri III’s rule and that of Xavier Le Person on the closing years of his reign have demonstrated how Henri III leveraged the consultative, persuasive, and performative features of the monarchy, ﬁrst in efforts to reform his kingdom from the late 1570s and then to control aristocratic rebellion from the mid-1580s.7 However, as Greengrass concludes, while the early Bourbon rulers pursued many of the goals of Henri III’s reform agenda and continued his emphasis on a

4

Introduction

‘harmonious and ordered polity’, they had reshaped the monarchy’s approach to reform in important ways by the 1620s. By then, a distinctly Bourbon belief had emerged that, far from destroying France, ‘a selective application of strong medicine was perhaps the best way of remedying the patient’. This contrasted sharply with the late Valois view that such remedies were potentially lethal to the kingdom. Meanwhile, the moralizing elements of reformist ideology that had been evident in the 1570s and 1580s waned ‘in the face of arguments that sought to create a public morality that was separate from private morality, a “reason of state” in which obedience was a virtue over and above others’.8 The emergence of this more authoritarian emphasis from the 1590s has led scholars to acknowledge readily that this was a period of redeﬁnition and consolidation of royal authority. Scholars like Joseph Bergin have also shown that the aspirations of religious reformers in France emerged around the same time as the monarchy’s revival and frequently developed a mutually dependent relationship with it. Bergin’s research shows that Henri IV placed considerable emphasis on episcopal patronage as a key element of establishing control in the provinces, winning over suspicious opponents, and rewarding royal service. In doing so, he displays the close connection between the re-establishment of the monarchy’s authority and the revival of the French Catholic church, a link that provided the impetus for substantial reforms to the episcopate during the ministries of Richelieu and Mazarin.9 Yet, in these achievements, the monarchy actually channeled reform tendencies that had originally emerged independently of it. Barbara Diefendorf’s study of female piety in Dévot Paris builds on the work of an earlier generation of scholars such as Louis Cognet and Jean Dagens, who argued that one goal of the Dévots was the return of the Gallican church to a position of cultural eminence that was unrivalled by the Protestant presence in the kingdom.10 She argues strongly for the central contribution of women to this development; the surge in female vocations and public religiosity from the Catholic League onwards offered the Catholic reformation a topography of monasteries, convents, and initiatives in charitable welfare, underpinned by the substantial spiritual reﬂections of inﬂuential and charismatic ﬁgures such as Barbe Acarie and Louise de Marillac. Diefendorf also notes intriguingly that the roots of female Dévot piety lay ﬁrmly in the trauma endured during the League years, and were at least partially a response to it. Her conclusion that the League period’s harsh physical ascetic practices and emphasis on Christ’s passion gave way to inner mortiﬁcation, moderate asceticism and emphasis on the Christ of the poor plainly indicates the rewards that lie in examining progression within

Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson 5

Dévot piety over the longue durée, from the later Wars through the ﬁrst three decades of Bourbon rule, and beyond. In general, however, despite their ready admission of the transformative nature of the period 1589–1629, scholars have tended to concentrate either on the years that immediately preceded or succeeded it. This is in part a structural problem, for the period falls between two distinct and easily identiﬁable eras: the Religious Wars and the era of Absolutism spanning the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. With few exceptions, consequently, it falls victim to their dominance in the historiography. Analyses of the Wars present the ﬁrst decades of Bourbon rule as a happy epilogue of returning political and social order. Examinations of the evolution of Bourbon rule during the seventeenth century give in to the temptation to hurry past these ‘introductory’ years, with just a perfunctory nod to them in Chapter 1. Few publications concentrate entirely on the period, although a notable exception is Michael Hayden’s investigation of the Estates General of 1614, in which the regent’s problems of noble unrest, Gallican doctrine amongst members of the third estate, and the bishops’ desire to enshrine the decrees of the Council of Trent in law coalesced.11 In 1990, Denis Crouzet’s Les Guerriers de Dieu challenged historians to abandon the stock interpretations of the Religious Wars as explicable by economic, social, and institutional causations in favour of a reprioritization of religion as a belief system that offered legitimacy to violence even before the violence of the 1560s began. Herein lay the ideological underpinnings of the Catholic League and the explanation for its popular appeal. He rejected the contention that the Saint Bartholomew Massacres should be labelled a Guisard plot or popular uprising, arguing that they were simply the bloody but explicable climax of ten years of apocalyptic tension and violence. Crouzet went on to argue that sacral violence waned after 1572, as violent impulses became internalized and expressed in the corporate repentance of ritual processions.12 He takes clear aim at the tendency to explain the League sans Dieu (without God), perhaps most famously attempted by Robert Descimon’s forensic dissection of the Seize, which interpreted the League in Paris as an attempt to revert to the political balance of the medieval city commune where civic honours were thought to be shared harmoniously across a spectrum of urban notables.13 In Descimon’s assessment of the League’s conﬁguration, religious motivations tend to be depicted as minor and superﬁcial, the afterthoughts of the profound social forces that dictated events. Although he admits that the utopian myth perpetuated by Leaguers was borne of

6

Introduction

a theological conception of the world, he contends that the reform of social and political disparities within the Parisian magistracy drove the Leaguers.14 Furthermore, Jean-Marie Constant’s analysis of the social and geographical dimensions of the League in the provinces provides crucial insights into the local issues and ambitions that determined its levels of support nationally, suggesting that its defeat owed much to its inability to overcome local conﬂicts of interest amongst and between urban elites and nobles, and to win sustained support in more than a few urban centres.15 Crouzet’s conclusions, however, have set the scene for other major studies of the Wars through the 1990s and 2000s, so that religion has been reinserted ﬁrmly into the Wars of Religion.16 Barbara Diefendorf expertly exposes the dynamics of religious sensibilities in her study of the escalation of religious tensions in Paris from 1562 to the Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre in August 1572. She demonstrates the causal force of religion in the emergence of Huguenot cells in the city, the subsequent rise of confessional confrontation, exacerbated by socioeconomic tensions, and the breakdown of order as Catholics confronted those that they believed threatened to destroy the social body of the municipality, the political body of the monarchical realm, and the dogmatic body of Christ.17 Research on the Catholic League continues to offer its best results when situated in the larger context of the Wars. Philip Benedict highlights the interconnection between the religious and the socio-political content of the Wars in Rouen in his contention that devotional activities in the city were genuine expressions of the League’s meaning and purpose as a crusade against heresy.18 Benedict suggests that the classical expressions of League piety, penitential processions, confraternities, and eucharistic adoration in Rouen were early expressions of the Catholic Reformation that matured in the seventeenth century. He, Diefendorf, and other specialists conﬁrm Denis Richet’s suggestion that the League gave birth to the Dévot movement that molded the Catholic Reformation in France. Indeed, Richet claims that the League of the Dévots, though politically vanquished, emerged victorious in the seventeenth century as its social asceticism, advocacy of the Tridentine decrees, and emphasis on eucharistic devotion were transformed into a mass of vocations, missions to catechize the faithful, and moral campaigns to purify the streets.19 However, with the exception of Diefendorf’s study of Parisian women in the early seventeenth century, most examinations of the evolution of reform after the Wars concentrate on the period of maturity from the 1630s. Philip Hoffmann, Jim Farr and Keith Luria have led the way in

Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson 7

pioneering regional studies that trace the complex relationship between traditional, local, devotion and the agenda of Tridentine diocesan reform.20 This cultural approach has tended to dominate historiography, although understanding of the episcopate’s social background, corporate identity and diocesan activities, in particular, has developed exponentially by virtue of new biographical and prosopographic studies.21 In turn, these highlight the vulnerability of the convention that the absolutist aims of the Bourbon kings were met, and that the French state remorselessly and purposely employed bureaucratic mechanisms to strengthen its authority in religious affairs, whether through episcopal appointments or opposition to Jansenism. For instance, Joseph Bergin points out that Richelieu, through desire and necessity, made creative use of patronage to install bishops who were ideological allies of the Crown and committed to ecclesiastical reform. Furthermore, his penetrating analysis of the Cardinal’s personal wealth portrays him as a minister who served the Crown, family, and himself. This evaluation of the minister as a shrewd survivor greatly weakens the traditional interpretation of his reforming statesmanship and state building.22 Over the past 30 years scholars have effectively dismantled the notion that a coherent and effective centralized absolutist government emerged under the Bourbons, while continuing to recognize the absolutist ambitions of the Crown. Regional studies have emphasized the distinction between aspiration and practice, particularly in outlying provinces where the reach of royal rule was deﬁned through compromises forged with local elites.23 David Parrott, in his exhaustive study of a key French institution, the army, lends further credence to the claim that the Crown, and its ministerial representatives, could not rely on bureaucratic apparatus to implement their will, but bought obedience and co-operation of individuals and groups through patronage and kinship. Parrott depicts pervasive networks of clientage that connected ministers, administrators, and ofﬁcers, but concludes that these could not be sustained once France entered a multi-theatre war in 1635. By the 1640s, the Crown’s military objectives and bloated army outgrew the number of candidates eligible for military posts, and its control over military commanders and their units diminished dangerously during the early ministry of Mazarin.24 In prioritizing the years 1594–1624, this volume seeks to return scholarly attention to their importance as a period of transition between the Wars of the late Valois regime and the Bourbon France of Henri IV and Louis XIII. Its essays offer the fruits of new research in primary areas of political and religious relations, notably the restoration of equanimity

8

Introduction

between the Crown and its most virulent Catholic opponents, attempts to quell political faction, and the campaigns, often royally sponsored, to promote Catholic reform. As such, not only do these essays precisely expose the decisive patterns of political and religious behaviour up to 1624, but also explicitly set the scene for their evolution thereafter. Amongst the Crown’s fundamental priorities, once the League disintegrated, was the restoration of relations with two key clerical opponents to the change of dynasty. Throughout the Wars, the papacy and the religious orders had not hidden their distaste either for a policy of toleration or for the prospect of a Protestant or convert king. In print and from pulpit, religious roused the Parisian crowds against both, and groups of Capuchins, Observant Franciscans and other religious assumed prominent roles as political actors in the penitential processions of the Catholic League from 1585.25 Demonstrably and seemingly resolutely ultramontane, these clerics took their lead from the papacy that excommunicated Henri de Navarre and declared him ineligible to succeed to the French throne in 1585. Within ten years, however, the papacy performed an about turn. Several authors have traced the chronology of these events and, in particular, French efforts to ensure that Henri IV’s succession received the Roman seal of approval.26 Generally, these tend to pair the papacy and Spain in opposition to the campaign to recognize Henri IV but, as Alain Tallon argues in his contribution to this collection, Roman hostility to this was due to a determined reluctance on the part of the cardinal inquisitors of the Holy Ofﬁce to reconcile to a relapsed heretic, rather than to Spanish favouritism. Reconciliation of Clement VIII with Henri IV constituted his ﬁrm imposition of papal authority over the Holy Ofﬁce, and checked its growing inﬂuence on the theological and political orientation of the Tridentine church. As a political gesture of the plenitude of papal power, the reconciliation paved the way for the pope’s careful engagement with the new regime; although the pope proved unwilling to promote clerics with suspect politique or even heretical pasts, such episodes did not erupt into open conﬂict. Megan Armstrong agrees that this new found détente contributed much to Henri’s ability to court his clerical opponents in France; amongst the Observants of Paris, a remarkable shift in political perspective took place in the aftermath of his conversion, crowning, and papal absolution. In turning from outright condemnation of the heretic pretender, they borrowed from a Franciscan tradition of turmoil, puriﬁcation, and reconciliation, which enabled them to embrace the clement aspects of royal authority that identiﬁed Henri IV as the divinely chosen instrument of peace and order.

Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson 9

Michael Wolfe takes the public disputation at Fontainebleau in 1600 between the Huguenot Philippe Plessis Du Mornay and the Catholic Jacques Davy Du Perron as the king’s clearest signal to his subjects that he had sacriﬁced his old life for the new life of a Catholic monarch and defender of the true faith. Prominent members of the political establishment, Huguenot and Catholic, attended the conference but, crucially, once it concluded, the debate moved into the wider sphere of public opinion. This marks, according to Wolfe, a transition in the organization and dissemination of intellectual capital but, more broadly, in the religious politics of the new regime; Bourbon political culture focused on the art of perception and systematically used the skills of theologians, lawyers, and rhetoricians to ﬁght the cause of monarchical authority on paper and vocally. As Robert Descimon’s dissection of the construction of the ‘Chastel affair’ reveals, this was a vital component of the Crown’s struggle to appropriate a watertight vindication of its Catholic loyalties and royal succession. Discrediting of opponents, whether Leaguer or Huguenot, formed part of this larger narrative, but Henri IV proved conspicuously reluctant to allow Chastel’s attempt to assassinate him or the Paris Parlement’s expulsion of the Jesuits in 1594 to be turned into ‘affairs’ that would scupper his efforts to complete his reconciliation with the Catholic church. Yet, later conﬂicts enabled Voltaire and his Enlightenment colleagues to resurrect Chastel and to construct a rhetorical narrative of the affair that supported their attacks on the Jesuits. As historical memory moved beyond the control of the monarchy, the careful crafting, by Henri IV, of the Bourbon image of royal power was unable to maintain its stabilizing effect on the reigns of his successors. Nevertheless, his initial success speaks of early Bourbon efforts to shape public perceptions. Similar to the conference of Fontainebleau, Henri’s congruent encounter with the parlementaires of Paris provides a crucial perspective on the steps that the ﬁrst Bourbon took to pacify the kingdom and rebuild relationships with key institutions and individuals. Eric Nelson’s analysis of Henri’s redeﬁnition of kingship concentrates on the theatrical encounter between the king and the parlementaires of Paris in January 1599, when Henri adopted a political style that characterized his reign to justify his effort to secure religious co-existence in the Edict of Nantes. Although the episode is familiar to historians, this is the ﬁrst effort to dissect the conceptual layers of Henri’s assertion of royal power over the Parlement, and Nelson places particular emphasis on Henri’s construction of the theory and practice of kingship through emphasis on royal clemency and the realities of political power.27 The monarch’s speech blended command and request to

10

Introduction

induce obedience and acted as the climax of his earlier attempts to redeﬁne French kingly rule as a product of inscrutable royal authority, reason, and clemency. Challenging a historiography that radically distinguishes between the merciful justice of Henri IV and the rigorous severity of Marie de Medici and Louis XIII, Michel de Waele demonstrates that the principle of clemency continued to shape the Bourbon approach to peacemaking and its assertions of authority, lending some coherence to the priorities of early Bourbon rule. As it did for his father, therefore, this fundamental royal virtue inﬂuenced Louis XIII’s efforts to resolve conﬂicts during his reign, even though the nature of conﬂicts changed from civil war to revolts and conspiracies. In fact, de Waele illustrates that, from the mutiny of Condé in 1615 to the conspiracy of Cinq-Mars in 1642, revolts were normal phenomena in France, and that their speciﬁc contexts determined the variations in the Crown’s responses to them. He concludes that the Crown’s resort to clemency as its primary gesture of negotiation certainly did not alter from Henri IV to Louis XIII. The treatments meted out to Huguenot rebels in 1629 and to conspiring nobles, Chalais, Ornano, Soissons, de Thou, and Cinq-Mars, signal that only the intransigent and secretive who did not dance to the tune of informal political rules that permitted open expression of grievances, and negotiations ending in rapid submission and a royal pardon, bore the brunt of the king’s ire. The contrived encounter at Fontainebleau in 1600 ushered in a new era of co-operation between Henri IV and the devout Catholics who sought to initiate religious renewal in France. A small but highly inﬂuential group known as the Dévots beneﬁted handsomely from the king’s displays of partisanship during the 1600s. Barbara Diefendorf’s contribution to this volume illustrates Henri’s deliberate targeting of reformed religious orders and her ﬁndings complement Eric Nelson’s study of Henri’s collaboration with the restored Jesuit order.28 The king lavished his patronage on notoriously recalcitrant orders such as the Capuchins, as well as others such as the Feuillants and Recollects that formed the vanguard of the Catholic Reformation in Paris. In symmetry with Armstrong’s assessment of the timing and manner of the Observant friars’ capitulation to the new king, the results of Diefendorf’s research testify to the emerging alliance between French Catholic reform and the Bourbon monarchy. Alison Forrestal’s exploration of the early network of Vincent de Paul, who emerged as a highly regarded and inﬂuential Dévot activist under Louis XIII, presents a further aspect of Dévot growth. The pattern of

Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson 11

relationships, material and intellectual, within the Dévot community proved highly productive in initiating ideas and foundations. Its range and vitality, however, remain beyond the scope of most studies, which concentrate instead on the thesis that a religious renaissance emanated from the spiritual insights of a select group of individuals, especially Benet of Canﬁeld and Pierre de Bérulle.29 Forrestal’s essay extends this limited perspective in tracking de Paul’s early exposure to three crucial inﬂuences: Bérulle, a leading spiritualist; the Frères de la Charité, a Spanish religious order; and the generous patronage of the noble Gondi family. In the long term, she suggests that they had a decisive impact on the missionary ethos and activities of de Paul and the Congregation of the Mission, providing the organizational, intellectual, and material resources that enabled him to create a confraternity of charity that proved extremely adaptable to the missionary locales that his priests targeted from 1625. Vincent de Paul established the ﬁrst confraternity of charity in 1617, by which time Elizabeth Tingle suggests that piety in the former League city of Nantes was progressing rapidly towards Tridentine norms. Tingle argues strongly that the roots of the Catholic Reformation lay in the years of League dominance, when features that became classic manifestations of Tridentine religiosity ﬁrst emerged. Indeed, the Catholic League marked a transition between older customs and new, from large-scale communitarian processions to parochial organization, frequent communion and confession and, in that regard, follows a pattern identiﬁable in other cities.30 Thierry Amalou’s study of Senlis, whose royalist loyalty differentiated it clearly from Leaguer Nantes, further illustrates the plasticity of local religious traditions. The members of the municipal oligarchy of Senlis were affected by the same pious zeal of their counterparts in Nantes and Paris during the early seventeenth century; proﬁting from sensitive respect for local religious conditions that two reforming bishops displayed, they succeeded in melding customary pious traditions with recent Tridentine devotions, so that former Leaguers and royalist Catholics were simultaneously satisﬁed. Both urban studies indicate that the reestablishment of social and political consensus amongst Catholics in the provinces was successful precisely because it harnessed an already emerging and widespread predilection for Tridentine reform and devotions that could be customized for local settings. The essays assembled in this volume are representative of the most recent and progressive research in the politics and religion of early Bourbon France. The volume does not claim, however, to be a composite history of the ﬁrst decades of the new regime. Indeed, the gathering of ten

12

Introduction

essays that represent current directions and conclusions in research gives rise to a further, ideal opportunity to assess the current state of scholarly knowledge and to reﬂect on the potential for its expansion in the future. Clearly, Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France’s essays shed welcome light on the solidifying alliance between the Catholic church and the monarchy after 1598, on the regeneration of Catholic loyalties through the articulation of reform relationships and objectives, on the evolution of a Bourbon style of kingship, and on its implications for the monarchy’s ability to respond to political opposition. Even so, to some extent, they still reﬂect the harsh reality of historiographical convention, for none focuses speciﬁcally upon one signiﬁcant period of the early Bourbon regime, the regency of Marie de Medici between 1610 and 1614. Scholars and students must still resort to the late nineteenth-century studies of Perrens, supplemented by Zeller, in order to access information on the events and policies of the regency government, and only one biography of the queen regent has been published recently.31 Michael Hayden’s study of the 1614 Estates General offers signiﬁcant insights into Marie’s efforts to quell the open opposition of the great nobility, but far more of this type of detailed analysis of regency policies is essential if we are to understand the role that these years played in the formation of the Bourbon monarchy.32 What do the limits to the expression of the female regent’s authority reveal about the progress made in the refashioning of royal authority to 1610, and did the hiatus between adult kings inﬂuence the development of the theory and practice of Bourbon kingship? The period that immediately followed Marie’s regency, the personal rule of the young Louis XIII, is equally neglected. It is rarely considered, on its own terms, as a period of attempted readjustment to the pattern of rule established by the new monarch’s father, and the generalizations made about political and religious developments during these early years tend to smooth out the intrigues and strategies that shaped the Crown’s actions. For example, while Richelieu’s rise to prominence after Louis’s majority has come under close scrutiny, his mother’s favourite, Carlo Concini, and his successor chosen by Louis XIII, Charles Albert de Luynes, have remained enigmatic and underestimated in their abilities. In particular, their efforts to reassert royal authority remain relatively unexplored in regard to both planning and attempted execution.33 Marie has also certainly received very bad press, despite the fact that she inherited a set of difﬁculties from her husband that he had failed to smother completely during his reign – the potential for noble disaffection, dissatisfaction with the religious settlement, and grave structural weaknesses within the ﬁscal system. Finally, her political activities from

Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson 13

her ﬁrst exile to Blois in 1617 have been explored only as they relate to Richelieu’s rise to, and consolidation of, power. Marie’s regency signalled the return to dominance in central government of former Leaguers such as Sillery and Villeroy, once the duc de Sully resigned in 1611. In effect, this mirrored the growing strength of the Dévot wing of French Catholic reform but contributed to deteriorating relations between the monarchy and the Huguenot community. While the Parisian network and activities of these Dévots have now been quite closely examined, we still remain starved of knowledge about the Dévot presence and inﬂuence in the provinces. In this volume, the essays of Thierry Amalou and Elizabeth Tingle hint at the potential for archival study in formerly royalist and Leaguer towns. Alison Forrestal’s study of the connection between Vincent de Paul’s sojourn in Paris and his pastoral work in south-east France highlights one manner in which the fundamental ideas and structures of reform were transmitted. Elsewhere, Alain Tallon has tackled the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement in Paris, one of the confraternal organizations that played a crucial role in the dissemination of the ideas and practices of moral and religious reform, but it was formed only in 1629 and Tallon’s study is limited to the Parisian branch.34 The roots of the Compagnie’s pursuits in the provinces surely lie in the circles of Dévot activity that evolved during the ﬁrst three decades of the seventeenth century. Only further sustained study of public and private piety in provincial towns will enable us to recognize such a link securely and gauge fully the mechanisms used for the transmission of reform agendas across France. Although the Huguenot community of the sixteenth century has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention, it remains, with the exception of its military engagements, a relatively unknown quantity in the seventeenth century. Philip Benedict’s surveys have led the way in opening up this subject area, while Gregory Hanlon and Keith Luria’s important accounts of denominational co-existence in Aquitaine and Poitou, respectively, indicate the potential value of further local examinations of the cultural and social contexts of co-existence, as evidenced in, for example, records of commerce, kinship, and religious afﬁliation.35 But other lines of inquiry still remain to be explored. For instance, a study of the relationship between Huguenot and noble identity in a period when both were being shaped by an emerging Bourbon regime and the system of ofﬁcial religious co-existence would advance the ﬁeld, as would a study of the international links of French Protestantism in the decades before open conﬂict with the Crown in the 1620s. Finally, the missionary campaigns amongst the Huguenots undertaken by Crown-sponsored groups

14

Introduction

such as the Capuchins and Congregation of the Mission are almost entirely unexplored. A further area of exciting research potential is the widening horizon of French missionary, commercial, and political engagement in the Mediterranean and the Americas during this period of intense exploration and colonization. The religious character of French imperialism requires particular attention. The Crown’s interest in and its support for French missionaries such as the Congregation of the Mission in Fort Dauphin and the Jesuits in Canada and other strategic locations has largely been overlooked.36 Even more neglected is the Mediterranean, where Fernand Braudel’s identiﬁcation of the region as a critical French space never really expanded to engage with the study of the French state, particularly, during the period of Bourbon rule. Richelieu and Père Joseph’s plan for a French led crusade of Catholic and Protestant princes against the Turks is quite well known,37 but diplomatic sources as well as contemporary travel accounts point more signiﬁcantly to the routine engagement of the Bourbon monarchy in the religious affairs of the Mediterranean on behalf of the Latin Christian faith. By the time of Louis XIV this engagement stretched well beyond the dispatch of a few missionaries and it raises important questions about the role of religion in the construction of Bourbon absolutism. Finally, much of the economic history of the opening decades of Bourbon rule has yet to be written. Most studies to date have either slotted the early Bourbon regime into large scale surveys of the longue durée or have focused on particular aspects such as urban growth, with the exception of a few studies of Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, and Henri IV’s surintendent des ﬁnances.38 Very little has been produced regarding the Crown’s interventions in regional and international commerce and in revenue collection before Richelieu’s tax initiatives from the mid-1620s. Nevertheless, the revival of both trade and Crown revenue were critical to the early Bourbon political revival and the reestablishment of peace in the localities. A further avenue of inquiry might look at the early Bourbon economy in the context of the growth of the European economy and the increasing importance, and wider trading networks, especially in the Atlantic World, to the French economy. The opening decades of Bourbon rule saw France engage, as never before, in long-distance trade – an initiative that helped to underpin and shape later mercantilist policies of the Crown. The writing of the history of the early Bourbon regime is a work in progress, and this volume is both a record of recent advances and a reminder of what remains to be investigated. These essays conﬁrm the

Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson 15

pivotal role that the early decades of the seventeenth century played in inventing and consolidating the classic features of the Bourbon polity and Catholic revival, while simultaneously ushering these years towards a position of historiographical parity with the hitherto dominant eras of the Wars of Religion and Bourbon Absolutism. Without doubt, a new political and religious world developed in France over the course of the 30 years between 1594 and 1624. Its deﬁning characteristic lay in the appeals to and search for social, religious, and political consensus. The responses to this pressing need for stable accord produced the distinctive forms of kingly authority, the rules of political negotiation, and Dévot piety that continued to shape the Bourbon realm through the remainder of the century.

Notes 1. Keith Cameron (ed.), ‘Introduction’, From Valois to Bourbon. Dynasty, State & Society in Early Modern France (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1989), 1–3, at 2. 2. Jacques Hennequin, Henri IV dans ses oraisons funèbres ou la naissance d’une légende (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977); Marcel Reinhard, La Légende de Henri IV (Paris: Hachette, 1936). 3. With the exception of the important survey by Mack Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), most studies depict the Edict of Nantes as the terminus of the Wars; Georges Livet, Les Guerres de religion, 1559–1598 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962); J. H. M. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Benn, 1975); Robert Knecht, The French Wars of Religion, 1559–1598 (London: Longman, 1989). 4. S. Annette Finley-Croswhite, Henri IV and the Towns. The Pursuit of Legitimacy in French Urban Society, 1589–1610 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also Michael Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV: Politics, Power and Religious Belief in Early Modern France (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 5. Mark Greengrass, France in the Age of Henri IV, 2nd edition (London: Longman, 1995), p. 256. 6. Eric Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy. Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590–1615) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 7. Mark Greengrass, Governing Passions: Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom (1576-1585) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Xavier le Person, ‘Practiques et Practiquers’: La vie politique à la ﬁn du règne de Henri III (1584–1589) (Geneva: Droz, 2002). 8. Greengrass, Governing Passions, pp. 370–1. 9. Joseph Bergin, The Making of the French Episcopate, 1589–1661 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). 10. Louis Cognet, La Spiritualité française au xviie siècle (Paris: La Colombe, 1949); Jean Dagens, Bérulle et les origins de la resstauration catholique (1575–1611) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1952); Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity:

16

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

Introduction Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). J. Michael Hayden, France and the Estates General of 1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion, 2 vols (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1990). Robert Descimon, Qui étaient les Seize? Mythes et réalités de la ligue parisienne (1585–94) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1983). Robert Descimon and Elie Barnavi, La Sainte Ligue, le iuge, et la potence: L’assassinat du président Brisson (15 novembre 1591) (Paris: Hachette, 1985). Jean-Marie Constant, La Ligue (Paris: Fayard, 1996). See also Stuart Carroll, Noble Power during the French Wars of Religion: The Guise Afﬁnity and the Catholic Cause in Normandy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Mack Holt, ‘Putting Religion Back into the Wars of Religion’, French Historical Studies, 18 (1993), 524–51. Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross. Catholics and Huguenots in SixteenthCentury Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Philip Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). See also Robert Harding, ‘Revolution and Reform in the Holy League: Angers, Rennes, Nantes’, Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981), pp. 379–416. Much of Richet’s work remains untranslated. A key article, ‘Sociocultural Aspects of Religious Conﬂicts in Paris during the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century’ is printed in translation in Robert Forster and Oreste Ranum (eds), Ritual, Religion and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1982), pp. 182–212. For a larger selection of his writings, see Denis Richet, De la Réforme à la Révolution (Paris: Aubier,1991). James Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy (1550–1730) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Philip Hoffmann, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon 1500–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Keith Luria, Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the SeventeenthCentury Diocese of Grenoble (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Bergin, French Episcopate; Isabelle Bonnot, Hérétique ou saint? Henri Arnauld, évêque janséniste d’Angers au xviie siècle (Paris: Nouvelles Éditiones Latines, 1984); Alison Forrestal, Fathers, Pastors and Kings: Visions of Episcopacy in Seventeenth-Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) Bergin, French Episcopate; Joseph Bergin, Cardinal Richelieu: Power and the Pursuit of Wealth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); James Collins, Classes, Estates and Order in Early Modern Brittany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). David Parrott, Richelieu’s Army: War, Government and Society in France, 1624–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Megan Armstrong, The Politics of Piety: Franciscan Preachers during the Wars of Religion, 1560–1600 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004); Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson 17 26. Bulla, legatus, nuntius. Études de diplomatique et de diplomatie pontiﬁcales (XIIIeXVIIe siècle) (Paris: École des Chartes, 2007); Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV. 27. Michel de Waele, Les Relations entre le Parlement de Paris et Henri IV (Paris: Publisud, 2000). 28. Nelson, Jesuits and the Monarchy. 29. Dagens, Bérulle; Yves Krumenacker, L’École française de spiritualité (Paris: Cerf, 1998); René Taveneaux, Le Catholicisme dans la France classique, 2 vols (Paris: Société d’Éditiones d’Enseignements Supérieur, 1980). Barbara Diefendorf’s From Penitence to Charity remains the only recent effort to trace Dévot relationships with an emphasis on females networks of activism. 30. P. Benedict, ‘The Catholic Response to Protestantism. Church Activity and Popular Piety in Rouen 1560–1600’, in J. Obelkevitch (ed.), Religion and the People 800–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), p. 178; M. Cassan, ‘Laïcs, Ligue et Réforme Catholique à Limoges’, Histoire Économie et Société, 10 (1991), pp. 159–60. 31. M. Carmona’s, Marie de Médicis (Paris: Fayard, 1981) is an unreconstructed condemnation of Marie; François-Tommy, Perrens, L’Église et l’état en France sous le règne d’Henry IV et la régence de Marie de Médicis (Paris: Durand et Pedone-Lauriel, 1872); G. Zeller, Aspects de la politique française sous l’Ancient Regime (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1964). 32. Hayden, France and the Estates General. 33. Joseph Bergin, The Rise of Richelieu (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991). The standard biography of Concini is Hélène Duccini, Concini: Grandeur et misère du favori de Marie de Médicis (Paris: A. Michel, 1991). 34. Alain Tallon, La Compagnie du Saint- Sacrement (Paris: Cerf, 1990). 35. Philip Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France, 1600–1685 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1991); Philip Benedict, The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots, 1600–85 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); G. Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Co-Existence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1993); Keith Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conﬂict in Early Modern France (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005). 36. The Congregation of the Mission inaugurated its mission to Fort Dauphin in 1648: Pierre Coste, Le Grand Saint du grand siècle, 3 vols (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1931), ii, p. 227. Henri IV offered the Jesuits a pension to establish a house in Canada in 1607, although the mission only sailed after his death. See Dominique Deslandres, Croire et faire croire: les missions française au xviie siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2003), for a valuable survey of French missions in the seventeenth century. 37. B. Pierre, Le Père Joseph: L’Éminence grise de Richelieu (Paris: Perrin, 2007), pp. 129–59, 189–215. 38. See, for example, the important work on urban economies and social change by Philip Benedict: Philip Benedict, ‘More than Market and Manufactory: The Cities of Early Modern France’, French Historical Studies, 20 (1997), pp. 511–38; Philip Benedict, ‘Faith, Fortune and Social Structure in Seventeenth-Century Montpellier’, Past and Present, 152 (1996), pp. 46–78, reprinted in Philip Benedict, Faith and Fortune, pp. 121–49. On agrarian economic history, see P. Hoffmann, Growth in a Traditional Society: The French Countryside, 1450–1815

18

Introduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). On Sully, see David Buisseret, Sully and the Growth of Centralised Government in France, 1598–1610 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1968); Bernard Barbiche, Sully (Paris: Albin Michel, 1978); Bernard Barbiche and Ségolène Barbiche, Sully: L’homme et ses ﬁdèles (Paris: Fayard, 1997); Richard Bonney, The King’s Debts: Finance and Politics in France, 1589–1661 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) is a useful general survey.

Part I Crown, Church and Ultramontanism

This page intentionally left blank

1 Henri IV and the Papacy after the League Alain Tallon

The absolution granted to Henri IV in Rome on 17 September 1595 was an important moment in the consolidation of power of a king who still remained challenged, in spite of his return to Catholicism in 1593. It took two years after the solemn abjuration of Saint-Denis to obtain this decision from Pope Clement VIII. It gave the French sovereign a decisive advantage from the point of view of both external and internal affairs. On the external front, the eldest son of the Church, ﬁnally welcomed as such by the common father, was now able to establish or strengthen diplomatic relations with Catholic states, which he needed in his conﬂict with Spain. Admittedly, Venice had at once acknowledged Henri de Bourbon as king on the death of his predecessor without awaiting his conversion – but had nonetheless refused to grant him the title of ‘très Chrétien’ and scaled down the customary special embassy sent to congratulate him. The other Italian sovereignties, who were much more sensitive to pressures from Rome, were not really in a position to follow the example of Venice, not even Tuscany, despite its concern to use its French alliance to counterbalance the Spanish power in the Italian peninsula. The reconciliation of the king with the Pope paved the way to a re-establishment of the French presence in Italy, which had been considerably diminished during the wars of religion. On the internal front, the king’s last Catholic opponents could no longer cite Rome’s reticence for delaying their submission to his authority and after a truce which started in the month of September, the duc de Mayenne made his ﬁnal submission in November 1595, which was followed during the next few months by that of the last great nobles of the League, with the notable exception of the duc de Mercœur in Brittany. It was true that the abjuration of Saint-Denis had made it possible for the League’s supporters to rally to the king. However, justiﬁcation had to be 21

22

Henri IV and the Papacy after the League

found for the fact that the newly converted Henri had been accepted back into the fold by bishops without the endorsement of the Pope, whereas canon law explicitly reserved cases of heresy for the Sovereign Pontiff to absolve. The subtle lines of argument regarding the threat to the king’s life every day at war, which therefore constituted one of the emergency situations envisaged by the same canon law as justifying the granting of an absolution by an authority other than that of the Roman pontiff, hardly carried any weight.1 The Gallican Church could not endure for long this untenable situation of king and Pope pitted against each other, which was a major obstacle to all its institutional mechanisms. The solution of establishing a national council or independent patriarchate, as advocated by the most radical Gallicans, would have rekindled suspicions of a false conversion, thus more effectively leading France into schism, to follow an English model of heresy, a possibility which was particularly present in the minds of French Catholics.2 The reconciliation of 1595 therefore marked a true turning point for Henri IV. It put an end to more than a decade during which the heir apparent to the French crown, subsequently Henri III’s successor, had in the eyes of the Roman Curia represented its main adversary and then perhaps the most decisive political and ecclesiastical problem for the papacy: the decision whether or not to welcome back the newly repentant heretic. This was for Rome, to a large extent, a decision about its own future and that of Roman Catholics. The incidents which marked these years have of course been well known for quite some time; however, in order to better understand the post-1595 period, it is useful to analyse the incidents in the light of recent works on the papacy in the second half of the sixteenth century, which, mainly in Italy, have been characterized by a radical re-evaluation of the role of the Congregation of the Holy Ofﬁce in the political and religious management of the Catholic Church.3 Simon Ditchﬁeld has quite rightly spoken of an ‘inquisitorial turn’ in Italian historiography during the last 30 years.4 The Congregation created in 1542 quickly assumed a central role in the deﬁnition of theoretical, yet also political, orientations, of the papacy, and even imposed its rule on the Curia, having placed throughout the second half of the sixteenth century a virtually uninterrupted series of cardinals from within its ranks on the throne of Saint Peter. However, the Holy Ofﬁce suffered a serious setback when Clement VIII decided to grant an absolution, a decision which it fought with utmost determination. The re-establishment of normal relations between the Holy See and France also had signiﬁcant consequences with regard to the internal politico-ecclesiastical balance within the Roman Curia. From

Alain Tallon 23

1584 onward, the Congregation of the Holy Ofﬁce was at the forefront of the campaign against the heir apparent to the French throne. The archives of the Congregation contain evidence of inquiries carried out at the start of the month of July, when news of the death of the duc d’Anjou, on 11 June, reached Rome. The lawyer of the inquisition copied the records of the earlier trial of Henri de Bourbon’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret, queen of Navarre, in 1563, in order to prepare for the later case held against her son.5 This trial, which Olivier Poncet discovered in the Archivio segreto Vaticano, and which he is preparing for publication, and the sentence delivered by the court declaring Henri de Bourbon a relapsed heretic, paved the way for the drafting of the famous bull of privation, the Brutum fulmen, denounced by François Hotman, which Sixtus V fulminated against Henri in September 1585, in the middle of a diplomatic crisis with France.6 The Pope, worried about the strength of the Spanish and hostile towards the League, was soon to relax this uncompromising policy and towards the end of his pontiﬁcate seemed willing to explore the road of reconciliation with Henri, who by then was king of France. Public rumour in Rome certainly suggested such an intention on the part of the Pope. On 6 June 1590, in the course of an investigation held in Rome involving the trade of portraits of Henri IV, the court cross-examined the painter Giandomenico Angelini, in whose home the Holy Ofﬁce’s henchmen had discovered an efﬁgy of the heretical sovereign. He explained that he had heard it being said that the Pope intended to receive Navarre back into the Church very soon and so he was preparing for that by painting portraits which he would sell at the right time. He added that he had already made a tidy proﬁt selling 150 portraits of the duc de Guise following his assassination.7 This last detail is interesting as an example of somewhat reassuring opportunism in such fanatical times. Although one can legitimately doubt the level of genuine openness of Sixtus V’s policies, he may have given the impression of being ready to retract the bull suspending Henri’s rights and to accept him back if he decided to return to the bosom of the Roman Church. In any case, the death of the pontiff on 27 August 1590 put an end to any speculations about a possible change of heart. The Congregation of the Holy Ofﬁce and its president, Giulio Antonio Santori, who also, signiﬁcantly, presided over the Congregation of French affairs set up after the Blois assassinations, for their part never shared such hesitations. The Roman Inquisition even became one of the instruments in the struggle against Navarre’s propaganda in Italy, as the investigations into the distribution of portraits of the

24

Henri IV and the Papacy after the League

king prove. These were to resume following the death of Sixtus V. In January 1591, the Holy Ofﬁce once more began to search for portraits of Henri IV, which were being sold from stalls in Rome.8 In May, copies which had been seized were burnt in the square of the Congregation palace.9 In June of the same year, the Inquisitor of Genoa complained about seeing noblemen of that republic, despite it being a loyal ally of Spain, attempting to obtain engravings portraying the sovereign who had been condemned by the Holy See.10 At the start of the year 1592, the Inquisitor of Vicenza managed to dissuade a peddler from selling portraits of the king; yet, when congratulated by the Congregation in Rome, he was obliged to admit in his reply that these engravings were commonplace in the city, a city which pledged allegiance to the Venetian Republic, the only Catholic power to have acknowledged Henri IV as early as 1589.11 The Inquisition did not stop at simply searching for images of the king, and during the ﬁrst half of the 1590s the Holy Ofﬁce in Italy arrested many French subjects, of all social classes, from simple beggars to nobles, whilst not sparing the merchants either. These arrests led to at least one execution.12 This militant hostility towards Henri de Bourbon on the part of the Holy Ofﬁce came as no surprise to French historiography which, without any close scrutiny, adopted the vision created among Protestants and ‘politiques’ of a vast Catholic plot with Spain at its helm. Throughout the second half of the sixteenth century, the Catholic powers, and the papacy in any case, were unanimous in their attempts to destroy the Reformation by imposing Philip II’s hegemony throughout Europe.13 However, this supposed political unity of post-Tridentine Catholicism is purely and simply a myth. During his long reign, the Spanish king’s relations with Rome were often tense, and sometimes quite frankly hostile.14 The objectives, both political and ecclesiastical, which were pursued openly by the Catholic monarchy and the papacy were only in perfect harmony. And it must be pointed out that within the Roman Curia, the most uncompromising faction from a religious point of view was also that which was most vocal in anti-Spanish sentiment. Gian Pietro Carafa, the guiding spirit of the Congregation of the Holy Ofﬁce since its creation in 1542, who became Pope Paul IV in 1555, was the last Sovereign Pontiff to attempt to expel the Spanish from Italy by force.15 His pitiful failure in this regard did not prevent successive inquisitor popes during the Inquisition period from having tense relations with the Catholic king. Pius V, Michele Ghislieri, who had also been Carafa’s main collaborator in inquisitorial matters, was far from appreciative of Philip II’s intervention in the ecclesiastical domain and his reluctance to engage in the

Alain Tallon 25

Holy League against the Turks; as for the Spanish sovereign or the representatives in his territorial possessions, they opposed any efforts to fully restore all the former rights and privileges of the Holy See or of the bishops, when the decrees of the Council of Trent were being applied. Despite the Brutum fulmen of 1585, it was well known that Sixtus V’s policy towards Philip II was hostile. This steadfast distrust of the Catholic monarchy displayed by the most extremist faction in Rome is striking and surprising, given the closeness of their religious beliefs. While it is the case that under the reign of Charles V, the zelanti, led by Carafa, had suspected the emperor of wishing to impose a pact with the heretics, no such accusations could be levelled at Philip II. In fact, it is the very closeness of their beliefs which explains the opposition between the inquisitorial papacy and the Catholic monarchy during the second half of the sixteenth century. Both wished to establish a religious and political order which was aimed at the sanctiﬁcation of the faithful and the punishment of heretics. Yet, the supporters of the inquisitorial faction had a concept of power within Christendom, which they had inherited from the classical Middles Ages and mendicant ecclesiology, characterized by a theocratic gloriﬁcation of pontiﬁcal power, of the rights of the Holy See and of those of the Church. Although respectful of the Holy See’s prerogatives, Philip II could not delegate to it the power which he believed was vested in him by God, to lead the ﬁght for faith in his states and in Europe. Far from being inevitable, the convergence between Spain and the Holy Ofﬁce regarding Henri IV goes against the anti-Spanish tradition of the zelanti which occasionally led them to side with the French. Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santori, the head of the Congregation of the Holy Ofﬁce and loyal heir to Gian Pietro Carafa and Michele Ghislieri, even if he did not hold a negative view of the Catholic monarchy, had maintained his pro-French sentiments and had for a long time hoped to see the re-establishment of Henri III’s authority.16 His radical opposition to the reconciliation of Henri IV does not stem from him aligning himself with Spanish positions, even if the Grand Inquisitor was rather highly regarded in Madrid and became even more so when his antipathy to Sixtus V and his disagreement with his policies became manifest. Santori was one of Philip II’s candidates in the four conclaves which followed one after another from 1590 to 1592, and notably his favourite in the last one, which resulted in the election of Clement VIII. The Spanish position on the issue of French succession was well known in the Holy Ofﬁce, where there is an extant copy of the tracts in favour of the rights of the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, on whose

26

Henri IV and the Papacy after the League

behalf Spanish diplomacy was making inroads in Rome and Catholic Europe.17 But, for all that, the main reason for Santori’s committed opposition to any notion of absolving Henri IV did not stem from an analysis of the international situation which led him to favour Spain, but rather above all from the desire, which had been present since the creation of the Congregation as the papacy’s political arm, to impose rigid inquisitorial principles.18 These inquisitorial norms ruled out any reconciliation for a relapsed heretic, who could only be handed over to the secular arm. The arguments put forward by supporters of the French king, highlighting the fact that his absolution was not a normal case in view of the major political implications which it would have on the future of France and of Christendom, served only to reinforce Santori’s opposition on principle. He saw it as a crucial struggle against the ‘raison d’État’, defended by the ‘politiques’, which in his view threatened the very foundations of the Catholic Church. The ﬁght against heresy could not accept half-measures or exceptions. Santori was unable to contemplate without terror all the irenic projects re-emerging about Henri IV, which the Holy Ofﬁce, since its origin, had considered to be as dangerous as heresy itself. Throughout Europe mémoires were beginning to appear in which the religious afﬁliation of the new king of France was considered as a source of hope for the reconciliation of Christians. Some of their authors, breaking free from all rival orthodoxies, went so far as to address the Pope directly. One such was the exiled Francesco Pucci, who, from Frankfurt, wrote to Gregory XIV and to his nephew, Cardinal Sfondrato, prophesying the reform of the Church by the king of France and the uniﬁcation of all believers, including Jews.19 The stance of the Congregation of the Holy Ofﬁce towards Henri IV therefore did not arise from its pro-Spanish sentiment, but rather from its uncompromising concept of the struggle against heresy and its willingness to insistently impose such a stance as a political norm on the Sovereign Pontiff. On this last point, the absolution of the French king brought up an issue which had continued to weigh heavily on the papacy since the creation of the Congregation: to what extent would tribunal decisions subsequently be imposed upon later sovereign pontiffs? For the theocratic concepts of inquisition, cardinals were not exactly identical to the pontiﬁcal absolutism practised in lay states. Of course, the tribunal was indeed born of the desire to rekindle old conceptions of the universal and absolute power of the Sovereign Pontiff, such as those found in the preamble to the Brutum fulmen, for example. However, the Holy Ofﬁce tended to view itself as the true guardian of

Alain Tallon 27

this absolute power, which successive popes merely wielded for a time. This conception severely challenged the pontiﬁcal plenitudo potestatis, as we can see from a mémoire by Canon Francisco Peña, who was very close to Santori. Written in the early summer of 1595, De veris et falsis remediis Christianae religionis instaurandae et catholicos conservandi was a last-ditch stand of the inquisitors prior to the absolution of the king. In it Peña violently attacks the concessions made to heretics on the pretext of civil unrest, the notion that the Pope could disregard the canonical norms in the name of politics of necessity, and goes so far as to reiterate the theory of a heretic Pope.20 The reaction of Clement VIII was ﬁerce: he gave Baronius responsibility for examining the treatise and had its main points condemned by the Congregation of the Holy Ofﬁce itself, which was thus forced to swallow this new humiliation, as well as that of the king’s absolution. The reconciliation of the king of France was therefore the perfect opportunity for the Sovereign Pontiff to afﬁrm his authority over the Inquisition, without necessarily weakening its power. The following years saw new tensions between the Pope and the cardinal inquisitors. For all that, one must avoid being too quick to reduce this conﬂict to a mere ideological opposition between intransigents and moderates. Clement VIII, like the Congregation of the Holy Ofﬁce, shared the conception of the papacy which was adopted in Rome with the Counter Reformation, taking up again the theocratic conceptions of the classic Middle Ages and adapting them for use in the struggle against heresy. The subtle difference between the Pope’s vision and that of the inquisitors lies in the former’s more absolutist and personal conception of his plenitudo potestatis, which could not be restricted by any congregation, not even that of the Holy Ofﬁce. But, for all that, the defeat of the latter was not complete: although the bull granting absolution to Henri IV only mentions the congregation in passing, the acts submitted for the king to ratify included the transcripts of purely inquisitorial proceedings. This made the Congregation a body within the absolution procedure, to the great rage of Arnaud d’Ossat, who saw this as a means to force the French to recognize the jurisdiction of the Holy Ofﬁce in Rome.21 French diplomacy quickly realized that Clement VIII, despite having imposed his wish regarding the reconciliation of the king, did not necessarily intend to revisit in any radical way the political principles of the inquisitorial papacy in the second part of the sixteenth century, but rather to adapt them to his own vision and to use his own men. Admittedly, the Pope may for a while have supported a slight relaxing of this policy. Gigliola Fragnito has clearly demonstrated this in regard

28

Henri IV and the Papacy after the League

to the Index: the Congregation of the Index, made up of the Pope’s men, among them Francisco Toledo and Cesare Baronius, the chief architects of the reconciliation of Henri IV, attempted in 1596 to impose a new Index, of which the Congregation of the Holy Ofﬁce disapproved. This proves the extent of the split of 1595. The inquisition cardinals won their case and the Pope had to withdraw the Index, which he had, however, ofﬁcially promulgated. Clement VIII had tried to exploit the renewed links with France in this struggle concerning the Index.22 The Congregation of the Index had therefore sent a copy of its new Index to Cardinal Pierre de Gondi, asking him to publish it in France.23 The congregation showed great optimism in imagining that Henri IV was going to accept something which his predecessors had always refused, namely the introduction of pontiﬁcal censorship in France. Such an attempt may be explained by the Roman context, where what mattered was proving the legitimacy of the Pope’s political choices in favour of France by showing that henceforth France would collaborate with a policy of repressing heresy. From Clement VIII’s point of view, this collaboration would be facilitated by relaxing censorship standards, a move that actually had the effect of angering the cardinals of the Holy Ofﬁce, particularly with regard to La République by Jean Bodin.24 Yet, from France’s viewpoint, the issue was not about appreciating the severity or the indulgence of the Roman censors, but rather about maintaining an intangible Gallican principle. It was only with the king’s consent and under the control of the temporal authorities that Rome’s sentences could be applied in France. In reality, for Henri IV it was not a question of just accepting censorship decisions taken in Rome and he could count on the support of the majority of French Catholics, who, even at the height of the League, had rejected the introduction of an Inquisition along Roman lines.25 The example of the Index is not an isolated case. As far as international policy was concerned, Clement VIII was quick to demand of the king he had just welcomed back into the Roman Church that he should break away from his heretical allies and join in the war which the emperor was waging with some difﬁculty against the Ottoman Turks. The Pope’s plan of bringing about a complete reversal of alliances and of seeing France abandon her English ally and form an alliance against England with Philip II gave rise to a very revealing comment by d’Ossat: While the Pope still does not feel any bad feeling toward the King, nor any love for the King of Spain, and while moreover he has a good soul, nevertheless the hatred that he carries toward heretics moves him so

Alain Tallon 29

fundamentally that he allows pernicious maxims, unworthy of all good men, to escape from his mouth, although under the name of another . . . . His Sanctity ﬁnds good all means to separate his Majesty from his allies, because they are not Catholics, and do not recognise the holy See, while the said ways might be despicable and damaging to his Majesty and his Realm.26 The logic of the Inquisition, which regarded the struggle against heresy as the ultimate end which justiﬁed all means, appears here as being completely incompatible with the nobility’s principle of remaining true to one’s word and one’s alliances, which for d’Ossat neatly sums up the true code of relations between princes. Clement VIII’s hopes of seeing Henri IV turn himself into the perfect prince of the Counter Reformation, ready to wage war on heretics and inﬁdels, were completely illusory and the Pope himself was undoubtedly not taken in.27 From the point of view of internal affairs, the Edict of Nantes did not give rise to any ofﬁcial condemnation; nevertheless, the Pope displayed his annoyance with it, and was only appeased with great difﬁculty by the assurances of French diplomats that in the ﬁnal analysis the new laws were favourable to Catholicism.28 To take one last example of continuity with the inquisitorial papacy, Clement VIII stubbornly refused to grant the bull of provision for René Benoist, one of the main architects of the conversion in Saint-Denis, and the king’s confessor, whom Henri had made bishop of Troyes. While parish priest of Saint-Eustace he had translated the Bible into French in 1566, which had been condemned in its time by the Faculty of Theology in Paris, then by Gregory XIII, and this blot on his reputation was sufﬁcient to disqualify him from being elevated to the rank of bishop in the eyes of the Holy Ofﬁce,29 yet also, in this case, in those of the Pope.30 Clement VIII did not take into account an inquiry which gathered very favourable information regarding the candidate, conducted by the Cardinal of Florence. He evidently preferred to give credence to the reports of the nuncio, which proved to be most hostile to René Benoist. Thus, Gasparo Silingardi, complaining about seeing Henri IV surrounded by heretics, placed Benoist, who was greatly suspected of being one, on the list of those he identiﬁed in a mémoire deploring the Edict of Nantes.31 Henri IV’s insistence ﬁnally drove Clement VIII to provide the king’s ambassador, Philippe de Béthune, with the following interesting explanation of his position: ‘The pope said to me that there was a great difference between those who had been heretics and had converted themselves and those who being Catholics had written as heretics.’32 In

30

Henri IV and the Papacy after the League

saying this, Clement VIII was drawing a distinction between the case of the repentant king and that of his ﬁendish confessor, justifying his own current intransigence as well as his past leniency. Was this merely a smokescreen to conceal the Pope’s capitulation when faced with the demands of the Holy Ofﬁce, which was taking its revenge for the humiliation of 1595? It is a plausible hypothesis, even if the French ambassadors did not immediately blame the inquisition cardinals, but rather the Pope himself, for this obstinate refusal. On other occasions, Clement VIII showed the same reluctance to appoint as bishops men who were nominated by the king, yet who were considered as suspect or of having had a heretical past. Besides referring to the Gallicans, such as Renaud de Beaune, who fell victim to Roman resentment, Joseph Bergin also mentions the cases of Paul Hurault, born a Protestant, for the Aix diocese, and of the Benedictine Jean Garnier, appointed in Montpellier, disliked by Rome on account of the earlier condemnation of one of his books by the Sorbonne.33 It seems more than likely that the Pope shared the inquisitorial point of view which considered any suspicion of heresy as an irreversible blot on one’s character, at least with regard to episcopal appointments.34 The reconciliation of Henri IV was well and truly an exception, intransigence remaining the rule. On many crucial points for Franco-Roman relations, Clement VIII pursued the uncompromising objectives of his predecessors, which had already given rise to incomprehension and irritation among French leaders for over half a century.35 And yet these numerous sources of friction, even if they sparked off prompt and ﬁrm protest from the king on particular occasions, never actually degenerated into open crisis. One may even call this a particularly happy period in the history of normally turbulent relations between Rome and the eldest son of the Church during the Ancien Régime. Bernard Barbiche has already given the main reasons.36 In the ﬁrst place, the Pope had a particular affection for the king of France, due to his own role in his reconciliation with the Roman Church, and this affection was reciprocated by Henri IV. This strong personal link did not always enable differences to be settled, but it avoided turning them into confrontations. The king too could appreciate certain aspects of pontiﬁcal policy, especially Clement VIII’s commitment to achieving peace between the Catholic princes which led to the successful treaty of Vervins and then of Lyon in 1601.37 Henri IV did not necessarily have the same goals as the Pope, who viewed these peace treaties as a means to unite the princes against the Turks and heresy: France’s unwavering support for Geneva at the time of the attempted Escalade in December 1602 by the duc de Savoie with Clement VIII’s full consent

Alain Tallon 31

is more than enough proof of this. But his work in promoting peace endowed the Pope with an indisputable personal prestige, even within the traditionally most hostile French circles in Rome. There was another factor that contributed to the good relations between France and Rome after the League. The re-establishment of an equilibrium that corresponded to the Concordat was implemented to the general satisfaction of the Gallican clergy, after the period of utmost confusion which marked the end of the sixteenth century. It was a simple matter for Arnaud d’Ossat, in responding to his Gallican detractors who accused him of having placed the French Church back in Roman shackles when negotiating the conditions of the reconciliation of 1595, to recall the fact that the return to normal relations with the papacy had restored to the Gallican Church a margin for manoeuvre, which it had previously lost: Regarding those who murmur in this way against the form held in the reconciliation of the King and Realm with our holy Father and with the Holy See, and who would not wish that one even searched for, nor accepted any absolution from the Pope for the prejudice that they claim to have been there made to the authority and liberty of the Gallican Church and the dignity of our Kings and France . . . that they excuse us if in place of their magniﬁcent and brave words, we have better loved the substance and truth and the reality of the health, security and grandeur of the King and his line, and of the Estate and Crown of France . . . . There is no need for a particular response to what they say of the authority and liberty of the Gallican Church, since it is a notorious thing that during the divorce of the Crown with the Holy See, the poor Gallican Church was miserably reviled and berated, pillaged and enslaved by the other two Estates and was gone totally ruined, without that it had any means there to raise itself and to free itself than those that it followed.38 In the re-establishment of order which followed 1595, and of which the legate Alexandre de Médicis was the skilful architect, the French clergy recovered not only its stability but also the autonomy that only double allegiance to Rome and to the crown could guarantee.39 The clergy’s loyalty to the king, which was not a simple matter following the rifts of the League, was strengthened, and although Henri IV might from time to time have become irritated with the Gallican Church’s age-old game of playing king and Pope off against each other, he was undoubtedly sensitive to the arguments of his advisors, d’Ossat primarily, who saw it

32

Henri IV and the Papacy after the League

as an essential means of consolidating peace and the new dynasty. Clement VIII’s commitment to reviving the main principles of the Reformation set down in Trent also met with the approval of the king, eager to introduce the new spirit of the Catholic Reformation on Gallican territory. Although in the end, when faced with the irreparable hostility of his jurists, Henri IV did not ofﬁcially accept the Tridentine decrees, he did work actively for the return of the Jesuits in 1603 and defended the establishment and the development of numerous religious orders, be they reformed or new, one particularly well-known case being Thérèse d’Avila’s reformed Carmelite order.40 The reconciliation with Rome also allowed France to recover its position in the capital of the Catholic world, which was an issue of not only prestige but also inﬂuence over Italy. Damaged by the Wars of Religion, French inﬂuence had virtually disappeared after the crises of 1588–89. When sent to Sixtus V by Henri III to justify the assassination of the cardinal of Guise, the bishop of Mans, Claude d’Angennes, assessed the situation with considerable dismay on 15 March 1589: throughout Italy, apart from Florence, all these clever people decry your Majesty and your Realm, in a way that most hold it as lost and without remedy, particularly in this Court [of Rome], where I will not conceal it, thus I will say with great displeasure, that it has very few affectionate and assured servants.41 The accession of Henri IV to the throne ended up by destroying what little remained of the ‘parti français’ in Rome and all needed to be rebuilt from nothing in 1595. The French ambassadors in Italy during his reign designated this task as being of highest priority. From Venice, in March 1602, Philippe Canaye de Fresne highlights the political primacy of Rome in independent Italy and the need to concentrate French efforts on the pontiﬁcal court. In a letter to Henri IV, he complains about the general passivity in Venice and throughout Italy and concludes: ‘It is true, Sire, that in the great sweep of these lands, it is Rome; and this State [Venice] and the grand Duke that will never separate themselves from this body and they will do nothing to start this separately.’42 He goes on to add for Villeroy: ‘We have lost in this land all that we can lose, if we must spend, this should be in Rome, it is there by my judgement that it would not be scorned.’43 The rebuilding of a group to represent French inﬂuence in Rome took the usual route: ensuring the nomination of cardinals who were known to favour ‘le roi très chrétien’ and securing the goodwill of the most

Alain Tallon 33

inﬂuential among those already in ofﬁce.44 Although Clement VIII in his major appointments of 5 June, 3 March and 9 June 1604 re-established the balance between the French and the Spanish within the Sacred College, he did not give a marked advantage to Henri and in fact did not shy from going against his wishes. This was the case in the nomination of the bishop of Lisieux, Anne d’Escars de Givry, a few months after the reconciliation of the king, who took a dim view of the promotion of this bishop who had been an active member of the League. In any case, the stances adopted by the cardinals were not always determined by their national afﬁliation, or by the ‘parti’ to which they belonged, or by their reforming or uncompromising tendencies. To take but one example, Federico Borromeo, a subject of the king of Spain, was most of the time quite distanced from positions adopted in Madrid. If we add to that the fact that he was close to the Oratorians, and somewhat hostile to the Holy Ofﬁce, we might easily imagine that in the great debate surrounding the reconciliation of the king he took the side of Henri IV.45 However, on the contrary, Borromeo remained a resolute adversary of this reconciliation right up to the end. The allegiance and political and religious choices of Curia cardinals were far from being a given. The French monarchy during the Renaissance had in spite of everything found a way to secure a certain level of loyalty from Curia cardinals by lavishing French dioceses and abbeys on them. Although Henri IV seemed to have wanted to return to this practice, he met with little success: the cardinals, who since 1547 had been required to limit themselves to one diocese, no longer found the revenue of French sees, ruined by 40 years of civil war, very attractive.46 The king therefore used the other equally well-established method of pensions, awarded primarily to the ‘nephew cardinals’, since Clement VIII favoured a system of nepotism which his predecessors had practised more moderately. Henri IV’s efforts were not in vain, for on the death of Pope Clement VIII the Sacred College ensured a signiﬁcant triumph for French diplomacy by electing Cardinal Alexandre de Médicis on 1 April 1605. Although the king’s joy in seeing the former legate to France, with whom he had been on best terms, occupy the throne of Saint Peter’s was to be shortlived, since the new Pope died on 27 April, the new conclave produced a very satisfactory result with the election of one of Clement VIII’s protégés, Camillo Borghese, who was thought to be rather favourable to France. The re-establishment of French inﬂuence in Rome may also be explained by France’s close alliance with Tuscany, which was traditionally very inﬂuential in the Curia.

34

Henri IV and the Papacy after the League

This begs the question as to whether, after the ﬁerce confrontation which preceded the reconciliation of 1595, the Holy Ofﬁce continued to display systematic hostility towards Henri IV. We have seen the obstacles it put in the way of the conﬁrmation of René Benoist’s appointment to the diocese of Troyes. Yet, for all that, it does not seem that the Congregation, which retained its powerful position within the Curia, had become a relentless opponent of France and of its interests in Rome. For their part, the French representatives in Rome were able to assess the tribunal in a more balanced way, seeing it as more clearly subject to the authority of the Pope. A Discours de l’Estat de l’Eglise et court de Rome, composed in 1604 and addressed to the king, presents the tribunal of the Holy Ofﬁce in the following way: Its jurisdiction extends only over heretics and heathens. They commit few abuses in Rome where the Pope is its head and for some years [it has been staffed by] twelve of the leading and most pious cardinals of the College. But in Naples, Milan and other states of the King of Spain, like in Spain, the Inquisition is the instrument to carry out all sorts of cruelties and nastiness principally on foreigners who have some wealth and goods for the Inquisition conﬁscates bodies and goods.47 This Roman Inquisition, which had in a sense been somewhat subjugated and quietened down, and whose power, according to the author, was under the control of the Pope, is portrayed as the very opposite of the ﬁerce Inquisition in Spanish territory.48 This vision is of course idealized; yet it does demonstrate the absence of hostility which from then on was to characterize the relations between French diplomats and the Holy Ofﬁce, provided that the latter did not attempt to damage French interests or Gallican privileges. The pontiﬁcate of Paul V conﬁrmed the new relationship which had developed between the king and the papacy. During the crisis of the Interdict of Venice, while disapproving of the basis for the pontiff’s demands, France tried above all to prevent the conﬂict from worsening. The French monarchy was willing to go along with a Catholic Reformation under its own aegis, but did not intend to let Rome take advantage of that to impose its most uncompromising views on France, not only regarding the papal plenitudo potestatis, but also in respect of its merciless ﬁght against heresy both within and beyond France’s borders, and indeed regarding the pre-eminence of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. A kind of quiet incomprehension developed, resulting in a relative

Alain Tallon 35

calming down of Franco-Roman relations, which did not at the same time mean that the Pope and the king truly understood each other, even in a relative way. This mutual incomprehension did not totally escape the attention of those French Catholics who were most hostile to Henri IV. In the disturbed mind of Ravaillac, this vague perception grew into an absolute conviction that the king was going to wage war on the Pope, which for him justiﬁed his actions.49 The king’s assassin had completely invented this war, yet he was not mistaken in perceiving, behind these cordial relations, a relentless contradiction between the French monarchy’s theological–political ideas and those of a papacy, which, although it was no longer as evidently dominated by inquisitorial ideology as it had been in the second part of the sixteenth century, still harboured the same vision of the relationship between the Holy See and the Catholic sovereignties. Be that as it may, this contradiction did not bring about any major conﬂicts between the papacy and Henri IV, of the magnitude of the crises which had occurred so frequently throughout the sixteenth century. One need only recall the famous speech the king made to the parlementaires in Paris who were refusing to accept the Edict of Nantes: ‘You fool yourselves, if you think that you enjoy the Pope’s favour. I enjoy it more than you do.’ A less well-known version of this speech adds: ‘If I wanted, I could have you declared heretics, for not obeying me.’50 It is amusing to see the king brandishing the threat of papal excommunication against the opponents of the Edict of Nantes. However, this phrase does reveal the connivance between these two absolutist powers, in spite of their rivalry and even the incompatibility of their principles. This connivance explains the long period of peaceful relations between the monarchy and the Holy See which followed the reconciliation of 1595. Both powers were now conscious of their solidarity, for quite different reasons. This new consciousness also led to an evolution in theological–political thinking on both sides of the Alps. First Louis XIII, and then Louis XIV, even more devout kings than the founder of the dynasty, became staunch defenders of the rights of the crown, yet within the framework of a Tridentine Church, whose spirit and institutions they respected. They never took up the proposals for a reformation of the Church to be imposed on the Sovereign Pontiff from the outside, such as the last Valois kings had often advanced. And with the emergence of Jansenism, the monarchy became even more fervent in its support of the Roman concept of the power of the Church, as a means of counteracting this new form of dissidence. In Rome, the popes of the seventeenth century could occasionally be inﬂuenced by the theocratic ideals of Sixtus V, while becoming more and more

36

Henri IV and the Papacy after the League

aware of the diplomatic limits of their action, caught between the two major Catholic crowns. The support of France proved essential to them in resisting Spanish pressure, and it is signiﬁcant to note that the resumption of major conﬂicts between France and Rome coincided with the decline of power of Spain under Charles II. However, above all, the devout monarchy of the Bourbons and the papacy of the second Counter Reformation, which was not marked by the inﬂuence of the Inquisition to the same extent, reached a long-lasting equilibrium during Henri IV’s reign, through the solidarity of two absolutisms faced with diverse forms of protest and religious belief, and pursuing a henceforth ambitious goal of reforming the Church, a reformation that nonetheless should undermine neither the Pope’s power not that of the king.

Notes Translated by Declan Webb. 1. See, for example, l’Advis de quatre fameuses universitez d’Italie sur l’absolution du Roy. Auquel par le tesmoignage des Canons et Ordonnances des Papes, ou preuve que les Évesques et Prélats de France ont peu absoudre sa Majesté (Lyon: Guichard Jullieron et Thibaud Ancelin, 1594), p. 24. 2. A. Tallon, Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au XVIe siècle. Essai sur la vision gallicane du monde (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2002), pp. 185 seq. 3. An article by Victor Martin, which is by no means recent, provides a chronological framework, ‘La reprise des relations diplomatiques entre la France et le Saint-Siège, en 1595’, Revue des sciences religieuses, 1 (1921), 338–84, and 2 (1922), 233–70. For purely Roman matters, see R. De Maio, ‘La Curia Romana nella riconciliazione di Enrico IV’, Riforme e miti nella Chiesa del Cinquecento (Naples: Guida editori, 1992), pp. 143–87. Reference must of course be made to the studies of Bernard Barbiche, which are indispensable for this subject, particularly: ‘L’inﬂuence française à la cour pontiﬁcale sous le règne de Henri IV’, École française de Rome. Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire, 77 (1965), 277–99; [in collaboration with Ségolène de DainvilleBarbiche] ‘Un évêque italien de la Réforme catholique légat en France sous Henri IV: le cardinal de Florence (1596–98)’, Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France, 75 (1989), 45–59; ‘Clément VIII et la France (1592–1605). Principes et réalités dans les instructions générales et les correspondances diplomatiques du Saint-Siège’, Die Papsttum, die Christenheit und die Staaten Europas, 1592–1605. Forschungen zu den Hauptinstruktionen Clemens’ VIII, G. Lutz (ed.) (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1994), pp. 99–118. These articles were included with others in the anthology Bulla, legatus, nuntius. Études de diplomatique et de diplomatie pontiﬁcales (XIIIe-XVIIe siècle) (Paris: École des chartes, 2007). The book by M. Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV: Politics, Power and Religious Beliefs in Early Modern France (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) is focused on French concerns and deals with Roman negotiations only in the light of these.

Alain Tallon 37 4. S. Ditchﬁeld, ‘Innovation and its limits. The case of Italy (ca. 1512–ca. 1572)’, La Réforme en France et en Italie: contacts, contrastes, comparaisons, actes du colloque international de Rome, 27–29 Octobre 2005, P. Benedict, S. Seidel Menchi and A. Tallon (eds) (Rome: École française de Rome, 2007), p. 154. 5. Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede (ACDF), Rome, S. O., St. St., R 4 d, ff. 607–16 v. 6. The new Pope took a very poor view of Henri III’s refusal to receive Fabio Mirto Frangipani, a suspected sympathizer of Spain and of the League, as the new nuncio. In retaliation, on 25 July 1585 he ordered Jean de Vivonne, Sieur de Saint-Gouard, the king’s representative in Rome, to leave the pontiﬁcal State within ﬁve days. Diplomatic relations were not completely severed, but they did not return to normal until December, with the mission of Pierre de Gondi in Rome, see P. Blet (ed.), Girolamo Raggazzoni évêque de Bergame, nonce en France. Correspondance de sa nonciature 1583–1586 (Rome and Paris: Presses de l’Université Grégorienne and Editions E. de Boccard, 1962), pp. 82 seq. 7. Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), Ms. Latin 8994, ff. 322–3 v. 8. Ibid., ff. 333 seq. 9. Ibid., f. 337 v. 10. Ibid., ff. 338 seq. The nobles in question declared to the Inquisitor that they thought they were allowed to have such portraits ‘com’anco si tengono quelli de i turchi et del Demonio, non considerando la diversissima ragione di tener ritratti di heretici, et d’altri, oltre il particolar inconveniente, che nasce dal tener hora questo di Navarra massime con quelli titoli falsissimi, contro la dichiaratione della S. Sede Apostolica. In questa città regnano assai tali humori, et si parla tanto liberamente in questo particolare sotto colore di ragione di Stato, che piaccia al Signore non vergat tandem in haeresim, parendomi gran cosa che in favor d’un publico heretico dichiarato dalla Santa Sede privo, inhabile, si parli così alla scopertà.’, Ibid., ff. 339–40. 11. Ibid., ff. 342 seq. 12. The trials are contained in the manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France cited above, a collection which seems to be the last remaining vestige of the transfer of the Roman archives to Paris in 1810 as ordered by Napoleon. It is impossible to establish for certain that during these years the Inquisition kept the French who were present in Italy under more careful surveillance than usual since we cannot ﬁnd reliable statistics covering a prolonged period, as can be established for Spain, which would have allowed us to observe any such intensiﬁcation. Nevertheless, inquisitorial nervousness in the face of a possible plot by the Navarre faction in Italy is evident. 13. For the 1560s and the German case, see M. Weiss, ‘La peur du grand complot catholique. La diplomatie espagnole face aux soupçons des protestants allemands (1560–1570)’, Francia, 32 (2005), 15–30. To take a further example, all the correspondence of Théodore de Bèze bears witness to his fear of ‘syncretism’, to use his own word, which had been put together in Trent and which would give rise to an impregnable alliance between Rome, Spain and the League. 14. A. Borromeo, ‘Filippo II e il papato’, Filippo II e il Mediterraneo, L. Lotti and R. Villari (eds) (Rome: Laterza, 2003), pp. 477–535. 15. It is important to note that Clement VIII’s father Silvestro Aldobrandini had supported the anti-Spanish policy of the Sovereign Pontiff and the alliance

38

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

Henri IV and the Papacy after the League with France under the pontiﬁcate of Paul IV; see V. Martin, ‘La reprise des relations diplomatiques’, p. 355. S. Ricci, Il sommo inquisitore. Giulio Antonio Santori tra autobiograﬁa e storia (1532–1602) (Rome: Salerno editrice, 2002), p. 310. ACDF, S. O., St. St., 0 5 – c, Argomenti a favore della successione ad Enrico IIII (sic) di Francia dell’infanta di Spagna Isabella, 1589, 164 folios. This long memoir defends the rights of the Infanta Isabella to the French crown, contrary to Salic law, yet reminds us also of her speciﬁc rights to Brittany, concluding that, although these rights to Brittany are even more ﬁrmly established, putting them forward could be detrimental to those she holds for the entire kingdom. See the in-depth analysis by Elena Bonora, particularly with regard to Pius V, in her Giudicare i vescovi. La deﬁnizione dei poteri nella Chiesa postridentina (Bari: Editori Laterza, 2007), pp. 200–1. These letters ended up at the Holy Ofﬁce. They have been published by A. E. Baldini, ‘Tre inediti di Francesco Pucci al cardinal nepote e a Gregorio XIV alla vigilia del suo “rientro” a Roma’, Rinascimento, 2nd ser., 39 (1999), 157–223. Pucci was burned at the stake in Rome in 1597. Concerning his links with France and more speciﬁcally with Henri IV, who never paid him the slightest attention, see G. Caravale, ‘Da Firenze a Parigi. L’eretico Francesco Pucci nella Francia delle prime guerre di religione’, La Réforme en France et en Italie, especially pp. 277–80. For more on this topic, see V. Frajese, ‘Regno ecclesiastico e Stato moderno. La polemica fra Francisco Peña e Roberto Bellarmino sull’esenzione dei chierici’, Annali dell’istituto italo-germanico di Trento, 14 (1988), pp. 273–339, especially pp. 282–98; and E. Bonora, Giudicare i vescovi, pp. 246 seq. M.-T. Fattori, Clemente VIII e il Sacro Collegio (1592–1605). Meccanismi istituzionali ed accentramento di governo (Stuttgart: Anton Hierseman, 2004), pp. 80–1. G. Fragnito, ‘In questo vasto mare de libri prohibiti et sospesi tra tanti scogli di varietà et controversie: la censura ecclesiastica tra la ﬁne del Cinquecento e i primi del Seicento’, Censura ecclesiastica e cultura politica in Italia tra Cinquecento e Seicento, C. Stango (ed.) (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2001), pp. 1–35; G. Fragnito, ‘L’applicazione dell’indice dei libri proibiti di Clemente VIII’, Filippo II e il Mediterraneo, pp. 577–616; G. Fragnito, Proibito capire. La Chiesa e il volgare nella prima età moderna (Bologne: Il Mulino, 2005), chapter 1. G. Fragnito, ‘Diplomazia pontiﬁcia e censure ecclesiastica durante il regno di Enrico IV’, Rinascimento, 2nd ser., 42 (2002), pp. 145–67. As G. Fragnito points out, the new sentence pronounced against Bodin by the Congregation of the Holy Ofﬁce, against the wishes of the Pope who, having been hostile to La République at the start of his pontiﬁcate, had gone back on his decision, is linked to the context of the struggle regarding the reconciliation of Henri IV, Ibid., pp. 163–4. A. Tallon, ‘Inquisition romaine et monarchie française au XVIe siècle’, Inquisition et pouvoir, colloque d’Aix-en-Provence, 24–26 octobre 2002, Gabriel Audisio (ed.) (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’université de Provence, 2004), p. 311. A. d’Ossat, Lettres de l’illustrissime et révérendissime cardinal d’Ossat, évesque de Baieux, au roy Henri le Grand et à Monsieur de Villeroy, depuis l’année MDXCIV jusques à l’année MDCIIII (Paris: Joseph Bouillerot, 1624), Part I, pp. 198–9 (letter

Alain Tallon 39

27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

to Villeroy, 1 February 1597). ‘Encores que le Pape n’aye aucune mauvaise affection envers le Roy, ny aucun amour vers le Roy d’Espagne, et que d’ailleurs il aye l’ame bonne, néantmoins la haine qu’il porte aux hérétiques le transporte si avant, qu’il se laisse échapper de sa bouche, bien que sous le nom d’autruy, des maximes pernicieuses et indignes de tout homme de bien...Sa Saincteté trouve bonnes toutes façon de séparer sa Majesté d’avec ses alliez, pour ce qu’ils ne sont Catholiques, et ne recognoissent le saint Siège, encores que lesdites façons fussent infâmes et dommageables à sa Majesté et à son Royaume.’ B. Barbiche, ‘Clément VIII et la France’. B. Haan, ‘Les réactions du Saint-Siège à l’édit de Nantes’, Coexister dans l’intolérance. L’édit de Nantes (1598), M. Grandjean and B. Roussel (eds) (Genève: Labor et Fides, 1998), pp. 353–68. This constitutes one of the main focal points of E. Bonora’s, Giudicare i vescovi. For Rome’s opposition and Henri IV’s dogged, but vain, requests, see É. Pasquier, Un Curé de Paris pendant les guerres de Religion. René Benoist, le pape des Halles (1521–1608) (Paris and Angers, Alphonse Picard-G. Grassin, 1913), pp. 282 seq. ‘Se guardiamo poi a quelli che governano il re, la maggior parte sono heretici’. Silingardi names Louis Servin, avocat général du roi at the Parlement in Paris, Antoine de Loménie, sécretaires des ﬁnances, the duc de Bouillon ‘maestro de camera’ sleeping in the king’s chamber, Rosny, sieur de la Rivière, the king’s ﬁrst physician and ﬁnally Benoist, and concludes ‘che quanto ha questo re, cioè anima, corpo e robba, tutto sia nelle mani d’heretici’, B. Haan (ed.), Correspondance du nonce en France Gasparo Silingardi, évêque de Modène (1599–1601) (Rome: École française de Rome-Université Pontiﬁcale Grégorienne, 2002), pp. 304–5. Quoted in É. Pasquier, Un Curé de Paris, p. 299. ‘Le pape m’a dit qu’il y avait une grande différence entre ceux qui avaient été hérétiques et s’étaient convertis et ceux qui étant catholiques avaient écrit comme hérétiques.’ Gigliola Fragnito is engaged in a study of the case of René Benoist in the context of internal conﬂicts within the Curia. J. Bergin, The Making of the French Episcopate 1589–1661 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 406–7. One must, however, place this intransigence within the more general context of the Pope’s struggle against possible scandalous nominations of candidates who were too young or merely a front for important laymen ready to help themselves to episcopal revenues. For a stricter application of concordat norms which Clement VIII wanted to endorse when faced with Henri IV’s episcopal nominations, see Ibid., pp. 409 seq. For the speciﬁc case of Catherine de Médicis, see A. Tallon, ‘Catherine de Médicis et la papauté’, Chiesa cattolica e mondo moderno. Scritti in onore di Paolo Prodi, Adriano Prosperi, Pierangelo Schiera and Gabriella Zarri (eds) (Bologna: il Mulino, 2007), pp. 421–36. Barbiche, Bulla. A. Borromeo, ‘Clément VIII, la diplomatie pontiﬁcale et la paix de Vervins’, Le Traité de Vervins, J.-F. Labourdette, J.-P. Poussou and M.-C. Vignal (eds) (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2000), pp. 323–44. D’Ossat, Lettres, Part 1, pp. 84–5 (letter to Villeroy, 16 January 1596). ‘Quant à ceux qui murmurent par delà contre la forme qui a esté tenue en la

40

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

Henri IV and the Papacy after the League réconciliation du Roy et du Royaume avec nostre sainct Père et avec le sainct Siège, et qui ne voudroient pas mesme qu’on eust recherché, ny accepté aucune absolution du Pape pour le préjudice qu’ils prétendent y avoir esté fait à l’authorité et liberté de l’Eglise Gallicane et à la dignité de nos Roys et de la France . . . qu’ils nous excusent si au lieu de leurs paroles magniﬁques et braves, nous avons mieux aimé la substance et vérité et la réalité du salut, seureté et grandeur du Roy et de sa lignée, et de l’Estat et Couronne de France . . . Il n’est point besoin de particulière responce à ce qu’ils disent de l’authorité et liberté de l’Eglise Gallicane, puisque c’est chose tout notoire que pendant le divorce de la Couronne avec le sainct Siège, la pauvre Eglise Gallicane a esté misérablement vilipendée et gourmandée, déprédée et asservie par les autres deux Estats et s’en alloit du tout ruinée, sans qu’il y eust aucun moyen de la relever et s’affranchir que celuy que l’on a suivy.’ For more on this stabilization, see J. Bergin, Making of the French Episcopate, pp. 365 seq. For the case of the Jesuits, see E. Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy. Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590–1615) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). BNF, ms fr. 16042, f. 450. ‘toutes les malignes personnes décrient et vostre Maiesté et vostre Royaume, de façon que la plupart le tiennent pour perdu et sans remède, particulièrement en cette Cour (de Rome), où je ne luy dissimuleray pas, ains diray avec un grand déplaisir qu’elle a fort peu de serviteurs affectionnez et assurez.’ P. Canaye de Fresne, Lettres et ambassades de Messire Philippe Canaye, seigneur de Fresne, conseiller du roy en son conseil d’Estat, 3 vols (Paris: Estienne Richer, 1635), vol. 1, p. 178. ‘Vray est, Sire, que le grand ressort de ce pays, c’est Rome; et cette Seigneurie et le grand Duc ne se sépareront jamais de ce tronc là et n’entreprendront rien à part’. Canaye de Fresne, Lettres, p. 203. ‘Nous avons perdu en ce païs tout ce que nous y pouvons perdre; s’il y faut faire despence, ce doit estre à Rome; cettelà à mon jugement ne peut estre méprisée.’ Barbiche, ‘L’inﬂuence française à la cour pontiﬁcale sous le règne de Henri IV’. Fattori, Clemente VIII, p. 33. Bergin, Making of the French Episcopate, pp. 405–6. BNF, ms fr. 5668, f. 13. This manuscript speech, which is often quite critical of Clement VIII and especially of his nepotism, is anonymous. However, the author presents himself as having carried out many missions in Rome on behalf of Henri III and Henri IV. It is possible that it may have been the work of Nicolas Brûlart de Sillery, future chancellor of France. ‘Sa jurisdiction s’estend seulement sur les hérétiques et mécreans. Il s’y commet peu d’abus à Rome d’autant que le Pape en est le chef et depuis quelques années douze cardinaux des premiers et plus pieux du College. Mais à Naples, Milan et autres Estats du roy d’Espagne, mesmes aux Espagnes, l’Inquisition est l’instrument pour y exercer toutes sortes de cruautez et de meschancetez principalement sur les estrangers qui ont quelques biens et commoditez pour ce que l’Inquisition conﬁsque corps et biens.’ However, the author notes that it can from time to time limit pontiﬁcal power, for example, with regard to the promotion of a cardinal. The Pope can nominate anyone he wishes to, with the exception of bastards ‘pour ce

Alain Tallon 41 qu’ils sont du tout exclus du cardinalat quand ores ils seroient ﬁlz de Roys, ou bien qu’ils feussent deferez à l’inquisition, auquel cas les cardinaux de l’inquisition s’opposent et faut que cette opposition soit vuidée sans aucune tache avant que les accusés puissent prandre le chappeau et en estre capables. Et encores diﬁcilement y peuvent-ils parvenir tant ceste accusation recule loing ceux à qui elle touche’, Ibid., f. 26. 49. R. Mousnier, L’assassinat d’Henri IV 14 mai 1610 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 17–18. 50. The version presented by Pierre de L’Estoile and reproduced by Roland Mousnier (Mousnier, Assassinat, p. 335) omits this last phrase, which was particularly offensive to Gallican ears, but another version, to which my attention was drawn by the thesis of Sophie Martin (Pierre de Beloy. Un paradigme du «politique» à l’époque de la Ligue, unpublished doctoral thesis, Université de Paris IV Sorbonne, 2007, p. 315), contains it: Jean-Baptiste Dubedat, Histoire du Parlement de Toulouse, 2 vols (Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1885), vol. 1, p. 631.

2 Adjusting to Peace: The Observant Franciscans of Paris and the Reign of Henri IV Megan Armstrong

As support grew for Henri de Navarre’s accession to the throne following his conversion in 1593, François Feuardent, Jean Garin and their Franciscan brothers marched in pro-League processions and publicly denounced the would-be king as a heretic. It ultimately took the forces of Navarre at the gates of Paris in 1594 to quench the overt political activism of these clerics. Yet, surprisingly, four years later the Edict of Nantes failed to bring these friars back into public view. Support, however, was far from universal for the Edict, and particularly controversial was its guarantee of religious co-existence. The pulpits became one particularly active site of clerical opposition just as they had throughout the wars of religion. In Paris the preaching of the Capuchins and some parish clergy proved particularly irritating to royal authorities.1 Four Capuchins found themselves in the Conciergie for their vitriolic attacks on the king. Particularly embarrassing to the king was the participation of Jean Brulart de Sillery, a member of a leading parlementaire family and brother to councilor Nicholas.2 The king was also not impressed by the public anti-Huguenot rantings of Marthe Brossier, a young woman who was closely associated with the Paris Capuchins in the early months of 1599 and who claimed demonic possession.3 In these contentious circumstances, one would also expect to ﬁnd the Observant friars fomenting opposition from pulpits, but contemporary records provide little evidence that this was the case. It would be unrealistic to assume that the taciturn friars of 1598 suddenly found spiritual value in religious co-existence, let alone were convinced of Henri’s own change of heart. Their writings from the period, and in particular their sermons and devotional treatises, show that their old concerns about his orthodoxy persisted, and that their deep-seated unease remained throughout Henri IV’s reign. Such uneasiness nevertheless cohabits in 42

Megan Armstrong 43

these texts with a willingness to accept his rule, at least for the time being. Relations between the Observant Franciscans and Henri IV during his reign offer a particularly poignant window into a time of political and spiritual uncertainty, a time in which the civil conﬂicts were anything but a distant memory for French men and women. These relations also underscore the continuing signiﬁcance of traditional religious institutions in shaping France under the Bourbon dynasty. While historians have recognized his support of newer Catholic traditions such as the Jesuits and Capuchins in the wake of the publication of the Edict of Nantes, Henri IV knew full well that his survival as king depended significantly on rebuilding relations with the entire French ecclesiastical structure. But rebuilding these relations was not entirely in his hands and nor was it something that could be accomplished overnight. The path he trod was complicated by the diverse nature of the Catholic tradition in France, and clerical perspectives varied, at times dramatically, on the worthiness of his religious policies. Observant sermons in particular illuminate a distinctively Franciscan understanding of peace, one that was about much more than political harmony or religious unity in the kingdom and which allowed Observants to reconcile with the new reign. For Jacques Suarez and the other preachers discussed here chose to interpret Henri IV’s efforts at peacemaking as a path to that ultimate peace, that ﬁnal, mystical reconciliation with God. When the Capuchins arrived in Paris in 1568 the Observants were less than welcoming. The Capuchins were the most recently formed of the three branches of the Franciscan tradition (Conventual, Observant, Capuchin), ﬁrst receiving ofﬁcial recognition from the papacy in 1528. The Observant friars controlled one of the most important religious communities in the city and one of the two most important in the entire Franciscan order, a prominence largely owed to its close – if at times fraught – relationship with the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris. Since the thirteenth century, promising preachers from across the continent came to study in the theology school (studium generale), and the more gifted went on to pursue the much coveted licentia docendi at the University.4 The prominence of the Paris friary made this community a prized constituent of the international Observant tradition, and it also made this community a favourite resting place of the Parisian elite. One can therefore well understand the cool reception that the Capuchins received upon their arrival from their Observant brothers. The Observants resented Capuchin accusations of laxity in their interpretation of the Rule, and worried that the new tradition would siphon off their own patrons or, even worse, claim control of the Paris studium.5

44

Adjusting to Peace: The Observant Franciscans

Such intra-order rivalry was not unusual for the Franciscans, and it persisted throughout the Wars of Religion. But these friars did unite in their opposition to any royal discussion of religious co-existence. Certainly by 1589, contemporary memoirs and the registers of the criminal courts show that the Capuchins and Observants were vocal supporters of the Catholic League in Paris and elsewhere. Surviving portraits of League processions from 1590 to 1593 show the friars walking alongside one another, dressed in their distinctive habits and armed like good soldiers militant with halberds, helmets and crosses.6 By the time of the publication of the Edict of Nantes in 1598 this political unity had apparently cooled, at least with regard to overt political activism. Records from the period including memoirs and the criminal registers of the Parlement of Paris are surprisingly quiet on the response of the Observant Franciscans to the Edict, and indeed to royal policies in general.7 Franciscans could and did differ with one another over a variety of issues including those of a political nature. For this reason we need to be careful not to universalize Observant behaviour from surviving documents especially given their distinctive character. The council minutes of the Paris friary, for example, rarely comment on the political environment at the time, but this was characteristic of these documents throughout the wars. Such commentary was more commonly relegated to Franciscan writings, and in particular to sermons and devotional treatises. These writings, furthermore, while informative, were largely products of an educated Franciscan elite and thus of a rariﬁed group of Franciscans. It is noteworthy nonetheless that overt hostility to Navarre himself that we ﬁnd in their writings from the last decade of the civil wars has largely disappeared. In its place, somewhat surprisingly, is implicit acceptance of his rule. We see this acceptance in a number of ways, above all in their recognition of the changed religious climate of his reign and, just as surprisingly, in their insistence upon obedience to the Crown. To say that the friars recognized the new spiritual reality of France is not to say that they liked it. The well-known theologian François Feuardent serves as a good example. Few preachers were more ardent critics of the monarchy than Feuardent during the last years of the Wars of Religion, or as effective. Feuardent was one of the preachers credited with mounting effective popular resistance to Navarre’s siege of Paris in 1590, and until 1594 he would continue to be a thorn in the side of Henri de Navarre’s efforts to claim Paris.8 Whether or not François Feuardent was banished by royal authorities to his home convent of Fontenay following his return from exile in 1596 is impossible to know from the sources, but one thing is clear: this once ﬁery supporter of the

Megan Armstrong 45

Paris League remained as adamantly opposed to religious co-existence as ever. He published learned and popular anti-heretical tracts up until his death in 1610.9 The example of Feuardent is simply to show that we should not assume a drastic ideological reorientation of the Observants during the reign of Henri IV. Indeed, Feuardent had plenty of company in his determination to rid France of the Protestant heresy. Jacques Suarez published the treatise Torrent de feu in 1603 to defend a recent sermon he gave on the subject of purgatory. The Portuguese Suarez was a product of the Paris studium generale and already by this time one of the designated royal preachers. The sermon in question was given at St Jacques de la Boucherie, a well-known hotbed of League radicalism during the last years of the Wars of Religion, and a favourite pulpit of the Paris Observants. In a surprisingly descriptive and personal preface to his tract on purgatory, Suarez lashes out at the Protestant preacher Molin. He calls him vile, insidious and corrupt. He was also a coward, we hear, who ran from a pre-arranged public confrontation with Suarez after seriously distorting the latter’s preaching on purgatory. Suarez is clearly just as offended by Molin’s mockery of his own religious order as he is by the distortion of his sermon. Molin apparently preached that the soul of one friar failed to enter purgatory because he was forced to wait for his companion. Franciscans were bound by their Rule to travel in pairs, the hope being that the presence of another friar would ensure good behaviour. Suarez defended his own tradition before launching an attack of his own. Heretics, he argues, are doomed to hell for destroying ‘the loving yoke of the Church’ in their pursuit of liberty of conscience. They become, as a result, eternal slaves.10 Suarez, like Feuardent, viewed Protestants as threats to the ‘true’ religion. He refrains, however, from any suggestion of overt violence against the other faith. Suarez’ text will correct Molin’s errors, he says, and thus show the truth of the doctrine of purgatory. His method of choice is persuasion, as it is of Friar Jean Boucher. Unlike the other friars discussed here, Boucher likely never studied at the University of Paris and there is even some debate as to his Observant status. However, his close ties with the Observant community in France as well as the particular character of his spiritual writings explain his inclusion here.11 The preface to Jean Boucher’s funeral sermon for Eméry de Barbezières rather cheekily notes that he would restrain the impulse to ‘belabour doctrine’ out of respect for the noblemen present who belonged to the other faith. He nevertheless hoped that they would be ‘illuminated’ by his text. Jean Boucher – not to be confused with the pro-League theologue of earlier times – was a celebrated author and preacher in his day,

46

Adjusting to Peace: The Observant Franciscans

one who would go on to write a popular travelogue to the Holy Land.12 Here Boucher shows that he is very much aware of the new religious context in which he was living. Protestantism was not only legal, it was woven into the very fabric of sociability among certain sectors of society. By 1609, Boucher expected to ﬁnd Protestant nobles sitting alongside Catholic ones in a Catholic church enduring a Catholic funeral rite. It is also revealing of the new social reality in France that the interactions of Suarez and the Protestant Molin were public, and they were mediated by prominent men and women of the local community. In this case Monsieur Pellejay, a maître des comptes in the Parlement, had offered his house for a meeting of the two. At the last minute, Molin apparently declined through the auspices of yet another respected member of the community, Madame de Fonlebon.13 Such sociability between members of the two faiths was not uncharacteristic of the times as recent work on post Edict of Nantes France shows. In certain cities where the two faiths existed side by side it is not hard to ﬁnd examples of intermarriage, urban governments comprising members of both faiths not to mention economic interaction.14 Confessional battle lines nevertheless persisted in many quarters, and it is fair to say that the Catholic clergy as a body continued to see possibilities for conversion among the Protestant faithful. What had changed is that opposing confessions largely restricted their demonstrations of religious antagonism to words rather than overt political action or violence. But the Observant preachers also indicated their acceptance of the new political and religious reality in a more overt way, through their repeated emphasis upon obedience to the monarchy. The preface to Diego de la Vega’s collection of Sunday sermons published in 1608 expresses a traditional conception of the monarchy as an agent of divine authority. Vega was a Spaniard but his formation in the Paris friary and close ties to its members ensured that his sermons were published in French as well as Spanish and Latin. This preface is no ringing endorsement of the person of the monarch, but rather acceptance of God’s orchestration of a hierarchical cosmos in which the monarch had a central role. As Vega remarks, God expects us to obey princes regardless of their worthiness. We should obey not only princes who ‘profess the faith and have knowledge of God, but also pagans and inﬁdels’.15 Vega’s easy acceptance of the existence of imperfect monarchs was what one would expect from a Franciscan. The Franciscan tradition juggled Augustinian pessimism about the naturally sinning state of the human condition with a surprisingly optimistic view of human capacity for reform. His suspicion of political authority as a particularly powerful

Megan Armstrong 47

source of corruption explains Francis of Assisi’s rejection of the exercise of any political ofﬁce. His followers were to be God’s humblest servants, and as such his most perfect. True humility, he urged, meant rather the absolute subjugation of the self to God’s will and this included subjugation to the divinely sanctioned order on earth. Friars, in other words, would show their devotion to God by obeying his earthly viceroys. To this end Francis gave his followers the designation ‘friars minor’ and called on all men to be his master.16 Vega echoes this injunction when he urges his ﬂock to render unto ‘Caesar what belongs to Caesar’, here meaning political obedience and not simply taxation. As Vega makes clear, though, a good monarch would of course obey the will of God. This is the true chain of authority, one that is based on God’s own will. Vega’s injunction regarding obedience to the monarchy was thus characteristic of the early modern Franciscan preaching tradition, and it only seems unusual to our eyes because two decades earlier Observant friars preached regicide as a spiritual act. That this momentary breach in the traditional relationship of king and friar had been repaired by 1608 seems apparent. Vega uses the ﬁfteenth-century English King Henry IV as a model ruler, one who took the pomegranate as a symbol of his authority – a fruit both bitter and sweet. Though indirect, his mention of this monarch suggests that Vega likely had the French King Henri IV in mind. They shared the same name, and they both became rulers during periods of intense civil disruption. Vega here praises Henri IV’s use of mercy towards his subjects and avoidance of vindictiveness.17 A more extensive and direct commentary on Henri IV’s reign comes from the pens of Jean Boucher and another former member of the Paris friary, Jacques Suarez. Written a year prior to the king’s death, Boucher’s sermon on the nobleman Barbezières reﬂects openly on the previous political disorders and praises him for his constancy to earlier monarchs. Comparing Barbezières to Hermines, he cites the classical hero’s insistence that it was better to die in the service to one’s king than to soil one’s name through inﬁdelity. Boucher’s celebration of Barbezières’ ﬁdelity to the Crown in the face of constantly shifting political and religious agendas looks past the particular merits of each monarch just as it fails to challenge Barbezières for his loyalty to questionable monarchs. He refuses to comment, for example, on the character of Henri III (1574–89), a monarch whom his own order denounced as a tyrant from the pulpits of France following his murder of the Guise brothers at the royal chateau of Blois in December 1588. The same friars greeted Henri III’s own assassination six months later with still more sermons and processions, this time in honour of the assassin.

48

Adjusting to Peace: The Observant Franciscans

Boucher’s interest here is clearly less in the person of the monarch than in Barbezières himself whom he portrays as the ideal royal servant. The rest of this brief sermon suggests, even so, that Boucher’s concern about obedience to the Crown also reﬂected a certain level of conﬁdence in – or at the very least acceptance of – the rule of Henri de Navarre. Barbezières transferred his loyalty to Navarre following the death of Henri III. Boucher emphasizes, furthermore, that Barbezières played a critical role in negotiating a treaty between Henri III and Navarre years earlier. The preacher is taking care to show that the transition from the Valois to Bourbon dynasty, despite earlier religious differences, was natural. Boucher is distancing the man from the ofﬁce, but he is nevertheless making a case for Henri IV’s legitimate claim to this ofﬁce. His assumption of the throne was divinely ordained. Boucher’s sermon makes Barbezières’ constancy one mark of the new regime’s legitimacy, a notion that Henri IV would have been delighted to hear. For this reason we cannot rule out self-interest on the part of this friar. The monarchy, after all, was the most powerful of all patrons and the funeral sermon suggests that the royal servant Barbezières was one of Boucher’s supporters. But Franciscans including Boucher were never shy about criticizing those in authority, and by the time of Barbezières’ death in 1609 Boucher could reﬂect on 15 years of Bourbon rule. Why were the Observant friars willing to accept Henri’s rule? Several answers suggest themselves. Simple exhaustion could explain their unwillingness to challenge royal authority by this time. The Wars of Religion took a hard toll on all those living in Paris for example, a home to most of the friars discussed here. By the time of Henri’s arrival at the gates of the city in 1594, disruptions to the University cursum caused by political disorder within and the threat of war from without had sapped the Paris friary of pensioned students and sufﬁcient income to operate effectively.18 François Feuardent and Jean Garin wisely ﬂed to Brussels, perfectly aware that they would not be included in the general amnesty offered by the new king in 1594.19 The ﬂight of these as well as other men may have disheartened the members of the Paris house, or simply left a more politically temperate body of clerics in place. Beyond sheer exhaustion and the departure of their most politically active members, the Paris friars may well have come to see the restoration of civil order as a welcome end in itself. It is remarkable how quickly normalcy seems to return to life in the friary following Henri’s triumphal arrival in Paris. The inner council minutes point to a resumption of Franciscan studies in the studium and at the University of Paris by 1595. By 1598 we also ﬁnd the friars turning to the civil courts of the

Megan Armstrong 49

Parlement of Paris to challenge the authority of the Faculty of Theology over the training of would-be Franciscan preachers, and they would soon bring their disputes with the Minister General of the Franciscan order before these same magistrates.20 That the friars resumed their usual testy, and certainly litigious, relations with the Faculty and their own General is arguably just one more sign of a restoration of normalcy in the Paris community. The number of ﬁnancial bequests from the Paris elite also signal the resumption of normal relations both within and without the house. Indeed, the number of foundations increases steadily over the ﬁrst few decades of the seventeenth century. This could simply be a matter of better bookkeeping.21 The Paris friary lost its archive in a ﬁre that swept through the church in 1580. Many of their ﬁnancial documents did survive, however, and seventeenth-century account books include lists of earlier bequests. Moreover, burial registers show a similar increase in the numbers of those entering the crypt. Whether or not the account books reﬂect a genuine increase in patronage of the friary requires further investigation, but one thing is clear – the Observant friary remained a highly desired resting place for the magisterial elite throughout Henri’s reign. The confraternity the Order of the Holy Sepulcher was one of these patrons, and its body numbered prominent members of Parisian society.22 The continuing signiﬁcance of this friary for all Parisians and not simply the elite is more clearly indicated in the list of funeral convoys. Although beginning in 1615 and thus ﬁve years after Henri IV’s reign, this list points to long-established relations because participation in such convoys was generally predetermined by wills.23 Since the restoration of civil order was something Franciscan preachers urged throughout the previous conﬂicts, we can assume that they saw this return to traditional urban relations as something truly beneﬁcial to all members of French society and not just themselves. Given their willingness to perpetuate decades of civil unrest in the name of religion, however, we have to assume that their acceptance of Navarre’s rule was predicated heavily upon their perception of his spiritual agenda. They would have noted, in particular, public signs that he had truly converted. Moreover, they would have paid close attention to his relations with Catholic religious institutions. Recent work has shown quite convincingly that Henri IV envisioned religious co-existence as a temporary state on the path to a stronger and more centralized monarchy. Religious reuniﬁcation was thus a long-term ideal, one that later Bourbon monarchs would continue to make a priority.24 While allowing

50

Adjusting to Peace: The Observant Franciscans

a degree of religious co-existence it is clear that Henri was simultaneously setting into place the foundations of a French church that was loyal to the Crown. This foundation rested upon public afﬁrmation of the catholicity of the Crown and the interdependency of Church and State, the active missionization of Calvinist France and a generous usage of patronage. As in the case of the rest of France, Henri had to negotiate support at all levels of the Gallican structure because the French Church was far from a uniﬁed institution. Even before promulgation of the Edict of Nantes, Henri marched in public processions on feast days to demonstrate his humility and asserted his place in printed propaganda and public spectacle as an agent of divine justice. Henri’s support of Jesuit and Capuchin missions was yet another early sign of his longer-term agenda to re-catholicize France as was his ratiﬁcation of the reform ordinances of Blois and Melun. The Edict of Nantes also situated the Valois monarchy on the road to religious reuniﬁcation even as it granted the Huguenot faith a degree of toleration. In addition to limiting the geography of Huguenot worship the Edict forbade Huguenot synods and the existence of the chambres mi-parties, courts comprised of both Protestant and Catholic magistrates.25 The myriad religious orders posed their own set of obstacles to the expansion of royal authority. Eric Nelson shows how Henri IV used patronage and fear of abolition to transform the Jesuit tradition into an effective agent of Bourbon authority. As relatively recent arrivals to France, the Jesuits were arguably more vulnerable to royal authority and thus more amenable to threats of abolition.26 Henri could not treat the older orders in the same way because their ties to local communities ran deep. Soon after assuming control of the throne Henri followed in the footsteps of his predecessors by legally recognizing the particular privileges of each order. Generally, shared privileges included the exemptions of the orders from certain forms of taxation such as the salt tax (gabelle) and customs duties (péages, pontages) and the right to appeal cases of jurisdictional abuse before the Parlement of Paris. We also ﬁnd Henri along with the courts defending mendicant access to the cursum at the Faculty of Theology and offering secular support to their apprehension of runaway (apostate) members.27 These relations between the friars and Henri IV do not suggest a favoured status for the friars, but do point to efforts on both sides to resume their traditional relationship. There were other signs as well. Henri continued the practice of appointing Franciscans such as Suarez as royal preachers, an ofﬁce that was both ﬁnancially and politically rewarding to the friar and a mark of prestige for the order. Jacques

Megan Armstrong 51

Suarez points out, furthermore, that the king was an active supporter of the friars in the Holy Land. Though vague on particulars, Suarez mentions Henri’s protection of the friars from Ottoman persecution.28 Henri’s patronage of this mission would have been particularly meaningful to the French Observant friars. Palestine was the ﬁrst missionary site of their founder, Francis of Assisi, and from the ﬁfteenth century onwards the Observant friars enjoyed governance of the Catholic rite and the pilgrim trafﬁc in the region on behalf of the Latin (Catholic) Church.29 A number of French Observants made the trek themselves to spend three years working in this oldest and most prestigious of the Franciscan missions. Henri’s patronage of their work in this region thus not only reinforced his image as a Catholic leader but also as a particular supporter of the Observant Franciscan tradition. Suarez is making this very point when he insists: ‘[W]e members of the Franciscan tradition can say that we feel well protected by [this king] and in consequence so are all Christians of the Catholic tradition.’30 By protecting Observant presence in the Holy Land, Henri was protecting Western Christian access to the spiritual potency of the region. Such efforts on the part of Henri to resume his support of the religious institutions including their own were no doubt reassuring to the friars but they would not have entirely mitigated their concerns about a subversive religious agenda. The very fact that he introduced ofﬁcial religious co-existence in France remained problematic for most Catholics including the Observant friars. Concern about the king’s orthodoxy never disappeared entirely, a fact that might explain why it is difﬁcult to ﬁnd Franciscan sermons that speak forcefully about his virtues as a ruler until near the end of his reign. These Franciscan sermons are nevertheless intriguing because they give spiritual weight to Henri’s role as peacemaker, a role that the friars clearly believed was beneﬁcial to France even while they had retained concerns about the true spiritual leanings of their ruler. That they placed such signiﬁcance on peacemaking reﬂects the distinctive character of the Franciscan spiritual ideal. Boucher’s funeral sermon on Barbezières is particularly revealing on this front. While Boucher is not speciﬁcally discussing Henri IV, his description of this noble as a reconciler of men can be read as a positive comment on Henri’s rule to date. We see this in particular in his description of Barbezières as a man of douceur and force. Force is necessary, he says, to take on hard challenges, even war. His use of force here suggests that Boucher meant not only military might but also strength of purpose and determination. The civil wars were hard, even bitter, Boucher says, but good could come from them – that is, if the aftermath was handled

52

Adjusting to Peace: The Observant Franciscans

skilfully. Force alone, however, was not sufﬁcient. Douceur must follow, to ensure that this difﬁcult challenge ultimately beneﬁted all and brought the ‘sweetness of peace’. What set Barbezières apart from other nobles, Boucher argues, was this very quality. Boucher notes that ‘when it was a question of presenting a matter to the king that would make him angry, [Barbezières] knew how to reduce the bitterness of the subject with sweet words’. Such a gift made it possible for Barbezières to ‘sweeten something bitter’, and make ‘a sad matter bearable’.31 This same gift also enabled Barbezières to soothe personal relations between the monarch and anyone who angered him. The multiple meanings of douceur, as sweetness and gentleness, here combine nicely in this portrait of a man who could soothe the irritable and temper the angriest heart, even that of a king. It is hard not to read in this passage a critique of the nobility. As we know from the recent work of Stuart Carroll in particular, peacemaking was a valued skill among the ever fractious French nobility and indeed essential to maintaining order in the kingdom of France.32 In a kingdom with a relatively weak monarchy and a heavily armed military elite, political stability rested on noble as well as royal ability to regulate their behaviour and relations with other families. One could go so far as to argue that the civil wars expressed the breakdown of noble ability to regulate relations amongst themselves when faced with religious division among other issues. Certainly, the fractious nature of this social group earned the opprobrium of many preachers over the course of the civil wars including Christophe de Cheffontaine, the one-time Minister General of the Franciscan order. In a treatise published in 1579, Cheffontaine lashed out at those ‘great and powerful nobles of France’ who waged war without just cause out of their ‘evil will’ [meschante volonté] or in the name of honour. Nobility, he insists, rested not on military might but on Christian virtue.33 Concern about public order made enticing the great Catholic and Protestant families a time-consuming and expensive but critical facet of Henri’s paciﬁcation strategies after 1594. Boucher’s association of douceur with Barbezières reﬂected his contention that political stability required an end to internal contention not only within this group but also between the nobility and the crown. We can also read Boucher’s description of Barbezières, however, as an endorsement of Henri IV’s peacemaking policies because douceur was a quality particularly associated with royal authority – clemency. Predicated on a vision of the monarch as God’s vice regent on earth and as such a dispenser of divine justice, clemency became an effective way for Henri IV to pacify erstwhile

Megan Armstrong 53

enemies after assuming control of the throne in 1594. Michael Wolfe shows that douceur was a term that Henri IV and his apologists made particular use of from early on in his reign, arguing that Henri’s conversion was itself a manifestation of divine clemency. It was an expression of God’s will and a sign of his grace in action. God was willing to forgive Henri his earlier errors and place him on the throne. Henri’s apologists argued that the new king had little choice but to show the same gentleness with his own erring subjects, hence the general amnesty of 1594.34 Boucher’s use of douceur here thus invokes Henri IV as much as it does Barbezières, something that contemporaries would have immediately understood. The same language is echoed in Jacques Suarez’s sermon on Henri IV from 1610. This is an outright paen to the reign of Henri IV, and given Suarez’ stature as royal preacher it was also to be expected. Suarez’s sermon is, even so, a powerful and moving tribute to a king that he argues died far too young, and who had accomplished a great deal for France. Suarez’ tribute is not wholly free of criticism. Henri’s adultery gave this preacher no choice, he tells us, but to chastise the monarch publicly in an earlier sermon given before the monarch and his wife. Henri was also once far from the ‘bosom of the Church’ before the ‘divine light illuminated his soul so that he would recognise the truth.’35 Thereafter, however, Suarez insists Henri showed the marks of a true religious leader. Indeed, nothing ‘touched his heart more’, Suarez tells us, than the conversion of those of the ‘so-called reformed tradition’ [Calvinists]. Suarez even goes so far as to defend Henri’s imposition of the Edict of Nantes. To those who might point out that Henri imposed an edict that overly favoured the Huguenots, Suarez argues that Henri had little choice. The ‘affairs of state’ and ‘his desire to preserve peace in the kingdom would not allow him to do otherwise.’36 Suarez’s defence of the Edict of Nantes should not be read as a prioritization of political stability over religious purity. For Suarez, political stability was rather a critical stage in the restoration of the natural Catholic order in France. His comparison of Henri to the biblical King David makes this intent clear. Like King David, Henri was an adulterer but he also possessed qualities that made him a ﬁne monarch. He was a warrior, a devout reformer and clement. Suarez’ insistence that clemency was an integral facet of royal authority is also found in Vega’s description of good rulership found in the preface to his Sunday sermons. Vega compares the king to a bee, who must make honey and sting only sparingly: ‘The King must use mercy in such a way that is truly just, and punish in such a manner that piety and clemency are always present.’ Otherwise, Vega warns, that monarch risks being viewed as a tyrant. Vega holds up

54

Adjusting to Peace: The Observant Franciscans

God as the model of justice for the king, one who does punish but never takes joy in it.37 Suarez’ discussion of clemency gives particular weight to Henri’s treatment of his enemies, arguing that this king’s greatness lay in his willingness to pardon those who opposed him. Suarez points out that King David did much the same when he chose to cut the cloak of his enemy Saul rather than take his life. Henri’s clemency was something rarely seen before according to Suarez: ‘In what Prince of this world is this virtue more demonstrated than in our dead King Henri IV? What enemy offended him that he did not pardon them and receive them with open arms . . . ?’38 Suarez argues that Henri was only doing what Jesus would wish, by turning the other cheek and leaving vengeance to God. He was even greater than David in this regard, for he forgave the men who attempted to assassinate him. Henri thus manifested to Suarez divine justice in action. He was truly acting as an agent of God on earth. The above discussions about royal authority all place a premium on royal use of mercy and gentleness, and, above all, forgiveness. Contrast this discussion to descriptions of royal authority at the height of the wars and one can readily see a change in tone. In the aftermath of terrible conﬂict, the victor monarch must now heal his people through the gift of forgiveness. The way in which these friars discuss the role of clemency, however, shows that they are talking about much more than a restoration of political stability. Douceur and paix had spiritual connotations that would have had particular meaning for Franciscans such as Suarez and Boucher. To be sure, early modern conceptions of peace were rarely wholly secular. The very fact that religious division fuelled much of the sixteenth-century civil conﬂict in France underscores the persistent inﬂuence of the corpus christianorum ideal – that is, a divinely constituted order on earth in which political stability and economic prosperity rested on spiritual unity and a conception of ‘true religion’. Such a view informed Bourbon discussions of royal clemency as the dispensation of divine justice on earth, and underlay early modern legal discourses on religious co-existence and ‘tolerance’.39 It is also hard not to see in Boucher’s discussion of the cross on Barbezières’ coat of arms an invocation of the distinctly medieval crusading conception of peace, the ‘peace of God’. This cross, Boucher notes, was a symbol of the two qualities necessary for peace: douceur and force.40 Multiple meanings of peace could and did co-exist even in Franciscan texts, but Franciscan sermons even during the wars of religion reﬂect an understanding of peace that was both internal and eternal in nature. We see this, for example, in Boucher’s insistence that douceur was necessary for ‘lasting peace’. The usage of these words in conjunction – douceur and

Megan Armstrong 55

paix – is particularly revealing of the mystical cast of Franciscan spirituality. Douceur spoke of a kind and loving God who was ever anxious to see his wayward ﬂock return to his bosom, their natural home. For mystics such as Francis of Assisi, love deﬁned God’s nature, and it also deﬁned the relationship between the reformed sinner and God. Diego de la Vega notes in a sermon published in 1612 that the Bible is ‘full of the sweet and peaceful nature of God. God [he insists] was more inclined to use mercy than justice, gentleness than rigor, and more inclined to bestow crowns and rewards than punishments and plagues.’ Vega compares God’s love to the most soothing of oils. ‘My Spouse, there is no oil or balm more soothing than your love.’41 For Francis of Assisi, the ultimate sign of God’s love was his sacriﬁce of his son Jesus, and Jesus showed his love of humankind by embracing this fate. His sacriﬁce explains why Friar André de Lauge refers to Christ as ‘this gentle Lamb’.42 God’s love was crucial to the salvation of the sinner, and salvation meant union with God. It was at the moment of reunion that the reformed sinner was ﬁnally and truly at peace. Peace for the friars thus meant the absolute absorption of one’s soul into God, a state only possible once the soul had been perfected. This perception of peace can be found even in Franciscan writings at the height of the civil conﬂicts. Christophe Blaiseau, for one, discusses peace in 1587 not simply as a state of material and spiritual abundance, but of spiritual transformation: ‘With peace ﬂourishes religion, the service of God, Justice, the virtues for the contentment of the soul.’ Where there is ‘union and peace, God our lord gives us his blessing and life ever after.’43 True peace was transformative, and it was eternal. Why the Franciscans would see Henri’s peacemaking efforts in France as essential to this more important spiritual transformation is clear when we understand the signiﬁcance they gave to the passions in the achievement of true peace, above all, their concern about anger. The litany of vices regaled in Franciscan sermons points to the continuing signiﬁcance the friars gave to the seven deadly sins as markers of human error throughout the early modern period. Medieval theology situated human passions such as pride, anger and jealousy among the deadly sins out of a widely shared perception that human passions reﬂected a preoccupation with the earthly realm.44 To love the world above God was a sin, and so the passions were signs of corruption at the heart of one’s soul. Such passions divided one from God. Francis of Assisi was particularly insistent that peace meant the absence of human passion, or at least passion for what was earthly and not divine in nature. Peace was a state of absolute rest. The once restless soul, tormented by guilt over past sins, has succeeded in perfecting itself

56

Adjusting to Peace: The Observant Franciscans

and readying it for re-absorption in God. In its place remained only God’s love. God’s love was the one constant, and the one unifying force. Francis’s well-known injunction to ‘Go in Peace’ expressed his desire that all Christians seek that ultimate quietude at God’s bosom by distancing themselves from all experience of earthly passions. This conception of peace as the absence of the passions requires some qualiﬁcation because the passions were also the route to salvation in the Franciscan tradition. A seeming contradiction at the heart of Franciscan spirituality lay in its embrace of carnality as a vehicle of redemption as well as a source of corruption. The Christocentric Francis viewed Christ’s human life as the model for Christian life, and consequently gave the senses and the emotions a role in the reformation as well as the deformation of the Christian. The body, in other words, was the site of redemption. Cleansing oneself of sin necessitated understanding its serious nature, and this meant feeling genuine remorse. The emotional character of Franciscan preaching reﬂects this concern about stimulating contrition before the heart of the sinner was hardened beyond the point of redemption. The Passion of Christ – in other words, his suffering (passio) – proved particularly useful in this regard, allowing preachers to dwell in vivid terms on the particular torments suffered by the human Christ to stimulate genuine tears and a willingness to contemplate His goodness. Receptive listeners would experience ﬁrst-hand the horrors of this greatest of all sacriﬁces. They would hear the jeers of the crowds as Jesus carried the cross to the site of his execution, and they would feel the nails as they pierced his already lacerated ﬂesh. Through the perpetration of such emotional violence upon the hearts of their listeners the preachers sought to soften their hearts so that love for God could take the place of earthly desires.45 This love was so powerful, so intense that it left no room for the other passions and the soul was thus ﬁnally and blissfully at rest. Stirring the passions was thus part of the process of reconciliation with God, and this might explain why friars viewed the civil wars with some ambivalence. Boucher clearly shares his founder’s perception of both physical violence and civil conﬂict as the manifestation of a restless, angry soul. Boucher blames anger for the prolongation of disorder in France, and praises Barbezières for his ability to mitigate its power over subjects and rulers alike. Suarez and Boucher both also praise Henri IV for ending military conﬂict within France as well as across Europe. But their understanding of the path to perfection as one ﬁrst marked by internal suffering and emotional turmoil explains why Boucher could say in his funeral sermon for Barbezières that war could be necessary in

Megan Armstrong 57

the pursuit of true peace. The cross represents force, he says, which is necessary when embarking on ‘difﬁcult endeavours such as wars’. But the cross is also ‘gentle’ in order to ‘make all people sweetly favourable to the blessings of peace’.46 Francis of Assisi would not have agreed about the necessity of war since he found any violence to be sinful even when acted in the name of faith. However, his followers, including the friars of this study, were not always as paciﬁc. The notion that violence was necessary to purge France of contagion came out of Franciscan pens and pulpits just as it did from those of other clerics during the wars of religion. Heretics, many friars had argued, were at times simply too stubborn or hardened by sin to be allowed to stay in the pure body politic of France. Now that the civil conﬂicts were over, however, and the king declared himself a Catholic, Boucher was clearly anxious to soothe lingering passions in the kingdom. Henri IV’s peacemaking was trying to do just that. That Boucher views Henri IV’s use of clemency and other paciﬁcation policies as a precondition to the achievement of true peace becomes particularly apparent in his statement that ‘sweet conversation breaks a hardened heart’.47 For Franciscans, what stood between individual salvation and God was exactly that: a hard heart. Temptations clouded the judgement of the Christian, and convinced him/her to give love to what was temporary and inferior – in other words, of the earth. Suarez similarly believed that Henri’s virtue lay in his role as the bearer of peace. He was a great king, he argued, because he brought order to France. He goes even further, and gives him credit for pacifying the Christian world more generally. He ended the French civil wars, but he also ended troubles elsewhere. Suarez suggests that Henri needed only his words (parole) to affect this paciﬁcation – at least for the latter conﬂict. Without leaving his kingdom, he says, Henri ended the bitter conﬂict between Venice and the papacy, and the tumults in Flanders. Henri did not stop there, but also ended the conﬂict between Savoy and Geneva, and not to mention within his own kingdom. The Edict of Nantes, he makes clear, ended the bloody noble conﬂicts in France.48 Suarez portrays Henri as the ultimate peacemaker, someone who used arms judiciously, and words whenever possible, to resolve conﬂict among Christians. Suarez’ description of the king echoes Boucher’s description of the nobleman Barbezières, depicting the monarch as a man of soothing words. Comparing Henri to the biblical king David, he celebrates not only his warlike qualities but also his prudence. Henri’s wisdom lay in consulting others, according to Suarez. He consulted widely, and as a result proved invincible on the ﬁeld. He was the greatest of generals. Like

58

Adjusting to Peace: The Observant Franciscans

David, furthermore, he also knew when to pardon his enemies. Suarez’s meaning is clear. Clemency was the way to win the hearts of the people: ‘Clemency is the virtue which best encourages subjects to love their Prince: as [the Spartan king] Cleomenes once said, the responsibility of the king is not only to look after his servants but to seek the friendship of his enemies through good deeds and royal muniﬁcence.’49 Henri pardoned his enemies, a sign of his greatness as a monarch. Suarez argues that clemency is a royal quality, one that Henri IV clearly had in abundance. He mentions his pardoning of men accused of attempting his assassination. This is the Christian way he argues, it is what Jesus did on the cross. Suarez argues that a sign of Henri’s greatness as a monarch was the depth of sadness he provoked upon his death in 1610. Even the Pope, he says, cried upon receiving news in violation of the traditional taciturnity of this ofﬁce.50 Sadness was the necessary ﬁrst step to true contrition, and so the Pope’s tears testiﬁed to the fact that France was ﬁnally on the right path. For a Franciscan to have the Pope cry at the death of a former heretic is a particular feat of literary imagination. Whether the Pope cried or not, Henri had managed to do the seeming impossible – win over his erstwhile opponents. Observant sermons from the reign of Henri IV rarely provide such a ringing endorsement of this monarch. Collectively, however, these sermons do point to a willingness on the part of many prominent members of the Observant Franciscan tradition to recognize his authority. For these friars, Henri’s establishment of religious co-existence was ultimately secondary to his wide-ranging efforts to restore peaceful relations within his society. Why the Observants were less worried about Henri’s policies regarding religious co-existence than their brothers the Capuchins is impossible to know for certain but perhaps Boucher provides one answer. Boucher would shortly join the Franciscan mission in the Holy Land alongside other members of the French Observant tradition. Suarez’ funeral sermon shows, furthermore, that news from this mission circulated throughout the Observant brotherhood. Palestine was a society dominated by Islam but also populated by numerous Christian traditions as well as by Judaism. In this home to Christ, Western Christians could not hope to use force to bring about religious uniﬁcation and so they turned to persuasion. The Capuchins were still a new order, though they too would eventually penetrate the friaries of Palestine out of their own thirst to experience the spiritual potency of this region. At the time of Henri IV’s reign, however, perhaps the French Observant friars were better able than the Capuchins to see the possibilities of the lasting peace in a France that, for a time at least, had to accept the existence of a corrupted spiritual tradition.

Megan Armstrong 59

At the very least Observant sermons remind us of the fragility of royal authority in the wake of the civil wars, and equally importantly, the continuing signiﬁcance of the traditional religious institutions as gatekeepers to political stability. Henri would co-opt the Jesuits and other new traditions to secure his authority, but he was perfectly well aware that the Franciscans were popular and inﬂuential ﬁxtures of French society. As he did with the towns and nobles of France, Henri IV slowly, patiently rebuilt the traditional relations of king and cleric to win their support.

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Jotham Parsons for raising the question posed by this article in his review of my book.

Notes 1. See among others, Frederic Baumgartner, ‘The Catholic Opposition to the Edict of Nantes 1598–1599’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance, 1978 (40), 525–37. 2. Archives de la Prefecture de la Police, Registres du grefﬁer de la Conciergerie 8, f. 272. See also Megan C. Armstrong, ‘La reaction des frère mineurs à l’édit de Nantes’, Paix des Annes, paix des âmes (Paris: Société Henri IV, 2000), pp. 261–8. 3. Alfred Soman, ‘Press, Pulpit and Censorship in France before Richelieu’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,120 (1976), 439–63; Anita M. Walker and Edmund Dickerman, ‘A Woman Under the Inﬂuence: A Case of Alleged Possession in Sixteenth-Century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 22 (1991), pp. 534–54. 4. Laure Beaumont-Maillet, Le Grand Couvent des Cordeliers de Paris: études historiques et archéologiques du XIIIe à nos jours (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1975). 5. For a Capuchin perspective on this conﬂict, see among others Bibliothèque Mazarine, Ms. 2418, ‘Annales des Reverends Peres de la Province de Paris’. 6. Megan C. Armstrong, The Politics of Piety: Franciscan Preachers During the Wars of Religion, 1560–1600 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004), pp. 7–32, 143–64. 7. For example, the Observants feature prominently in Pierre de l’Estoile’s journal during the height of Catholic League authority in Paris as political actors but are largely absent after 1595. 8. For contemporary discussion of his political activism during the wars, see for example, Theodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, Histoire Universelle, André Thierry (ed.), 11 vols (Geneva: Droz, 1981–2000), viii, 175–6. Feuardent is also discussed more extensively in Armstrong, Politics. 9. See among others, Feuardent’s Entremangeries et guerres ministrales, c’est a dire haines, contradictions, accusations . . . fureurs et furies des ministres de ce siecle, les uns contre les autres touchant les principaux fondemens de foy et de la religion chrestienne (Caen: n.p., 1601).

60

Adjusting to Peace: The Observant Franciscans

10. Jacques Suarez de Sainte Marie, Torrent de feu sortant de la face de dieu pour desseicher les eaux de Mars, encloses dans la chossee du Molin d’Ablon (Paris: Laurens Sonnius, 1603), p. 4. ‘Because such is the punishment of heretics, who break the loving yoke of the Church in pursuit of liberty of conscience, where they encounter the chains of servitude that will drag them in the end to eternal punishment.’ 11. Jean Boucher’s inclusion in this study reﬂects his Observant sensibility even though evidence suggests he professed with the Conventual branch of the Franciscan order. Boucher typiﬁes the difﬁculty of categorizing French Franciscans as either Conventual or Observant during this period, because of the unique and complex character of French Franciscan reform. This friar enjoyed close ties with many Observants and even preached at the Paris Observant house several times in 1619. Jean-Barthélemy Hauréau also found that at least one of his treatises describes Boucher as a member of the Observant tradition in its preface. On the debate over Boucher’s Observant status, see Jean-Barthélemy Hauréau, Histoire Littéraire du Maine (Paris, 1878. Reprint, Geneva: Slatkine Press, 1969), i, pp. 164–78. On the complexity of French Franciscan reform, see among others, Duncan Nimmo, Reform and Division in the Franciscan Order (1226–1538) (Rome: Capuchin Historical Institute, 1995), Pierre Moracchini, ‘Quand le temoin réplique à l’historien . . . notes sur les origins des Recollects de France Parisienne (1597-1612)’, in Écrire son Histoire: Les Communautés régulières face à leur passé (St Étienne: C.E.R.C.O.R., 2005), pp. 461–78, and P. Gratien, ‘Les Débuts de la réforme des Cordeliers en France et Guillaume Josseaume (1390–1436)’, Etudes Franciscaines, 21 (1914), 415–39. 12. Jean Boucher, Le bouquet sacré compose des plus belles ﬂeurs de la Terre Saincte (Paris: Denis Moreau, 1620). 13. Suarez, Torrent, pp. 29–30. Pellejay ‘offered his [house] which had the beneﬁts of a ﬁne library but the next day Madame Fonbelon gave me a letter from Molin that he had written, and I have to laugh, he stated that he was not interested in ﬁnding himself in the presence of a Cordelier who did not ﬁrst produce a response to his treatise . . . .’ 14. Critical works include Keith Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conﬂict in Early Modern France (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 2005); Thierry Wanegffelen, Ni Rome, ni Genève: Les ﬁdèles entre deux chaires en France au XVI siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997); Gregory Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). 15. Diego de la Vega, Employ, et sainct exercice des Dimanches de toute l’année, 3 vols (Paris: Nicholas de Fosse, 1608), iii, pp. 1001–2. ‘I wish you to subject yourselves in God’s name to all human creatures: as it is said: not only to good Princes, but also the evil ones, not only to those who profess the faith and recognition of God but also to pagans, & inﬁdels, one owes them complete obedience: each to his own station; to Kings as well as to sovereign monarchs; to their ministers as to those who hold their position. Thus according to the ﬁrst part of the answer. Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.’ 16. See in particular the Testament of Francis of Assisi, in Opuscula sancti patris francisci Assiensis (Claras Aquas: College of S. Bonaventure, 1904), pp. 77–82.

Megan Armstrong 61 17. Vega, Dimanches, iii, p. 1058. ‘Because the Prince must use mercy in such a way that he does not forget the true justice owed, and uses his chastisements in such a manner that reﬂect the presence of piety and clemency, to the end that...he will not be taken for either a tyrant, or cruel, uncaring or fearful.’ 18. Armstrong, Politics, 165. 19. Algemeen Rijksarchief Brussel/Archives generales du royaume Bruxelles, Papieren van Staat en Audientie/Papiers d’etat et de l’audience, no. 1398/7. Eric Nelson brought this document to my attention. 20. For their disputes with the University, see Archives Nationales de France, LL 1524, ff. 20–32; for their disputes with the Minister General, see AN, LL 1524, beginning f. 148. 21. There are multiple, and often overlapping registers for the Paris friary, all produced in the seventeenth century or later. Typical are AN, LL 1517, and LL 1519, both of which list bequests for the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In each case, seventeenth century bequests are the more numerous. 22. The confraternity was a generous benefactor of the community throughout the early modern period. See for example the series of bequests found in AN, LL 1517; AN, LL 1519, ff. 209–21. 23. AN, LL 1525. 24. See for example, Mario Turchetti, ‘Religious Concord and Political Tolerance in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 22 (1991), 15–25; Annette Finley-Croswhite, Henry IV and the Towns: The Pursuit of Legitimacy in French Urban Society, 1589–1610 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 25. Jean-Pierre Babelon, Henri IV (Paris: Fayard, 1982), pp. 687, 703. 26. Eric Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy: Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France 1590–1615 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 27. On the exemptions of the Franciscans from customs duties, see among others AN, LL 1524, ff. 185, 192–3; AN, LL 1523, p. 340. For the apprehension of apostate friars, see AN, LL 1523, pp. 349–50. 28. Jacques Suarez, Sermon funèbre fait aux obsequies de Henry IIII, roy de France et de Navarre, le 22 Juin dans l’eglise de St Jacques de la Boucherie (Paris: Nicolas du Fosse, 1610), p. 56. 29. On Franciscan custody of Latin Christian holy sites in Palestine, essential works include Bernard Heberger, Les Chretiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la réforme catholique (Syrie, Liban, Palestine au XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1994); Leonard Lemmens, Die Franziskaner im Heiligen Lande 1335–1552 (Munster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1925); and Martiniano Roncaglia, Storia della Provincia di Terra Santa (Cairo: Centro di studi orientali della Custodia francescana di Terra Santa, 1954). 30. Suarez, Sermon funèbre, p. 56. 31. Jean Boucher, Oraison funèbre de haut et puissant seigneur messier Emery de Barbezières, chevalier des deux ordres du roy, conseiller en ses conseils d’Estat et privé, grand mareschal des logis du corps & armies de sa Majesté, Comte de Civray, & Seigneur de la Roche Chemeraut (Poitiers: Julian Thoreau, 1609), p. Ciii. 32. Stuart Carroll, Blood and Violence in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 33. ‘I speak of those who make war without just cause, with no other reason than an evil will, to give the kingdom to another, or out of that detestable ambition

62

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

Adjusting to Peace: The Observant Franciscans to acquire this evil honor.’ Christophe de Cheffontaine, Chrestienne confutation du poinct d’honneur sur lequel la Noblesse fonde aujourdhui ses querelles & monomachies (Paris: P. L’Huillier, 1579), p. Biii. Michael Wolfe, The Conversion of Henry IV. Politics, Power and Religious Belief in Early Modern France (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Suarez, Sermon funèbre, pp. 44, 36–9. Ibid., p. 38. Vega, Dimanches, 3, p. 1058. See footnote 14. Suarez, Sermon funèbre, p. 65. The complex meanings of peace have received a great deal of attention in recent years. See among others, Olivier Christin, Le Paix de Religion: l’automisation de la raison politique au XVI siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1997); Penny Roberts, ‘The Languages of Peace during the French Religious Wars’, Cultural and Social History, 4 (2007), pp. 293–311; Penny Roberts, ‘Royal Authority and Justice during the French Religious Wars’, Past and Present, 184 (2004), pp. 3–32; Mario Turchetti, ‘Religious Concord and Political Tolerance in Sixteenth Century France’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 22 (1991), pp. 15–25; John Bossy, The Peace in the Post-Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Boucher, Barbezières, p. Ciii. ‘Because the cross that one ﬁnds here, is the symbol of strength and gentleness.’ Diego de la Vega, ‘Sermon pour le mardy d’apres le troisiesme Dimanche’, in Sermons et exercises sur les evangiles de tous les jours de caresme, 2 vols (Paris: G. Chappuis, 1612), i, p. 500. ‘The gentle and peaceful nature of God, who is more inclined to use mercy than justice, gentleness than rigor, and more inclined to dispense crowns and rewards than impose punishments and lashings...Your inclination my spouse is so gentle, that their is no oil nor balm any sweeter....’ Andre de l’Auge, La Saincte Apocatastase ou sermons adventuels sur le Psalme XXVIII (Paris: Robert Foüet, 1623), p. eii. Christophe Blaiseau, Untitled sermon (Troyes: Denis de Villerval, 1587), pp. 12–19. See for example, E. Ann Matter, ‘Theories of the Passions and the Ecstasies of Late Medieval Religious Women’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 18 (2001), pp. 1–16; Morton W. Bloomfeld, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967). This relationship between preaching and the emotions is much discussed in early modern Franciscan preaching manuals including the popular one produced by the former Paris friary member, Francesco Panigarola, L’art de prescher et bien faire un sermon (Lyon: Pierre Rigaud, 1615). Boucher, Barbezières, p. Ciii. The cross combines ‘the strength to embrace difﬁcult endeavours, such as wars, and gentleness for rendering these designs beneﬁcial for all people and bring them the sweetness of peace.’ Boucher, Barbezières, p. Ciii. Suarez, Sermon funèbre, pp. 2–4. ‘Because it was he who, without leaving his kingdom, ended the tumults in Italy between his holiness and the Venetian Republic. It is he who with only his words paciﬁed the troubles of Flanders that had disrupted it for 30 years. It is he who with one sole Edict and decree stopped the bloody swords of his nobility, and calmed their hatreds and dissensions . . . .’ Suarez, Sermon funèbre, pp. 29–30. Ibid., p. 9.

Part II Contentious Words and Deeds: History and the Construction of Memory

This page intentionally left blank

3 Exegesis as Public Performance: Controversialist Debate and Politics at the Conference of Fontainebleau (1600) Michael Wolfe

The celebrated and thoroughly contrived encounter at the royal palace in Fontainebleau between Jacques Davy Du Perron and Philippe DuplessisMornay in May 1600 marked an important shift in the religious politics of early Bourbon France. At one level, the Conference of Fontainebleau subscribed to an intellectual tradition that joined syllogistic logic, philology, and biblical hermeneutics. At another, it was cruel theatre as Du Perron cleverly set the terms of the debate so that Mornay could not but ‘lose’. Mornay’s ritual humiliation served as a symbolic sacriﬁce by the king of an old friendship, indeed his whole prior life, to improve his Catholic bona ﬁdes. The Conference of Fontainebleau evolved out of the public disputations that provided one of the main vehicles for the spread of Protestant reform. The roots of public disputatio go back to the scholastic practices of textual interpretation and debate found in medieval universities. These techniques had become highly sophisticated during the previous two centuries, and politicized as seen in the well-known cases of Lorenzo Valla and Johann Reuchlin.1 In this tradition, the debate at Fontainebleau turned on the use of history and philology in disputes over biblical exegesis and doctrine.2 Differences over the Eucharist, in particular, formed the main focus, and had long been at the heart of Reformation theological controversy. Indeed, the Catholic doctrine on real presence never enjoyed a stable consensus even in the Middle Ages.3 Since the Council of Trent, which revamped Church teachings on the sacraments, Catholic spokesmen proved more able to counter their Reformed adversaries. Such colloquies also offered hope that there was a way to talk through religious differences, rather than resolve them by violence. As the Wars of Religion broke out, Catherine de Médici, queen 65

66

Exegesis as Public Performance

mother and regent, sought to reconcile the two confessional camps when she convoked the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561. Yet, a month of often acrimonious dispute, mostly over the Eucharist, only left the two sides even further apart.4 Undaunted, Catherine tried again the next May at another colloquy held in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, with the same results.5 Public disputations also accompanied Henri IV’s conversion to Catholicism in 1593. A conference at Mantes in March 1593, though not widely publicized, brought together disputants to debate doctrinal questions related to the king’s religious instruction. The two principal ﬁgures at Fontainebleau also ﬁgured in this dispute. Du Perron participated as a disputant and Mornay helped to prepare the Calvinist pastors who attended.6 In 1599 an open debate occurred in Paris, while another colloquy took place in Bordeaux in early 1600.7 After the Conference of Fontainebleau, public disputations and polemical exchanges continued unabated over the next 20 years, only diminishing with the Huguenot defeat at La Rochelle in 1629. Controversialist debates also took place in print media, in forms that varied from short satirical pamphlets to weighty scholarly tomes.8 This verbal sparring only fuelled tensions.9 The stakes at Fontainebleau became so high not because of what was said, but rather who was there to hear it. The assembled throng included the king, possibly his sister Catherine, who remained an ardent Calvinist, and a host of courtly personages and foreign diplomats. Indeed, the Catholic ‘victory’ at Fontainebleau signalled the opening of a new front in the Wars of Religion, a war fought in words that presaged the efforts of Catholic preachers, publicists, and missionaries to win Calvinists back.10 Deploying arguments in public forums or print relied on team efforts, for behind spokesmen such as Mornay and Du Perron stood other individuals trained in ancient languages, philology, textual criticism, and history. Interestingly, the men picked by the king to serve on the panel of judges at Fontainebleau had long played these subsidiary roles. The érudits who assisted Du Perron came from the intellectual milieu in Paris of the parterre, bookshops, universities, and the royal library. Mornay drew his support from scholars in Geneva and France. Intellectuals thus became a new kind of warrior in the battle to sway public opinion.11 Another backdrop to consider concerned the steady defection of leading Calvinists following Henri IV’s conversion. While efforts to convert Catherine de Bourbon proved futile, the king ensured a Catholic succession when he entrusted his heir, the young Henri, duc de Condé, to Catholic tutors in 1595. Careerist ambitions and stated spiritual qualms motivated some of his advisers to abjure.12 They included Victor PalmaCayet, the king’s former tutor and historian, Jean de Sponde, a poet, and Nicolas de Harley, sieur de Sancy and surintendant des ﬁnances.

Michael Wolfe 67

A closer look at the two disputants who met at Fontainebleau reveals these dynamics and converging trends. On the Catholic side was Jacques Davy Du Perron.13 Born into a Huguenot family, Du Perron exhibited an extraordinary intellect at a very early age. When not yet 18, he travelled to Paris, where he met the abbot and poet, Philippe Desportes.14 Under Desportes’s tutelage, Du Perron converted to Catholicism to pursue a career in the Church. Soon after, he received a position at court as lecteur du roi, with an annual pension of 1200 livres. Under Henri III, Du Perron shone in academic debates, which he apparently advertised in posters across Paris, inviting all comers to debate him on any proposition. Du Perron’s critique of Mornay began in the early 1580s when he received a visit from the sieur de Chaumont, a Huguenot, with whom he often played chess. Chaumont saw a copy of Mornay’s Traité de l’Eglise on a table, and immediately asked him his opinion of it. Du Perron claimed it was ﬁlled with falsehoods, which Chaumont challenged him to prove. Du Perron did this so convincingly that Chaumont soon converted to Catholicism.15 Du Perron’s method consisted of checking the book’s sources against the original to detect unwarranted paraphrasing, misquotation, or interpretations taken out of context. Word of the errors he detected got back to Mornay eventually, for he altered or expunged many of them in the 1598 edition of the Traité. Around the same time was a conference organized by Albert de Gondi, duc de Retc, to convince his sisters to return to Catholicism. It pitted Du Perron against an unnamed minister in the English ambassador’s suite. The debate lasted several days and proved such a resounding success for Du Perron that the English ambassador reportedly sent the minister home lest he be tempted to convert.16 A particularly theatrical performance came in a sermon Du Perron delivered in 1587 at the church of St. Merry in Paris, where he attacked the scholarship of the Huguenot divine, Daniel Tilénus.17 The German Tilénus held a post at the Academy of Sedan; he later served as the tutor to the young comte de Laval. Aubigné describes the scene rather comically. Du Perron’s brother Jean and several other ‘apostles’ stood before the pulpit at a table with a huge pile of beaux livres, which they opened to show the dozing congregants as Du Perron cited supposed errors in particular passages. Rather than be ediﬁed, most in the pews simply caught bad head colds, Aubigné later quipped.18 Du Perron employed these same methods of interpretative critique and showmanship later at Fontainebleau. Following the 1589 regicide, Du Perron initially declared for Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon, but within a year shifted his allegiance to the Béarnais. Du Perron accompanied Cardinal d’Ossat to Rome in 1595 to secure papal absolution for Henri IV; Pope Clement VIII also conﬁrmed

68

Exegesis as Public Performance

Du Perron’s appointment as Bishop of Evreux, an ofﬁce the king had awarded him back in 1591. In 1596, Du Perron proved instrumental in convincing Jean de Sponde and his brother, Henri, to convert to Catholicism.19 In 1597, Du Perron again debated Tilénus, this time in the household of two Huguenot ladies, one of whom, Mme de Beines, had recently lost her husband. She wished to know if she could pray for his soul. Over the next three days, the debate centred on whether such practices could be found in the apostolic church, so it became an exercise in historical research and exegesis. The discussion soon expanded to encompass other doctrinal questions touching the sacraments and clerical celibacy. Du Perron claimed success when the two women immediately converted along with their families and one of Tilénus’ assistants, a man named Prévôt.20 However, Tilénus attributed Du Perron’s reliance on French translations and refusal to check the original Latin sources to Du Perron’s poor command of Latin. More likely, the two women could not follow a complicated parsing of Latin theological treatises, so Du Perron preferred to use his established eloquence in French to dazzle them.21 Tilénus also objected to Du Perron’s refusal to continue the debate in writing, a frustration that Mornay later expressed in the aftermath of Fontainebleau.22 Where Du Perron is a study in calculated change, Philippe DuplessisMornay is a model of dogged, if not blinkered, consistency.23 Born in the Vexin, Mornay gravitated towards the Reformed faith while young; in his late teens, he travelled to Germany and Geneva to pursue his studies in theology, canon law, and ancient languages. He also toured Italy and spent time in England and the Low Countries. In the early 1570s, he entered the service of Admiral Coligny. Unlike his patron, he survived the St. Bartholomew’s massacre and ﬂed to England, where he stayed until 1574. The next year he joined Henri de Navarre’s service where he served roles ranging from soldier, engineer, and diplomat to propagandist, theologian, and spiritual adviser.24 In the 1570s, Mornay emerged as an intellectual leader of the Calvinist movement. His Traité de l’Église, published in 1578, argued against a hierarchical church led by the papacy, calling instead for a national council to settle disputes and unite the kingdom under the ‘true’ faith. After 1593, Mornay began a tract on the Eucharist which appeared in La Rochelle in 1598 to lively debate. Mornay’s sarcastic mention throughout of ‘le monde’ clearly targeted the courtly milieu of the newly Catholic king, Henri IV.25 A brief look at Mornay’s line of argument sheds light on what later occurred at Fontainebleau. For Mornay, early Christianity became

Michael Wolfe 69

barbarized through contact with Roman paganism.26 He argued that no scriptural or apostolic basis existed for the Mass, and that, instead, it derived from pagan ritual. Next, Mornay contended that early Christians eschewed the idolatrous trappings of pagan worship, such as temples, altars, and images, all of which later came as a result of Roman pagan inﬂuences. Finally, he argued that Scripture only supported the view of the Mass as a commemoration, not a real presence for the only expiatory sacriﬁce had occurred with the cruciﬁxion. He blamed the priesthood for this perversion of the Mass following Constantine’s conversion in the fourth century, though the present errors in Catholic teaching came later at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.27 Mornay sent advance copies of the treatise to Beza in Geneva and important opinion makers in Paris, a number of whom became involved in the Conference of Fontainebleau. Several early recipients lauded the book’s scholarship, which was reﬂected in its nearly 5000 references, while one future Catholic participant in the Conference, the judge and historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou, praised the work’s stylistic beauty.28 Even before its publication, Mornay conceded he lacked time to verify each and every reference. Instead, he used a shorthand method to relate a series of references in a particular citation, choosing to fully highlight only one of them, leaving the others, as a result, vague. Here lay the opening through which Du Perron mounted his attack. A wave of criticism greeted Mornay’s treatise as the Sorbonne anathematized it and Parisian preachers fulminated in their pulpits against it. A particularly heated response entitled La saincte Messe came from the Jesuit controversialist Louis Richeome.29 Despite their recent expulsion by the Parlement of Paris, Jesuits remained active in politics and polemics, particularly in Bordeaux, as they sought to return to the king’s court. This dispute provided a golden opportunity for Jesuits and Gallicans to set aside their differences and collaborate towards a common goal. Another critic, the theologian Jules César Boulanger, published in October 1598 a detailed list of errors he found in Mornay’s preface, followed by a treatment of the entire treatise in an expanded 1599 edition.30 Anticipating Du Perron’s later tack, Boulanger made much of the incomplete citations, faulty paraphrases, and non-existent works supposedly referenced by Mornay. The wave of Catholic attacks continued in 1599 with the appearance in Bordeaux of the Jesuit Fronton du Duc’s Inventaire des Fautes, Contradictions et Faulses Allegations du sieur de Plessis and the anonymous Probation de la S. Messe et Sacriﬁce d’icelle in Paris. An obscure canon in Bazas named Le Puy claimed in a widely circulated letter that he had

70

Exegesis as Public Performance

found nearly 300 erroneous citations and attributions in the book.31 Even Pope Clement VIII took notice of Mornay’s publication, and asked Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino to write a refutation. When he refused, the Pope pressed Henri IV to arrange for its public denunciation.32 Henri IV needed little prodding, for his frustrations with the Huguenots, and Mornay in particular, had mounted since 1593. In fact, not long after the Traité’s publication, Henri IV chastised Mornay for stirring up religious passions, to which Mornay snidely reminded the king of his promise long ago to reform the Church. This exchange revealed the white-hot anger of two one-time intimates now hardly on speaking terms.33 In Protestant circles, however, Mornay’s book received high praise. In December 1598, the noted humanist Joseph Scalinger congratulated him for his learned critique of Catholic doctrine.34 In February 1599, Theodore Beza lauded Mornay’s point-by-point rebuttal of Boulanger’s criticisms.35 Du Perron’s encounter with Mornay in 1600 thus represented the culmination of a year-long series of mounting Catholic critiques.36 While the treatise on communion later formed the focus at Fontainebleau, it was Mornay’s publication of Pour le Concile in 1600 that prompted Du Perron’s challenge to debate the matter. Mornay could not resist taking the bait for what turned out to be a complete set-up. Reconstructing the course of the debate proves problematical. Our best sources are pamphlets which aimed to inﬂuence public opinion about who won and lost. These ephemeral pieces actually came about through the combined efforts of the teams of scholarly writers assembled in each camp to represent what each man said. In line with earlier controversialist tactics, Du Perron and his supporters decided to attack Mornay through his sources rather than on theological grounds.37 The idea of a public conference ﬁrst came from Mornay, who in late 1599 offered to go before a panel of Catholic divines to rebut these charges. The conference actually originated in March 1600 when, at the behest of the duc de Bouillon, Louise de Coligny, the princesse d’Orange and daughter of Admiral Coligny, invited Mornay to dinner at her residence outside Paris. She wanted him to meet a minor Huguenot nobleman from Normandy named Henri aux Epaules, sieur de Sainte-Marie du Mont. Sainte-Marie du Mont apparently contemplated converting to Catholicism after hearing several sermons by Père Laurent, a Capuchin friar, attacking Mornay’s errors. Sainte-Marie du Mont knew Jean Davy du Perron, the bishop of Evreux’s brother, who offered to come along to represent the Catholic side, promising, in fact, to demonstrate no fewer than 50 patent falsehoods in Mornay’s recent treatise on the Eucharist.

Michael Wolfe 71

Although Jean Davy du Perron did not attend the dinner, behind him and likely feeding him these provocations stood his powerful brother Jacques. The ensuing exchange over dinner on 17 March provided a preview of events to come. After Mornay’s scornful lecture, where he called his Catholic detractors ‘ignoramuses’, Sainte-Marie du Mont let drop before the princesse and her guests that one Catholic critic, a man of enormous learning, had recently identiﬁed 500 errors in the book. This man was, of course, Jacques Davy Du Perron. The remark so infuriated Mornay that he rashly signed a statement stating his readiness to meet and debate the alleged errors using whatever editions of books his adversaries chose, leaving the judgement of the whole matter to a panel of experts handpicked by the king. It had all the earmarks of a duel, only the weapons would be words and books, not swords.38 No sooner was the challenge signed than Sainte-Marie du Mont immediately rushed it over to Jean Davy Du Perron, who then communicated it to his brother. Mornay called for the king to choose men known for their ‘doctrine et probité’ before whom to verify ‘page en page et de ligne en ligne’ all the alleged errors in this book. Meanwhile, Sainte-Marie du Mont formally abjured Calvinism on 11 April now, as he explained in a signed statement, that he realized its errors. Five days later, Du Perron publicly accepted Mornay’s challenge, stating that the summons Mornay threw out was not between two particular persons, but ‘d’un party à un party’.39 Silence on his part would only vindicate Mornay’s writings. Rather than examine every alleged error, what he called ‘this boring method . . . which will provide a specious pretext to turn his offer into a refusal’, Du Perron declared a readiness to demonstrate before learned men and the king any of the 500 alleged errors from among the even greater number contained in Mornay’s book on the Mass, as well as all his other earlier works. Du Perron went to pains to state that he considered Mornay a man of merit. It was Mornay’s excessive credulity that allowed others to abuse ‘l’industrie de sa plume’. He welcomed the king’s involvement, likening him to the great Roman emperor Constantine, who restored peace in his state and God’s church at the Council of Nicaea. For Du Perron, the debate was not over scriptural interpretations, where subtle deceptions often clouded the truth, but rather plain indisputable facts of attribution and citation.40 Yet, hermeneutics and thus doctrinal truth remained in the dispute over Mornay’s references and paraphrases. Du Perron’s letter, along with Mornay’s original and a list of the alleged errors, appeared in print. He sent a copy to the king, with a personal plea to allow the debate to take place. On 1 April Mornay publicly reiterated his readiness

72

Exegesis as Public Performance

to debate and accepted the new conditions.41 Du Perron, in turn, submitted copies of all the materials he exchanged with Mornay to the king.42 The clash in print now gave way to public spectacle. It is not difﬁcult to see why Henri IV found the idea of a public debate attractive. First, it provided him an easy way to play up his strong attachment to Catholicism to both the papacy and French Catholics. It also set the confessional struggle in a setting and manner where he could control the outcome. Finally, it furnished him an irresistible opportunity to humiliate his former companion and adviser, disabusing the Huguenot faithful once and for all of any hope he would one day return to the Reformed religion. After Mornay conﬁrmed his acceptance of the challenge, Henri conﬁded the organization of the conference to the chancellor, Pomponne de Bellièvre. Plans to hold the conference got under way quickly, beginning with the selection of judges. Although not trained as theologians, these men were called upon to judge textual interpretations that ultimately turned on questions of doctrine – matters technically beyond their purview. Mornay’s objections fell on deaf ears, since he had agreed to come before a panel of the king’s choosing. That Catholics outnumbered Calvinists on the panel two to one only further ensured that a balanced debate would be impossible. Bellièvre’s role as referee also raised concerns about potential Catholic favoritism. A brief look at the men chosen for the panel therefore offers telling insight into why the debate unfolded as it did. On the Catholic side was Jacques-Auguste de Thou, a prominent judge in the Parlement of Paris and historian. He had studied at a Jesuit college in Burgundy and took a law degree at the University of Orléans where he had studied under François Hotman and Jacques Cujas. His career in the Parlement of Paris began in 1576. He worked with moderate Catholics who urged Henri III to seek an alliance with Henri de Navarre. After the assassination of Henri III, he entered into Henri IV’s service. He helped to draw up the Edict of Nantes and vehemently opposed any formal acceptance of the Tridentine decrees in France. De Thou was a Gallican of unimpeachable credentials and a recognized scholar of considerable standing. In the late 1590s he began writing his celebrated universal history of France. Its anticlerical tone was so sharp that the papacy placed it on the Index.43Another panelist, cut from much the same cloth, was François Pithou. Born in Troyes in 1543 into a Norman family of jurists, he embraced the Reformed religion as a young man, but reconverted after the St. Bartholomew’s massacre. He studied under his father and also Cujas in Orléans. In 1580, he became a lawyer and undertook a diplomatic mission to the Low Countries.

Michael Wolfe 73

A noted legal scholar specializing in jurisprudence, ecclesiastical law, and ancient literature, the Gallican Pithou was among the most vociferous of the Jesuits’ Catholic critics in France. The last Catholic panelist was Jean Martin, an obscure doctor in Marguerite de Navarre’s service, who apparently knew Hebrew very well. Thus, humanist legal training, knowledge of languages, and Gallican sentiments largely characterized the Catholics on the panel. On the Calvinist side, Philippe Canaye, sieur de Fresne, was chosen. Born in Paris in 1557, Canaye had pursued a career in the bar before Henri III named him to his Grand Conseil despite Catholic opposition. He continued to serve Henri IV as a royal councillor, an envoy to the English court, and in diplomatic missions to the Empire. In 1595, the king named him as president to the newly created chambre mi-partie in the Parlement of Castres, which judged cases involving both Catholic and Huguenot plaintiffs. He ﬂirted with abjuration in the mid-1590s but only publicly quit Calvinism in 1601, citing Du Perron’s performance at Fontainebleau. A second Huguenot panelist was Isaac Casaubon.44 Casaubon possessed by far the greatest linguistic and philological expertise of all the judges. A noted French classical scholar and theologian, he was born in Geneva into a family of French religious refugees. He studied Greek at the Academy of Geneva, where he eventually received a professorship. He joined the University of Montpellier in September 1596 but remained restless. In 1598, he went on business to Lyons where he stayed with Méric de Vicq, a Catholic surintendant de la justice closely connected with the erudite circle of liberal Catholics in Paris. On a visit together to Paris, de Vicq presented Casaubon to Henri IV, who reportedly promised to ﬁnd Casaubon a post in the University of Paris. The professorship never materialized. In late February 1600, de Vicq wrote to tell him to rush straightaway to Paris for an affair of importance, which proved to be the Conference of Fontainebleau. Despite entreaties, Casaubon agreed to join the king’s panel to pronounce on issues carefully contrived to humiliate Mornay. By lending his prestige to a verdict of dubious merit, Casaubon only fanned suspicions that he, too, contemplated abjuration. De Thou convinced Casaubon to stay in Paris after the conference, where he received a pension from the king but no professorship lest it offend the Sorbonne’s sensibilities. In November 1604, Casaubon succeeded Jean Gosselin as assistant librarian in the royal library, adding a salary of 400 livres to his pension. Yet, despite ensuing Catholic inducements, Casaubon remained a Calvinist and later, perhaps for atonement, contributed his expertise to Pierre du Moulin and King James I of England in a controversy with Du Perron over divine right kingship.

74

Exegesis as Public Performance

While Catholics justiﬁed the choice of Fontainebleau for its tranquility, Calvinists claimed it was picked because it forced Mornay to be far away from his assistants and his own books. Henri IV left the Louvre on 21 April for Fontainebleau, but Du Perron and Mornay only arrived later the next week. Their delay likely occurred because both men and their assistants were working feverishly to prepare their cases. Only upon arrival did Mornay discover details about the conference format. On learning that Du Perron intended to focus on a few passages, he argued that all the rest should be considered correct. Furthermore, he insisted that Du Perron present his criticisms in writing beforehand, along with the precise editions whence his proofs came. Lastly, Mornay demanded that the entire book had to be considered in order; otherwise Du Perron could manipulate Mornay’s authorial intent. Du Perron in turn met with Henri IV to argue that Mornay had long since accepted the original terms of the debate. Time was too short, moreover, to prepare a full list of all the errors.45 He did promise, however, to make the entire list of 500 passages public, together with all substantiating documentation, after the initial debate. He and Mornay could then take 50 of them up at random over the course of ten days. Two very different interpretations of textual error hid behind all this theatrical posturing. Du Perron intended to incriminate the whole book by implicating a few passages, while Mornay insisted that any errors be treated as exceptional, not exemplary. Mornay then asked that a Catholic and Calvinist panelist choose the passages to be examined. On 3 May Henri IV angrily exploded upon learning of Mornay’s latest demand, declaring he would let Du Perron choose the passages himself. If Mornay still refused, passages would be examined by the panel in his absence. Given this even worse alternative, Mornay consented to return to the original format, and the king effectively ended his bid to reframe the conference.46 It was now Du Perron’s turn to baulk, this time over the selection of the 50 errors to debate with Mornay. Mornay initially submitted 60 rather than 50; even after paring the list to 50 he insisted on the right to raise them in any order he wished. The tactical parrying persisted as Du Perron kept the list overnight, ostensibly to go over it again in the morning. Some Huguenots at court cried foul because the delay left Mornay too little time to prepare. In the end Mornay only received the list at 1 a.m. on 5 May, the day of the debate, which meant he had to work long into the night, thus adding fatigue to his lack of preparation. Yet, the list provided by Du Perron lacked any explanation about what was wrong with the citation and it took several hours for Mornay

Michael Wolfe 75

to procure the books he needed to check his references. When the books did arrive, they were different from the editions cited by Du Perron, which meant Mornay had to relocate the references, all of which took up valuable time. Early the next morning, the king summoned Mornay to ask if he was ready. Mornay wanly explained he had only had time to verify 19 passages.47 Mornay identiﬁed six of the nine passages that would be debated, and Henri IV sarcastically asked him if he chose the ones he could most easily defend. The king then called Du Perron in, and before an assembled throng apprised him of the situation and asked if he was willing to proceed even though Mornay was not full prepared. With sly magnanimity, Du Perron declared his readiness to demonstrate the patent falsity of every identiﬁed passage in the book. With that the conference began. No extant copies of the transcript exist apart from an eighteenth-century version in the Bibliothèque Nationale.48 It took place in a long room beneath the Galerie de François I. Henri IV sat in front of the main ﬁreplace at a large rectangular table, with Mornay to his left and Du Perron to his right. At a second table sat Bellièvre and the panel, while at the third were the secretaries for the two sides. Two hundred persons crowded into the room to see this royal pièce de théâtre. The high nobility included the ducs de Nemours, Mercoeur, Vaudemont, Mayenne, Elbeuf, Aiguillon and the prince de Joinville took up places around the tables. Among the Catholics prelates who stood behind the king were the Archbishop of Lyons and Bishops of Nevers, Castres, and Beauvais. The four royal secretaries of state stood behind Mornay. The chief royal ofﬁcers, a number of Catholic abbots and other ecclesiastical dignitaries, including the young Pierre de Bérulle, stood in attendance. A handful of Calvinist ministers were also present. The Huguenot noble Sully attended all the sessions, as did Pierre du Moulin, who formed part of Catherine de Bourbon’s entourage. The king declared the conference open at 1 p.m., whereupon Bellièvre rose to explain to the assembled throng the origins and purpose of the debate.49 Henri IV then afﬁrmed his chancellor’s presentation and urged the chancellor and judges to ensure that the debaters adhered to the agreed format and maintained decorum.50 He invited Du Perron to begin. Du Perron lauded the king for calling the conference and assured everyone that matters of factual error, not doctrine, would only be discussed. It was then Mornay’s turn to speak. He stated that he was there to defend his book, which he wrote not out of ambition but to serve the king’s long-stated ambition to reform the Church.51 Du Perron then explained to the assembled audience that Mornay’s book contained

76

Exegesis as Public Performance

2000 citations, 500 of which he considered erroneous in one way or another. The 19 passages under consideration for this day had been chosen by Mornay from the original list of 60 he had sent him two days earlier. Du Perron then placed Mornay’s Traité de l’Eucharist on the table, along with the original list of 60 passages and the shorter list of 19. Every time the discussion of a passage concluded, the chancellor and judges stepped outside the room to deliberate, thus punctuating the proceedings into distinct scenes and acts. The items on the list mainly concerned the evolution of Catholic doctrine since the Fourth Lateran Council, and focused especially on major areas of contention between Protestants and Catholics. The ﬁrst two items of debate therefore concerned the Eucharist. In his book, Mornay claimed that the medieval scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus had raised questions about the real presence in the Eucharist some 100 years after the Fourth Lateran Council. Duns Scotus, he glossed, argued that the Lord’s body could not be in heaven and in the wafer and wine without some diminution of its vital essence.52 In turn, Du Perron argued that Mornay made two mistakes here. The ﬁrst was to equate what was essentially a scholastic exercise in considering hypothetical propositions with Duns Scotus’s actual opinion. The second, more serious mistake, was to attribute heretical views to Duns Scotus which he actually combated in his other writings. Mornay replied that he did not question Duns Scotus’s belief in the real presence in the Eucharist, but rather the dogma of transubstantiation. To back up his position, he cited relevant sections in Chapter 23 of Bellarmine’s recent work, De Sacramento Eucharistiæ, even though he conceded that Bellarmine disapproved of Duns Scotus’s position.53 Du Perron responded by arguing that Duns Scotus, whatever his personal opinion, afﬁrmed the Church’s authority to establish doctrine, in this case the dogma of transubstantiation established at the Fourth Lateran Council. That the churchmen assembled there, including Duns Scotus, considered varying viewpoints was perfectly appropriate. After a brief deliberation, the judges ruled that Mornay had confused Duns Scotus’s views with those he condemned; they left aside for a later time Duns Scotus’s personal views.54 The pro-Catholic Réfutation du faux discours later alleged that the judges decided not to condemn Mornay in error on this ﬁrst point lest he quit the conference, while the pro-Calvinist Discours véritable later claimed that the lack of a decision actually vindicated Mornay. Mornay also used a second passage, this time from the widely read Rationale divinorum ofﬁciorum of the thirteenth-century Dominican theologian Guillaume Durand, to challenge the veracity of transubstantiation.

Michael Wolfe 77

In response to Mornay’s claim that this passage revealed Durand’s doubts about the simultaneous presence of Christ in the consecrated host along with the ‘accidents’ of the bread and wine,55 Du Perron again argued that Durand laid out a heretical position as a prelude to refuting it. When Mornay began to claim that Durand practised self-censorship, Du Perron rejoined that such speculation departed from the format of the debate. The king agreed and cut off Mornay, for he went beyond the words in the text at hand. Bellièvre then read the texts in Durand identiﬁed by Du Perron. The judges not only declared Mornay in error, but halted him again when he tried to explain his position.56 The second focal point of debate centred on the Catholic doctrine of the intercession of the saints. Mornay paraphrased the homilies of John Chrysostom on Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians and the Gospel of Matthew, and a commentary of Jerome on Ezekiel 15, to suggest that the Church fathers doubted the legitimacy of this Catholic practice.57 According to Du Perron, Mornay simply took individual passages out of context in order to twist their meanings for his own ends. In other passages, the Fathers afﬁrmed this doctrine and the veneration of the saints generally. Mornay defended his choice to paraphrase rather than quote the texts in its entirety, but Du Perron argued that paraphrasing was not a licence to alter the author’s original views. Mornay then countered that Chrysostom’s call to pray for saints was limited to those still living. Du Perron then had the entire passage from Chrysostom’s commentary on Thessalonians read, to show that Mornay’s paraphrase did not sustain this interpretation. The judges again ruled against Mornay for distorting the passage’s meaning by omitting to include it in its entirety in the text. However, Mornay also used Chrysostom’s homily on Matthew to illustrate his criticism of the practice of praying to saints rather than amending one’s life through genuine repentance. He then argued that the Catholic notion of the treasury of the saints and the Church’s power of the keys is was a later, pernicious, invention.58 In this instance, Du Perron sought to undermine Mornay’s position by arguing that his opponent’s omission of the words that immediately followed this homilectic passage fundamentally altered Chrysostom’s views. Of additional interest here was the debate over Chrysostom’s own citations from Jeremiah 11:14 and Ezekiel 14:14–16, which discussed the efﬁcacy of prayer. Du Perron insisted that Mornay’s paraphrase actually reversed the original meaning of the passage in question. The judges again ruled against Mornay for omitting to include the entirety of Chrysostom’s words in his abridged citation.59 They adopted the same stance in assessing Mornay’s quotation of Jerome.

78

Exegesis as Public Performance

According to Mornay, Jerome disparaged any sinner who placed his faith in a person, rather than God.60 However, the judges accepted Du Perron’s assertion that Jerome simply raised questions about praying to so-called living saints, and he offered numerous citations from elsewhere in the saint’s works to show his belief in the intercession of saints. The remaining four points of debate dealt with signiﬁcant but less fundamental issues of denominational division. While Mornay used Cyril of Alexandria’s Adversus Julianum to decry the adoration of the cross, Du Perron was judged to have successfully defended Cyril’s endorsement of the practice of spiritual adoration.61 Points seven and nine raised the question of the legitimacy of using images in devotion. Once again, Du Perron accused Mornay of removing passages from their correct context, and of deliberately omitting key words that legitimized Catholic traditions from the originals. In these cases, the judges pronounced against Mornay for using tainted sources and distorting the original meaning of the texts.62 The penultimate point concerned the cult of the Virgin Mary. Du Perron condemned Mornay for leaving out crucial phrases exalting Mary from Bernard of Clairvaux’s 74th epistle.63 But while Mornay did not question St. Bernard’s support for Marian devotion, he claimed the saint worried such adoration might become idolatrous. In the ensuing discussion, Desbordes-Mercier commented that while God used Mary as his instrument for the salvation of mankind, it was reasonable to question whether that meant Christians should adore her alongside the godhead. Nevertheless, the judges again pronounced against Mornay for distorting the original meaning of the text. By the time the last passage had been discussed and settled, it was 7 p.m.; so the king called the session to a close and ordered it to resume the next morning. The next morning, word reached Du Perron that Mornay was ill and wished an adjournment of that day’s meeting. A short time later, the king’s physician, La Rivière, went to tell Henri IV of Mornay’s indisposition, describing him as wracked by chills and vomiting violently. The king then sent word to Bellièvre to cancel that day’s meeting and inform the panel judges not to bother coming to the palace. In the evening, word went to the judges that they could leave for Paris, which they did the next morning, 7 May. In the meantime, Mornay apparently rallied enough to say he might soon resume the conference. However, he later suffered a relapse so bad that he left for Paris the next morning without asking the king’s permission, a serious breach of court etiquette. In a letter to the royal secretary, de Loménie, Mornay explained he had quit Fontainebleau upon the advice of friends; he also wrote of the bitterness he felt as a result of how the king had treated him after

Michael Wolfe 79

years of stalwart service. His only consolation was his faith and the certainty that posterity would vindicate him.64 As reported by L’Estoile, the rulings against Mornay raised sufﬁcient doubts about his entire book for Catholics to declare Du Perron – and Catholicism – the winner.65 Word of Du Perron’s triumph went forth from the pulpits of Paris on the Sunday following the conference. On 10 May, Du Perron wrote the new vice legate, Cardinal Aldobrandini, to announce his glorious triumph over heresy at Fontainebleau. On 29 May, Pope Clement VIII sent Du Perron a letter of congratulations.66 The poet Berthaut published a laudatory poem celebrating Du Perron’s victory. In it, he urged Henri IV to chase heresy out of the kingdom, albeit with ‘douceur’ and ‘charité’.67 On Pentecost, a procession of thanks wound through Paris to the Sainte-Chapelle for the singing of a Te Deum.68 Six princes of the blood participated, as did the king, his head uncovered while carrying a large candle. Du Perron presented a series of sermons on the subject at Notre Dame de Paris and Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. Throughout the summer, Mornay wrote to erstwhile admirers seeking reassurance of their support. Some Huguenots, outraged on his behalf, took up their pens to defend Mornay’s reputation. Mornay received a letter of sympathy and support from the aged Beza in Geneva and another more substantial review of the conference from Daniel Tilénius. Constant, the pastor at Marens, wrote a long chiding letter to Mornay several days after the conference, saying he had predicted the terrible outcome.69 Yet, sympathy for Mornay was not universal among the Huguenots. D’Aubigné and Sully, in particular, publicly voiced their disappointment at Mornay’s performance. It reﬂected the widening divisions among Huguenot leaders following the king’s conversion. In his Mémoires, Sully, who personally disliked Mornay after long years competing for the king’s ear, snidely remarked that the ‘Pope of the Huguenots’ had bestowed a cardinal’s miter on Du Perron.70 D’Aubigné boasted in his Histoire Universelle that he could easily have vanquished Du Perron. In fact, among his papers he made the claim to have debated Du Perron two weeks after the colloquy with Mornay, besting the Catholic champion before the king and an assembled throng. However, no other evidence exists of this encounter, so we must suppose Aubigné drafted his debate with Du Perron as an imaginary exercise.71 By contrast, Du Perron enjoyed congratulatory press from publicists such as Mathieu and Palma Cayet.72 Jacques-Auguste de Thou, one of the judges at the disputation, was more restrained in his Histoire Universelle. The diarist Pierre de l’Estoile, interestingly, also registered a more even-handed account of the conference’s déroulement and outcome.73

80

Exegesis as Public Performance

Mornay and Du Perron continued the debate of that day at Fontainebleau in print over the course of the next two years. Mornay drafted his account at Saumur in four days in early June, addressing it to members of the Reformed church of Paris. He was assisted by several associates who had assisted him in Fontainebleau. Pierre du Moulin prepared and published a short account of the conference within weeks, which likely formed the template for the more substantial compilation, the Discours véritable de la Conférence à Fontainebleau, that appeared in July. Henri IV angrily threatened to strip Mornay and all his associates of their pensions and ofﬁces when he learned of the publication. Pierre Constant also published a short piece later that summer attacking Du Perron’s arguments.74 Back in June, Du Perron learned of Mornay’s plan to publish his account of the conference shortly after returning to Evreux. This prompted him to begin assembling notes for his own version, the Réfutation du Faux Discours véritable.75 It initially appeared anonymously in Antwerp in late July 1600 under the title Discours véritable de l’ordre et forme qui a été gardée en l’assemblée de Fontainebleau. If Du Perron did not compose this account, he likely had a strong hand in it, for it explicitly countered the Huguenot account issued by Mornay. Du Perron reiterated his readiness to meet Mornay anywhere, anytime to debate all the other enormous falsehoods on his original list. He offered several examples, replete with textual citations for the reader to verify, just as the judges had. In late August, Du Perron submitted his manuscript for royal approval, even though he remained prepared to explain the many other errors in Mornay’s text not considered at the conference.76 Mornay, in turn, launched a retort to Du Perron’s Réfutation, where he provided the kind of defence of his own work denied him at the conference.77 Interestingly, Du Perron’s expanded account of the conference did not receive permission for publication until 22 December, so the book ﬁnally appeared early in 1601 as Actes de la conférence. The reasons for this lengthy delay are not altogether clear. Catholics said the king was too involved in negotiations with the Duchy of Savoy to give it his attention, while Huguenot commentators speculated it was due to the very weak nature of Du Perron’s original criticisms of Mornay’s work. We know that Du Perron joined the royal entourage in Lyons later that summer, where he personally asked the king for permission to publish the Actes. Bellièvre went over the manuscript while in Grenoble, and the royal council examined a preliminary version in Lyon that fall.78 Mornay later claimed that the version Du Perron presented to the royal council differed substantially from the later published one. In the second edition of the Actes

Michael Wolfe 81

published in early 1602, Du Perron solicited a letter from Bellièvre stating that it served as the ofﬁcial record of the conference.79 The Actes compiled redacted minutes of the debate, together with Du Perron’s previously published Réfutation. It mixed erudition and sarcasm in its expanded treatment of Mornay’s errors along with rebuttals of recent Huguenot attempts to answer these criticisms. The inﬂuence of Robert Bellarmine’s De Sacramento Eucharistiæ, which furnished a potent, deeply researched Catholic defence of doctrinal questions at dispute with the Protestants, can be readily discerned in the text. Perhaps most importantly, this pamphlet described the king’s very active engagement in the debate.80 Mornay responded to the Actes and its accompanying texts with an expanded version of the Discours véritable, which he published in Saumur and Montpellier in 1601, entitled Advertissement à Messieurs de l’Église romaine. In it, he revisited the points under dispute at the conference, providing further a defence of his scholarship and interpretations. He also nuanced the tone of the judgements offered by the judges so they appeared to be in his favour. He emphasized, again, the conference’s fundamental unfairness and the king’s own bias. Finally, he promised to take up Du Perron’s other points of criticism, which duly appeared in a massive tome of some 767 pages the next year in Saumur under the title Response au livre publiée par le Sieur Evesque d’Evreux. Mornay argued that it was Du Perron, not him, who manipulated the meaning of texts.81 Nevertheless, fellow Calvinists regularly urged Mornay to revise his Traicté de l’Eucharistie to eliminate the problems identiﬁed by his Catholic critics. In late 1601, he completed his revisions of the Traicté 82, while in 1602 he ﬁnally issued another fuller rejoinder to Du Perron.83 In print and letters, Catholic polemicists kept up the attack on Mornay. A certain Viamoret, a doctor in theology, penned a caustic tract in 1601.84 Another one by Charles Bourgeois, likely a pseudonym, appeared in 1602.85 Mornay’s efforts to ‘speak truth to power’ proved in vain, since these arguments over the ultimate meaning of texts relied on methods of interpretation, as set by Du Perron and his assistants, which purposely destabilized and obfuscated the texts under consideration. The Conference of Fontainebleau thus marked a key moment of transition in the religious politics of France after the Wars of Religion. It pointed to the new kind of controversialist warfare that militant Catholics in France waged against Calvinism up to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. This was a battle to shape public perceptions through staged encounters and artfully managed publicity campaigns in print and letters, one that relied upon the coordinated efforts of highly skilled men trained in theology, the law,

82

Exegesis as Public Performance

and, above all, rhetoric. Under Henri IV, the monarchy began a more systematic recruitment and organization of the intellectual capital necessary to wage this new kind of warfare, one that reﬂected the emerging importance of public opinion and a ‘public sphere’.86 For this, Henri IV drew in men, such as Du Perron, once associated with Henri III’s academy, legists and historians connected to the Parlement of Paris, and érudits in the capital. It also required a more systematic approach to managing the royal library and organizing the vast ocean of manuscripts and correspondence accumulated over the centuries – a task taken up just a short time later by the Dupuy brothers. After the demise of the Catholic League in the 1590s, this new kind of warfare came to characterize the political culture of Bourbon France, achieving ever greater levels of sophistication under Richelieu and Louis XIV before slipping out of the monarchy’s control in the eighteenth century.

Notes 1. See, among others, Richard Grifﬁths, The Bible in the Renaissance: Essays on Biblical Commentary and Translation in the Fifteenth and the Sixteenth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Valerie R Hotchkiss and David Price (eds), The Reformation of the Bible, the Bible of the Reformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Olivier Fatio and Pierre Fraenkel (eds), Histoire de l’exégèse au XVIe siècle: textes du colloque international tenu à Genève en 1976 (Geneva: Droz, 1978). 2. Richard Stauffer, Interprètes de la Bible. Études sur les réformateurs du XVIe siècle (Paris: Beauchesne, 1980). 3. Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 4. Donald Nugent, Ecumenism in the Age of Reformation: The Colloquy of Poissy (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1974). 5. David Willis-Watkins, The Second Commandment and Church Reform: The Colloquy of St. Germain-en-Laye, 1562 (Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1994). 6. Michael Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV: Politics, Power, and Religious Belief in Early Modern France (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 123–9. 7. Jacques Solé, Le débat entre protestants et catholiques français de 1598 à 1685, 4 vols (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1928), i, pp. 33–58. 8. Michel Peronnet (ed.), La controverse religieuse (XVIe–XIXe siècles): actes du 1ère Colloque Jean Boisset, VIème Colloque du Centre d’Histoire de la Réforme et du Protestantisme (Montpellier: Presses de l’Imprimerie de Recherche, Université Paul Valéry, 1980). 9. Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

Michael Wolfe 83 10. Bernard Dompnier, Le venin de l’hérésie: image du protestantisme et combat catholique au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Le Centurion, 1985). 11. Jeffrey Sawyer, Printed Poison: Pamphlet Propaganda, Factional Politics, and the Public Sphere in Early Seventeenth-century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 12. See Pierre Tucoo-Chala, Catherine de Bourbon: une calviniste exemplaire (Biarritz: Atlantica, 1997). 13. Pierre Féret, Le cardinal Du Perron, orateur, controversiste, écrivain. Étude historique et critique (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969). 14. Jacques Lavaud, Un poète de cour aux temps des dernier Valois: Philippe Desportes (1546–1606) (Geneva: Droz, 1936), pp. 285–312. 15. ‘Discours sommaire’ in Jacques Davy Du Perron, Oeuvres diverses, 2 vols (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), i, p. 6. Originally published in 1633. 16. Ibid. 17. Pierre de l’Estoile, Journal de Henri III (Paris: Éditions Paleo, 2000), vii, pp. 284–6. 18. Agrippa d’Aubigné, Histoire universelle (Geneva: Droz, 1984), iii, p. 405. 19. Henri de Sponde, Défense de la Déclaration du feu sieur de Sponde (Bordeaux: n.p., 1597). 20. Du Perron, Oeuvres, ii, p. 465. 21. Confession de Sancy (The Hague: P. Gosse, 1744), p. 537. 22. Daniel Tilénus, Response à un traitté du sieur du Perron, Evesque d’Evreux, touchant l’insufﬁsance et imperfection de l’Escriture-Saincte et la nécessité et authorité des Traditions non escrites (n.pl.: n.p., n.d.), pp. 8–9. 23. Raoul Patry, Philippe du Plessis-Mornay, un huguenot homme d’État (1549–1623) (Paris: Rischbacher, 1933). 24. Hugues Daussy, Les Huguenots et le roi. Le combat politique de Philippe DuplessisMornay (1572–1600) (Geneva: Droz, 2002). 25. Philippe de Mornay, seigneur du Plessis-Marly, De l’institution, vsage, et doctrine du sainct sacrement de l’Eucharistie, en l’Eglise ancienne. Ensemble; comment, quand, & par quels degrez la Messe s’est introduite en sa place (La Rochelle: H. Hautlin, 1598). 26. Ibid., pp. 49–51. 27. Ibid., pp. 709, 801. 28. Jacques-Auguste de Thou, Histoire universelle, 16 vols (Paris: n.p., 1734), ix, pp. 326–7. 29. Louis Richeome, La saincte Messe declarée et defendve contre les erreurs sacramentaires de nostre temps, ramassez au livre de l’institution de l’Eucharistie (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1600). 30. Jules César Boulanger, Examen des lieux alléguez par le sieur du Plessis-Mornay en l’Epistre limionaire du livre contre la Messe (Paris: n.p., 1598). 31. P.M.N.R.S.D.P.P., Discours veritable de l’ordre et forme qui a esté gardé en l’Assemblée de Fontainebleau (Antwerp: H. Verduffen, 1600), p. 22. 32. Lettres du cardinal d’Ossat (Paris: Ioseph Bouillerot, 1627), iv, p. 862. 33. Letter cited in David de Licques, Vie de Mornay (Leiden: Bonaventure and Abraham Elsevier, 1647), pp. 252–3. 34. Paul Colomiès (ed.), Scaligerana (Cologne: n.p., 1695), p. 461. 35. ‘Lettre de M. de La Scala’, in Hippolyte Aubert (ed.), Correspondance de Théodore de Bèze (Geneva: Droz, 1983), 6 December 1598, p. 190.

84

Exegesis as Public Performance

36. The only comprehensive account of the subject is J. A. Laliot, Essai historique sur la conférence de Fontainebleau entre Duplessis-Mornay and Du Perron, le 4 mai 1600 (Paris: Fischbacher, 1889). 37. Avertissement à MM. de l’Eglise romaine (n.pl.: n.p., n.d.). 38. Sommation du Sieur du Plessis à M. L’Evesque d’Evreux. Avec la Response dudict Sieur Evesque (Paris: n.p., 1600). 39. All quotes here are in Actes de la conférence de Fontainebleau, pp. 2–5. 40. This riposte was published in Evreux on 28 March. A copy was later included in Actes de la conference de Fontainebleau. 41. Response du Sieur du Plessis à l’escrit publié par le Sieur evesque d’Evreux sur la Sommation à luy faicte privément par ledit sieur du Plessis (Paris: n.p., 1600). 42. Actes de la Conférence de Fontainebleau, p. 5. 43. Ingrid A. R. De Smet, Thuanus: The Making of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553–1617) (Geneva: Droz, 2006). 44. Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 1559–1614, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 45. Actes de la Conférence de Fontainebleau, p. 15. 46. Histoire de la vie de Philippe de Mornay, (Leiden: B. and A. Elsevier, 1647), p. 266. 47. Du Perron, Oeuvres, ii, p. 104. 48. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Fonds français 20341, ff. 27–31. 49. Actes, pp. 29–30. 50. Ibid., p. 31. 51. Vie de Philippe de Mornay, pp. 32–3. 52. De l’Institution, usage et doctrine du Saint–Sacrement de l’Eucharistie, pp. 869–70. The citation was from Duns Scotus, In Quarum Librum Sententiarum, IV Sent., dist. X, quæstio I (Paris: n.p., 1519). 53. Robert Bellarmine, De Sacramento Eucharistiæ, 2 vols (Ingolstadt: Sartori, 1589), ii, book III, chapter 23. 54. Advertissement sur la vaine vanterie de ceux de l’Eglise romaine touchant ce qui s’est passé à la conférence de Fontainebleau (n.pl.: n.p., 1600). 55. De l’institution, p. 870. 56. Acte, p. 50. 57. De l’institution, pp. 537, 574, 583. 58. Ibid., p. 574. 59. Actes, p. 63. 60. De l’institution, p. 583. 61. Ibid., p. 223. 62. The quotations were taken from Crinitus (1465–1505) and Theodoret of Cyr. De l’institution, pp. 218, 223. 63. De l’Institution, p. 604. 64. Mémoires et correspondences de Duplessis-Mornay, 12 vols (Paris: Treuttel and Würtz, 1824–1825), ix, pp. 369–72. 65. Pierre de l’Estoile, Journal de Henri IV (Paris: Éditions Paleo, 2000), ii, pp. 498–9. 66. César de Ligny, Ambassades et Négotiations (Paris: Antoine Estiene,1623), p. 345. 67. Jacques Berthaut, Oeuvres poétiques de Berthaut (Paris: n.p., 1614), i, p. 152. 68. Les Fuites de M. Duplessis (n.pl.: n.p., n.d.), p. 27. 69. Mémoires et correspondences de Duplessis-Mornay, ix, pp. 372–8.

Michael Wolfe 85 70. Louis Raymond Lefèvre (ed.), Mémoires de Sully, 2nd edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), iv, p. 112. 71. Agrippa d’Aubigné, ‘Petites Œuvres meslees’, in Eugene Réaume and François de Cassaude (eds), Oeuvres completes (Paris: Lemerre, 1873), i, pp. 73–4. 72. Pierre Mathieu, Histoire de France, sous Henri IV, (Paris: n.p., 1606), i, p. 559; Victor Palma-Cayet, Chronologie septennaire, (Paris: n.p., 1605), p. 141. 73. L’Estoile, Journal de Henri IV, ii, pp. 496–7. 74. Advertissement touchant la vaine Vanterie de ceux de l’Eglise romaine sur ce qui s’est passé à Fontainebleau (n.pl.: n.p., 1600). 75. Du Perron, Oeuvres, ii, pp. 301–2. 76. Ibid., pp. 79–80. 77. Responce au livre publié par le sieur Evesque d’Evreux sur la conférence tenue à Fontainebleau, en 1600 (La Rochelle, n.p., 1602). 78. Du Perron, Oeuvres, ii, p. 81. 79. Ibid., p. 83. 80. Actes de la Conférence tenue entre le sieur Evesque d’Evreux et le sieur du Plessis, en presence du Roy à Fontainebleau le 4 de mai 1600, pp. 3–4; Réfutation du faux discours de la Conférence (Evreux: Antoine le Mairié, 1601). 81. Advertissement à Messieurs de l’Église romaine (Saumur: n.p., 1602), preface. 82. Mémoires de Mornay, (n.pl.: n.p., 1624–1626), ix, p. 397–8. 83. Advertissement de l’autheur à Messieurs de l’Eglise romaine, unpaginated, found as the prefatory material in Response au livre du sieur Evesque d’Evreux (n.pl.: n.p., 1602). 84. Viamoret, Les Fuites de M. du Plessis en son discourse et advertisement sur le jugement donné à Fontainebleau contre ses faussetez (Rouen: Jean Osment, 1601). 85. ‘Carlo Burgesio’, Brevis narratio eorum quæ religionis causa gesta sunt apud Fontem-Bellacum (Paris: n.p., 1602). 86. Michael Wolfe, ‘Henri IV and the Press’, in Paul Nelles (ed.), The SixteenthCentury French Religious Book (Saint Andrews: University of St. Andrew’s Press, 2001), pp. 177–96.

4 Chastel’s Attempted Regicide (27 December 1594) and its Subsequent Transformation into an ‘Affair’ Robert Descimon

The event The attempted assassination of Henri IV by Jean Chastel on 27 December 1594 was a historical happenstance. There had, of course, been other attempts, and that of Pierre Barrière at Melun in August 1593 already placed the Jesuits under suspicion (through the suspected involvement of Père Ambroise de Varade in it). The regicidal obsession was so omnipresent in the minds of Gallican magistrates and ‘politiques’ that one wonders if these events can be contextualized other than through the perspective of royalist ideology and polemic.1 The king had returned from Picardy (where he was urgently preparing for the war against Spain) to Paris and was visiting Gabrielle d’Estrées in the Hôtel Schomberg that winter’s evening. That was where Jean Chastel attacked him with a knife, wounding him on the lip. The culprit did not try to make off. The Parlement launched a hasty investigation which ended with Jean Chastel’s condemnation and execution and also the banishment of the Jesuits from the kingdom, in reality from the jurisdiction of the Paris Parlement.

Who was Jean Chastel? The young Jean Chastel was just 19 years old at the time of the attack. He had experienced intensely the turmoil of the period that had just culminated with Henri IV’s entry into Paris on 22 March 1594.2 He belonged to a somewhat respectable family of merchant drapers. His father, Pierre, was dizainier (local watch and ward ofﬁcer) for the Notre Dame quarter on the Ile de la Cité. This was the part of the city where 86

Robert Descimon 87

the League échevin Jean de Compans had his residence. Pierre’s outlook was that of a Leaguer, but he had never been regarded as one of the movement’s leaders.3 He had at best played only a minor role in the arrest, led by the procureur Leclerc, sieur de Bussy, of the magistrates at the Parlement in January 1589. At the time of the anti-League rising, known as ‘Du Pain ou la Paix!’ (‘For Bread, or for Peace!’) on 10 August 1590, Robert Legoix, also a merchant draper and the captain in chief of the band of watchmen for the locality where Pierre Chastel lived, was killed. Inevitably, we know nothing about the impact of these events in the mind of Jean Chastel, still at school. But, according to his interrogation he followed the sermons of Guarinus and other League preachers. He was evidently well acquainted with the political ideas developed by the League in opposition to Henri IV. Can the social environment in which Jean Chastel grew up help to illuminate his emerging crisis of conscience? It is possible, albeit in a very indirect way, that he had the vague sense of belonging to a group of people who felt that they had lost out in recent social developments.4 Jean Chastel, however, was a conscientious student at the College of Navarre, then at the College of Justice, and eventually at the College of Clermont (the Jesuit college). He then entered law school for six months, perhaps at Orléans or elsewhere. A career as an avocat, perhaps an ofﬁce as conseiller at the Châtelet court, seemed in store for someone with that level of education – unless, that is, he surrendered to the dictates of conscience and, pursuing a vocation, entered the priesthood or took monastic orders. College life afforded Jean Chastel the opportunity to develop his adolescent circle of acquaintances. In his interrogation he cited the sons of Messier and Lepeuple5 as being those whom père Guéret approached to ﬁnd Chastel and dissuade him from his attack with a game of tennis.6 The father of Messier was a clerical outﬁtter (‘marchand chasublier’) whose business naturally placed him in contact with the clergy.7 The father of Lepeuple was a merchant jeweller or goldsmith. This network of adolescent acquaintances would doubtless repay further research. They all lived in the quarter of the Cité, not far from the house on the rue de la Vieille-Draperie, on the corner of the rue de la Barillerie, in the parish of St-Pierre-des-Arcis, which was the home of Jean Chastel’s parents. We can recover something of their lives. Pierre Chastel (1544–1608) descended from the Targer family, which linked him to a distinguished merchant family of mercers (they traded in woad), whose Calvinist inclinations put them poles apart from any League religious

88

Chastel’s Attempted Regicide

convictions.8 In June 1593, Pierre and his wife Denise Heuzard had married their elder daughter Catherine to the son of a merchant draper of their generation, Jean Leconte. Her father-in-law and her relatives would form a company together trading in drapery. Her dowry was 1800 écus (5400 livres tournois), of which 1000 was to be in ready money. The future spouse brought the same sum of 1000 écus into the marriage. The dower was 600 écus in one lump sum (a third of the dowry, as was usual) and the preciput was 100 écus.9 Leconte invested 1800 écus (his and his wife’s portion) in the marriage. Given the harsh economic circumstances of the time, these are not insigniﬁcant sums; but they are not so high as to situate the Leconte and the Chastel families among the merchant aristocracy of Paris. By the time of his death in 1608, however, Jean Leconte was, by all accounts, a highly prosperous draper on the rue St-Honoré.10 The sign to his house, Le Roi priant (‘The King Praying’), had been replaced by L’escu de Bar (‘The Shield of Bar’), the duchy of Bar being an inheritance of the dukes of Lorraine. It is worth emphasizing that both the Leconte and the Chastel had close relationships with the house of Lorraine and with the duke’s servants (who, by 1608, was the brother-in-law of Henri IV). We know that, following the execution of Jean Chastel, the family house was dismantled and replaced by an expiatory pyramid. In addition to a ﬁne of 2000 écus, their wealth was conﬁscated and they were banished from the capital. They did not suffer too harshly from these penalties, even though Pierre Chastel never returned to Paris. In 1605, a decade after Jean’s execution, his parents purchased (along with their daughter and a relative) a signiﬁcant property from a master of requests of the cardinal de Lorraine. It involved a house and adjoining property, with 160 arpents of agricultural land, situated at Fouju (in Brie), and some other disparate bits of real estate (two mills on the Seine at Samois). These purchases cost them 13,333 livres and one third.11 Once they had been banished, the Chastel had probably no desire to return to Paris and the place their son had been put to death and they had presumably invested their merchant capital in land. Jean Chastel’s sister had been implicated in his trial; one of them (Catherine) died in 1659, 64 years after her brother! The catastrophe that had befallen the family did not have such terrible long-term consequences. That is worth underlining, not least since the fate of the families of other regicides (Ravaillac and Damiens) was much harsher. To recover a social standing equivalent to their wealth, they simply quit trade and moved into ﬁnance.

Robert Descimon 89

Généalogie simpliﬁée des Chastel Nicolas Chastel, marchand drapier * Isabeau Targer

Jeanne * 1/Philippe Heuzard Marchand drapier 2/ Nicolas Dumoulin Marchand

Pierre marchand drapier * Denise Heuzard

Catherine * 27 VI 1593 1/Jean Leconte Marchand drapier 2/Pierre Legrand Marchand drapier Secrétaire du roi (1626)

Jean trésorier des Menus Plaisirs * 1627 Elisabeth Langlois

Madeleine Jean *? (1575–1595) Jean Delaistre Contrôleur général des Boîtes de Monnaies de France

Elisabeth * 29 I 1617 Claude Delaistre Receveur général des Bois for the départements de Champagne, Lyonnais; then secrétaire du roi and grefﬁer en chef de la cour des Aides

That process is clearly revealed in the accompanying genealogy. Jean Leconte junior and Elisabeth also had two brothers: Florent, a contrôleur general in the Grande Chancellerie of France, and Nicolas, trésorier de France in Burgundy. So the grandchildren of Pierre Chastel, regicide Jean’s nephews, had shifted from commerce to ﬁnancial ofﬁces. It was a success story, albeit one with risks attached to it, since the second Jean Leconte was legally prevented from touching his wife’s inheritance from the 1630s onwards. The Leconte family more generally, however, did well since his sister, Elisabeth Langlois, became the principal creditor of her husband who, when he died, owed her over 320,000 livres. As to

90

Chastel’s Attempted Regicide

Catherine Chastel’s youngest daughter, the offspring of her second marriage (the lineage is not shown on the simpliﬁed genealogical table), she would marry Denis Palluau, a conseiller in the Parlement of Paris, whose father, also Denis (a conseiller in 1580, a member of the Grand’Chambre in 1612), must certainly have witnessed the trial of Jean Chastel.

Regicide and its consequences The 19-year-old Chastel certainly paid the price for his Catholic religion in 1594. Two different interpretations explain his motives: his own and those of the magistrates who interrogated him.12 He himself said that he took his decision on the Feast of Saint John the Baptist (23 June). The signiﬁcance of that statement would have escaped no one at the time. This was the day on which an efﬁgy, representing the League, was burnt on a bonﬁre lit in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice. On Saint John’s Day back in December 1588, an efﬁgy representing ‘Heresy’ had been set alight in the Place de Grève. Jean Chastel proclaimed before his judges his adherence to the religion of the League. He admitted that it had been the preachers generally who had convinced him and led him to contemplate the act. He denied having thought that it was legitimate to kill kings but (following the orthodox line) maintained the right to kill tyrants and continued to uphold it through to his execution.13 This Leaguer conviction was reinforced by an intense sense of his sinfulness. He had hit his mother and his reading of a book by the theologian Poncet had persuaded him that he would never obtain forgiveness for the act. The same sense is to be found in the Discours autobiographique (1599) of François Leclerc, sieur du Tremblay, the future Père Joseph, written when he entered the Capuchin religious order.14 Born in 1577, he was two years younger than Chastel. François Leclerc’s Discours is an extravaganza of baroque religious rhetoric, characterized by his penitence for his sins of adolescence (he had aimed a loaded weapon at his mother, a former Huguenot, and his sisters) and his rejection of the world and its corruptions.15 Jean Chastel admitted that his own sense of guilt drove his death wish. Unlike Père Joseph, however, he did not seek a civil death (represented by the decision to enter a monastic order). He might perhaps have done so, had he lived long enough to have survived the critical period of the collapse of the Parisian League. This death wish was perhaps manifested in his refusal to live under the rule of a relapsed heretic, and his rage for not having been able to convince God to prevent its occurring.

Robert Descimon 91

The interpretation offered by the magistrates of Jean Chastel’s crime was very different. Their explanation focused on sexual issues, especially evident in Jacques-Auguste de Thou’s History of His Own Times (Historia Sui Temporis). De Thou maintained that the search of the Chastel house amounted to the discovery of an autobiographical confession. Chastel had sought to commit suicide by engaging in bestiality with a mare from the royal stables.16 There had been an incestuous relationship with one of his sisters. Casting doubt on the sexual purity of the Leaguers was a constant refrain in the discourse of the ‘politiques’ about the zealots, as it was about the Jesuits.17 Only one conclusion was possible: the Devil had inspired Chastel to do the deed. He was therefore promptly put to death on 29 December 1594. Catholic royalists believed in the Devil just as much as the Leaguers, locating his existence, however, more precisely in the camp of their adversaries, which (after all) was another way of demonstrating their commitment to their cause.18 Chastel’s own testimony under torture demonstrates that he had hallucinations. He saw men, dressed as Spaniards, everywhere, bringing knives out of their pockets and showing him how to use them . . . He said that ‘he would rather damn his soul quator que octo [‘four, rather than eight’]’. Asked ‘where had he learnt this doctrine?’ he replied ‘that he had learnt these numbers in philosophy’.19 Jean never, however, owned up to any accomplice, or sponsor. He simply revealed (but it is a telling sign of family problems, because he cannot have been ignorant of the consequences of what he was saying) that he had revealed his plan to his father. His revelation was turned as evidence against him of his immorality (the ‘double parricide’ of Gallican propaganda). His implication of his father, which struck the judges forcibly, is (in reality) very signiﬁcant.

The jesuits on trial: the ‘Jesuit Conspiracy’ Chastel’s attempted regicide led to the Jesuits being banished from the jurisdiction of the Paris Parlement on the pretext that he had been their pupil. The magistrates found what they were looking for when they searched the College of Clermont: writings on tyrannicide, as it happened, in the handwriting of Père Guignard, one of Chastel’s teachers. This was the classic kind of discovery to be expected in the investigations by ‘politiques’ of League preachers.20 Père Guignard was hanged and many Parisians, according to the Jesuits and Leaguers, cherished his remains as relics. The banishment of the Jesuits is an event that has so often been studied that it is hardly necessary to say much more about it.21 Sufﬁce it to

92

Chastel’s Attempted Regicide

note that Jacques-Auguste de Thou prided himself on having persuaded Henri IV to let the Parlement of Paris handle the Chastel case, removing it from the competence of the Prèvôt de l’Hôtel du roi (whose jurisdiction it would certainly have been, given the place and circumstances of the event). The transfer of the investigation to the Parlement allowed the case against Chastel to be conjoined to that of the Jesuits and the University of Paris, pending since 1564 but reactivated in June 1594 through a legal complaint, lodged by Jacques d’Amboise. He was the University Dean, newly appointed by the royalists, a physician who had formerly been a surgeon. De Thou’s manoeuvre was a political master stroke because, in July 1594, the Parlement had been ‘parti’, that is, divided on the suit, with as many voices for as against the Jesuits. That was an unlikely outcome unless it had been arrived at by prior negotiation among the magistrates in order to maintain the status quo. The Chastel attack allowed the Gallicans to relaunch their offensive against the Jesuits and force through their banishment. Their condemnation, however, disguised a paradox. The plaintiffs (the University of Paris and the Parisian parish priests) were much more implicated in the League than the Jesuits had ever been (for they had succeeded in keeping some distance from it). It is true, of course, that the University and the parishes of Paris had been thoroughly purged of Leaguers after the king’s entry to the city. But an objective analysis has to acknowledge that the investigation did not prove the Jesuits were behind Chastel’s attack, either in its preparation or in its execution.22 They were chosen as symbols – hence the contemporary expression for those who supported a rapprochement with Rome as ‘Jesuits in Disguise’. As Roland Mousnier says, ‘the term designated a way of being Christian.’23 Even Cardinal d’Ossat, no lover of the Jesuits, remarked that ‘after all, Jacques Clément was not a Jesuit’ – and Clément, the assassin of Henri IV’s predecessor, was, of course, a Dominican. None of this goes to prove (unless we take into account the post-1603 reconstruction of the evidence) that the Jesuits would not have been secretly delighted if Chastel had not succeeded in his attempted assassination. What with the Gallican legendary ‘autobiography’ of Jean Chastel and the Jesuit legend of his secret revelations to his prison companions, it was a pretty shabby way of concocting history by fabricating evidence. The Gallican tendency in the Parlement of Paris was utterly bent on expelling the Jesuits because they thought they were too close to papal authority. In reality, however, the papacy had displayed a notable caution for the greater part of the League, treating it as a diplomatic rather than as a doctrinal affair.24 The Gallican objective, buried and denied as it

Robert Descimon 93

would be in the aftermath, was apparently to promote a breach with Rome à l’anglaise, albeit retaining what were the essential Catholic articles of faith. A patriarch would have ruled over a French church under the real authority of the sovereign, holy ruler (‘le roy de saincteté’), whilst a national council would open the way to a reconciliation of the Protestants with the French church.25 In retrospect, the lack of realism in such a programme leads one to doubt whether it had ever been thus conceived, but the Gallicans, albeit Catholics, had always been principally royalists. And, in their midst, there was one tendency which was (above all) unreconstructed: theological hostility to the Catholic Counter Reform and the canons of the Council of Trent, and faithfulness to the old Sorbonne traditions, those of Gerson and Almain in the ﬁfteenth century. The Gallican magistrates were surely deluding themselves when they imagined that a doctrinal consensus could be concluded with the Protestants.26 Yet, such a convergence between Protestants and Catholics, improbable as it might seem, emerged in the course of the construction of the pyramid on the site of Pierre Chastel’s house, as luck would have it opposite the gate of the Palais de Justice. Some of the inscriptions on the monument were composed by Joseph Scaliger, a renowned Calvinist savant and poet, who wrote them upon the encouragement of de Thou.27 They merit the closest scrutiny. The English translation of the Chastel trial and the expulsion of the Jesuits speak volumes about the political world of the protagonists behind it.28 The Chastel expiatory pyramid was the royalist counterpart to the Croix de Gastines, constructed in 1570 on the ruins of the dismantled house of the Protestant goldsmith, Jean de Gastines (just as the burning of the efﬁgy of the League on the Feast of Saint John the Baptist in 1594 was a royalist response to the burning of the efﬁgy of Heresy in 1588). This symmetry in the desire to delineate urban space symbolically, shared by Catholics of both Leaguer and royalist persuasions, reveals its metaphorical and mystical power in the civil wars. Catholics had the same emblematic conception of civic space in a way that was not shared with Protestants.29 The court’s decision to expel the Jesuits was accompanied by an outpouring of Gallican propaganda.30 From a pragmatic point of view, the intellectuals of the ‘republic of letters’ – in reality a network of irenicist thinkers who were attempting to establish the theoretical basis for civil peace by eliminating the immanentist vision of Christianity, and challenging the papacy’s claims to temporal authority – loudly supported the execution of Chastel and the expulsion of the Jesuits. In fact, however, the two acts were only conjoined by the Parlement’s decision. The execution

94

Chastel’s Attempted Regicide

of Jean Chastel, whom the magistrates had taken for a poor sacrilegious nincompoop, had furnished the opportunity for a political initiative that Gallicans had long wanted, but which had been rejected by the sizeable Jesuit lobby, which included numerous royalist magistrates. The latter, however, were reduced to silence and impotence by Chastel’s action, and by the interpretation immediately placed upon it by the adversaries of the papacy. The comments on Chastel’s execution by the Paris memorialist Pierre de L’Estoile might readily have been cited on all this. Far more interesting, however, is the work that Etienne Pasquier published anonymously, the ‘Discourse on the Love of one’s father’ (Discours sur l’amour du pere). In it, he expounds the fact that Jean Chastel had not only tried to assassinate the king, ‘common father of all the French’, but had also endangered ‘his own natural father, who had conceived him, because he wanted to implicate him in his crime, solely in order to provide cover for the counsel that he had received from those ﬁne Fathers, teachers of such a pernicious determination’.31 The paternal model, presented as the natural one, was thus symbolically transposed (legitimately) onto the king and also (albeit illegitimately) onto the religious orders – the Jesuits in this instance.32 As is widely known, Jean Boucher, the former curé of SaintBenoît, replied on behalf of the Leaguers from Brussels in his Apology for Jean Chastel (‘Apologie pour Jehan Chastel’). By then, however, they had lost the battle for hearts and minds, even at Rome. What is perhaps most striking about the history of the Chastel attack is that the expulsion of the Jesuits was decreed by the Parlement alone, without any authorization from the king, who was perhaps more preoccupied with his teeth and lip. The edict of banishment of 17 January 1595 is a complete fraud. Moreover, the decision only applied to the jurisdiction of the Parlement of Paris and at least two others (Toulouse and Dijon – Bordeaux should not be ignored too) opposed its application in theirs. The Parisian magistrates had rarely gone so far for so little, and they even passed a new, somewhat dubious decree on 21 August 1597, which declared that of 1594 applicable throughout the realm, and reiterated this on 18 August 1598 and 27 January 1603.33 Henri IV could not go on countenancing an activity which, alongside the Edict of Nantes, could only further complicate the relationships with Rome, whose support he needed. On 1 January 1600, the affair of the Jesuits was taken up at the Privy Council. The Edict of Rouen in 1603, the essential components of which had been negotiated with the French Jesuits (Coton and Armand), recalled the Jesuits throughout the realm.34 The Parlement of Paris was constrained to register the Edict by a formal command (lettres de jussion) from the king on 2 January 1604.

Robert Descimon 95

This episode, which led to various explicit formulations of an ‘absolutist’ doctrine of royal authority on the part of the king, opened up questions which went to the heart of monarchical government. Etienne Pasquier’s Catéchisme des jésuites (‘Catechism of the Jesuits’) and Antoine Arnauld’s Franc et veritable discourse (‘Frank and True Discourse’) developed Gallican and parlementaire theories on the role of the Parlement in relation to monarchical power.35 For Arnauld, the decrees of the sovereign courts are, for kings ‘the form of their justice, the support for their sceptre, the pillars of their Crown and the reinforcement of their succession’. Such formulations were in direct praise of the Parlement and against the Jesuits, whom Arnauld accused of wanting to weaken the Parlement and disturb the relations between the monarch and his principal sovereign court.36 It is clear that the expulsion of the Jesuits stirred up issues that we would describe as ‘constitutional’. The Parlement of Paris had never been so close to realizing its ambitions as in the latter days of 1594 and the early part of 1595, probably as a result of the passivity of Villeroy and Bellièvre (the king’s ministers), who were perhaps anxious to rid themselves of any hint of being compromised as supporters of the League. In the end, however, it was the Parlement who lost out. It could hardly have turned out otherwise, given that Henri IV had a war with Spain on his hands, and had to negotiate his absolution with the papacy and his divorce with Marguerite de Valois, not to mention the Edict of Nantes. Numerous Jesuits, including the general of the order, Claudio Acquaviva, spoke out openly in favour of the king. The Jesuits defended their cause, not merely through the nimble pen of Louis Richeome, the Jesuit from Bordeaux (who could vaunt his ﬁdelity to Henri III), but through their ability to negotiate directly with the royal council, without involving either the Pope or the general of the order in what they were doing. This explains why the Jesuit Pierre Coton became such a hate ﬁgure for the Gallicans (demonstrated by L’Anticoton and other pamphlets). The Jesuits were adept at playing the political game to their advantage, the price being a monarchical stance that they had never totally repudiated, even at the height of the League.37 Henri IV needed the papacy and, by choosing a Jesuit as his confessor, he was providing a copper-fastened certiﬁcate of his religious orthodoxy. At the same time, he was well aware of all the advantages that accrued to him from exercising his regalian authority in the French church, besides which he was himself becoming an ever more convinced reformed Catholic. The Gallicans never openly admitted their defeat during Henri IV’s reign (they continued to advance the

96

Chastel’s Attempted Regicide

proposition for a national council and lend their support to a French diplomatic intervention in the affair of the Venetian Interdict) and their activities during the estates general of 1614–15 prove that they had by no means given up. Once more, however, they were defeated.

The aftermath of the Chastel attack and the Jesuit expulsion We might be tempted to conclude from these complex events that neither the Chastel attack nor the Jesuit expulsion turned into an ‘Affair’. In fact, it was only in the eighteenth century and in the context of the Jansenist crisis and the expulsion of the Jesuits of 1762–3 that the events of 1594 and their aftermath were revisited and reinterpreted to become so. With its Dévot disposition and its absolutist tendencies, seventeenthcentury society tended to relegate Chastel’s feeble attempted assassination, and with it the banishment of the Jesuits (to whom it entrusted the education of a good many of its children), to the lumber room of unhappy memories. Up to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Jean Chastel was conveniently ignored, along with the Jesuit Leaguers, or those reputedly so. In the context of the French confessionalization of the kind that occurred during the early phase of the Bourbon monarchy, the Santarelli affair and the Day of Dupes enabled Richelieu to recoup mutually contradictory elements from both the Dévots and the Gallicans.38 It was only at that moment that the political circumstances which had given rise to Chastel’s deed disappeared for good. The king and his ﬁrst minister were thereafter the undisputed masters and religious dissidence, held together by a rejection of confessionalization, became identiﬁed with the various Jansenist movements of the seventeenth century. The article on Chastel in the 1734 edition of Bayle’s ‘Dictionary’ (Dictionnaire historique et critique) undoubtedly marked a turning point.39 That same year, the so-called London edition of the Histoire of de Thou in its French translation was published, in which the sub-title ‘The Chastel Affair’ appeared for the ﬁrst time (it does not appear in any of the preceding Latin editions which I have consulted). Voltaire’s propaganda latched onto the assassination of President Brisson in the Henriade (1728) and then on the Chastel assassination attempt in the ‘Essay on the Manners and Customs of Nations’ (Essai sur les mæurs, 1755).40 In parallel, the Gallican and Jansenist offensive, orchestrated by parlementaire magistrates, recycled the same arguments in their campaign to have the Jesuits banished once again. The abbé Dazès completed his ‘On the Jesuit Leaguers’ (Des Jésuites ligueurs) in 1765;41 the abbé Jean Antoine

Robert Descimon 97

Gazaignes published his ‘Annales of the Society of the so-called Jesuits’ (Annales de la société des soi-disans jésuites) in 1764–71.42 The context for the Jesuit expulsion of 1763 was undoubtedly Damiens’ attempted regicide43, France’s defeat in the Seven Years War, and an extraordinary transformation in patterns of thought and sentiment.44 The ‘Chastel Affair’ thus took shape in the course of the philosophical and Jansenist debates of the eighteenth century. Chastel never, however, became a ‘cause’. Voltaire regarded him as a poor fool, misled by nothing more than his religion (a view that has the ring of truth). No one ever questioned Chastel’s fate (Damiens’ punishment, by contrast, created a storm of protest). His crime was always seen as altogether too heinous. As for the Jesuits, they carefully conducted (later on in the nineteenth century) their own interrogation of what had happened and never turned their expulsion into an ‘Affair’. Although the philosophes and Jansenists were diametrically opposed to one another in their worldview, they were both convinced of the culpability of the Jesuits, and rejoiced in their expulsion. It was the liberal ideologue and Protestant Sismondi who eventually recognized that their case had been prejudged – it then being recognized that an abuse in the exercise of power was as dangerous as the perverse use of religion to inﬂuence people’s minds. The philosophes did not believe that the principles of the Rights of Man could be applied to the Jesuits without peril. And with cause. Elisabeth Claverie has demonstrated how an ‘Affair’ was concocted from the trial of the chevalier de La Barre. Jean-François de La Barre was a French nobleman from Abbeville who was tortured and beheaded in Paris on 1 July 1765 for sacrilege, a victim of the Jansenists and abandoned by the Jesuits. His body was burnt on a funeral pyre along with his copy of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. Within the ‘black box’ of the La Barre affair, there were, in reality, various smaller ‘black boxes’. An archaic Catholicism emerged from the distant shadows of the League at Abbeville, immersed in the principles of divine immanence and riven by age-old provincial rivalries. No doubt the chevalier and his youthful friends committed sacrilege to ridicule this kind of Catholicism, and all Catholicism which had not been cleansed of its ‘superstitions’.45 For the Enlightenment was an even more important turning point. Voltaire’s formula that ‘that which does not offend society is not a matter for judicial scrutiny’ marked the emergence of a kind of laicization which would have been utterly unthinkable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even to ‘politiques’ or Calvinist Protestants.46 To summarize, rather than conclude, the tragic history of Jean Chastel was not merely an important (albeit ephemeral) episode in the

98

Chastel’s Attempted Regicide

period immediately after the end of the League. It was reinvested with meaning in the Enlightenment and Jansenist conﬂicts with the Jesuits in the mid-eighteenth century.47 It was thus reutilized in different political circumstances whilst within an underlying historical continuity. In 1595, Chastel’s trial united the Parlement Gallicans who opposed the last vestiges of the League. The former radical Leaguers were in the process of undergoing a transformation which would, in due course, lead them to form (along with other militant Catholics who had remained loyal to Henri III and Henri IV) what we know as the Dévot party. These two groupings permeated each other but the potential for conﬂict between them remained great. That duality dominated French politics until Richelieu reunited the two Catholic factions around a common devotion to the absolute monarchy, ‘confessionalized’ by distinctive ritual practices.48 In the eighteenth century, with the evolution from ‘religious system’ to ‘Enlightenment ethic’, regicide provided a stock of arguments with which to deconstruct both absolutism and the Jesuits. That was no easy task and it would no doubt only culminate in the crisis which would undermine the French political system. The Chastel ‘Affair’ thus took up where the Chastel ‘regicide’ had left off. And, in a cruel irony, it was the Jansenists who would demand the execution of the chevalier de La Barre before the Parlement of Paris.

Notes Translated by Mark Greengrass. 1. R. Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry IV. The Tyrannicide Problem and the Consolidation of the French Absolute Monarchy in the Early Seventeenth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1973; original edition Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 39–60 remains an indispensable analysis; O. Ranum, ‘The French Ritual of Tyrannicide in the late Sixteenth Century’, Sixteenth Century Journal 11 (1980), 63–82; P. Chevallier, Les Régicides: Clément, Ravaillac, Damiens (Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp. 132–43; D. Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion vers 1525-vers-1610, 2 vols (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1990), ii, pp. 586–7, who writes of a ‘fantasmagorie collective’. 2. Denis Richet reﬂects on the participation of young people in the League processions in ‘Politique et religion: les processions à Paris en 1589’, La France d’Ancien Régime. Etudies réunies en l’honneur de Pierre Goubert, 2 vols (Toulouse: Privat, 1984), ii, pp. 623–32, reprinted in De la Réforme à la Révolution. Etudes sur la France moderne (Paris: Aubier, 1991), pp. 69–82. 3. R. Descimon, Qui étaient les seize? Mythes et réalités de la Ligue parisienne (1585–1594) vol. 34, Paris et Ile-de-France: Mémoires (Paris: Fédération des sociétés historiques et archéologiques de Paris et de l’Ile de France, 1983), pp. 7–300; E. Barnavi, and R. Descimon, La sainte ligue, le juge et la potence (Paris: Hachette, 1985).

Robert Descimon 99 4. R. Descimon, ‘The “Bourgeoisie Seconde”: Social Differentiation in the Parisian Municipal Oligarchy in the Sixteenth Century, 1500–1610’, French History 17 (2003), 388–424. 5. A Pierre Lepeuple, merchant jeweller, lived on the Pont aux Changeurs in the parish of St-Barthélémy. He appeared as a tutor to Jean de Gastines, son of François de Gastines (goldsmith), and Marie Lepeuple – Archives Nationales de France (AN), Minutier Central (MC) Etude CV 60 (18 January 1591). These Gastines were certainly related to the unfortunate Huguenot who was executed as a heretic and whose house was dismantled and replaced by the famous Cross. AN, MC Etude CV 77 (19 October 1598) contains the postmortem inventory of Pierre Lepeuple, ‘marchand maître orfèvre’, in which his 23 year-old son is described as ‘écolier’ – most likely Chastel’s companion. 6. Henri Fouqueray, Histoire de la compagnie de Jésus en France des origines à la suppression (1528–1762), 5 vols (Paris: Picard, 1913), ii, p. 723 (interrogation of 29 December 1594). 7. The Messier lived on the rue de la Barillerie in the parish of St-Jacques de la Boucherie. Jacques Messier was a chasublier, as had been his father Jean, who had been an échevin. Jean had two sons who became priests; the elder, Jacques, a doctor of theology, died as the chanter, archdeacon and canon of Beauvais, the grand vicaire of the bishop (and probably a friend of Chastel’s) and the younger, Louis, also a doctor of theology, and curé of Saint-Landry on the Ile de la Cité in Paris, see AN, MC Etude LXVI 111 (30 August 1648) – succession of Jacques Messier, archdeacon; AN, MC Etude LXVI 152 (9 December 1632) – post-mortem inventory of Catherine Santeuil, widow of Jacques Messier, chasublier. 8. Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) 8237, f. 363 [documents 314 and 316], the funerary inscription of honourable homme Pierre Chastel, merchant draper, who died in his house at Bailly (near Versailles) aged 74. Denise Heuzard died in January 1612 in her house on the rue Saint-Martin in the parish of St-Jacques de la Boucherie, see Jacques Meurgey, Histoire de la paroisse Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie (Paris: Champion, 1926), p. 236. 9. AN, MC Etude XVI 11 (27 June 1593) – marriage contract; (12 July 1593) – act of association. Among the witnesses were Jean Targer, her elderly uncle, a wine merchant, Nicolas and Guillaume Targer, mercers, both ﬁrst cousins (their brother Valentin, a future échevin, traded at Antwerp during the League) and Eustache Boulanger, a substantial silk merchant, the spouse of the latter’s sister. The presence of the Chastel family name among them is not noticeable. The preciput is an agreement of a sum to be abstracted by one of the parties from the community of the marriage at the time of its dissolution, normally through the death of one of the parties to it, before the mutual division of the rest of the belongings. 10. AN, MC Etude VII 85 (7 July 1608) – his stock of cloth was impressive (worth over 39,000 livres). The numerous outstanding letters of credit and bills of exchange (on Grenoble, Beauvais, Meaux, or owed by substantial seigneurs and Parisian merchants) amounted to 25,000 livres. The outstanding debts were to merchants in Rouen and Beauvais, who provided the cloth, and to cloth-dyers. They amounted to almost 17,000 livres, debts which his widow had no difﬁculty in clearing. His landed wealth seems to have been evaluated as worth around 40,000 livres. On the family descendants see Roland Garnier,

100

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Chastel’s Attempted Regicide ‘1661 – un bourgeois de Paris deviant seigneur à Noisy’, Le passé présent 6 (1995), 30–48. AN, MC Etude VII 85 (The act of 11 August 1605 is analysed as title No. 140 in the inventory). On the death of Jean Leconte in September 1607, Pierre Chastel and his wife sold on half of what they owned at Fouju (Seine-et-Marne) to their daughter. However the relatives of the vendor in 1605 asserted their right of ‘retrait lignager’ (the right whereby an inheritor can reacquire an inheritance when it changes hands). In the resulting law suit, Catherine Chastel and her second husband, Pierre Legrand the Younger (a respectable merchant draper) settled out of court by paying 1650 livres to the Legastinois, the inheritors concerned. See AN MC Etude CXV 25 (4 August 1611). The arpent of the region around Fouju was 100 square perches, a perche being locally around 20 feet. The analysis of the event clearly relies upon sources with underlying antithetical apologetic motives. On the one hand, there are Gallican sources (essentially those from président of the Parlement, Jacques-Auguste de Thou), and on the other hand there are those originating with the Jesuits, who sought to demonstrate his innocence. A critical appraisal must therefore rest on an evaluation of all the accounts, and in particular upon the most detailed of them, such as the ‘Relation du M. de Mena’ published by J.-M. Prat (S.J.), Recherches historiques et critiques sur la compagnie de Jésus en France du temps du P. Coton, 5 vols (Lyon: Briday, 1876–8), v, pp. 51–68 (in reality, an autograph letter, dated 19 July 1603, written at the time of the Jesuit’s reintroduction into France). For the context to this argument, see M. Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001). Fouqueray, Histoire de la compagnie de Jésus, ii, p. 727 (Account of Chastel’s execution): ‘a faict l’amende honorable portée par l’arrest ayant neantmoins faict reffus de prononcer ces mots’, “qu’il estoit permis de tuer les roys”, disant qu’il n’avoit dict les roys, mais les tyrans.’ This was the kernel of Jean Boucher’s argument in [François de Verone Constantin], Apologie pour Jehan Chastel, parisien, executé à mort, et pour les peres & escholliers de la Societé de Iesus, bannis du royaume de France contre l’arrest de Parlement donné contre eux à Paris le 29 décembre 1594 (n.pl.: n.p., 1595), second part: ‘Que l’acte de Chastel est juste.’, ‘personnes des rois inviolables.’, ‘Chastel n’a voulu tuer un Roy.’, ‘Ne peult estre dit Roy pour sa conversion pretendue.’ – hence the conclusion that Henri IV was, at one and the same time, a heretic and a tyrant. Joseph du Tremblay [sic], Discours en forme d’exclamation sur la conduite de la divine providence (Grenoble: Jérôme Million, 1998 [originally published in 1598]). Benoist Pierre, Le père Joseph. L’éminence grise de Richelieu (Paris: Perrin, 2007), pp. 45–128 paints a detailed picture of his internal struggle and family conﬂicts, all of which underlay his eventual self-reconciliation, represented by his commitment to a monastic life. Alfred Soman conﬁrms the involvement of bestiality in suicide cases in ‘Pathologie historique: le témoignage des process de bestialité aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles’, Actes du 107e congrès national des Sociétés savantes (Brest 1982). Section de philologie et d’histoire jusqu’en 1610 (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, 1984), pp. 149–61, reprinted in Sorcellerie et justice criminelle (16–18 siécles) (London: Variorum Reprints, 1992), ch. 8.

Robert Descimon 101 17. For example, the pamphlet concerning the sodomy of the Jesuit Henri Mangot, condemned to death by the magistrates at Antwerp, and denounced as a forgery by Pères Coton and Richeome, see Fouqueray, Histoire de la compagnie de Jésus, ii, pp. 591–2. 18. Although Henri IV might appear as a ‘king of reason’, the contextual difﬁculties of such a rationalizing interpretation of the worldview of the ‘politiques’ (which comes as natural to us) are underlined in Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu, ii, pp. 566–85; equally by Mario Turchetti in ‘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’Hostpial à l’édit de Nantes. Politique et religion face aux Eglises (Clermont-Ferrand; Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2002), pp. 357–90. 19. On the magical role played by numbers and ﬁgures in pre-Tridentine Catholicism, see the essential work of Ann W. Ramsey, Liturgy, Politics and Salvation. The Catholic League in Paris and the Nature of Catholic Reforms, 1540–1630 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1999), pp. 197–205. 20. Pierre Chevallier, ‘Les poursuites exercées par les Parlements de Tours et de Châlons contre les religieux apologistes de Jacques Clément’, in Robert Sauzet (ed.), Henri III et son temps (Paris: Vrin, 1992), pp. 253–70. 21. Most recently, Eric Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy. Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590–1615) (London: Ashgate, 2005). See also 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), 231–55. A. Drouin, ‘L’expulsion des Jésuites sous Henri IV et leur rappel’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 3 (1901), pp. 5–28 and 593–609. 22. Myriam Yardeni, an author not noted for her Jesuit sympathies, remarks that ‘The Jesuits fulﬁlled the same functions and played the same role in the subconsciousness of their enemies as the Jews played in the nineteenth century’, in G. and G. Demerson (eds), Les Jésuites parmi les hommes aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, 2 vols (Clermont-Ferrand: Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de l’Université de Clermont-Ferrand, 1987), ii, pp. 226–7. It was a question of denouncing a foreign (that is, papal) conspiracy – see Eric Nelson, ‘The Jesuit Legend: Superstition and Myth-Making’, in Helen L. Parish and William G. Naphy (eds), Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 94–115. 23. Mousnier, Assassination, p. 212. 24. Jotham Parsons, The Chuch in the Republic. Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), pp. 185–226; Alain Tallon, Conscience nationale et sentiment religieux en France au XVIe siècle. Essai sur la vision gallicane du monde (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002); Corrado Vivanti, Lotta politica e pace religiosa in Francia fra Cinque e Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1963). These three works are not identical in their conclusions but, when read alongside one another they merge to provide a coherent picture in which the dominant motif is the maintenance and restoration of equilibrium. 25. F. Baumgartner, ‘Renaud de Beaune, Politique Prelate’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 9 (1978), 99–114; Marco Penzi, ‘Un schisme gallican en 1591? Historiographie, politique et utilisation de l’imprimé’, in Radu Paún (éd.),

102

26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36.

Chastel’s Attempted Regicide Culture de l’imprimé et discours du pouvoir. France, Russie, Roumanie, XVIe–XIXe (Bucharest, Editions de l’Institut Culturel Roumain, 2008). On the question of a national council to the period of the Interdict of Venice see Robert Descimon, ‘Guillaume Du Vair (7 mars 1556–3 août 1621): les enseignements d’une biographie sociale. La construction symbolique d’un grand homme et l’échec d’un lignage’, in Bruno Petey-Girard et Alexandre Tarrête (eds), Guillaume Du Vair. Parlementaire et écrivain (1556–1621) (Geneva: Droz, 2005), pp. 17–77. For this interpretation, which seems to go against the trend of current historiography, see Robert Descimon and José Javier Ruiz Ibáñez, Les ligueurs de l’exil. Le refuge catholique français après 1594 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005), pp. 7–49. ‘That you shall realize there is nothing more sacred than kings’ (‘Regibus ut scires sanctius esse nihil’) was the last line of one of the poems inscribed on the Chastel pyramid. ‘Nothing’, says the Latin, not even the consecrated host. Rome, dismayed by the banishment of the Jesuits, remained silent because it did not want to further augment the menace of a Gallican schism. The texts are republished in Roland Mousnier, Assassination, pp. 300–15. BNF, Dupuy 394, poems by Scaliger under the pseudonym of Yvo Villomarus and Nicolaus Vincentius. Claude Sutto, ‘Quelques consequences politiques de l’attentat de Jean Chastel’ Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 1/2 (1977), 136–54. Sutto notes on page 142 that ‘cette lutte, les robins l’auraient peut-être menée avec moins d’opiniâtreté s’ils n’avaient pas bénéﬁcié de l’appui discret mais efﬁcace des protestants.’ The Decree of the Court of Parliament against John Chastel (London: T. Millington, 1595) and Alexandre Pont-Aymeri, A State Discourse upon the Late Hart of the French King (London: E. Agges, 1595). See John Bossy, ‘Henry IV, the Appellants and the Jesuits’, Recusant History 8 (1965), p. 95. N. Z. Davis, ‘The Sacred and the Body Social in Sixteenth-Century Lyon’, Past and Present 90 (1981), 40–70. Claude Sutto, ‘Quelques consequences’, 140–1 (lampoons, prints and songs). Trevor Peach, ‘Autour de l’affaire Chastel’ (27 décembre 1594): le Discours de l’amour du père (d’Etienne Pasquier?)’, La Renaissance, l’Humanisme et la Réforme 40 (1995), 37–52. Despite the opinion of Dorothy Thickett, Bibliographie des Œuvres d’Estienne Pasquier (Geneva: Droz, 1956), p. 23 and 121, the attribution of the Discours to Pasquier appears to rest on fragile foundations. Aurélie du Crest, Modèle familial et pouvoir monarchique (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Aix: Presses universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 2002). Charles Jourdain, Histoire de l’Université de Paris aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1888), i, pièce justiﬁcative XVII. Claude Sutto, ‘Le père Richeome et le nouvel esprit politique des jésuites français (XVIe–XVIIe siècles)’, in G. and G. Demerson (eds), Les Jésuites parmi les hommes aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, 2 vols (Clermont-Ferrand: Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de l’Université de Clermont-Ferrand, 1987), ii, pp. 175–84. C. Sutto (ed.), Etienne Pasquier. Le catéchisme des jésuites ou examen de leur doctrine (Quebec: Université de Sherbrooke, 1982) provides a convenient modern edition of one of these texts with an ample introduction. Antoine Arnauld, Franc et veritable discours au Roy [...] (Paris: n.p., 1602), p. 66.

Robert Descimon 103 37. The point is amply demonstrated in A. Lynn Martin, Henry III and the Jesuit Politicians (Geneva: Droz, 1973); A. Lynn Martin, The Jesuit Mind. The Mentality of an Elite in Early-Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). See also Nelson, Jesuits and the Monarchy. 38. Sylvio Hermann de Franceschi, ‘La genèse française du catholicisme d’Etat 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 de l’histoire de France 2001 (Paris: Société de l’histoire de France, 2003), pp. 19–63; Christian Jouhaud, Les pouvoirs de la littérature. Histoire d’un paradoxe (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). 39. Dictionnaire historique et critique par Mr Pierre Bayle, 5 vols (Amsterdam: La Compagnie des Libraires, 1734), ii, pp. 429–434. Unless I am mistaken, this entry on ‘Jean Chastel’ does not appear in other editions. The article includes a substantial critical apparatus citing various sources, but de Thou’s History is the ultimate reference point. The objective of the text seems to be an attack upon Louis Richeome, who ‘omitted nothing which demonstrated the Jesuits’ innocence, but suppressed everything which incriminated them’ (which was true, albeit hardly surprising). 40. On the historiography of Brisson’s murder, see Elie Barnavi and Robert Descimon, La sainte Ligue, le juge et la potence. L’assassinat du president Brisson (15 novembre 1591) (Paris: Hachette, 1985), pp. 247–65. 41. Abbé Dazès, Des Jésuites ligueurs. Les jésuites accusés de complicité dans l’attentat de Barrière, de l’attentat de Jean Châtel et du bannissement des Jésuites (1765) (Avignon: Séguin l’aîné, 1828). The abbé Dazès would be one of the principal propagandists hostile to the Jesuits in 1762. 42. J.A. Gazainges (ed.), Annales de la société des soi-disans jésuites, 5 vols (Paris: n.p., 1764–71). This is an impressive collection, published in Paris, of the major polemical source-texts concerned. 43. Dale Van Kley, The Damiens Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Régime 1750–1770 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), especially p. 94 and pp. 266–8. 44. The whole intellectual tradition is summarised by Roger Chartier, Les origines culturelles de la révolution française (Paris: Seuil, 1990) – translated as The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1991), which is complemented by ways of thinking about the social economy, summarised in Jean-Claude Perrot, Une histoire intellectuelle de l’économie politique (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: éditions l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1992). 45. Elisabeth Claverie, ‘Sainte Indignation contre indignation éclairée. L’affaire du chevalier de la Barre’, Ethnologie française 22 (1992/3), 271–90; Elizabeth Claverie, ‘Naissance d’une forme politique: l’affaire du chevalier de La Barre’, in Philippe Roussin (ed.), Critique et affaires de blasphème à l’époque des Lumières, (Paris: Champion, 1998), pp. 185–265. Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs. The Causes célèbres of Pre-revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), for the notion of ‘Affairs’ and ‘Causes’. 46. Alphonse Dupront, Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). One might have equally referred to the works of Michel Foucault and Michel de Certeau.

104

Chastel’s Attempted Regicide

47. Dale Van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757–1765 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), in particular pp. 208–37 (the analysis of d’Alembert’s work Sur la destruction des Jésuites en France). 48. Michel de Certeau, ‘Politique et mystique. René d’Argenson (1596–1651)’, Revue d’acétique et de mystique 39 (1963), 45–82; Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 152–212.

Part III Clemency and Conﬂict: The Bourbon Style of Government

This page intentionally left blank

5 Royal Authority and the Pursuit of a Lasting Religious Settlement: Henri IV and the Emergence of the Bourbon Monarchy Eric Nelson

Before speaking of the matter for which I have called you here, I want to tell you a story of which I have just reminded the marshal de la Chastre. Shortly after Saint Bartholomew’s Day, four of us playing at dice around a table saw drops of blood appear on it; and seeing that after wiping them away twice, they appeared again for a third time, I said that I would no longer play; and that it was a bad omen against those who had spilt blood. M. de Guise was amongst them.1 Through this story, pregnant with multiple meanings and intended to touch the Baroque sensibilities of his audience, Henri IV opened with contrived spontaneity one of the most remarkable pieces of political theatre of his reign. The carefully choreographed encounter between Henri and a delegation of judges from the Parlement of Paris, in his private chambers at the Louvre on 7 January 1599, was Henri’s response to opposition among his magistrates to his effort to secure religious coexistence in his kingdom through the registration of the Edict of Nantes.2 The encounter had an immediate impact on contemporaries. Numerous manuscript copies and at least one printed edition of the encounter circulated in Paris and at Court in the weeks that followed the meeting. Moreover, many contemporary observers commented on it, including the Parisian memoirist Pierre de L’Estoile who copied the printed edition into his journal along with his judgment that Henri addressed his Parlement ‘as a king and in exquisite, well chosen terms’.3 Like L’Estoile and his contemporaries, later historians have also noted the encounter as an eloquent and powerful statement by Henri at this decisive moment of his reign. However, neither contemporaries nor later historians have 107

108

Royal Authority and the Pursuit of Religious Settlement

offered sustained analysis of the encounter. There are good reasons for this. The encounter deﬁes easy summary. Henri’s speech lacks a linear narrative, instead regularly shifting between different strains of his message for rhetorical effect. Moreover, while on the surface the harangue appeals to political reality, it also advances important assertions on the nature of sovereignty and authority in France. Finally, the encounter can only be fully understood when the ideas expressed are placed in the context of its extraordinary and carefully contrived setting. Nonetheless, sustained analysis of the encounter is a worthwhile endeavour. Through his regular juxtaposition of blunt statements of political reality with sophisticated references to theoretical conceptions of sovereignty, authority and the duty of subjects, Henri provides a revealing example of his political style. Moreover, it was during this moment of crisis at the culmination of Henri’s nearly decade long paciﬁcation campaign that he more than ever before fully and explicitly deﬁned his conception of his authority as derived both from traditional inherited legitimacy and his right as conqueror and paciﬁer of his realm. In doing so he strongly asserted the inscrutability of royal decision making. Henri’s speech also provides insight into how he paciﬁed his kingdom by rebuilding relationships between the monarchy and key individuals and institutions in his realm.4 Up to this point, Henri had focused his attention on securing the submission of his Leaguer opponents, but in January 1599 he sought to reestablish and redeﬁne his relationship to his Parlement.5 In this encounter, he laid out his conception of his Parlement’s relationship to him and its legitimate role in the public life of the kingdom through a set of assertions that ran counter to ideas current amongst some of his most inﬂuential parlementaires.6 His speech rejected the most assertive claims of his Parlement over the past decade to authority in the area of public policy as deﬁned by its deﬁnition and defense of public law. Instead he promoted an alternative set of ideas that emphasized the inscrutability of royal judgment in matters of public policy and the fundamental debt of obedience owed by magistrates to their king. Henri’s political style evolved over the ﬁrst decade of his reign, but in this encounter with his Parlement key elements come together. This essay will use the encounter on 7 January 1599 as a focus through which to explore Henri’s conception of royal authority, the role of his Parlement in the government of his realm and his relationship with his judges. In doing so, it seeks to make a contribution to our understanding of the emergence of Henrician political culture during Henri’s paciﬁcation of his kingdom and, in broader terms, the foundations of Bourbon political culture.

Eric Nelson 109

Setting the scene What I have done is for the sake of peace. I have obtained it abroad and now desire it within my kingdom. The opening days of 1599 were tense ones for Henri IV. His lengthy campaign to pacify his kingdom had paid important dividends in the spring and early summer of 1598. In March 1598, Henri accepted the submission of the last unreconciled Leaguer noble, Philippe Emmanuel de Lorraine, duc de Mercœur, which brought Brittany back under royal control and effectively marked the end of the Catholic League as a political movement.7 In May, Henri concluded hostilities with Spain through the Peace of Vervins, which ended open Spanish support for his enemies in France.8 But to fully establish peace and political control over his kingdom Henri still had to secure an understanding with the Huguenot minority in France, which the Catholic majority could accept. In pursuit of this goal, Henri promulgated the Edict of Nantes in April 1598.9 This Edict and its related addenda granted limited rights of conscience, worship, access to the law and security to the Huguenot minority in order to re-establish peace in the kingdom. Through this agreement, which he always viewed as temporary, Henri sought to re-establish peace in order to create conditions through which the Catholic and Huguenot churches in France could reach an understanding and, ultimately, religious concord.10 But in order for his will as expressed in the Edict to have the full force of law, it required registration by his Parlements, especially his Paris Parlement.11 Yet in the months following the promulgation, Henri chose not to secure registration of the Edict. He had good reasons to delay. He was aware of the intense opposition to the Edict in Paris and within the Paris Parlement.12 Moreover, to bolster the legitimacy of the Edict, Henri wanted to secure its registration without recourse to a lit de justice, a legal procedure through which he could compel his Parlement to register the Edict under duress. His reluctance to use a lit de justice required Henri to use persuasion rather than force to secure his will. To overcome these obstacles, Henri, as he had with other politically contentious initiatives, bided his time until he could focus his full attention on this issue. He also prepared the ground for registration in the intervening months by, for instance, sending président Antoine Séguier, a key opponent of the Edict in the Parlement, to Venice as his ambassador and by making concessions to Catholic interests on some aspects of the Edict, both to garner support and to allow him to speak more forcefully when he pressed for registration.13

110

Royal Authority and the Pursuit of Religious Settlement

After months of informal preparation, Henri took a key step towards securing registration of the Edict on 15 December when he met with his gens du roi to give them a full copy of the Edict to present for registration to the Parlement.14 However, because of its contentious nature and the Parlement’s Christmas recess the issue was only formally taken up by the Parlement weeks later on 8 January 1599, when the Parlement appointed a committee of judges to consider the Edict’s stipulations.15 During the recess, which ended on 5 January 1599, it became apparent that the Edict would meet with strong opposition from many judges in the Parlement who opposed the Edict on the grounds that it broke traditional law, endangered the kingdom by creating a state within a state and placed Protestants in the Parlement as judges.16 At the same time, opposition to the Edict was building in Paris stoked by seditious Advent preaching by many clergy in the capital.17 Preachers sought to sway public opinion by promoting the (untrue) spectre of Protestant temples being erected in Paris and a sinister rumour that the Protestants planned to use their strengthened political situation to massacre Catholics in the capital as revenge for the Saint Bartholomew Day massacre of Huguenots in 1572.18 Capuchin Friars were in the forefront of this preaching campaign with one Father Jean de Brulart, the brother of the close adviser to the king Nicolas de Brulart, stating from the pulpit of the Paris parish church of Saint André on 6 January 1599 that any judge who consented to the registration of the Edict would be damned.19 The preaching along with reported pressure on Catholics during confession had an impact upon the population of the capital with rumours of efforts to reform the Catholic League in order to oppose the registration of the Edict reaching the king.20 In the ﬁnal week of December, Henri found the situation alarming enough to return to Paris.21 It was under these circumstances that he chose to summon a delegation of his most important judges before him in his private chambers at the Louvre for a carefully crafted encounter where words, gestures and the setting itself worked together to communicate Henri’s will. Before examining the ideas that Henri wished to convey, it is worth offering a few observations about the style, tone and setting that underpinned the encounter. Henri offered a short harangue in ostensibly plain and direct language in a manner typical of other speeches during his ﬁrst decade of rule.22 But while Henri sought to set the tone through familiar unadorned language, the oration also contained a number of innovations. For instance, underneath his ‘straight talk’ was a more dense set of political ideas and learned allusions than Henri had typically used in the past.

Eric Nelson 111

Through these additions Henri undoubtedly sought to engage with the sensibilities of his sophisticated audience: a purpose advertised through the Baroque aesthetic at the heart of the marvelous story of a dice game at the opening of his harangue. Moreover, this speech offered one of the ﬁrst manifestations of an increasingly common rhetorical strategy that Henri used later in his reign, which involved alternating freely between threats and promises, blunt accusations and offers of clemency, command and entreaty in an effort to move his audience to obedience through both fear and hope. While Henri had eschewed such strong words in the past, his strengthened political situation from the early summer of 1598 allowed him to ‘speak as master’, as he called it in a similar encounter in May 1598, this time in private with Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, duc de Bouillon.23 In conjunction with his words, Henri leveraged the dramatic possibilities of an audience with the King for maximum effect as he drew on the theatrical opportunities inherent in a face-to-face encounter and a carefully contrived setting that cast him as a father speaking to his children to reinforce the ideas expressed in words. Henri did not call his Parlement before him to speak about his decision to promulgate the Edict of Nantes, but rather to assert his authority to make public policy and to deﬁne the public role and the authority of his Parlement. In this context the contrived family setting manufactured by Henri suited his requirements well. Henri wanted the Parlement to register the Edict of Nantes without royal compulsion, in order to give his religious peace the legitimacy it needed to succeed. Thus, Henri’s appearance, however artiﬁcial, as a paternal ﬁgure allowed him to directly pressure his Parlement in forceful terms without demanding the obedience due to him as King – even if inevitable and undoubtedly intentional slippage occurred between the royal and father personae.24 Henri’s purpose was not lost on observers. Contemporaries noted with care the performative aspects of the encounter with both manuscript copies and the printed version of the speech recording in detail the setting and Henri’s physical gestures.

Inheritance and Acquisition If obedience was due to my predecessors, as much if not more devotion is due to me, because I have restored the State, God having chosen to set me over this kingdom that is mine both through inheritance and acquisition. The members of my Parlement would not be in their seats if it was not for me. I do not want to boast, but I must say that I have no other example to follow than my own.

112

Royal Authority and the Pursuit of Religious Settlement

In this extraordinary statement Henri claimed the legitimate authority to rule France through both inheritance and right of acquisition. He continued to refer to both sources of legitimacy as the speech unfolded alternating assertions of traditional royal attributes, such as the French monarch’s long-established dignity as ﬁrst son of the Christian church, with his rights as established through the successful seizure of opportunity. Henri presented his authority in a matter- of- fact language that spoke as much to the reality of the political situation as to abstract theories of royal authority. Nevertheless, some in his audience may have recognized an implicit but distinctly Machiavellian tone to his claims. Henri – through his claims to inheritance of the throne and to a special relationship with the divine – embodied in this passage Nicolo Machiavelli’s ideal natural sovereign (principe naturale): a type of sovereign that Machiavelli deﬁnes as the most secure because he is able to draw on custom and tradition to maintain his authority.25 At the same time Henri – through his claims to the successful use of force, to the conquest of his realm and to the seizure of opportunity – embodied in this passage Machiavelli’s ideal ‘new prince’ who seized power through exceptional personal qualities that allowed him to impose his will on fortuna (fortune).26 Over the previous decade opponents had challenged his claim to be a principe naturale by questioning both Henri’s right to inherit the throne and the sincerity of his conversion to the Catholic faith. Nevertheless, Henri, especially after his conversion and subsequent anointment as king, had increasingly drawn on the rich monarchical tradition of France to present himself as Machiavelli’s principe naturale. Henri chose to return to this aspect of his authority with real force as his speech progressed. Thus, when Henri turned to the crucial question of his right to make decisions for the good of the Catholic church in France, he stated Do not speak to me about the Catholic faith: I love it more than you do. I am more Catholic than you are. I am the eldest son of the Church, which none of you are or ever can be. You fool yourselves, if you think that you enjoy the Pope’s favour. I enjoy it more than you do. If I wanted, I could have you declared heretics, for not obeying me. In this passage, Henri asserted his dignity as ‘ﬁrst son of the Catholic church’, a status embodied in his dignity as King of France. In doing so, he drew upon a well-established Gallican narrative promoted by his Parlement that emphasized the close relationship between the Pope and the King of France in a manner that placed the king in a strong position in the relationship. Embedded in this same passage was a further claim

Eric Nelson 113

that Henri possessed access to the arcane imperii of monarchy. Here Henri again drew on a well-established late-medieval set of ideas about the French monarchy that asserted that the French king possessed inscrutable aspects of the royal mystique allowing him to make judgments for the good of his subjects that transcended the laws of the kingdom.27 Henri’s claim to legitimacy as a ‘new prince’ through conquest and seizure of opportunity had taken shape as the military and political situation improved in the early 1590s. From the opening months of his reign, Henri and his image-makers actively promoted his persona as the ﬁrst gentleman of France as they drew on established noble ideology of authority by right of arms to bolster his claims to a right to rule through the successful use of force.28 Royalist pamphleteers also bolstered Henri’s claim to authority through a neo-stoic reading of his military victories that emphasized their role in vanquishing the present chaos in the realm and establishing a new golden age as part of the fulﬁllment of a predetermined and, therefore, inevitable divine plan.29 The combination in French political discourse of legitimacy through both inheritance and acquisition provided a basis for Henri to construct a more inscrutable right and duty to make decisions for the good of his state that ultimately became an important feature of Bourbon political culture. The elements of Henri’s authority asserted in 1599 had evolved as circumstances allowed over the previous decade. But in this speech Henri juxtaposed themes of inheritance and acquisition with a clarity and force rarely seen during the fraught years of paciﬁcation. Henri reinforced these dual claims to authority in this encounter by meeting with his judges in his private chambers dressed in the simple attire of a father of a family rather than King. Henri explicitly drew the delegation’s attention to the scene in the opening words of his speech: You see me in my study where I have come to speak to you, not in regal garb nor with sword and cloak, like my predecessors, nor like a Prince who comes to speak to foreign ambassadors, but dressed like a father of a family in a doublet, to speak informally to his children. In terms of his claim to authority through inheritance, by making such an appearance Henri theatrically embodied a distinctive form of indivisible sovereignty as deﬁned through the model of the family that Jean Bodin had established in French political thought in the 1570s in his Six Livres de la Republic.30 It was this conception of sovereignty, which conﬂated Henri’s personal judgment with his judgment as King of France, that underpinned

114

Royal Authority and the Pursuit of Religious Settlement

his claim to the inscrutable ability to make difﬁcult decisions for his realm which his subjects were obliged to obey.31 However, by eschewing royal regalia and the formality of encounters with his Valois predecessors, Henri also emphasized that he was a man of action whose success in pacifying his kingdom warranted deference to his judgment in the future. This aspect of his authority contrasted starkly with the authority of his Parlement which was based on institutional, customary and legal foundations. Henri’s appearance as a father highlighted this contrast in a manner that could not have been more apparent. On the one hand, members of his Parlement stood before their king in their traditional red robes and other symbols of ofﬁce, while on the other, Henri not only appeared without the trappings of a king or even a noble, but as a father of a family, which emphasized his own physical body and thus his earthly and human condition. Henri’s emphasis on his physical body symbolized the authority within him as deﬁned by his body’s personal experience of bloodshed (referred to at the opening of the speech in the game of dice anecdote) and its inevitable appearance before God on the day of judgment (implied through his claims to have been chosen by God). This emphasis on the physical body rather than the external trappings of power spoke to Henri’s claim that his authority derived from practical experience acquired during his paciﬁcation of his kingdom and moral authority acquired both through inheritance and the seizure of opportunity. The intended message was that Henri’s authority through both inheritance and acquisition, as represented in his body, trumped the incorporeal, institutional and ceremonial authority of the Parlement, embodied in their red robes. Henri’s appearance without the symbols of a monarch was not strictly new. It had developed and evolved over the previous decade as Henri had frequently presented himself as a man of action in simple attire during the paciﬁcation of his kingdom. At ﬁrst this image reﬂected the reality of Henri’s role as a military leader early in his reign. Nevertheless, Henri continued to promote this image even as the military situation improved, consciously choosing to leverage this important part of the royal persona in more formal encounters with corporations in his kingdom. On 28 September 1598, for instance, in another well-publicized meeting, this time with a delegation of the clergy, Henri responded to their requests as follows: ‘My predecessors have given you words with much pomp and ceremony, but me, in my grey jacket, I will give you results. I only have a grey jacket; I am grey on the outside but golden within’.32 While in the same tradition, Henri’s speciﬁc appearance as a father on 7 January 1599 was new. The paternal persona offered Henri a

Eric Nelson 115

particularly potent image that allowed him to use his established informal style to embody both the most inscrutable aspects of inherited authority and at the same time assert authority to make decisions based on his track record of personal success. Henri alluded to this evolution in his image when he noted, ‘necessity made me a soldier in the past, it was spoken of, and I did not take any notice. I am King now, I speak as a King. I wish to be obeyed’.33

Force and Tyranny I shall cut off at the root all fractious preaching, and will bring to account all those that encourage it. I have leapt onto city walls; I can leap onto barricades that are not as high. Henri used his claim to legitimacy through inheritance and acquisition to underpin a further theme of the discourse: his legitimate right and personal willingness to take decisive action to secure his will. At one level, Henri drew upon previous successes in using force to assert his will. Thus, when he referred to a rumour, current in Paris, that he planned to use military force to crush opposition to the Edict, he stated: ‘There have been complaints in Paris that I planned to levy Swiss or some other body of troops. If I did so, it would be with good reason, and it would be to good effect by the evidence of my past actions . . .’. In plain and forceful speech Henri explicitly drew upon his past successful use of force as a reason for deference. However, many in Henri’s audience would have recognized a second implicit claim to his right as king to stage a coup d’état based on royal judgment to secure his state. The royal coup d’état, which allowed a monarch to take decisive action outside the normal channels of justice in order to safeguard his kingdom, drew on the established idea that the king embodied the law.34 Henri more explicitly asserted his prerogative as a sovereign French monarch to carry out a coup d’état at a crucial moment in the speech: ‘I am King now, I speak as a King. I wish to be obeyed. In truth the men of justice are my right arm, but should it become gangrenous, then the left must cut it off. When my Regiments do not serve me, I disband them’. This threat to disband his Parlement if it failed to do his bidding echoed a similar threat by François I to make his court itinerant or even shut it down if it failed to register the Concordat of Bologna in 1516.35 Few in his audience would have missed this connection. While Henri never used a coup d’état to advance his policies during his reign, the threat to take such action reﬂects an important aspect of Henrician

116

Royal Authority and the Pursuit of Religious Settlement

political culture that privileged action over words and the successful assertion of the royal will as the critical element in peace-making. As with his assertions of legitimacy through inheritance and acquisition, Henri used the theatre of the royal encounter to reinforce both his desire for obedience and his determination to take decisive action against those who deﬁed his will. Thus, as his speech reached a natural rhetorical peak with his threat to disband his Parlement if necessary, Henri paused and called out of the audience one of his closest advisers, Nicolas de Brulart, sieur de Sillery. In a passage designed to emphasize both his understanding of the current situation and his determination to act decisively, Henri spoke to Sillery about the seditious preaching in Paris of Sillery’s brother, the Capuchin Father Jean de Brulart: I had warned you that I had heard complaints about your brother, and I had ordered you to admonish him to retire and behave properly. I initially believed that there was nothing to what had been said about his preaching against the Edict because there was no proof of it, but it was true nonetheless, and in the end he ﬂed on the feast day of the Kings to the parish of St André where my procureur general went to hear him preach seditiously against the Edict. This was revealed to me as it should have been. Some want to excuse him alleging that he was carried away by zeal and without malice; but whether this is the case or not, seditious speech is always bad, and this excessive zeal deserves punishment. This strongly worded warning sought to reassure his Parlement both about Henri’s knowledge of the current situation in Paris as he referred to a sermon that had taken place the day before and his determination to take strong action even against a well-connected ﬁgure like Brulart. This impression would only have been reinforced in the coming days when Jean de Brulart ﬂed to Italy because of fear of arrest.36 However, the dressing down of one of his closest advisers also carried a menacing tone designed to reinforce the previous passage as it provided an implicit warning that Henri would take strong action for the good of his state even if it meant punishing his closest servants. This tone would only have been more menacing as Henri’s knowledge of preaching at Saint André, an important parish church in parlementaire circles, implied that the king maintained a careful surveillance over his judges. Henri’s statements and his direct interaction with Sillery offered a clear break with Henri III’s indirect manoeuvrings at the court and the search

Eric Nelson 117

for balance amongst interests in his kingdom.37 Instead, Henri IV drew on the idea of legitimacy through conquest to support his right by inheritance to take decisive action in pursuit of the general good. For Henri, peace could only be secured in the kingdom if his subjects were obedient to his judgment and will. During his reign, Henri continued to promote the idea that only obedience to royal judgments and the royal will could secure peace and that decisive action against anyone who opposed the royal will was justiﬁed in the pursuit of peace. This approach to royal judgment laid a distinctive foundation of Bourbon political culture that was taken further in the 1620s when Louis XIII and his minister Cardinal Richelieu established the concept of reason of state.38 While Henri presented his determination to take decisive action, he also sought to make clear that, while he possessed authority to make decisions for his kingdom beyond even those of his predecessors, he did not intend to rule as a tyrant, something of which his predecessors, Charles IX and Henri III, had been frequently and, not entirely unjustly, accused of. Thus, after stating that if need be he would come to the Parlement to force registration through a lit de justice as his predecessors had, he noted that he preferred not to and that he would call as witness to his decision the members of his council and the dukes and peers of the realm who had universally advised him that the Edict was ‘good and necessary for the state of my affairs’.39 Through this statement Henri made clear that while his authority to take action on this matter was beyond dispute, he still intended to seek and consider counsel from key advisers before taking a ﬁnal decision. Although once again Henri did not shy away from acknowledging that at least in part his authority came from his political strength when he noted that none of his councilors would dare to deny giving this advice or ‘dare to style himself a protector of the Catholic religion’. While not explicitly stated, this acceptance of counsel extended to his Parlement as well. When on 16 February the Parlement submitted a set of concerns about the Edict of Nantes to the king, Henri accepted several that had to do with legal issues within the Parlement’s competence.40 However, during this second face-to-face meeting again in the Louvre he also sought to make clear his authority: If I desired the ruin of the Catholic faith, I would not conduct myself in this fashion [by secretly plotting], and if I desired it, you would not be able to stop me. I would raise twenty-thousand men, I would hunt from here all those that it pleased me, and when I had commanded that someone leave, it would be obeyed. I would say to Messieurs les

118

Royal Authority and the Pursuit of Religious Settlement

juges: ‘The Edict must be veriﬁed, or I will have you killed.’ But then, I would be a tyrant; this would be to truly be a tyrant. I have not conquered this kingdom by tyranny; I have by nature and by my own work . . . . Thus verify the Edict, I ask you. Through this and other statements, Henri continued to paint a picture of the realities of the political situation and, at the same time, his intention to rule through counsel.

Affairs of State and the Laws of the Kingdom I know full well that there have been intrigues in the Parlement, that fractious preachers have been encouraged, but I will re-establish order amongst those people, I won’t wait for you to do it. That is the road that led to the Barricades and then by degrees to the assassination of the late King. This blunt accusation of both the Parlement’s failure to maintain public order for the previous king and its current disloyalty to him followed immediately upon Henri’s strident statement that his own authority was restrained only by his desire to rule through counsel. It served to forcefully introduce another theme of his speech: Henri’s assertion that meddling in the affairs of state by his Parlement brought disastrous consequences. When Henri acceded to the throne in 1589, the Parlement of Paris was a deeply divided institution.41 A group of committed Leaguers in Paris refused to recognize his claim, while a smaller group of royalist judges, in exile, accepted his legitimacy but were also skeptical of his ability to rule.42 Amongst his loyal magistrates in exile, a set of ideas had evolved that emphasized the importance of maintaining public law as vital to the re-establishment of peace in the kingdom. These magistrates were, from the start of Henri’s reign, concerned that he was ﬁrst and foremost a military commander who lacked the administrative experience and the political will to defend and enforce the law in a manner that would secure peace. These fears only grew in the early years of his reign when he frequently used clemency to secure the obedience of Leaguer individuals and corporations through a forgiveness of their patent rebellion.43 During the opening years of his reign Henri had carefully dealt with the Paris Parlement, whose support he required. However, tension between king and the Parlement grew, especially after he reunited Royalist and Leaguer judges in 1595 following the paciﬁcation of Paris.44 This

Eric Nelson 119

strain came to a head in 1597 when the Parlement refused to register a set of royal ﬁnancial edicts designed to provide the funds needed to recover the strategic city of Amiens that had fallen to the Spanish.45 He drew upon a long-established tradition of royal authority at this point, using a lit de justice in a manner similar to his predecessors to compel registration of the edicts despite the legal objections raised by his Parlement.46 However, in a strengthened political situation at the opening of 1599, he sought to take the opportunity to redeﬁne his relationship with the Parlement on his own terms by rejecting its efforts to make judgments on matters of state. Henri maintained the blunt tone of his harangue when he explicitly returned to the Parlement’s failure to register his edicts to fund the recovery of Amiens, reminding them of ‘my efforts to retake Amiens where I employed moneys raised by the Edicts that you would not have registered if I had not come to the Parlement in person’. In this passage, Henri highlighted his success in using his judgment to make decisions in affairs of state and his authority to take extraordinary measures beyond the laws of his kingdom in order to safeguard the state. By implication, the Parlement’s opposition to the funding of what was the crucial military campaign that secured a favourable peace with Spain served to highlight the Parlement’s lack of judgment and competence in such affairs. In his speech, Henri regularly alternated assertions of his successful use of personal judgment to make public policy and his Parlement’s shortcomings when it attempted to do the same. For instance, in one particularly revealing passage the opening lines speak to Henri’s judgment: ‘I have more informants than you do. Whatever happens, I know what each of you will say. I know everything you do and everything you say. I have a little demon that reveals everything to me’. Henri uses here a sophisticated reference to his ‘little demon’ that draws on his claims to authority both through acquisition and divine right. On the one hand, the ‘little demon’ referred both to Henri’s network of loyal servants in Paris and his spies who together kept him informed of intrigues amongst his judges. But at the same time his classically trained magistrates would have understood a second allusion, this time to Socrates’s Daimonion a mystical voice within Socrates’s head that always guided him and, in particular, warned him of danger. This second meaning emphasized Henri’s claim to an instinctual knowledge, beyond that of other mortals, that was present in him because of his anointment as King of France.

120

Royal Authority and the Pursuit of Religious Settlement

The remainder of the passage contrasted Henri’s claim to knowledge and judgment to the Parlement’s lack thereof: Those that do not wish my Edict to be ratiﬁed want war. I may well have to declare war tomorrow on those of the Religion, but I will not wage it. Instead, you will go in your legal robes resembling the procession of the Capuchins bearing muskets over their habits. You shall make a pretty sight. In this passage, Henri with typical ﬂair asserted that in opposing his Edict his Parlement would advocate war over peace without having the means to take military action. Henri chose to express this idea through an allusion to a notorious procession of armed Capuchin monks through Paris at the height of the Leaguer rebellion.47 This allusion to another group who, during the disorder of the League, had sought to wage war beyond their ability and vocation served to emphasize Henri’s assertion that the Parlement’s competence lay in law alone and that its pretensions to shape policy were tantamount to rebellion. In this sophisticated and stylish passage Henri presented a simple argument that reﬂected the reality of the situation. The Parlement could not oppose the Edict’s ultimate registration because to do so would be to claim the authority to make decisions on war and peace, a right limited to the monarch.

Obedience and Virtue What I have to say to you is that I wish you to verify the Edict that I have granted to those of the Religion . . . . You ought to obey me, if for no other consideration than my rank, and the duty that all my subjects owe me, and particularly members of my Parlement. For I have restored some to the houses from which they were banished, others I have restored to the faith that they had lost . . . . The members of my Parlement would not be in their seats if it was not for me. At the opening and closing of his speech Henri sought to deﬁne a clear relationship between the royal magistrates and their king. While rejecting his magistrates’ assertions to a role in public policy making when the laws of the kingdom were threatened, Henri offered his judges another model for their relationship to him, one of personal obedience in recognition of his dignity and personal good will. Henri again freely mixed a straight forward appeal to the reality of the situation with a powerful, though less explicitly stated, theoretical underpinning for his request in this passage. Thus, his audience could interpret

Eric Nelson 121

his words as a plea for his magistrates to think of their own interests in seeing peace re-established. But at the same time, Henri appealed to familiar neo-stoic themes of duty and obligation that royalist writers, many of whom were in the Parlement, had developed over the previous decade.48 Henri asserted this neo-stoic understanding of duty and obligation along with authority and acceptance that there was a divine purpose to the course of events even if it is inscrutable to observers, when he stated, ‘You ought to obey me, if for no other consideration than my rank, and the duty that all my subjects owe me...’. In this passage, Henri played concrete physicality off of abstract political theory by referring to the very speciﬁc circumstances in which he personally provided and they personally beneﬁted from stability, while at the same time foreshadowing the Hobbesian idea that Henri’s magistrates had a duty to support the state on account of its contribution to the social stability from which they beneﬁted. After emphasizing, in the central sections of his speech, the Parlement’s failings when it had meddled in public policy, Henri returned to the theme of obedience and royal good will in an extended passage at the conclusion. The tone of the passage was designed to remind the judges of their obligations to him: ‘there is not one amongst you who does not think me well disposed when you have dealings with me, and every one of you needs this at least once a year, and yet you treat me badly despite my goodness’. Henri then noted that this sort of disobedience had harmed public policy in tangible ways, when he noted that the failure of the provincial Parlements in 1595 to pass his declaration renewing the 1577 paciﬁcation decree had ultimately forced him to make further concessions to the Huguenots over the creation of Protestant magistrates. He then turned to the sort of obedience that he desired. He takes up again the preachers who opposed him in the past: Do not speak to me about the Catholic faith, all these Catholics and clergy who clamour so vociferously, it is enough to give one 2000 écus in beneﬁces, and another 4000 écus of revenue to keep them quiet. I wager the same about all others who will want to speak against the Edict. There are evil men who profess to hate sin, but it is for fear of the punishment, whereas others hate it for the love of virtue. A long time ago I learnt two Latin verses: Oderunt peccare boni, virtutis amore; Oderunt peccare mali, formidine pœnæ.49 It has been twenty years since I last spoke these verses aloud. I hope that by God I recognise those amongst you who hate sin and bear hatred of

122

Royal Authority and the Pursuit of Religious Settlement

it for love of virtue, and I will chastise those who hate it for fear of punishment, after which they will thank me for the chastisement, like a son would a father. Here Henri drew on a well-known couplet from Horace to press home an appeal for a relationship between himself and his Parlement based on love and devotion rather than fear and punishment.50 In pursuit of this goal Henri returns to the family metaphor to make the point that peace and tranquility will only return when his magistrates serve his will out of virtue rather than fear. Virtue in this case could only come from obedience to the royal judgment through love not fear, and it was this relationship that Henri wished to use as a model for his Parlement. At the end of this passage Henri made it explicit that underpinning his desired relationship with his Parlement was the same understanding that Henri sought to secure with leading ﬁgures and corporations of the League over the previous decade. In a ﬁnal theatrical ﬂourish, Henri turned towards Charles de Lorraine, duc de Mayenne, former leader of the League now present in his entourage. Henri singled out the duc, once his most dangerous enemy, by drawing upon a rumour, current in Paris, that when approached Mayenne had refused to take up the leadership of a nascent attempt to reform the League because, as Henri noted, [Mayenne] replied that he was too obliged towards me, as were all my subjects amongst whom there will always be some who would risk their lives to please me because I re-established France in spite of those who wanted to ruin it. When in the past he had done all he could to topple the State, now he would do all he could to keep it. If the head of the League speaks so, how much more should you, whom I have re-established, those who were always loyal to me, those whom I reunited in the faith . . . .51 In the Mayenne example, Henri offered a pathway to peace for his Parlement. It required a renewal of their personal relationship with Henri and abandonment to the royal will of public policy. He also built an image of himself and the monarchy as embodying peace and tranquility in the kingdom.

Henrician and Bourbon Political Culture . . . what credit must you give to my entreaties that you would not give to my threats. I shall make none: do what I command you or rather what I

Eric Nelson 123

entreat you to do. You will not only do so for my sake, but also for your own and for the good of the peace. These ﬁnal lines of Henri’s harangue speak to an emerging Henrician political style so dramatically displayed in this key encounter between the king and his magistrates. Through this mixture of command and request, demand and plea expressed through a personal face to face encounter, Henri sought to impose his will upon his subjects by deﬁning virtue as willing obedience to him and peace in terms of the fulﬁllment of the royal will. But political style is a very personal element of kingship and Henri’s successor Louis XIII possessed neither the temperament nor the personality to maintain his father’s political style. Louis, who in any case never needed to acquire his kingdom, abandoned the innovative aspects of his father’s image built around his paciﬁcation of his kingdom and instead relied upon a more formal imagery and the more traditional symbols of ofﬁce. Nevertheless, while Louis’ subjects may have found Louis’ style more familiar than his father’s, the underlying ideas about royal authority and the relationship between the crown and its subjects that Henri deﬁned and promoted during the paciﬁcation of his kingdom did have an impact on a distinctive Bourbon political culture that continued to evolve during Louis’ reign. Like his father, Louis deﬁned willing obedience of subjects to the monarchy as a paramount virtue in royal servants over the more corporatist ideas of his Valois predecessors. In this manner, the more authoritarian features of Henri’s speech were both a break with earlier Valois political culture and the foundations on which the more absolutist Bourbon political culture of Louis XIII and Louis XIV took shape. Louis also beneﬁted from and cultivated his father’s assertion of the inscrutable nature of royal decision making and obedience from his subjects to the royal will in affairs of state as he reconsolidated royal authority with the assistance of his ﬁrst minister Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, in the 1620s and early 1630s following a period of weak royal rule during his childhood. During this period Louis developed the distinctive concept of reason of state: that is the legitimacy of actions taken in the pursuit of the state’s general good even if questionable means are required to achieve the general good.52 In asserting this concept Louis relied upon and strengthened his father’s successful assertion of the royal prerogative to make inscrutable decisions for the good of the kingdom and his father’s distinctive stress on the importance of secret intelligence and the mystery of state in deﬁning the royal decision making process. Louis used these concepts, as his father had threatened to do before him,

124

Royal Authority and the Pursuit of Religious Settlement

to justify the taking of dramatic action sometimes beyond the laws of the realm for the good of the kingdom. These ideas, present in Henri’s speech on 7 January 1599, underpinned Louis’s concept of reason of state and laid the groundwork for a more absolutist and distinctly Bourbon political culture in the seventeenth century.

Appendix The words that the King spoke to the deputies of the Parlement of Paris on 7 January 1599 concerning the ratiﬁcation of the Edict of Nantes.53 Numerous accounts of Henri’s encounter with his Parlement on 7 January 1599 survive, each of which is different from the others. This translation is based on a manuscript copy held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Nouvelle Acquisitions Française 23479, pp. 219–24 (referred to as NAF in the references below). However, I have also consulted two further versions of the speech, the ﬁrst found in Berger de Xivrey, Recueil des lettres missives, v, pp. 89–94, which is a printed transcription of a manuscript located in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Fonds Fontette vi, document 114 (referred to as Lettres in the references below) and the second located in L’Estoile, Mémoires-journaux, vii, pp. 164–8 (referred to as L’Estoile in the references below).54 In the translation, I note only substantive differences between the versions in the references. When only one of the three versions possesses a variant passage, I note that passage in the references. When the versions differ on minor points I favour the NAF version. Before speaking of the matter for which I have called you here, I want to tell you a story of which I have just reminded the mareschal de la Chastre. Shortly after Saint Bartholomew’s Day, four of us playing at dice around a table saw drops of blood appear on it; and seeing that after wiping them away twice, they appeared again for a third time, I said that I would no longer play; and that it was a bad omen against those who had spilt blood. M. de Guise was amongst them. After these words, His Majesty said the following: You see me in my study where I have come to speak to you, not in regal garb nor with sword and cloak, like my predecessors, nor like a Prince who comes to speak to foreign ambassadors, but dressed like a father of a family in a doublet, to speak informally to his children. What I have to say to you is that I wish you to verify the Edict that I have granted to those of the Religion.55 What I have done is for the sake of peace. I have obtained it abroad and now desire it within my kingdom. You ought to

Eric Nelson 125

obey me, if for no other consideration than my rank, and the duty that all my subjects owe me, and particularly members of my Parlement. For I have restored some to the houses from which they were banished, others I have restored to the faith that they had lost. If obedience was due to my predecessors, as much if not more devotion is due to me, because I have restored the State, God having chosen to set me over this kingdom that is mine both through inheritance and acquisition. The members of my Parlement would not be in their seats if it was not for me. I do not want to boast, but I must say that I have no other example to follow than my own. I know full well that there have been intrigues in the Parlement, that fractious preachers have been encouraged, but I will re-establish order amongst those people, I won’t wait for you to do it. That56 is the road that led to the Barricades and then by degrees to the assassination of the late King. I will steer well clear of all that: I shall cut off at the root all fractious preaching, and will bring to account all those that encourage it. I have leapt onto city walls; I can leap onto barricades that are not as high.57 Do not speak to me about the Catholic faith: I love it more than you do. I am more Catholic than you are. I am the eldest son of the Church, which none of you are or ever can be.58 You fool yourselves, if you think that you enjoy the Pope’s favour. I enjoy it more than you do.59 If I wanted, I could have you declared heretics, for not obeying me.60 I have more informants61 than you do.62 Whatever happens, I know what each of you will say.63 I know everything you do and everything you say. I have a little demon that reveals everything to me. Those that do not wish my Edict to be ratiﬁed want war. I may well have to declare war tomorrow64 on those of the Religion, but I will not wage it. Instead, you will go in your legal robes resembling65 the procession of the Capuchins bearing muskets over their habits. You shall make a pretty sight. If you refuse to ratify the Edict, you shall make me come to the Parlement. You will have been ungrateful, if you make this necessary. I call as witnesses those within my Council who found the Edict to be good and necessary for the state of my affairs, M. le Connétable, M. le Chancelier, M. de Bellievre et de Sancy, Sillery, Villeroy. I have done it following their advice and that of the dukes and peers of France. There is not one of them who would dare to style himself a protector of the Catholic religion,66 or would dare deny having given me this advice. I am the only protector of Religion,67 I shall dispel the rumours that are spread. There have been complaints in Paris that I planned to levy Swiss or some other body of troops. If I did so, it would be with good reason, and it would be to good effect by the evidence of my past actions, by my efforts to retake Amiens where I employed moneys raised by the edicts that you would not have registered if I had not come to the Parlement in

126

Royal Authority and the Pursuit of Religious Settlement

person. Necessity led me to draft this edict. Similarly, necessity made me a soldier in the past, it was spoken of, and I did not take any notice. I am King now, I speak as a king. I wish to be obeyed. In truth the men of justice68 are my right arm, but should it become gangrenous, then the left must cut it off. When my Regiments do not serve me, I disband them. What will you gain from not ratifying the Edict, indeed I will still see it registered. The preachers can shout all they want, like the brother of Mr de Sillery, with whom I would like to have a word in your presence. Then having summoned M. de Sillery, the King said: I had warned you that I had heard complaints about your brother, and I had ordered you to admonish him to retire and behave properly. I initially believed that there was nothing to what had been said about his preaching against the Edict because there was no proof of it, but it was true nonetheless, and in the end he ﬂed on the feast day of the Kings69 to the parish of St André where my procureur general went to hear him preach seditiously against the Edict. This was revealed to me as it should have been.70 Some want to excuse him alleging that he was carried away by zeal and without malice; but whether this is the case or not, seditious speech is always bad, and this excessive zeal deserves punishment. This complaint being ﬁnished, his majesty turned back to the members of his Parlement and said to them: there is not one amongst you who does not think me well disposed when you have dealings with me, and every one of you needs this at least once a year, and yet you treat me badly despite my goodness. If the other Parlements, for having deﬁed my will, are responsible for those of the Religion asking for new things, I do not want you to be the cause of other novelties by your refusal. In the years 1594 and 9571 when I sent you my declaration on the Edict of the year 1577 for the provision of ofﬁces, I had promised not to appoint those of the Religion of the estates to any ofﬁce in the Parlement. Since then, times have changed things. Notwithstanding I will have good guarantees from those whom I appoint to ofﬁces that they will conduct themselves as they should. Do not speak to me about the Catholic faith, all these Catholics and clergy who clamour so vociferously, it is enough to give one 2000 écus in beneﬁces, and another 4000 écus72 of revenue to keep them quiet. I wager the same about all others who will want to speak against the Edict. There are evil men who profess to hate sin, but it is for fear of the punishment, whereas others hate it for the love of virtue. A long time ago I learnt two Latin verses: Oderunt peccare boni, virtutis amore; Oderunt peccare mali, formidine pœnæ.73

Eric Nelson 127

It has been twenty years since I last spoke these verses aloud. I hope that by God I recognise those amongst you who hate sin and bear hatred of it for love of virtue, and I will chastise those who hate it for fear of punishment,74 after which they will thank me for the chastisement, like a son would a father. I only thought to summon you late yesterday. You must realise that the Edict of which I speak is the late King’s Edict: it is also mine, because it was made with my help. Today I conﬁrm it. I do not think it good to intend one thing and to write another. If some have done it, I do not want to be like them. The last thing that you will hear from me is to urge you to follow the example of the obedience of M. du Maine. He was solicited to conspire against my will, he replied that he was too obliged towards me, as were all my subjects amongst whom there will always be some who would risk their lives to please me because I re-established France in spite of those who wanted to ruin it. When in the past he had done all he could to topple the State, now he would do all he could to keep it. If the head of the League speaks so, how much more should you, whom I have re-established, those who were always loyal to me, those whom I reunited in the faith, those for whom, to say it once more, I have reunited with their homes, with their faith,75 what credit must you give to my entreaties that you would not give to my threats. I shall make none: do what I command you or rather what I entreat you to do. You will not only do so for my sake, but also for your own and for the good of the peace.

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Jotham Parsons for his very helpful advice during the drafting of this essay. I would also like to thank all the members of the Centre for Reformation Studies at the University of Saint Andrews who kindly listened to and commented on versions of this essay during my time there as Cameron Fellow in the spring of 2007.

Notes 1. All quotations from Henri’s speech can be found in the Appendix. 2. There has been some disagreement over the date of this encounter. A frequently used copy of the speech held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Fonds Fontette vi, document 114 and reprinted in J. Berger de Xivery and J. Guadet (eds), Recueil de lettres missives de Henri IV, 9 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1843–76), v, pp. 89–94 dates the speech to 7 February 1599. However, Pierre de L’Estoile in his Mémoires-journaux 1574–1611, 12 vols (Paris: Jouaust, 1875–96), vii, pp. 164–8, dates the speech to 7 January 1599 as does another

128

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Royal Authority and the Pursuit of Religious Settlement seventeenth-century manuscript copy held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), Nouvelle Acquisitions Française (nouv. acq. fr,) 23479, pp. 219–24. While no deﬁnitive evidence survives, circumstantial evidence points to the 7 January date being the most likely. Henri’s speech refers to events including a sermon given by the Capuchin Father Bruslart on 6 January and a rumour current in Paris in early January that Henri planned to use troops to enforce his Edict. However, the speech makes no references to any event that occurred after the opening days of January. L’Estoile, Mémoires-journaux, vii, p. 164; Aggrippa D’Aubigné, Histoire Universelle, 11 vols (Geneva: Droz, 1981–2000), ix, pp. 253–4; François de Bassompierre, Mémoires de Mareschal de Bassompierre 2 vols (Amsterdam: Hoogenhuysen, 1692), i, p. 50. Michael Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 159–87. Michel de Waele, Les Relations entre le Parlement de Paris et Henri IV (Paris: Publisud, 2000). Eric Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 13–24. David Buisseret, Henry IV (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), p. 69. Mark Grengrass, France in the Age of Henri IV, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 238–9. While Henri promulgated the Edict he did not publicize its content. Thus through the summer and autumn of 1598 there was a great deal of speculation as to what exact terms were included in the Edict. Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion 1562–1629 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 162–5. Nancy Lyman Roelker, One King, One Faith: The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 67–77. Frederic Baumgartner, ‘The Catholic Opposition to the Edict of Nantes 1598–1599’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance, 40 (1978), 525–37. For the posting of Antoine Séguier to Venice see, L’Estoile, Mémoiresjournaux, vii, pp. 139–40. For alterations to the Edict see Maximilien de Bethune (Duc de Sully), Memoires de Maximilien de Bethune, Duc de Sully, Principal Ministre de Henry le Grand, Mis en ordre, avec des Remarques, par M.L.D.L.D.L., 3 vols (London: n.p., 1747), i, 589–93. This meeting was noted by the avocat du roi Louis Servin in his speech to the Parlement on 11 January 1599: Archives Nationales de France (AN), Registers of the Parlement, X1a 1761, f. 3vº. AN, Registers of the Parlement, X1a 1761, f. 2vº. Baumgartner, ‘Catholic Opposition’, 529. See also De Waele, Relations, p. 380. L’Estoile, Mémoires-journaux, vii, pp. 156–64. Ibid., pp. 156–7, 163–4. See also Jacques Nompar de Caumont (duc de La Force), Mémoires authentiques, 4 vols (Paris: Charpentier, 1843), i, pp. 301–2. L’Estoile, Mémoires-journaux, vii, pp. 163–4. This sermon is also mentioned by Henri IV on 7 January 1599. L’Estoile, Mémoires-journaux, vii, p. 158. La Force, Mémoires authentiques, i, p. 301. See also L’Estoile, Mémoires-journaux, vii, p. 159.

Eric Nelson 129 22. For instance, see Henri’s speech to the Assembly of Notables in 1596 Berger de Xivery, Recueil de lettres missives, iv, p. 416. The ﬁrst president of the Rouen Parlement commented that this speech was appropriate but reﬂected Henri’s military manner, Claude Groulart, ‘Mémoires de messire Claude Groulard, premier président du Parlement de Normandie, ou Voyages par lui faits en cour’, in Michaud and Poujoulat (eds), Mémoires ou voyages par lui faits en courts, 2 vols (Paris: Everat, 1857), ii, p. 565. 23. Sully, Mémoires, i, pp. 518–19. 24. Ibid. 25. Nicolo Machiavelli, Il Principe (Rome: Newton & Compton, 1998), pp. 30–7. 26. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 156–82. 27. Jacques Krynen, L’Empire du roi: Idées et croyances politiques en France XIIe-XVe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1993). See also Ernst Kantorowicz, ‘Mystereies of State: An Absolutist Concept and Its Late Medieval Origins’, Harvard Theological Review, 48 (1955), 65–91; Ralph Giesey, ‘The Juristic Basis of Dynastic Right to the French Throne’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 51 (1961), 3–42. 28. Arlette Jouanna, Ordre Social: Mythes et hiérarchies dans la France du XVIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1977), pp. 140–59. 29. Denis Crouzet, ‘King of Reason’, in Keith Cameron (ed.), From Valois to Bourbon: Dynasty, State & Society in Early Modern France (Exeter UK: Exeter University Press, 1989), pp. 88–90. 30. Jean Bodin, Les Six livres de la république (Paris: Iacques du Puys, 1576). 31. William Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 25–8. 32. Berger de Xivery, Recueil de lettres missives, v, pp. 33–4. Réponse de Henri IV aux deputes du clergé, 28 September 1598. 33. The usefulness to royal image-makers of paternal imagery is reﬂected in Henri’s continued use of this persona in November of 1599 when he met with a delegation of the Parlement of Bourdeaux to hear their complaints about the Edict of Nantes: Berger de Xivery, Recueil de lettres missives, v, p. 180. Response au Roy à Messieurs les depputez de Bourdeaux, 3 November 1599. 34. See Louis Marin’s introduction to Gabriel Naudé, Considérations politiques sur les coups d’États (Paris: Éditions de Paris, 1988), pp. 15–65. 35. Roger Doucet, Étude sur le gouvernement de François Ier dans ses rapports avec le Parlement de Paris, 2 vols (Paris: Champion, 1921), i, pp. 77–148. 36. Armand Lods, ‘L’Édit de Nantes devant le Parlement de Paris’, Bulletin de la société de l’histoire du Protestantisme Français, 48 (1899), p. 129. 37. Xavier le Person, “Practiques et Practiquers”: La vie politique à la ﬁn du règne de Henri III (1584–1589) (Geneva: Droz, 2002). 38. Church, Richelieu, pp. 11, 24. 39. Observers in Paris were aware of Henri’s efforts to seek council from his advisers, the peers of the realm and faculty of theology at the University of Paris, see L’Estoile, Mémoires-journaux, vii, pp. 157–9. 40. Bernard Cottret, 1598, L’Édit de Nantes (Paris: Perrin, 1997), pp. 211–12. 41. De Waele, Relations, pp. 93–308. 42. De Waele, Relations¸ pp. 137–248.

130

Royal Authority and the Pursuit of Religious Settlement

43. De Waele, ‘Image de force, perception de faiblesse: la clémence d’Henri IV’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, 17 (1993), pp. 55–8. 44. Henri alludes to this event in the speech when he states ‘I have restored some to the houses from which they were banished, others I have restored to the faith that they had lost’. 45. De Waele, Relations¸ pp. 285–308. 46. Roelker, One King, One Faith, pp. 70–3. 47. For an account of the Capuchin procession see L’Estoile, Mémoires-journaux, v, pp 23–4. 48. Crouzet, ‘King of Reason’, pp. 76–82, 90–1. 49. Good people hate wrong doing because they love virtue; bad people hate wrong because they fear punishment. 50. For instance, Jean Bodin included this couplet in his Sapientiae Moralis, Epitome, Quae, ﬁrst published in 1588 and republished in Lawrence Rose, Selected Writings on Philosophy, Religion and Politics by Jean Bodin (Geneva: Droz, 1980), pp. 19–31. For this speciﬁc passage see page 24. 51. L’Estoile, Mémoires-journaux, vii, p. 158. 52. Church, Richelieu, passim. 53. I would like to thank Luc Racaut and Malcolm Walsby for all of their help on this translation. 54. An English translation of the L’Estoile version of the speech can be found in Roland Mousnier’s, The Assassination of Henry IV (New York: Charles Scribner, 1964), pp. 364–7. I have consulted this text where appropriate in making this translation. 55. ‘Those of the Religion’ was a common term for Protestants in sixteenth-century France. 56. ‘That’ is a reference to the failure of the Paris Parlement to maintain order for Henri III in the late 1580s. 57. The Lettres version does not include the passage ‘that are not so high’. 58. The L’Estoile version lacks the passage ‘which none of you are or can ever be’. 59. The NAF version lacks this sentence, but both the Lettres and the L’Estoile versions include it. 60. The L’Estoile version lacks this sentence. 61. The NAF manuscript includes the words ‘in Rome’ at this point; however, these words are not found in the Lettres or L’Estoile versions and appears to be a transcription error. 62. The L’Estoile version lacks this sentence. 63. The Lettres version includes at this point the passage ‘I know all that happens in your houses’. 64. The L’Estoile version lacks ‘tomorrow’. 65. ‘Resembling’ is missing from the NAF manuscript, but can be found in both the Lettres and L’Estoile versions. 66. Unlike both the Lettres and L’Estoile versions, the NAF version of this passage reads ‘There is not one amongst them who is not of the Catholic Religion’. 67. Here Henri is referring speciﬁcally to the Catholic faith. 68. Unlike both the Lettres and L’Estoile versions, the NAF version lacks ‘The men of’.

Eric Nelson 131 69. The festival of the Kings is another term for Epiphany celebrated each year on the sixth of January. Only the NAF version mentions the exact date of the sermon, although Estoile mentions the date elsewhere in his journal, L’Estoile, Mémoires-journaux, vii, pp. 163–4. 70. This sentence appears in both the Lettres and NAF versions, but in the L’Estoile version it is substituted with ‘This behaviour was not punished as it should have been’. 71. The Lettres version includes only the year 1595. 72. The Lettres version does not specify the amount of the revenue. 73. The L’Estoile version reverses these two lines. The Latin couplet translates as ‘Good people hate wrong doing because they love virtue; bad people hate wrong because they fear punishment’. 74. The L’Estoile version offers a different variant of this passage: ‘It is twenty years since I have repeated these lines. I do not pretend to know which of you hate sin for love of virtue, but I shall most certainly punish those who hate sin for fear of torment’. I take this translation from Mousnier’s, Assassination, p. 367. Both the NAF and Lettres versions include the passage translated here. 75. All three versions offer variants on this passage. I have translated here the NAF version.

6 Conﬂict Resolution under the First Bourbons Michel De Waele

On 6 September 1632, Louis XIII put pen to paper to inform the Prince de Condé that the royal armies led by Maréchal Schomberg had just confronted the forces raised by his brother, Gaston d’Orléans, close to Castelnaudary. Fate had favoured the king’s soldiers. The duc de Montmorency, who was in command of the rival forces, had been taken prisoner after having been injured by numerous shots. The comte de Moret, the king’s half-brother, was killed, while many other rebellion leaders were killed or imprisoned. Rather than lamenting this blood-letting among his nobles, the king seemed actually to take delight in the turn of events: ‘it is a very advantageous thing for my service and which delivers a great blow to the weakening of this faction’.1 Such a phrase seems to lend credence to those historians who see Louis XIII as an ‘obstinate, withdrawn man, [ . . . who] had a merciless, almost sadistic streak in his character’.2 Could Gaston d’Orléans, this unpopular historical ﬁgure, not be Henri IV’s true heir, as George Dethan claimed? The harshness shown by Richelieu and Louis XIII towards those who stood up to their authority appears far removed from the positions adopted by the ‘Vert Galant’ ‘who had pardoned Mayenne, Biron, Entraigues, of more serious faults than those that had cost the life of Chalais, Ornano or Bouteville’.3 However, Henri IV was himself also capable of severity. While France was at war with Savoy, Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron, plotted with the duc de Savoie and signed a secret treaty with him which guaranteed him sovereignty over Burgundy and Franche-Comté. This betrayal was discovered and Biron was condemned to death in 1602. The king did nothing to spare him from execution despite the appeals for leniency made in favour of his former companion in arms. Some of his contemporaries blamed him for this excessive severity, but Philippe Ayala, the 132

Michel De Waele 133

archduke of Austria’s resident in Paris went even further when he asserted that the judges of the Paris Parlement responsible for judging Biron would have freed him if they had the chance: So one holds that if the hearts of the judges had not been preoccupied with the will of the King of France, that they had difﬁculty with his sentence being, for the most part, more inclined towards absolution.4 Accordingly, the sentence passed on Biron does not allow us to draw a clear contrast between the policies adopted by Henri IV and his son towards French subjects who contested their authority. A second element also makes such a comparison shaky. In the Testament politique, which he addressed to Louis XIII, Cardinal de Richelieu stated that, when the king recalled him to public ofﬁce, ‘the Grands conducted themselves as if they had not been his Subjects’.5 The primary objective of his government was therefore, according to him, to put the nobility back in its place – nobility which at the drop of a hat tended to take up arms against the realm. The convictions and executions of Chalais, Ornano, Marillac, Montmorency, De Thou and Cinq-Mars led historians to note that the cardinal had kept his promise. France, under his ministry, entered a new era during which the monarchy curbed the traditional power of aristocracy. Later Louis XIV would imprison the nobility in the golden cage which was Versailles, and absolutism would triumph.6 However, this traditional version of affairs has been challenged for quite some time now. Recent works have shown that the Bourbons, far from wanting to weaken the nobility, relied on it to manage the kingdom, especially the provinces. In this way, the nobles were in a position to consolidate their local domination, and the kings beneﬁted from it to strengthen their power. The nobles also took part in the ﬁnancial administration of the kingdom and, in the case of certain nobles, were a key part of the monarchy’s ﬁscalﬁnancial system as early as the second half of the sixteenth century. For her part, Katia Béguin has shown that a family generally associated with the revolts against royal authority, such as the Condé, prospered under ‘absolutism’. Finally, the nobles represented the essential pillars of the king’s army, which could not function without their help.7 The radical break with the past which historians generally associated with Louis XIII’s reign and the Richelieu government seems to have vanished. That being so, it is necessary to analyse the civil conﬂicts that they encountered, and the policies that they adopted to overcome these. These policies, as we shall see in this study, did not vary much over the different reigns, as the early Bourbons always reacted in the same

134

Conﬂict Resolution under the First Bourbons

way to the political conﬂicts which confronted them. First, their attitude was largely inspired by a fundamental royal virtue: clemency. Second, clemency was all the easier to practise since revolt, be it of the nobility or of the people, was considered a normal event in Ancien Régime France and was accepted as such. Third, however, not all political acts and modes of behaviour were forgiven. Some of them, particularly the stubborn acts of revolts and conspiracies, were systematically punished by the kings.

Clemency and princely pardon The 1620s saw the religious question ﬂare up again in French political life, when Louis XIII decided to re-establish the Catholic religion in Béarn and Navarre, just as his father had undertaken to do. The Protestants, who had remained calm throughout the troubles that had occurred during Marie de Médici’s regency, were worried by these changes. An assembly of their deputies met in La Rochelle on 25 December 1620 and adopted measures to raise troops and conﬁscate taxes, both of which went against royal authority. The duc de Rohan led the Huguenot forces against which the king decided to wage a campaign, but this met with little success. The king’s handful victories failed to completely conceal his numerous failures, such as having to abandon the siege in Montauban in December 1621. In October 1622, the treaty of Montpellier did not call into question the place of Protestantism in the kingdom in any fundamental way. It renewed the provisions of the Edict of Nantes, while nonetheless reducing the number of safe towns granted to the Huguenots. However, the Huguenots did not trust the king and in 1625 began to agitate again. They did not hesitate to form an alliance with the English who landed on the island of Ré in July 1627. The king responded by laying siege once again to La Rochelle. In 1621, a similar operation had ended in failure when royal troops were forced to withdraw. This time, however, the king persisted. The process of squeezing the life out of the town started in 1627 and ﬁnished in October 1628. The determination shown by the citizens of La Rochelle could have given rise to a desire for revenge on the part of the king. However, Louis XIII kept the door of clemency open for them. He wrote of this to Philippe de Béthune, one of his ambassadors in Italy, on 17 June 1628: ‘As their supplies are eaten every day and as they cannot be saved from any direction, I feel that in a little time they will be forced to resort to my clemency’.8 When the inhabitants of the town surrendered they obtained the general pardon which the king wished to grant them, for as he expressed to the duc de Bellegarde:

Michel De Waele 135

My cousin, At last God granted me the grace to give me the good success that I had always awaited for my enterprise. The inhabitants of my town of La Rochelle have had recourse to my clemency as to their sole refuge and have themselves returned in sight of the English Army although they had been until then awaiting a great assistance. I received and treated them as my subjects who show a great repentance of their past faults and who protest an inviolable ﬁdelity and obedience for the future.9 Likewise, a few months later, when the king overcame the Protestant revolts which were still taking place in Languedoc, he granted a complete amnesty to those who had taken up arms against him.10 During his ﬁrst campaign against the Huguenots, Louis XIII had asked the ecclesiastics of his kingdom for ﬁnancial assistance to help him strike a deal with some of his rebel subjects. He wrote to Cardinal de la Valette, to whom he had given the responsibility of asking the clergy for ﬁnancial aid, that the ‘utility is always greater to gain for money than to vanquish by arms’.11 In spite of what the executions of Chalais, Montmorency or Cinq-Mars might lead one to believe, Louis XIII considered himself ﬁrst and foremost as a clement prince, just as his father had. This is precisely what he said in January 1642 when granting his pardon to the Croquants in Périgord, who had rebelled a few years beforehand: he acted in that way because he wanted ‘according to our accustomed clemency to prefer mercy to the rigour of Justice’.12 Yet this leniency was only offered to those who acknowledged the error of their ways, showed sincere repentance and swore never again to commit such misdemeanours. Here, the practice of political clemency followed exactly the same model as that used in religious conversion.13 Since the time of ancient Rome, clemency was considered one of the most important virtues that a prince needed to possess. As for pardon, it became the main feature of Christianity. Since European political culture was rooted in Antiquity and religion, it was not surprising to see both political thinkers and governors attach such importance to this particular virtue. During the Renaissance the main political ﬁgures of the time often had recourse to it. In France, the kings tried to monopolize the right to pardon in their efforts to centralize and standardize judicial practices.14 Addressing the people of Paris, who had just recognized him as their legitimate king, Henri IV stated in March 1594 ‘that there is nothing which gives us more witness that we are made in the likeness of God, than clemency and kindness’. Consequently, he claimed to be willing to forgive them for the crimes which they had committed against

136

Conﬂict Resolution under the First Bourbons

him.15 Fourteen years later, the young bishop of Luçon appeared for the ﬁrst time before the chapter of his cathedral, with whom he found himself in conﬂict. Richelieu stated that he had ‘always inﬁnitely esteemed a law that the ancients called the amnesty of forgetfulness; they used it at the end of civil wars, to convince the people who had been animated against each other to lose the memory of all that had happened’.16 During the Ancien Régime, ‘mettre en oubliance’ meant for the French completely forgetting about anything which could rekindle the bitterness of former confrontations. In political practice, this oubliance, or forgetting, was inextricably linked to amnesty. The Trévoux Dictionnaire shows how real the fusion of these two concepts had become, deﬁning amnesty in the following manner: ‘General pardon accorded to subjects by a Treaty or Edict, when the Prince declares that he forgets and that he abolishes all that happened, and promises that one will not search it out’.17 The forgiving and forgetting of such offences demanded empathy on the part of the king, whose duty it was to listen to his subjects and be open to their plight. Henri IV indicated that he was following Christ’s example by forgiving the members of the League for having taken up arms against him. As he stated in the preamble to the Edict of Reconciliation of Paris, God had ‘wanted to leave for teaching, and to witness by example, and by the word of his son Jesus Christ, that those who will wish to be held for his children, must forget offences’.18 The gesture was all the more easy to make since he accepted the idea that the members of the League were only trying to defend their religion and were not opposing him on a personal level. Unfortunately, they had been misled by their leaders and by the Spanish who behind a veil of Catholicism concealed their true motivations to seize the crown more easily, to the detriment of Henri IV’s legitimate succession.19 Louis XIII employed the same trick to forgive his brother’s actions, while still condemning some of his accomplices. Thus, in March 1630, he declared guilty of treason the individuals who had induced Gaston d’Orléans to ﬂee the kingdom. In August, in an edict which reiterated this position, he attacked ‘those who abusing the facility of our very dear and very loved only brother the duc d’Orléans would have led him by their artiﬁces and pernicious counsels to leave us and to leave our Realm without our seal and permission’.20 So, in the case of political crimes, the kings tried to explain and, therefore, understand the acts of their subjects, to clear them of suspicion by making individuals whose errors were ﬁrmly established responsible for their actions.

Michel De Waele 137

As far as more ‘social’ crimes, such as an uprising of the people, were concerned, the monarchs also showed understanding, because the political situation often caused misery among the peasants. On 8 June 1590, the Parlement of Tours examined a ruling from Henri IV raising a new tax on every muid of salt. In this ruling, the king described the situation which he had confronted since claiming the throne: the need to ﬁght felons who had revolted against him had entailed excessive expense. He would prefer to put an end to the crisis by showing clemency: yet that seemed like an impossible task to him. He needed time, soldiers and money in order to achieve his goal. He said he was completely aware of the torment and the ordeals which his subjects had to endure, but in order to guarantee his own safety and that of the kingdom and all French citizens, he had no choice but to raise an additional tax.21 Consequently, he could not say that he was surprised to see some inhabitants of the kingdom, who were at their wits’ end, take up arms to demonstrate their distress. In March 1594, Jean de Thumery, a councillor in the Parlement of Tours, was commissioned to carry out an investigation into the recriminations made by the Croquants in the Limousin. In the letter he wrote to the sénéschal of Bourdeilles to advise him of Thumery’s arrival, the king displayed a deﬁnite willingness to enter into dialogue and an inclination to show leniency towards the rebel peasants: ‘I desire, if it is possible, that this chaos and disorder is re-ordered by mildness and that the said rebels recognise [this] themselves and lay down their arms’.22 Aware of the ordeals which his subjects had to endure, the king tended to forgive them for speaking out publicly. Following ancient ways of thinking and practice which were based on history, philosophy and religion, the ﬁrst two Bourbons wanted to be perceived ﬁrst and foremost as kings who were close to their subjects, distressed by their misfortune and always ready to forgive them. This attitude was denounced by some who, following Thomas Aquinas, reminded that clemency must be based in sound reason, that is to say that it ‘diminishes the pains . . . when it is necessary, and in the case where it is necessary’. Any mitigation of sentencing had to conform to two guiding principles: ﬁrstly, it had to conform to the will of the legislator, and this in spite of the terms of the law, and secondly, it had to ensure that man did not abuse his power in laying down punishments. Nevertheless, Thomas warned that ‘to pardon all is as cruel as to refuse pardon to all’.23 Equally, contemporaries were reminded that Caesar died as a result of his leniency, a theme frequently found in seventeenthcentury theatre. For example, in La mort de César, George de Scudéry reminds Lépide that

138

Conﬂict Resolution under the First Bourbons

To those whose hand governs the universe The greatest enemies are the least discovered: The mildness of Caesar will be found deceived, And his clemency will ultimately not have good result.24

Acceptance of revolt From 1495 to 1788, in other words a period covering 293 years, France was at war with one or several of her neighbours for 162 years and witnessed 58 years of intra-state wars. Moreover, as Jean Nicolas has pointed out there were 8528 cases of rebellion in the period between 1661 and 1789.25 The numbers put forward by Nicolas are enormous and suggest the coexistence of many forms of violence; he identiﬁes 72 different types. This attention to detail is not to be found among all historians, many of whom fail to examine the type of movement that they are researching. Thus, Hugues Neveux, in his study of peasant revolts in the early modern era, laments the fact that historians ‘employed this expression [peasant revolt] without feeling the need to deﬁne the content rigorously’.26 There is great conceptual confusion whenever internal political violence is discussed. The lack of precise and consensual deﬁnitions for terms such as insurrection, revolution, state of war, terrorism, revolt and civil war has led to these terms being freely used and often seeming interchangeable. Accordingly, in the preamble to her study of the Camisards, those Protestants who took up arms against Louis XIV from 1702 onwards, Liliane Creté speaks of war, guerrilla warfare, revolt, rebellion and insurrection, without any distinction. However, these different types of conﬂict were by no means identical and only some of them were common in that period. Unlike a riot, which represented localized collective violence of short duration, and was spontaneous and unorganized, revolt (la révolte) could affect more than one region and extend over several days, or indeed a lot longer.27 It was a movement that could mobilize considerable sections of the population, yet without managing to generate a dynamic that would be capable of transcending social groups or of causing the entire social order to erupt into violence. The ideology associated with revolt was not of the kind which motivated large numbers, because revolt normally broke out due to a speciﬁc problem: famine, excessive taxation, an unpopular judicial or political decision, and so on. As George Lefebvre quite rightly points out, if men gather together, ‘there was there among them beforehand, intermental action and formation of a collective mentality’.28

Michel De Waele 139

Strictly speaking, revolt did not undermine the foundations of political order and power relations. The legitimacy of government or the continuity of national destiny were not brought into question. Revolt was aimed more at how authority is used rather than the nature of it, as well as at the role of the ofﬁcers who were exercising this authority. Of course, all those involved in revolt demanded changes, because they found themselves placed in situations which they deemed dangerous or disastrous. The simple fact that people took up arms shows that they were capable of acknowledging the gravity of the situation and that they believed it to be possible to ﬁnd a solution for it.29 Often, during popular revolts, the attitude and the behaviour of the tax collector were denounced, unless it was the wheat merchants, who were being accused of artiﬁcially forcing the price up by refusing to immediately release the cereal stocks in their possession. Those who took part in such movements were convinced that the cause of their misfortune and of their taking up arms could easily be sorted out by royal authority. One of the founding myths of revolt concerned the natural goodness of the king and the tendency displayed by some of his ministers to conceal from him the suffering of his subjects. If the king was aware of it, he would immediately take the necessary measures to resolve the situation. Viewed from this angle, revolt may be seen as a cry from the heart of those involved, a call for help which could not but touch the monarch; moreover, it frequently happened that arms were taken up to the cry of ‘Vive le roi!’. Thus, revolt became a legitimate action and its protagonists could not be punished, since those who were truly guilty were close to the king and were deceiving him, while his subjects, on the contrary, wanted to expose a truth to the king which he had to listen to and accept because the very essence of the sovereign was to be just.30 Revolts on the part of the nobility systematically implicated the king’s close advisers, who supposedly acted, unbeknownst to the king, against the interests of the common good, often pursuing their own objectives. The rebellious action was undertaken to help the legitimate king whose authority was said to have been usurped by one or more of those close to him. It was not the king’s tyranny which was denounced, but that of those close to him. In 1560, in an attempt to justify the Amboise conspiracy, an anonymous pamphleteer explained to François II that if arms had been taken up, it was not in an attempt to defend the Protestant religion, but rather to remedy the ‘oppression made by them [the Guise] of our said Majesty, Estates, laws and customs of France’.31 As in the case of popular revolts, the demands put forward during noble revolts were often moderate, or expressed in commonplaces: the sovereign’s wishes were not

140

Conﬂict Resolution under the First Bourbons

being respected or carried out by his local representatives; justice was not being upheld; subjects were being strangled by excessive taxes; honour was no longer respected. A simple change of personnel or a taking in hand of the governmental apparatus by the monarch would be enough to put the situation right. The monarch needed to be surrounded by honest, moderate advisers, who cared about the well-being of his subjects and about the vital collective interests of the kingdom. Revolt, therefore, was often a spontaneous reaction, a defensive reﬂex and/or a backlash of anger in the face of a perceived threat. The actions it gave rise to were not necessarily a reﬂection of carefully thought out objectives, even if it was based on ‘the certitude of defending traditional rights and customs’.32 It was a response to an act of aggression; it was a gesture which, by the very fact of its reactive nature, did not call for great changes, or major upheaval in public order. Those engaged in it longed for a return to a former situation, one which was not very far removed, and one which had satisﬁed their economic, social, mental or political aspirations. Revolt was strongly ritualized, a mere jolt on the political terrain of the sovereignty even though it could bring about a rather bumpy ride. Individuals who were dissatisﬁed with a particular situation negotiated amongst themselves, which led to the drafting of a statement outlining their intentions. Subsequently, they would prepare and publish a protestation in which the legitimacy of their pursued objectives was asserted and in which they attributed the blame for all acts of violence to their adversaries. They would nominate a leader and, as a fourth and ﬁnal step, they would take a vow of mutual allegiance.33 Although it was difﬁcult to know who the leaders of the popular movements were, nobles who initiated such actions could be easily identiﬁed. Owners of vast domains, which allowed them to ﬁnance their operations, to meet the different needs of their clientele in terms of positions and favours and to provide them with a safe retreat, were the offspring of ancient families that often had close links to the reigning family. Accordingly, the most active noble during the 1610s was the Prince de Condé, whose family descended from the younger brother of Antoine de Navarre, Henri IV’s father. Based on this kinship, he could hope to ascend to the throne one day if Louis XIII and his brother died without children. His status as ‘prince du sang’ gave him the right, in his eyes, to play an important role in the political life of the kingdom. However, if the regent Marie de Médici had no choice but to take account of this prince when conducting public affairs, she also had to be wary of his ambitions which did not always coincide with the public good, despite what he may have claimed. A dangerous balancing act

Michel De Waele 141

emerged which did not satisfy Condé and his allies who seized upon the closer ties between the Spanish and French Crowns as a pretext to oppose Marie de Médici’s policies openly. Marie, in fact, had negotiated a matrimonial alliance with Madrid in order to secure peace between the two kingdoms, which had almost continually been at war for more than a century. At the start of 1614, Condé took Sainte-Menehould, while the duc de Nevers took the citadel at Mézières. The control of these two strongholds located on the kingdom’s borders placed them in an advantageous situation when negotiating with the Crown. In a letter addressed to the king, the prince stated that his position forced him to work for the good of the kingdom: Sire, it is to me an extreme misfortune and very sensitive displeasure to see myself removed from the presence of your Majesty for so long knowing well that I do not lack slanderers who try by their artiﬁces to put me also outside of your good graces. But I hope when he will consider my condition and the rank that I hold close to his after Monsieur his brother that he will judge me too concerned to fail in my duty and will have the honour of rejecting the bad impressions that some have wished to give him of me which I ask very humbly daring to say that my conservation serves that of Your Majesty.34 Such statements did not convince observers of the political scene. For one, Guillaume Du Vair in a letter to Monsieur de Villeroy was upset ‘to see so much spirit [carried] to trouble the state and so little to procure the good and repose’.35 However, the agreement negotiated between the two parties contained few clauses of national interest.36 The nobles obtained a few guarantees, disarmed the troops and received an assurance that the Estates General would be convened. After achieving few results at this meeting, Condé left the court again in early June 1615, taking with him some important nobles: the duc de Longueville, de Mayenne, de Bouillon, de Rohan and de Vendôme. The manifesto that they published harshly attacked the regent, accusing her of having ﬁxed the elections of deputies to the Estates General to ensure her control over them, of not listening to the voice of the kingdom as expressed during this meeting and of prostrating herself to Spanish power.37 Therefore, the taking up of arms did not give rise to a great many violent clashes between the rebel armies, on the one hand, and the Crown, on the other. On the contrary, it opened the door to negotiations between the parties. The normality of revolt in Ancien Régime France is evident in the fact that the sovereigns were always willing to negotiate with revolt leaders.38

142

Conﬂict Resolution under the First Bourbons

Of course, more often than not, the monarchy found itself in a ﬁnancial impasse which prevented it from quickly raising troops in order to overcome a revolt. The need to keep soldiers at the kingdom’s borders also meant that in the regions where arms were taken up, there was generally a lack of forces present to immediately repress those concerned. Thus, in early 1594, the sénéschal of Périgord informed maréchal de Matignon of his inability to deal with the revolt of the tards-avisés: The Parlement of Bordeaux has often written to me and enjoined me to oppose those assemblies that the people make under the title of tard avisez but as I do not have the liard to take to the ﬁeld I have excused myself because I have not received any deniers from the estate which it has pleased the King to give me over this region.39 Lack of means allowed the Huguenots in the Midi region of France to take up arms in the days after the Saint Bartholomew Day massacre, for example. Not only could the royalists not prevent this particular wave from breaking, but their limited resources, amongst others, their weak artillery, did not allow them to actually contemplate regaining lost towns.40 This situation, frustrating in itself, may perhaps explain, in the case of the popular revolts, the extent of the repression when those in power ﬁnally succeeded in sufﬁciently mobilizing the troops to confront armed peasants.41 Yet the ﬁrst gesture made by the kings continued to be one of gentleness. Revolts instigated by nobles also called for negotiations between aristocrats and the royal government, proof that the taking up of arms constituted ﬁrst and foremost a political rather than a military gesture. Quite often, its purpose was to place rebellious nobles in a position of power in relation to the sovereign so as to be able to win advantageous concessions from him. Thus, in the spring of 1585, Henri de Guise took control of the major towns in Champagne without meeting any resistance. Instead of pushing his advantage even further, he went to Catherine de Médici to negotiate an agreement with her which was meant to guarantee the survival of Catholicism. The very ritual of revolt called for negotiation. In effect, the fact of formally presenting in writing a list of one’s grievances and listing the solutions which one deemed most appropriate for solving them was, in itself, an invitation to negotiation. This did not prevent both parties from being prepared for all eventualities, as evidenced in the letter Concini addressed on 14 April 1614 to the vicomte de Brigueil: I have received letters from their Majesties in which they inform me that they still hope that everything may yet be brought to a peaceful

Michel De Waele 143

conclusion by the conference of Soissons. Nevertheless so as to be prepared for all events, they command me to hold the nobility of this province warned to be ready to mount horse at the ﬁrst commands that I will have.42 In February 1616, the conference of Loudun saw the king’s representatives and those of the rebel princes trying to reach a satisfactory agreement for both parties. To make negotiations easier, both agreed at the outset to a truce throughout the entire kingdom. A peace edict would be published by the king a few months later, in which the ﬁrst article abolished the memory of all things which had occurred in the kingdom since the outbreak of trouble.43 Desperate situations did not prevent the holding of negotiations. Thus, following the defeat of Castelnaudary, Louis XIII and Gaston d’Orléans started talks as early as 9 September, while the king sent Monsieur d’Aiguebonne to his brother with the mission of telling him that he, Louis, wished to continue to show him his usual kindness. Gaston responded by presenting demands that Louis found ‘so little suited to my dignity, to the good of my state and to your own’ that he sent his emissary back to his brother asking him to accept the articles which he was offering to him, ‘assuring you that in this case, I will forget the past with a completely good heart’. In the treaty to which both parties ﬁnally agreed, Louis XIII declared himself willing to forgive and forget his brother’s latest revolt, without laying down any further conditions: that he had a true repentance, & that he shows that he does not wish to fall again, as he did twice, after having received from his Majesty a parallel grace to that which he wishes to make for him now. A few days later, the king was able to write to the Prince de Condé that Monsieur the duc de Orleans having at last recognised the bad counsels that he had followed and accepted the conditions that I proposed to him as much for the enjoyment of his goods as for the pardon of his household who are at present with him, he goes with my good grace to his house in Champagne in the liberty to go to make his residence in Tours.44 French political life, therefore, allowed the nobles, as well as lesser subjects, to revolt. The kings accepted this state of affairs all the more readily because they did not possess the ﬁnancial, military, police or political

144

Conﬂict Resolution under the First Bourbons

resources to prevent acts of violence which were not aimed at the destruction of the realm. In such cases, the door remained open to negotiation, which invariably led to an agreement between the parties.

Unforgivable behaviour Revolt in Ancien Régime France was clearly signalled and clearly expressed. It was a public act that conformed to a certain ritual and put forward demands which inevitably called for negotiation. Those who followed the rules of the game ran little risk on a political level. On the other hand, anyone who moved away from established practices often paid dearly. Historians have tended to view all conﬂicts which threatened royal authority during the Ancien Régime on an equal footing. They have compared the fate of their leaders, without asking themselves if their acts were of a similar nature. They have judged the monarchs’ attitude without questioning the behaviour of their subjects. There, however, lies a fundamental difference which may explain why some beneﬁted from the king’s clemency, while others experienced the full extent of his anger. If a revolt that was duly announced and then resolved was normally forgiven, a contrario persistence in one’s error and secrecy of actions normally gave rise to severe punishment. For more than ﬁve years, the members of the League refused to recognize Henri IV as their king. However, no political ﬁgure, beginning with Henri IV, saw this as a mark of stubbornness. On the contrary, the preambles to the edicts of reconciliation that were negotiated between the parties claimed that, as soon as the political situation appeared favourable, the supporters of the League rallied around the ﬁrst Bourbon. Having discovered that their leaders deceived them, when they alleged that they defended religion but actually acted in their own interests, the Leaguers spontaneously turned to Henri IV once he had proven his Catholic faith to them. The preamble to the edict of Château-Thierry outlined effectively the message that Henri IV wanted to send out to his subjects. Divine mercy had so cleared the eyes of our said subjects, that it has made them know that they were born to serve it and to obey its commands, and that in consequence of these [developments] to [serve] us, as Ministers of his power and authority, that they in the end rejected the poison of the Spanish tyranny, to which under the lure of a gentle liberty it [Spanish tyranny] wished to enslave them perpetually, and recognised that to us alone was due by all divine and human law the obedience that it

Michel De Waele 145

[Spanish tyranny] made them reject and refuse for so long. This is why in an instant and against all men’s hopes, the inhabitants of the Capital towns of our Realm were the ﬁrst licentiates of the said work, and who seemed to be the most distant, threw themselves at our feet, and accusing themselves of their so obstinate rebellion required Us to forget all past offences, and to admit them to the number of our very humble and faithful subjects, protesting never to abandon our protection, to give up those who maliciously withdrew them, and to live and die in the recognition and defence of our authority. In which they have shown themselves to be prompt and willing, and we have found ourselves still more disposed to receive them and to forget all malice of the times permitted in prejudice to us, and to caress and embrace them with the mildness and clemency that a child can seek from a father irritated and offended by his impudence: but nevertheless also jealous of his good and repose, as his own.45 Factors that we have already dealt with are to be found here: not only the acceptance of positions adopted by the Leaguers and the attribution of the blame to the Spanish, but also the refuge in royal clemency found by those who recognied the error of their ways. Louis XIII found himself exposed to a different attitude in 1628. Having pardoned the inhabitants of La Rochelle for taking up arms, he hoped that the Huguenots who were continuing the ﬁght would understand ‘that my just indignation towards the rebels turns soon to favourable treatment when they recognise their fault and return to their duty’. He expressed this hope to the duc de Bellegarde on 10 March 1629, and repeated it ten days later: ‘I wish that of themselves they settle down to what they must do, and do not force me to reduce them there by the force of my arms’.46 He was quickly disappointed. Far from submitting, the inhabitants of Privas, convinced that their town could not be taken, stood up to the royal army, forcing it to use canons. According to the king, the besieged ‘by their crimes and by the audacity that they had to await me with my army and to see me draw my canon for eight days...[they render themselves] unworthy of all grace’. Instead of surrendering to the king’s mercy, they attempted to ﬂee. Those who were captured were hung without trial. The town was given over to plundering by the soldiers. In the letter that he wrote to Bellegarde informing him of these events, the king said that he wished that the remainder of his journey would be more tranquil, and that, instead of being overcome by force, his rebel subjects would give him the chance to ‘to use as much clemency and bounty towards those who will wear them there just as the rebellion and stubbornness of these forced me to my great

146

Conﬂict Resolution under the First Bourbons

regret to use severity and rigour against them’.47 Louis XIII had adopted a similar stance in 1622 with the inhabitants of Nègrepelisse. Believing that his subjects would open the city gates to him, he was surprised to see that the ofﬁcers he had sent to have the gates opened were greeted with gun shots. The town ﬁnally surrendered to the king, but he inﬂicted an exemplary punishment on it, after having spared the women and children.48 Obviously, the Protestants of Nègrepelisse and Privas had played offside in the eyes of the king who had decided to punish them. They were chastized not for having taken up arms, but rather because they had not accepted the informal rules of revolt which demanded that subjects should seize the ﬁrst opportunity available to them to lay down arms and to return to the right path. Of course, the fate which was reserved for them depended on the good will of the king, who could decide whether or not to make an example of the recalcitrant rebel. However, room for arbitrary decisions disappeared completely in the face of another threat which occasionally hovered over sovereign authority: that of conspiracy. Even more so than revolt, conspiracy was considered, as much on account of its objectives as of its modus operandi, as the most dangerous act that a sovereign had to face. For this reason, its participants, if captured, ran the risk of being punished more severely. And the majority of great noblemen who were executed for political reasons during the reign of Louis XIII were involved in plots: Chalais, Ornano, Soissons, De Thou and Cinq-Mars. Conspiracy was the last resort which revealed the despondency its partakers felt when faced with exceptional situations, beyond the ordinary run of events, which, according to them, risked dragging the realm into wrack and ruin. If revolt was ﬁrst and foremost a form of public denunciation of a situation that was considered intolerable and an appeal for negotiation to sort out abuses, conspiracy was a violent act that sought a radical and abrupt change at the highest levels of the sovereignty. It involved the assassination of an important piece of the political chessboard. In choosing secrecy, the conspirators showed that they no longer had conﬁdence in the political ritual of the time, and particularly in the king’s ability to resolve situations of conﬂict. In fact, conspiracy amounts to recognition of the king’s incompetence to manage a political situation and the need to impose a solution on him. If revolt was an armed dialogue with the monarch, conspiracy was undertaken with no reference to dialogue with him, especially when he was the direct object of the plot. Tyrannical power, as numerous examples from Antiquity showed, called for conspiracy. The assassination of Henri III by Jacques Clément, whether it was a plot hatched by an individual or by a small group, was intended by its perpetrator to rid France of a tyrant.

Michel De Waele 147

Conspiracy was all the more dangerous for the sovereignty in that it generally had international signiﬁcance. Its perpetrators often relied, in one way or another, on a foreign country to carry it out. According to Philippe d’Ayala, the archduke of Austria’s resident in France, the arrest of maréchal Biron and the comte d’Auvergne on Henri IV’s orders shocked observers who did not really know what to make of it: some say that not only had they offended against the King’s person, but also against those of the Queen and Monseigneur le Daulphin, others that it is under the leadership of Monseigneur the duc de Savoy and of the Count of Fuentes, who made [Biron] touch the money of the King of Spain and assured him of the marriage to the second daughter of Monseigneur the duc de Savoy, and the donation of the Duchy of Bourgogne, of ﬁfty million écuz income per month, with the title of general of His Majesty’s army.49 In any case, the secret required by conspiracy went against traditional noble values. The cowardice of the planned assassination was contrary to the bravery that warriors displayed on battle ﬁelds. The obvious treachery, when great noblemen and those close to the king were involved in the plot, was a negation of the friendship that was supposed to link them together. Breaking one’s promise to be faithful contravened the old feudalstyle contract between the political leaders of the time. Conspiracy also allowed individuals, who normally would not have had any important political role, to suddenly play a part on the political scene. As Machiavelli put it, ‘few individuals are in the position to make open war against a prince, but everyone is all the same in the position to conspire’.50 In 1641, the duc de Soissons was accused of having asked two hermits to make an attempt on the life of Cardinal de Richelieu.51 Clément and Ravaillac had already shown that princes needed to fear their most insigniﬁcant subjects, although they had no means of protection against them. The sum of these traits, which were peculiar to plots, gave rise to anxiety, repulsion and rejection. In Ancien Régime France conspiracy, a cowardly, dastardly and anti-chivalrous act, was readily associated with Italians.52 The revulsion that conspiracy inspired was expressed by the fate that was generally reserved for its participants who could hope for no pity from the prince, even if they managed to escape the people. The fate, which the corpse of amiral Coligny was subjected to at the time of the Saint Bartholomew Day massacre, is well known. Young Parisians mutilated it, dragged it through its streets and set ﬁre to it before throwing it in the Seine. Natalie Davis considered such behaviour as ‘rites of violence’

148

Conﬂict Resolution under the First Bourbons

which ‘were drawn from a store of punitive or puriﬁcatory traditions current in sixteenth-century France’.53 Yet these traditions were not the sole preserve of religious violence. Any event that went against the norms of political life could give rise to them, particularly conspiracy. If Coligny’s body met this fate and if ‘normal’ Catholics took their anger out on Protestants with such aggression during the month of August 1572, it was also due to the fact that the Huguenots were being accused of plotting against the realm and against the Roman Church. Henri IV and Louis XIII adopted the same stance: the conspirators were tried, condemned and executed. Furthermore, the seriousness with which their crimes were judged increased when they were found to have had dealings with foreigners. In August 1626, a chamber of justice was established in Nantes, with the king having been made aware of ‘several conspiracies made against our person and our authority, and of crimes of treason against the chief leader the most atrocious that the extremely malicious be able [to think of]’.54 During the ﬁrst day of the comte de Chalais trial, the garde des sceaux listed the pieces of evidence that he would use, particularly the ‘letters of foreign agents concerning the conspiracy of Maréchal d’Ornano’.55 Cinq-Mars and de Thou, in the last conspiracy that Richelieu would have to face, also looked for support from the Spanish.56 At a time when France was at war with the Hapsburg family, to have sought an alliance with Madrid constituted a serious aggravating circumstance in any revolt by the nobles. In 1641, the duc de Soissons had led a revolt against the king. In the preamble to the agreement which he negotiated with Louis XIII, the duc de Bouillon, one of his accomplices, is seen to ‘ask the King very humbly, to pardon him the fault that he made, by separating himself from his ﬁdelity, and from the natural obedience that [the King] must have of him, treating with the Spanish, and taking arms with them against [the King’s] service in the interests of Mr le Comte de Soissons’. He further testiﬁed that he felt ‘an extreme repentance for such a crime’, although this did not prevent him from becoming involved in the conspiracy of Cinq-Mars a year later.57 An unrepentant opponent of Richelieu, Bouillon showed that the politics of leniency exercised by the kings of France did not guarantee them tranquillity. The ﬁercest examples of royal justice, such as the sentencing of the duc de Montmorency in 1632 to death for the crime of treason, were no more successful in ensuring peace. The events which shook the kingdom under the ﬁrst two Bourbons seemed to corroborate the view of the archdukes’ resident, A. de Clercq, who wrote of France that ‘this nation cannot subsist without disorder, turbulence and confusion’.58

Michel De Waele 149

It is true that conﬂicts were part and parcel of French political life. Nobody was surprised by another armed revolt, all the more so since the situation at the summit of the political pyramid was far from clear. Questions relating to the heir to the crown almost continually dominated French political life for more than a century. The death of Henri II in 1559 opened the door to a period of dynastic tension that was to know little rest until Louis XIV began to have children. Henri IV settled the question for a while by having three sons, yet his assassination gave rise to another period of prolonged instability. In this context where power might be considered to be there for the taking, the aristocrats, who customarily advised sovereigns, became agitated and jostled for position. Insofar as their behaviour respected traditional political rules, they were certain that they would be pardoned for their misdeeds. Their kings recognized the delicate political situation in which members of the nobility found themselves – just as they were aware of the socio-economic difﬁculties of all their subjects. Following Christ’s example, they were willing to forget the errors of sinners if these followed a public process of conversion in which recognition of their crimes and a plea for pardon played central roles. But punishment was swift to strike any subjects who strayed away from established practices. Persistent revolts, which constituted a refusal to acknowledge one’s crimes and secretive actions, were unpardonable. France experienced very little stability under the ﬁrst Bourbons, and the gaps between conﬂicts grew even shorter. Yet the actual way of resolving them was inscribed in a traditional practice that remained unchanged.

Notes Translated by Declan Webb. The research for this article was made possible through a grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. 1. Archives du Musée Condé (Chantilly) [henceforth AMC], M 3, f. 433. 2. Robin Briggs, Early Modern France 1560–1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 113. John Elliott, for his part, blamed Richelieu for the sentencing to death of Montmorency, which was delivered a few weeks later, and he mentioned in this regard the ‘sheer ruthlessness of the man’: J. H. Elliott, Richelieu and Olivares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 119. 3. Georges Dethan, Gaston d’Orléans, conspirateur et prince charmant (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1959), p. 97. 4. Recueil memorable de tout ce qui s’est passé pour le faict du sieur Duc de Biron, Mareschal de France (Langres: J. des Preyz, 1602); Archives générales du Royaume (Bruxelles), Papiers de l’État et de l’Audience [henceforth AGR, PEA] 421, ff. 8–9.

150

Conﬂict Resolution under the First Bourbons

5. Testament politique d’Armand Du Plessis cardinal duc de Richelieu (Amsterdam: Henry Desbordes, 1679), p. 5. 6. Lucien Romier, Le royaume de Catherine de Médicis. La France à la veille des guerres de religion, 2 vols (Paris: Perrin, 1925); Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of Aristocracy, 1558–1681 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); Davis Bitton, The French Aristocracy in Crisis 1560–1640 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969); J. Russell Major, From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Sharon Kettering, ‘Patronage and Politics during the Fronde’, French Historical Studies, 14 (1986), 409–41; William F. Church, Richelieu and the Reason of State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Richard Bonney, Political Change under Richelieu and Mazarin, 1624–1661 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Jean-Marie Constant, Les conjurateurs. Le premier libéralisme politique sous Richelieu (Paris: Hachette, 1987). 7. James B. Wood, The Nobility of the Election of Bayeux, 1463–1666: Continuity through Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Bill Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Daniel Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et société au grand siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1984), pp. 346–8; Françoise Bayard, Le monde des ﬁnanciers au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1988); Ariane Boltanski, Les ducs de Nevers et l’état royal. Genèse d’un compromis (ca 1550–ca 1600) (Geneva: Droz, 2006), pp. 131–69; Katia Béguin, Les princes de Condé. Rebelles, courtisans et mécènes dans la France du grand siècle (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1999); James B. Wood, The King’s Army: Warfare, Soldiers and Society during the Wars of Religion in France, 1562–1576 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Guy Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661–1701 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 8. Bibliothèque Nationale de France [hereafter BNF], MS Fr. 3672, f. 35. 9. BNF, MS Fr. 20546, f. 89 (Louis XIII to Bellegarde, from the camp in front of La Rochelle, 30 October 1628). 10. Articles accordez par le Roy a ses subjets de la ville de La Rochelle. Sur le pardon par eux demandé à sa Majesté, à cause de leur rébellion (Paris: A. Estienne, P. Mettayer and C. Prevost, 1628); Articles de la grace accordee par le Roy, au duc de Rohan, et autres ses subjects de la Religion pretenduë reformée, envoyés par sa Majesté à Monsieur d’Halincourt (Lyon: n.p., 1629). 11. BNF, MS Fr. 6644, f. 55. 12. BNF, MS Fr. 4873, ff. 130–1. 13. Michel De Waele, ‘Clémence royale et ﬁdélités françaises à la ﬁn des guerres de Religion’, Historical Reﬂections/Réﬂexions Historiques, 24 (1998), 231–52. 14. Michel De Waele and Johanne Biron, ‘L’Hercule Gaulois et le glaive spirituel’, in M.-J. Louison-Lassablière (ed.), Le recours à l’Écriture. Polémique et conciliation du XVe au XVIIe siècle (Saint-Etienne: Presses de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2000), pp. 211–29; Jacques Foviaux, La rémission des peines et des condamnations. Droit monarchique et droit moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970); Krista Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 15. ‘Edict et declaration du Roy sur la reduction de la ville de Paris, soubs son obeissance’, Recueil des edicts et articles accordez par le Roy Henry IIII. pour la reünion de ses subiets (n.pl.: n.p., 1606), ff. 20v–6.

Michel De Waele 151 16. Armand Jean du Plessis Richelieu, Lettres, instructions diplomatiques et papiers d’État du cardinal de Richelieu, 8 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1853–77), i, p. 14: ‘Petite harangue au chapitre de Luçon’, 21 December 1608. 17. Dictionnaire universel français et latin, 8 vols (Paris: Libraires associés, 1752), i, p. 549. 18. ‘Edict et declaration du Roy sur la reduction de la ville de Paris: soubs son obeissance’, Recueil des edicts et articles accordez par le Roy Henry IIII. pour la reünion de ses subiets (n.pl.: n.p., 1606), ff. 20v˚–26. 19. Archives nationales de France [hereafter AN], X1a 8641, ff. 54–9: ‘Edit du roi sur la reduction de la ville d’Abbeville a son obeissance’. 20. Archives départementales de la Haute-Garonne, B 1915, f. 116. 21. AN, X1a 8640, f. 122; X1a 9232, ff. 30 and 352. 22. J. Berger de Xivrey and J. Guadet (eds), Recueil de lettres missives de Henri IV, 9 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1843–76), iv, p. 111 (to Monsieur de Bourdeille, 11 mars 1594). This attitude was not unique to the king of France. For England, see K. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority, and for Sweden Kenneth Johansson, ‘The Lords from the Peasants or the Peasants from the Lords. The Dacke War and the Concept of Cummunalism’, in Kimmo Katajala (ed.), Northern Revolts. Medieval and Early Modern Peasant Unrest in the Nordic Countries (Helsinski: Finnish Literature Society, 2004), p. 56. 23. Thomas Aquinas, Somme théologique (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1984–86), II, II, Q. 157, art.2, s. 1; art. 3, s. 1. See also, Michel De Waele, ‘Image de force, perception de faiblesse: la clémence d’Henri IV’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, 17 (1993), 51–60. 24. Georges de Scudéry, Le Prince déguisé – La mort de César, Évelyne Dutertre and Dominique Moncond’Huy (eds) (Paris: Société des Textes Français Moderne, 1992 [ﬁrst pubished 1634?]), act II, scene I. See also on the same theme, Jacques Grévin, César, Jeffrey Foster (ed.) (Paris: A. G. Nizet, 1974 [ﬁrst published 1561]), act I; Robert Garnier, Cornélie, Raymond Lebègue (ed.) (Paris: Société des Belles Lettres, 1973 [ﬁrst published 1574]), act IV; and Voltaire, La mort de César, Œuvres Complètes, 52 vols (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877–1885 [ﬁrst published in 1743]), iii, act I, scene 4. 25. John Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: the French Army, 1610–1715 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 11; Jean Nicolas, La rébellion française. Mouvements populaires et conscience sociale 1661–1789 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), pp. 548–50. 26. Hugues Neveux, Les révoltes paysannes en Europe XIVe-XVIIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), p. 35. 27. J. R. Ruff, Violence in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 184; Yves-Marie Bercé, Histoire des Croquants. Études des soulèvements populaires au XVIIe siècle dans le sud-ouest de la France (Geneva: Droz, 1974), p. 164. 28. George Lefebvre, ‘Les foules révolutionnaires’, La Grande Peur de 1789 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1988), p. 245. 29. Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, Ongles bleus, Jacques et Ciompi. Les révolutions populaires en Europe aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1970), p. 93. 30. Yves-Marie Bercé, Révoltes et révolutions dans l’Europe moderne XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980), pp. 37–42. 31. Les Estats de France opprimez par la tyrannie de ceux de Guise. Au Roy leur souverain seigneur (n.pl.: n.p., 1560). For another example, see BNF, MS Fr. 3802, f. 37.

152

Conﬂict Resolution under the First Bourbons

32. E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), 76–136. 33. Arlette Jouanna, Le devoir de révolte: la noblesse française et la gestation de l’État moderne (1559–1661) (Paris: Fayard, 1989), pp. 369–72. 34. AMC, M 1, f. 23. 35. BNF, MS Fr. 15582, f. 36 (Guillaume du Vair to Monsieur de Villeroy, Aix, 1 August 1615). 36. Articles accordez par le sieur Duc de Ventadour, Pair de France, & lieutenant general pour le roy au gouvernement de Languedoc, & les sieurs de Thou, Jannin, Boissise et de Bullion: tous conseillers d’Estats, & commissaires depputez par Sa Majesté, en vertu du pouvoir cy apres transcript, du cinquiesme may dernier, à Mgr. le Prince de Condé, . . . tant en son nom que des autres princes et seigneurs qui l’ont assisté (Paris: Joseph Bouillerot, 1614). 37. Manifeste et justiﬁcation des actions de M. le Prince (Sedan: J. Janon, 1615). 38. Arlette Farge, La vie fragile: violence, pouvoirs et solidarités à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1986), pp. 295–6. 39. BNF, MS Fr. 23194, f. 162. 40. Philip Conner, Huguenot Heartland. Montauban and Southern French Calvinism during the Wars of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 153–4. 41. Anthony Fletcher explains the wild nature of the repression of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1537 and of the nobles of the north revolt in 1569 in this way: Tudor Rebellions (London: Longman, 1983). 42. BNF, MS Fr. 3800, f. 1. 43. BNF, MS Fr. 3800, f. 67 (Louis XIII to vicomte de Brigueil, 26 janvier 1616). Edict du Roy pour la paciﬁcation des troubles de son Royaume. Vériﬁé en Parlement le 13 juin, 1616 (Lyon, Barthelemy Ancelin and Nicolas Iullieron, 1616). 44. BNF, Dupuy 380, ff. 110–11; Articles de la Paix accordée par le Roy à Monsieur le Duc d’Orleans, Frere unique de sa Majesté (Paris: Antoine Estienne, P. Mettayer and C. Prevost, 1632); AMC, M. 3, f. 452. 45. AN, X1a 8641, f. 206v: ‘Lettres patentes portant règlement pour la réduction de la ville de Château-Thierry’, July 1594. 46. BNF, MS Fr. 20546, ff. 93 and 97. 47. BNF, MS Fr. 20546, f. 107. See also the letters written by Richelieu to the Queen, Richelieu, Lettres, instructions diplomatiques et papiers, iii, pp. 323, 324, 325. 48. BNF, MS Fr. 20546, f. 59. 49. AGR, PEA 421, fol. 3. 50. Nicola Machiavel, Discours sur la première décade de Tite-Live (Paris: BergerLevrault, 1980), p. 254. 51. BNF, MS Fr. 17296, f. 55: ‘Accusation de Monsieur de Vendosme d’avoir voulu induire un certain hermitte a attenter contre la personne de Monsieur le Cardinal duc de Richelieu, en 1641’. 52. M. H. Smith, ‘Complots, révoltes et tempéraments nationaux: Français et Italiens au XVIe siècle’, Complots et conjurations dans l’Europe moderne (Rome: École française de Rome, 1996), p. 116. 53. Natalie Davis, ‘The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France’, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 185–6. 54. BNF, Dupuy 93, f. 129.

Michel De Waele 153 55. BNF, Dupuy 480, f. 66v. 56. ‘Relation faite par M. de Fontrailles des choses particulières de la cour pendant la faveur de M. le Grand’, in Petitot et Monmerqué (eds), Collection des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire de France, 79 vols (Paris, Foucault, 1819–29), liv, p. 428. 57. BNF, MS Fr. 23314, f. 72: ‘Accommodement du duc de Bouillon Prince de Sedan, avec le Roy; du 5 & 6 aoust 1641’. 58. AGR, PEA 425, f. 151 (to A. de Clercq, from Paris, the evening of 19 June 1631).

This page intentionally left blank

Part IV Catholic Activism to the Richelieu Years

This page intentionally left blank

7 Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation Barbara Diefendorf

During the weeks that preceded Henri IV’s entry into Paris on 22 March 1594, Leaguer preachers rallied the populace to oppose him by denouncing him as a heretic, an atheist and a hypocrite whose pretended conversion was mere trumpery and deceit. They called him a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a demon, the son of a whore and a seducer of nuns. Denouncing his consecration at Chartres as invalid, they insisted that the Pope could not absolve him without falling into heresy himself. The same preachers spread rumours that Henri was feasting on meat in his quarters at SaintDenis, even though it was Lent, and predicted an end to the Mass if he succeeded in defeating the Holy League.1 Although some Leaguer clerics changed their tune by early March, when Henri’s ultimate triumph began to appear inevitable, others donned armour in anticipation of a last great battle and urged their parishioners to join them in saving Paris for a truly Catholic king.2 As we all know, the will to ﬁght evaporated with Henri’s peaceful entry. What could priests in corselets do when Spanish soldiers were ﬁling out of the city and crowds in the streets were welcoming Henri with cheers? Henri’s most virulent opponents continued to rail against him from exile, but the tide had turned. City after city went over to the Crown. While still ﬁghting to extinguish the last remnants of the League on the battleﬁeld, Henri took up the new challenge of winning the hearts and minds of his heretofore enemies. Central to this challenge was the need to convince his most ardently Catholic subjects that he was – and would rule as – a Catholic king. This was a lengthy process and was only gradually accomplished. For analytical purposes, it can be divided into three stages. During the ﬁrst years after his conversion, Henri made very public efforts to display himself to his subjects as a sincerely Catholic king. He not only took 157

158

Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation

measures to silence clerics who continued to speak out against him but also used tact, negotiation and a policy of deliberately ignoring the past to win over devout Catholics who believed his conversion politically motivated and insincere. When he issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, he faced the challenge of convincing his most zealously Catholic subjects that the freedom of conscience and a limited but real right to worship promised to the Protestants by the edict were necessary measures and not a betrayal of their cause. This required a more commanding response through a ﬁrm demonstration of royal will, but was also aided immensely by Henri’s deliberate display of Catholic partisanship at the Fontainebleau Conference of May 1600. The Catholic triumph at Fontainebleau ushered in a new era of cooperation between Henri and the Dévots. Supporting their efforts to found newly austere Catholic institutions, Henri made himself a patron of France’s Catholic Reformation and inﬂuenced the shape it was to assume, such that when he died in 1610, Catholic preachers not only celebrated his piety but compared him to Clovis and Saint Paul in the impact of his conversion. This essay will take up each of these stages of Henri’s metamorphosis into a Catholic king in turn. Two cautions are necessary. First, as used here, the term ‘Dévots’ has two, overlapping meanings. The essay begins by looking at Henri’s attempts to convince all devout Catholics of his sincerity and bring them to support his rule. It later focuses on the small group of Catholic activists commonly referred to as ‘Dévots’, who sought to initiate a Catholic renewal or reformation in France in the wake of the religious wars and, in particular, the circle around Barbe Acarie in Paris. In neither the broader nor the narrower deﬁnition did these Dévots form a coherent political faction. They did not share a common political past. Although many – including Barbe Acarie – had been enthusiastic supporters of the League, this was not true of all. Some had remained faithful to the Crown throughout the religious wars; others, such as Michel de Marillac, for example, initially supported the League but later backed away.3 Nor did these devout Catholics necessarily share a common perspective on even such key political issues as the relationship between church and state, either during or after the League. This leads to my second caution: this essay will necessarily focus more on Henri’s efforts to cultivate support from devout Catholics than on the success of these efforts. Although there is some good evidence that much of the support Henri ultimately gained was sincere, we cannot know just how many hidden reservations some people maintained, or for how long. Obviously, Henri would not have been assassinated by a Catholic zealot

Barbara Diefendorf 159

in 1610 if his campaign to convince Catholics of his good intentions had been entirely successful.

‘He is no longer what he was’ The ﬁrst step in winning over devout Catholics was to convince skeptics not only that Henri’s religious conversion was sincere but also that this profoundly altered the situation, allowing him to be welcomed as France’s legitimate and divinely appointed king. A little pamphlet called La retraite de la Ligue, published anonymously in Lyons in 1594, expresses well the sentiment that a profound and meaningful transformation took place when Henri adopted the Catholic faith. ‘Raise your visors’, the author says, and take a good look at ‘him whom you wish so unjustly to ﬁght’: This is no longer the Bearnais prince whom they call the prince of heretics; nor is this the king of Navarre, whom the preachers dub the prince of Huguenots. Rather it is an entirely French prince, or, better put, the prince and king of all the French princes; a Most Christian King, and such as we desire him. He is no longer what he was; he is entirely other than what we have been given to understand . . . . Magnanimous, valiant, just, generous, clement, religious and debonnaire.4 The author of the piece goes on to say that the only problem with Henri had been his religion, but ‘the good and merciful Lord, having compassion for our too long though deserved afﬂictions, touched his heart in the midst of his victories and returned him to us such as we desired him, just when we least expected it’.5 This notion that Henri’s conversion was divinely inspired and God’s chosen way to bring peace to France was to become a major theme in the eulogies marking his death. In the years immediately following Henri’s Paris entry, however, sincerity and Catholic practice, rather than divine inspiration, were the keynotes in royalist propaganda, and Henri’s public participation in Catholic rituals was as important as published words or images in setting the tone. Henri’s self-representation as a Catholic king began even before Paris opened its gates to him. He carefully staged his abjuration at Saint-Denis, deliberately choosing a date liturgically associated with regenerated life and sending heralds into Paris to invite the public out to witness the ceremonies. Although League leaders forbade Parisians to go out to SaintDenis, many came anyway. They crowded around the abbey church,

160

Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation

where the release of a ﬂock of white doves from the belfry at the very moment that Henri received the consecrated Host allowed them vicariously to witness the king’s Communion.6 The elaborate sacre orchestrated at Chartres six months later reinforced Henri’s self-representation as a Catholic king at the same time that it responded to Leaguer charges that he lacked the consecration necessary to the Most Christian King. He still lacked papal absolution – an impediment much exploited by his enemies – but he made sure that people knew that his ambassadors in Rome were actively seeking the Pope’s pardon by publishing his letters to Clement VIII.7 Henri explicitly reiterated his promise ‘to live and die in the Roman Catholic faith’ in the broadsheets promising clemency distributed through Paris on the morning of his entry on 22 March.8 He also gave visible form to this promise by proceeding directly from the Porte Neuve, where he made his entry, through gathering throngs to Notre-Dame cathedral, where he prayed at the high altar and then heard mass.9 During the week that followed, he attended mass at a different church each day.10 On 29 March, he showed himself publicly again, taking part in a religious procession from the Sainte-Chapelle to Notre-Dame to celebrate the city’s restoration to obedience. The reliquary of Henri’s royal ancestor, Saint Louis, ﬁgured prominently among the holy objects brought out for the occasion, implicitly recalling Henri’s descent from a long line of Most Christian Kings.11 Holy Week began just a few days later and gave the king multiple opportunities to display his faith. He took part in the traditional Palm Sunday procession and offered the Blessed Bread that day at Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, the royal parish. He received absolution at Notre-Dame on Ash Wednesday, washed the feet of poor patients at the Hôtel-Dieu on Maundy Thursday and visited prisoners and gave them alms on Good Friday. On Easter Sunday, he touched for scrofula.12 Henri’s public participation in Catholic ceremonies continued after Holy Week, though rather less relentlessly. He was far more assiduous than his Valois predecessors, for example, in touching for scrofula and from the time of his Paris entry performed the ceremony at least twice a year.13 At the same time, he attempted to win over faltering Leaguers through his policy of clemency. The names of only 118 of the most outspoken and politically active Leaguers appeared on the initial list of men to be exiled from the city. A few names were added in the weeks that followed, but many more were pardoned and even conﬁrmed in their ofﬁces. When Henri was criticized for excessive clemency, he chastized his critics in explicitly Catholic terms, saying,

Barbara Diefendorf 161

If you, and all those who say such things, recited your rosary in all sincerity every day, you would not say what you do about me. I recognise that all my victories come from God, who extends to me his mercy in numerous ways, even though I am entirely unworthy; and as he pardons me, so do I wish to pardon and, in forgetting the errors of my people, be even more forgiving and merciful toward them than I have previously been.14 The Edict et declaration du roy, sur la reduction de la ville de Paris, soubs son obeyssance published on 24 March frames Henri’s forgiveness of Paris’s rebellion with the same analogy between royal and divine clemency: ‘Nothing gives greater evidence’, it says, ‘that we are made in the image of God than clemency and a good nature, freely forgetting past offenses and misdeeds’.15 The same edict casts Henri as a loyal Catholic by stressing his desire to have the advice and approval of the Pope in securing a durable peace. It also commences a more subtle rewriting of the League’s history by playing down the element of internal rebellion, depicting Henri’s true enemy as the Spanish intruders and portraying his Paris entry as a welcome liberation from foreign domination. Henri set the model and tone for the policy of oblivion – or forgetting of past wrongs – announced in the edict by describing his entry as resembling less that ‘of an irritated army than the joyous entries made by his royal predecessors upon their accession to the crown’.16 Emphasizing the rejoicing and applause of the crowds that gathered to greet him, he ignored the more negative emotions of the Leaguers who ﬂed in the wake of the Spanish army or stayed nervously in their homes. Opposition did not, of course, immediately cease on Henri’s Paris entry. The League’s rebellion continued, and many Leaguers looked at the loss of Paris as a temporary setback and not the end of the wars.17 Signiﬁcantly, much of the most vocal opposition continued to come from the pulpit, as clerics proﬁted from the Pope’s delay in absolving Henri to preach continued resistance to his rule. When Henri announced his intention to attend mass in the royal parish of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois on 24 March, parish priest Jacques de Cueilly forbade his vicars and parishioners to attend, telling them it would be a mortal sin.18 Cueilly preached continued support for the League on 25 March and was subsequently banished from Paris, but he was far from the only priest to take this stand. Despite attempts by not only the chancellor but also the archbishop’s ofﬁcial and penitentiary to remind Parisian clerics that their own bishop was in Rome seeking absolution for the king, and it was only a matter of time before it would be granted, some members of both the

162

Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation

secular and regular clergy continued to refuse to recognize Henri as king. Three of Paris’s most austere and respected religious orders – the Carthusians, Minims and Capuchins – for example, let it be known that they would not pray for Henri or recognize him as anything other than ‘prince of Béarn’ until he received his letters of absolution from the Pope.19 In the case of the Capuchins, this policy led to direct conﬂict with the king early in 1595 when Henri attempted to hear mass at the Capuchin friary near the Louvre and was abruptly turned away by the friary’s guardian, Paciﬁque de Souzy. Even though Henri was carrying letters from his ambassadors in Rome announcing that absolution would soon be granted, Père Paciﬁque insisted that the Capuchins could not say mass in his presence until they had seen the papal brief. According to the congregation’s chronicles, the furious king, retreating to the Louvre, signed letters for the expulsion of all of France’s Capuchins and only backed down when the bishop, Pierre de Gondi, reminded him that this could cause problems with Clement VIII, who still had not signed the all-important brief. Alongside this implicit threat – Henri could wait a long time for absolution – Gondi offered the more positive step of sending delegates to Rome to ask permission to pray for Henri even before the brief arrived. Paris’s Capuchins capitulated once these letters were received and admitted the king to Mass. Henri’s attempts to further capitalize on this success by sending copies to provincial governments apparently met with less success.20 Capuchins, in a number of provincial cities, continued to oppose Henri’s rule. In Orléans, Pierre Deschamps, one of the founders of the French congregation, continued into 1596 to preach that Henri was still secretly a heretic and only awaiting a good moment to entirely destroy the Catholic Church in France.21 In Rheims, the Capuchins were accused of taking part in factional politics and expelled in April 1597.22 And at least one member of the Amiens friary became involved in an assassination plot against the king. The plot failed but helped result in the city’s deliverance to the Spanish, thereby setting the stage for one of the great remaining battles with the League. Not all reformed religious orders proved so recalcitrant. The Feuillants had been active supporters of the League but were won over by the king in March 1595 when he reversed an order to shut down the Paris monastery on the ground that only four members remained and promised the monks adequate time to re-gather and strengthen their ranks after the trials imposed by the wars. Two years later, Henri issued letters patent declaring himself the monastery’s founder and giving it all

Barbara Diefendorf 163

of the ﬁnancial privileges of a royal foundation.23 However grateful, some members of the order undoubtedly continued to have mixed feelings about Henri personally, as well as lingering suspicions about the policies he would adopt with regard to his former co-religionists. The same was true of lay Catholics, especially but not exclusively those who had supported the League. The ﬁrst years following Henri IV’s entry were a time of difﬁcult readjustments, as former Leaguers and royalist Catholics sought new accommodations with one another and tried – with more or less good faith – to reconcile the ofﬁcial doctrine of forgetting past conﬂicts with vibrant memories of real or imagined wrongs. To take just one example, Barbe Acarie, whose husband Pierre was exiled from Paris for his active support of the League, found herself barraged by creditors and shunned by former friends as she set about trying to recuperate ﬁnancial losses due to her family’s involvement in the League.24 Her trials are said to have reinforced her practice of an ascetic and penitential piety. What they did to her political sympathies – which had been ardently proLeague – is harder to determine, but she remained staunchly opposed to permitting the Reformed faith to be practised in France and, as a consequence, almost certainly remained hostile to Henri IV and suspicious of his intentions for a considerable period of time. Although it is probable that old League sympathies were already being transformed into new Dévot alliances during the ﬁrst years after Henri’s Paris entry, these alliances only begin to emerge from the sources after peace was made with the Protestants in the spring of 1598 and the terms of this peace came to be known. The religious coexistence prescribed by the edict was the ﬁrst and most inﬂammatory of several issues that forced new accommodations between devout Catholics and Henri IV between 1598 and 1601.

‘I am more Catholic than you’ Perhaps inevitably, the conclusion of negotiations between the king’s emissaries and the Protestants in the spring of 1598 and the announcement of the terms for peace brought all of the submerged fears and hostilities that zealous Catholics harboured to the surface. The angry reactions of Catholic clergy, who had continued to hope that Henri would reafﬁrm Catholicism as the only legitimate religion in the kingdom, are well known. Pierre de L’Estoile recorded a number of incidents of preachers denouncing the edict from their pulpits, threatening excommunication for any judge who consented to it, and even spreading rumours that the Huguenots were sharpening their knives for their own Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

164

Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation

Similar opposition was expressed in provincial cities and does not need to be expanded upon here.25 Nor is it necessary to recount at length the famous scolding that Henri gave the presiding magistrates of the Parlement of Paris early in 1599, after summoning them to the Louvre. The commanding tone Henri assumed when he insisted that the magistrates cease their opposition and register the edict does, however, deserve mention. Asserting by turns his right to their obedience and the futility of further intrigues or delays, Henri did not mince words. ‘I will cut off at the root all factions and seditious preaching’, he announced. ‘Do not plead the Catholic religion to me’, he continued. ‘I love it more than you; I am more Catholic than you: I am the eldest son of the Church’. An odd boast for a recent convert, topped only by his next assertion: ‘You fool yourselves if you think you enjoy the pope’s favour. I enjoy it much more than you’. In fact, Henri was not at all sure of the Pope’s favour at that moment – Clement VIII had said he felt ‘cruciﬁed’ by the terms of the Edict of Nantes – though French emissaries were working hard behind the scenes to regain the Pope’s favour.26 Was there an element of bluff in the speech, or was Henri really conﬁdent that he could take a hard line and still secure the magistrates’ consent? Here, as in his dealings with the clergy, it is important to recognize the complexity of Henri’s strategy and his willingness to retreat when he foresaw insurmountable opposition, as long as he could maintain a facade of ﬁrmness. Henri had, in fact, already backed away from several provisions that most offended the magistrates, including the plan for a Chambre de l’Édit in Paris. Nearly a month before the edict was registered, the Dutch ambassador had conﬁdently predicted to his masters in the Estates General that these changes had convinced the presiding magistrates to support the edict. When registration ﬁnally took place, the same emissary accompanied this news with a copy of Henri’s speech to Parlement. This raises the possibility that the speech was deliberately crafted for broad dissemination and that, despite Henri’s attempt to frame his words as the private dressing down that a father might deliver to recalcitrant children, it was intended as much as a propagandistic public policy statement – ‘I am king now and speak as king, and will be obeyed’ – as an attempt to browbeat a still reluctant Parlement.27 Certainly the use of behind-the-scenes negotiation is characteristic of much of Henri’s religious policy during this period. He responded to the complaints expressed by representatives of the Catholic clergy by pleading for time and understanding. He had inherited the troubles, he explained, and not originated them. And now he had no choice but to

Barbara Diefendorf 165

do what was necessary to ensure peace. At the same time, he insisted that he wanted nothing more than ‘to establish Religion and Justice as the fundamental pillars of his kingdom’, but this could only be done gradually. ‘With God’s help’, he promised, ‘I will see to it that the Church is as well situated as it was 100 years ago; I hope in this to relieve my conscience and satisfy you. That will be accomplished little by little: Paris was not built in a day’. He concluded by reminding them that he was doing his duty; ‘I exhort you to do yours’.28 When individual members of the clergy opposed him, Henri could be harsher, but here too he liked to work behind the scenes to secure compliance with, if not approval of, his policies. He interrupted his speech to Parlement’s presiding magistrates to publicly chide his close advisor Nicolas Brûlart de Sillery, whose younger brother, a Capuchin friar, was preaching against the edict. When the outspoken sermons continued even after the edict was registered, as the controversy over the alleged demoniac Marthe Brossier prolonged the confessional tensions and deﬁance of royal authority that Henri had hoped the edict would lay to rest, he wrote repeatedly to Sillery, urging him to rein in his younger brother before he harmed himself and his order. He wrote similar letters to the Cardinal Joyeuse, whose brother, Capuchin Ange de Joyeuse, was also preaching against the authority of the king. Henri’s letters were tactful – he did not blame Père Ange personally and merely claimed that others were taking advantage of his ‘piety and simplicity’ – but he certainly made it clear that he expected these elder brothers to bring their cadets into line.29 Henri also used legal means to quash the controversy over Marthe Brossier, who had arrived in Paris in March 1599, after more than a year of public exorcisms in a variety of Loire Valley towns. When Capuchin priests, convinced that she truly was possessed, began to draw large crowds to watch her antics and hear her denounce the Huguenots as servants of Satan while they exorcized her, Henri called in Parlement to put an end to the public sessions, have her medically examined in private, and decide on the case. This provoked further opposition on the part of devout clerics who insisted that judging demoniacs belonged to ecclesiastical and not temporal authorities, all of which took some months – and further legal action on the part of Parlement – to resolve.30 In his handling of the case, Henri seems to have misjudged the passion with which the Dévots would defend not only the clergy’s exclusive right to intervene in matters of possession but also the importance of exorcism as a way of proving the superiority of Catholic doctrine and

166

Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation

practices. He wrote, for example, to Michel Marescot, one of the doctors who examined Marthe Brossier, asking him to publish an account of all that he had witnessed, because the rumours that Brossier was possessed were ‘strongly prejudicial to the Catholic faith’.31 Henri knew that, unlike several of the other Catholic doctors, Marescot had concluded that Brossier was faking her symptoms, and he seems to have thought that revealing this fraud would beneﬁt the Church by showing its members to have been innocent dupes of scheming lay people and not accomplices in the fraud. In this he misjudged the Dévots, who rallied to defend Marthe Brossier’s possession, the practice of exorcism more broadly and the independent spiritual authority of the church. Although the Capuchins took centre stage in the debate, André Duval, Pierre de Bérulle and others in the devout circle around Barbe Acarie took an active part in their defense. Henri faced another setback with the Dévots when he ﬁrst appeared to support the reception of the Council of Trent in France but then changed his mind and opposed it. Several of his closest advisors had urged him to take this step, which he had in any event agreed to as a condition for papal absolution, as a way of appeasing Catholics unhappy about concessions made to the Protestants in the Edict of Nantes. By all accounts, his most devout advisors had persuaded him that this was a simple matter of keeping his promise and posed no threat either to the Protestants or to the liberties of the Gallican church. There was consequently no need for Parlement to examine each article in detail. When Henri subsequently presented this idea to Parlement’s presiding magistrates, they let him know that this was wishful thinking. The court would never consent to register the document without examining it minutely, and any such examination would be an unprecedented intrusion on the independent sphere of the church. Quick to recognize that these problems were insuperable, Henri decided it was necessary to disappoint devout Catholics by taking the Council of Trent off of his agenda.32 Up through 1599, Henri IV’s relations with the Dévots were thus marked more by conﬂict than by collaboration. This situation ﬁnally changed in the spring of 1600 when Henri pronounced the Catholics resounding victors in the debate between Huguenot statesman Philippe Du Plessis de Mornay and Jacques Du Perron, bishop of Evreux, at Fontainebleau. Mornay might be said to have provoked the conﬂict by publishing a book against the Mass and then offering to defend it with his life after Du Perron claimed to have found 500 errors in it, and yet the circumstances and format of the contest held at the king’s behest favoured the Catholics from the start. Insisting that this was not a debate

Barbara Diefendorf 167

about doctrine, which he would never approve without permission of the Pope, but only about the validity of Mornay’s text, Henri placed the discussion into the realms of scholastic exegesis, where Roman Catholic clerics but not Protestant diplomats might be expected to excel. The Protestants knew they were at a disadvantage, as is evident from the anguished entries that Isaac Casaubon, one of the Protestant judges of the affair, made in his diary in the days leading up to this event. Summoned to take part by a personal letter from Henri himself, the respected scholar felt caught between the obligations he felt to his faith and those he had to his monarch. ‘What shall I do?’, he asked himself. ‘Shall I take my place among those who prepare to condemn a book whose doctrine is pious and holy?’33 Clearly, he recognized that, however much he loved and admired Mornay, his book could not stand up to the sort of scholastic examination that Du Perron proposed. He also clearly recognized just what was at stake – that it was not just the book but rather ‘the spirit of our reform that is being placed in doubt’. He was equally clear sighted about what the king hoped to prove by it: ‘It is a question of demonstrating to the bishop of Rome the zeal, piety and even the good works of the king.’34 Casaubon’s premonitions were justiﬁed; Mornay did not acquit himself well in discussion of the nine passages put into contention during the ﬁrst afternoon of the conference. Then he became so ill that the conference had to be abandoned. And yet Henri did not let either this sudden illness or feelings of friendship for one who had fought many years at his side stop him from declaring the Catholic side victorious in the debate. ‘The diocese of Evreux has defeated that of Saumur, and the benign fashion in which it all took place means that no Huguenot can claim that any force was used except that of the truth’, he wrote the duc d’Épernon immediately following the conference in a letter that was disseminated every bit as rapidly as the speech ordering registration of the Edict of Nantes had been. In the missive, Henri took a lot of personal credit for the Catholic victory. He told d’Epernon that the bearer of the letter, who had been present in Fontainebleau, would recount to him ‘what marvels I have wrought’. Boasting that ‘it was one of the greatest blows struck for the Church of God in a long time’, he predicted that they would bring more Protestants back into the Church in one year by this means than in 50 years by any other.35 Du Perron and the papal nuncio both commented on the knowledge and zeal Henri showed in the course of the discussions, and they were quick to send word of this to Rome.36 Du Perron’s letter to Henri’s ambassador in Rome also depicts him

168

Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation

as an active participant in the debate. ‘The King in this conference has showed himself so wise, so intelligent, so affectionate and so zealous, taking up the argument against [Mornay] at every occasion’, he wrote, ‘pressing him by disputation, and so convincing him of diverse falsehoods’. In a message clearly intended for Clement VIII, he concluded that Henri had ‘showed manifestly his wit and his affection toward the Catholic Religion, admirable to all France, which now sheds tears of joy to see their king excel as much as much in piety, devotion, and zeal toward the advancement of God’s Church, as . . . in valour and victory’.37 If tears of joy were indeed shed, it was by the Dévots, who rejoiced as much at Henri’s open partisanship as at the overall result of the conference. They had further cause to rejoice in 1601 when he nominated Du Perron, the victor of Fontainebleau, for a cardinal’s hat. A short time later, he added the name of François de La Rochefoucauld, bishop of Clermont, to the list of nominees. La Rochefoucauld was, in the words of Joseph Bergin, an ‘unreconciled Leaguer’. He had protected the Jesuits in Auvergne in spite of their expulsion and had also given Henri more recent cause for anger by sheltering Marthe Brossier, whom his brother Alexandre had decided to escort to Rome in deﬁance of Parlement’s order conﬁning her to her home in Romorantin. François de La Rochefoucauld did not get his cardinal’s hat until December 1607, but the nomination itself was a sign of the king’s favour. As Bergin suggests, it was intended ‘to bind another ex-Leaguer to him and, perhaps, advance his policy in Rome by nominating a candidate whose career and convictions were bound to win him a favourable reception there’.38 At the same time, it is true that La Rochefoucauld was a reformer – a resident bishop who held numerous synods, published new statutes for his diocese, conducted visitations and encouraged the foundation of new, reformed religious orders. Could Henri’s nomination have been not just a sop to appease the Pope and please the Dévots but also a sign of his own interest in a reformed and reinvigorated Catholic Church in France? The support he gave Dévot causes, especially after 1601, suggests that this was the case.

‘An inﬁnity of divine virgins and mortiﬁed men’ From one perspective, Henri’s patronage of Catholic institutions appears to have been a blatant and even cynical attempt to buy the loyalties of his old opponents, much as he had purchased the surrender of the

Barbara Diefendorf 169

aristocratic leaders of the Holy League. He appeared to say as much when ordering his magistrates to register the Edict of Nantes: ‘Let’s not talk so much about the Catholic religion or all the great squalling Catholics and clerics! If I give to one two thousand pounds in beneﬁces and to another an annuity, they will shut their mouths’.39 And yet there is more to Henri’s religious patronage than this. He supported projects for Catholic renewal to a perhaps surprising degree, and this support was consistently given to the austere orders that formed the front lines in the Catholic Reformation.40 When he died in 1610, Philippe Cospeau, preaching in Notre-Dame cathedral, could point with pride to the ‘inﬁnity of divine virgins and mortiﬁed men, entire communities, who opened the school of Calvary and raised the standard of the Cross under the benediction of his reign’.41 As we have seen, Henri began patronizing reformed orders as early as 1597, when he had himself named founder of the Feuillants’ Paris monastery and gave them all of the privileges of royal foundations.42 He continued to give tokens of his affection to the Feuillants and even posed the ﬁrst stone for their new church in 1602. Despite his long history of conﬂicts with the Capuchins, he approved new friaries at Tours and four other locations in 1600.43 He also formally took the congregation into his ‘special protection and care’ and conﬁrmed it in the same privileges previously extended by his predecessors.44 At the same time, he approved the introduction of two other Franciscan reforms, the Third Order Penitents and the Récollets. He also supported reform movements in the Dominican and Augustinian orders, although the latter only took place after his death. Most famously, he permitted the Jesuits to return from exile in 1603, despite ﬁerce opposition from magistrates who continued to associate the society with the doctrine of tyrannicide and to oppose its members as ‘foreign’ inﬁltrators more loyal to pope than king. In fact, Henri began negotiations for the Jesuits’ return as early as 1601 – their readmission was not the whim of a moment – and continued to favour them throughout his life. At his death, they were given his heart to display at the Collège of La Flèche founded by his gift.45 Henri’s patronage was not given solely to men’s orders, and in the foundation of women’s orders too, he showed his willingness to forget the past. In 1602, he issued letters patent for the foundation of a convent of Capuchin nuns at the request of Marie de Luxembourg, widow of one of the League’s last great hold-outs, the duc de Mercœur.46 He

170

Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation

even gave the foundation a special prominence by insisting that the convent be built in Paris and not in Bourges, as originally intended, and he associated the royal family still more closely with the project by having Marie de Luxembourg lay the ﬁrst stone in the name of his daughter Elisabeth.47 He similarly favoured the project of another ex-Leaguer Dévote, Barbe Acarie, when he granted permission in 1602 for the Discalced Carmelites of Saint Teresa of Avila’s reform to establish their order in France. Here too, he went beyond the mere issuing of letters patent. He helped the founders acquire the old priory of Notre-Dame des Champs to remodel as a convent and sent special assurances of his benevolence with the queen when she made her ﬁrst visit.48 He also permitted the order to expand rapidly; there were six Carmelite convents in France by the time of the king’s death in 1610. More telling, however, than a simple list of congregations founded or allowed to expand by Henri’s permission is the way he intervened to support reformed communities when their unreformed parent orders tried to prohibit their existence or block their growth. His support of the Franciscan Third Order Penitents and Récollets is pertinent here. Like the Capuchins, these communities began as reforms of strict observance within the Order of Friars Minor, or Franciscans. There was, however, an important difference. Founded in France with the enthusiastic support of Henri III, the Capuchins had from the beginning developed independently of established Franciscan (Cordelier) friaries. The Capuchins always built their own houses, wore a different habit and recruited new members only among the laity. As a consequence, the Cordeliers did not oppose their foundations. The Récollets and Third Order Penitents, by contrast, encountered ﬁerce resistance from Cordeliers because they attempted to reform – and take over – existing houses.49 Henri’s support was essential in establishing each of these reforms. The Récollets had their origins among friars in ﬁfteenth-century Portugal who wanted a more interiorized and, in their opinion, authentic Franciscan spirituality. By 1570, the movement had become sufﬁciently popular on the Iberian and Italian peninsulas that Pius V ordered each Franciscan province to designate two houses where special retreats for spiritual recollection might be made. The movement made few inroads in France, however, until 1597, when Franciscan general Bonaventura Secusi of Caltagirone, who had come to France the previous year to help negotiate between Philip II and Henri IV, began to use his spare time to promote reform within his order. Secusi handed several Franciscan houses over to the small number of friars who had voluntarily adopted the strict discipline and practices of spiritual recollection that typiﬁed the Récollet

Barbara Diefendorf 171

movement already under way on the Iberian and Italian peninsulas. He had Clement VIII’s support for this and gained that of Henri IV as well. In March 1601, Clement VIII reiterated Pius V’s order for Franciscan Observant provincials to give friaries to Récollets so that they could establish their reform. Henri IV conﬁrmed the order by letters patent of 17 July 1601 and again on 26 October 1603 ordered bishops to cede one or two friaries in each diocese to Récollets.50 Despite this support from the Pope and king, the Récollets struggled to establish themselves. Although individual Cordelier friars, caught up in the new spirit of reform, enthusiastically adopted the stricter life of Récollets, many more resisted change and fought orders to turn houses over to the newcomers. In at least two cases – La Baumette near Angers and BourgSaint-Andéol – conﬂicts between Cordeliers and the Récollets who were attempting to take over their friaries ended in pitched battles. The former case also resulted in a lengthy lawsuit, which ultimately prompted Henri IV to claim for himself the right to personally examine and pronounce on conﬂicts between Cordeliers and Récollets.51 According to the Récollets’ ﬁrst French historian, moreover, the king defended the Récollets’ foundation of a friary in Paris when his own ofﬁcers wished to prevent it. He also favoured the Paris friary by having Marie de Medici lay the ﬁrst stone for its church in 1603.52 In the struggle between Cordeliers and Récollets, then, Henri clearly aligned himself with the reformers. The same was true with the Third Order Penitents, who succeeded in reviving the largely dormant Third Order Regular of Saint Francis only with Henri’s help. A Parisian named Vincent Mussart took the initiative for renewing the order after discovering its rule in the library of Barbe Acarie’s husband Pierre. As with the Récollets, the Third Order’s revival took place with both collaboration and resistance from the Cordeliers. Although Mussart had been living as a penitential hermit, he had not joined an order, so he and his ﬁrst followers needed to make a novitiate and take vows before proceeding on with their reform. They were aided in this by the Franciscan provincial in Paris, who arranged for them to do a probationary year under the direction of Cordeliers at Pontoise. Their professions were ratiﬁed in 1598 by Franciscan general Bonaventura Secusi of Caltagirone, who also gave Mussart the power to admit novices to the habit and found new friaries. In 1601, Mussart and his companions moved from their hermitage near Saint-Denis into a friary at Picpus, on the outskirts of Paris. From here, Mussart sought apostolic authority to join whatever old Third Order friaries still existed into a new, restructured and revived province. When a chapter meeting was held in 1603, he had enough support from those favouring reform to establish himself

172

Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation

as provincial, even though old-style friars from Normandy and Picardy still largely outnumbered the reformers.53 At this point, Mussart found himself facing the same stubborn resistance to change that the Récollets were experiencing. He tried to introduce reforms gradually but was forced to appeal to the secular arm to ‘execute the intentions of the pope’. Henri IV assisted him greatly here, and he obtained a ruling prohibiting friaries that refused to accept his authority from accepting new novices. They could continue to exist but would die out in time. Henri’s assistance was also essential to Mussart’s extension of his reform into Languedoc. Refusing the strict discipline that Mussart wished to impose on them, rebellious friars in Languedoc and Aquitaine had invited members of the Italian branch of their order to take over their government. Henri IV sided with Mussart in the quarrel and ordered the foreigners out so that the Gallican reform could proceed.54 The Third Order’s historian, Jean-Marie de Vernon, claims that Henri IV so esteemed Vincent Mussart that he wanted to take him as his confessor and also to make him a bishop.55 This cannot be veriﬁed. The assistance Henri gave Mussart in establishing his reform nevertheless demonstrates the king’s determination to assist the spread of the austere orders associated with the Catholic Reformation but also his willingness to forget past political allegiances, for, like many Dévots involved in France’s Catholic renewal, Mussart had been a zealous supporter of the Holy League. Although Mussart had already adopted a hermit’s habit and taken deacon’s vows, his true religious conversion is said to have occurred during the siege of Chartres, when he helped defend the city ‘as much by his austerities and prayers as by arms’.56 Wearing a hair shirt and carrying heavy chains, he exhorted citizens of the besieged town to join him in penitential processions to appease the wrath of God. But he also appeared on the ramparts, pike in hand, to urge on the defenders and take part in the ﬁght himself. ‘He fought on with so much skill and magnanimity’, says Jean-Marie de Vernon, ‘that the King of Navarre, who commanded the besiegers, noticed and admired him and demanded his name’.57 This is almost certainly legend. It is nevertheless probable that, when he helped Mussart establish his reformed order, Henri knew – and deliberately ignored – his Leaguer past. It is equally probable that Henri took pleasure in the irony of the situation and that he aided Dévots who had formerly been his enemies not only to prove he had forgotten the past, or to buy their loyalty, but because they were serving a cause he had come genuinely to support, the reform of the regular orders in France. Henri did, however, want the reformed orders in his kingdom to be distinctly French in character. As we have seen, he placed all of the Third

Barbara Diefendorf 173

Order Penitents under Vincent Mussart’s authority and ordered the Italian friars who had taken over friaries in the Midi to leave. He favoured French leadership for the Jesuits as well, and even tried to insist on an oath of loyalty to the Crown in the initial negotiations for the order’s return.58 And he admitted Spanish nuns to establish the Carmelite reform according to the spirit of Saint Teresa but refused to allow the Carmelite friars who were their Spanish superiors to accompany them. The Spanish mothers thought this was a temporary situation, otherwise they probably would not have agreed to come to France, but the French novices were happy with their French superiors – whom they had previously known as members of Barbe Acarie’s devout circle – and sided with their French superiors in maintaining this situation, even after Discalced Carmelite friars arrived to establish their reform in France. In collaboration with their French superiors, the French Carmelites developed institutional structures and a culture quite different from their parent order in Spain.59 The same was true of the Ursulines founded by members of the same devout circles in Paris. From the beginning this was intended as a cloistered order, and the initial novices were trained by Augustinian nuns from the well regulated abbey of Saint-Étienne in Soissons, as well as by uncloistered Ursulines from Provence, whose practices were closer to those of the Italian parent order.60 Henri IV saw only the ﬁrst beginnings of the Catholic renewal in France. He did, however, help lay the groundwork for it by supporting the work of the Dévots, whatever their past politics; approving and even patronizing reformed religious foundations; and encouraging them to be French in leadership and character.

‘The eldest son of the Church’ Within a few years, the austere new congregations whose birth Henri had aided were attracting large numbers of novices from the best French families and opening new houses on a regular basis. Already in 1606 Pierre de L’Estoile could write that ‘the latest novelty, in Paris and elsewhere, was for sons and daughters of good families, men and women of high standing, to join these new orders of Capuchins, Feuillants, Récollettes, Carmelites and Capucines’. A very moderate Catholic himself, L’Estoile was scornful of the new enthusiasm for ascetic religious life, which he thought attracted only foolish, simple spirits and those too lazy to ﬁgure out what else to do with their lives.61 There is no evidence, however, that Henri IV shared this opinion. He continued to support the Dévots’ attempts to reform decayed old orders and extend new ones. According to

174

Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation

his confessor, Jesuit Pierre Coton, he always spoke of Barbe Acarie with ‘praise and respect’ and once even referred to her as ‘the Blessed’ – a title she was not to enjoy formally until beatiﬁed in 1791. He frequently sent her some of his gambling winnings to distribute to the poor.62 By the time Henri died in 1610, he was no longer the Dévots’ opponent but rather their collaborator. It was not, however, just his patronage of reformed orders that caused devout Catholics to look upon Henry as a true son of the Church and even as a champion of their cause by the time of his death. The eulogies delivered after his assassination offer good evidence of the way his image had evolved in Catholic circles. It is true that the very untimeliness of Henri’s death contributed to the early birth of a royal legend, and the funeral sermons preached for him helped lay the foundations of this legend.63 Despite the tendency towards exaggeration and adulation, the sermons are a useful source. They reﬂect their authors’ close observation – and approval – of Henri’s policies and are not catalogues of imagined virtues. Their laudatory tone is itself striking – this praise would not have been forthcoming ten years earlier – but what is more signiﬁcant is the way Henri is seen as having favoured the Catholic cause, in spite of his former religious background and of the coexistence granted Protestants under the Edict of Nantes. Sébastien Michaëlis, the head of the reformed Dominicans, for example, calls Henri another Saint Paul, because of his efforts ‘to restore the Mass in all of his kingdom, even in cities where it had not been celebrated for 40 years’.64 A number of other eulogies similarly praised Henri’s role not just in restoring peace to France, but in establishing a peace favourable to French Catholics.65 Like Michaëlis, their authors cited speciﬁc towns and provinces that beneﬁtted from the king’s edicts, and their tributes have a ring of sincerity that reaches beyond the formalized praise expected of a eulogy. The Fontainebleau Conference also ﬁgures prominently among the actions through which Henri was said to have demonstrated his religious zeal. Testimony to the sincerity of Henri’s conversion, his pro-Catholic decision in the debate is repeatedly cited as emblematic of his will to see the Catholic Church ‘covered with glory’ and ‘purged of the stinking waters of heresy’.66 It was at Fontainebleau, devout preachers exulted, that the ‘New Religion’ was forced to recognize that it was truly new and in all respects contrary to the teachings of the Church fathers.67 If tangible evidence that he would henceforth favour the Catholic cause was an essential element in bringing devout Catholics over to Henri’s side, so was his forgive-and-forget policy. For Philippe Cospeau, this policy was a measure of Henri’s greatness. ‘Never having feared his

Barbara Diefendorf 175

enemies, he wanted also never to hate them’; he ‘pardoned them all, loved them all and as soon as they recognised him as their king, he had no difﬁculty in recognizing them as his children’.68 Pierre Fenolliet, bishop of Montpellier, went further, saying that Henri’s clemency was ‘so great as to powerfully favor those who had been the most opposed to him, such that the condition of the defeated seemed better than that of the victors’.69 This is an exaggeration – Henri did reward royalist Catholics who helped him secure his throne – but it indicates how successful Henri was in reconciling former enemies and putting them to use in restoring state and church. The very effusiveness of the tributes to Henri’s clemency expressed in funeral sermons tends to mythologize his efforts to win over zealous Catholics by making the triumph seem quickly and easily won, obscuring the patience and effort that had gone into the campaign. As this essay has shown, Henri only gradually convinced devout Catholics of the sincerity of his conversion, and he did this through a variety of tactics that changed over time. If printed propaganda and public displays of devotion played an important role in the ﬁrst years after his conversion, policy choices became the crucial test of his sincerity once peace was attained. Only with time, however, could Henri recover from the initial anger with which devout Catholics greeted the Edict of Nantes. Giving the Catholics a resounding victory at Fontainebleau helped, but only with time could Henri demonstrate that he intended to limit the beneﬁts his former co-religionists gained from the edict, to restore the Mass in areas from which it had been eliminated and to encourage Protestant elites to convert to the Catholic faith. Only with time could he foster the spread of reformed Catholic institutions. When Henri declared himself the ‘eldest son of the Church’ in his 1599 speech ordering Parlement to register the Edict of Nantes, he did so deﬁantly – and without much credibility. When he died in 1610, he was sincerely mourned in these very terms, as ‘the eldest son of the Church, a father of his people and, after God, a saviour of his country’.70

Notes 1. P. de L’Estoile, Journal pour le règne de Henri IV, in L.-R. Lefèvre and A. Martin (eds), 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), i, pp. 346–7, 351, 352, 365, 370, 377, and 384. 2. Ibid., p. 376. 3. On Acarie’s circle, B. B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 77–100.

176

Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation

4. La retraite de la Ligue par P.I.D.G.C. (Lyons: Guichard Jullieron and Thibaud Ancelin, 1594), p. 4. Similarly, Advis et abjuration d’un notable gentil-homme de la Ligue: Contenant les causes pour lesquelles il a renoncé à ladite ligue, & s’en est presentement departy (Paris: Arnoul Cotinet, 1595). 5. La retraite de la Ligue, p. 10. 6. M. Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 145–6, 153–5; L’Estoile, Journal, i, p. 293; and ‘Journal de la Ligue, du 17 mai au 6 novembre 1593’, Revue rétrospective, 2nd ser., 11 (1837), 101. 7. Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV, p. 173. 8. J.-P. Babelon, Henri IV (Paris: Fayard, 1982), p. 588. 9. L’Estoile, Journal, i, p. 588. 10. Babelon, Henri IV, p. 591. 11. Registres du Bureau de la Ville de Paris, 19 vols (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), xi, p. 9. 12. L’Estoile, Journal, pp. 409–10. 13. Y.-M. Bercé, ‘Henri IV et la maîtrise des opinions populaires’, Avènement d’Henri IV: Quatrième centenaire de la bataille de Coutras (Pau: Association Henri IV, 1989), p. 121. 14. As cited by L’Estoile, Journal, I, p. 417. 15. Henri IV, King of France, Edict et declaration du roy sur la reduction de la ville de Paris soubs son obeyssance (Paris: Frederic Morel, 1594), p. 11. 16. Ibid., p. 10. 17. On continuing attacks by Leaguer emigrés, see R. Descimon and J. J. Ruiz Ibáñez, Les ligueurs de l’exil: Le refuge catholique français après 1594 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2006). 18. C. Valois, ‘Un des chefs de la Ligue à Paris: Jacques de Cueilly, curé de SaintGermain-l’Auxerrois’, Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ilede-France, 36 (1909), 94–7, 112–14. 19. Godefroy de Paris, Les Frères mineurs capucins en France, 2 vols (Paris: Bibliothèque franciscaine provinciale, 1939), i, part 2, pp. 170, 184. 20. Ibid., pp. 182–4. 21. Ibid., pp. 199–200. 22. L’Estoile, Journal, i, p. 501. 23. E. Raunié and M. Prinet, Epitaphier du Vieux Paris, 12 vols (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1918), iv, pp. 251–2. 24. Archives du Carmel de Pontoise, Procès apostolique de Marie de l’Incarnation, ff. 579 and 582, testimony of Jeanne L’Espervier. 25. L’Estoile, Journal, i, pp. 547–55. More broadly, F. J. Baumgartner, ‘The Catholic Opposition to the Edict of Nantes, 1598–1599’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 40 (1978), 525–37. 26. Baumgartner, ‘Catholic Opposition to the Edict of Nantes’, 526. 27. ‘Vériﬁcation et enregistrement de l’édit de Nantes’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du Protestantisme français, 2 (1854), 31–3. Henri’s speech has been published in slightly different versions; see the appendix to Eric Nelson’s essay in this volume. 28. ‘Réponse de Henri IV aux députés du clergé, 28 septembre 1598’, as reproduced in ‘Vériﬁcation et enregistrement de l’édit de Nantes’, 30–31. 29. Berger de Xivrey, Recueil des lettres missives, pp. 92 (speech to the magistrates of Parlement, 7 February 1599); 115–16, 121–2, 129–30, 145–6, and 149–52

Barbara Diefendorf 177

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

(letters to the Cardinal of Joyeuse, 14 and 28 May, 7 June, and 4 and 24 July 1599). L’Estoile, Journal, i, pp. 573–4; Bibliothèque Mazarine, Ms. 2418: , pp. 490–512, [Maurice d’Epernay], ‘Annales des Reverends Peres Capucins de la Province de Paris’ on Henri’s conﬂicts with the Capuchins. On other dimensions of the Marthe Brossier affair, see Bibliothèque Nationale de France [hereafter BNF], MS Fr. 18453. R. Mandrou, Magistrats et sorciers en France au xviie siècle: Une analyse de psychologie historique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1980), pp. 164–79, gives a good summary of the affair. Berger de Xivrey, Recueil des lettres missives, iv, pp. 127–8 (letter of 31 May 1599). J.-A. de Thou, Mémoires de Jacques-Auguste de Thou depuis 1553 jusqu’en 1601, Claude-Bernard Petitot and Alexandre Petitot (eds) (Paris: Foucault, 1823), pp. 521–8; also V. Martin, Le gallicanisme et la réforme catholique: Essai historique sur l’introduction en France des décrets du concile de Trente (1563–1615) (Geneva: Slatkine-Megariotis, 1975; reprint of Paris, 1919 edition), pp. 315–20. G. Mason, ‘Notes sur Isaac Casaubon’, Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du Protestantisme français, 18 (1869), 487. Ibid., 486. Berger de Xivrey, Recueil des lettres missives, iv, pp. 320–31 (letter of 5 May). R. Parsons, A Relation of the Triall Made Before the King of France upon the Yeare 1600 betweene the Bishop of Evreux and the L. Plessis Mornay (SaintOmer: F. Bellet, 1604), pp. 33–7. I have somewhat modernized spelling and punctuation of this early account of the debates by an English Catholic. Ibid, pp. 35–6. J. Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld: Leadership and Reform in the French Church (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 24–36; quoted passages pp. 33 and 36. Berger de Xivrey, Recueil des lettres missives, v, p. 93. J. Dagens, Bérulle et les origines de la restauration catholique (1575–1611) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1952), pp. 169–71, summarizes some of Henri’s actions in this regard. P. Cospeau, Oraison funebre prononcée dans la grande Eglise de Paris aux obseques de Henry Le Grand, Roy Tres-Chrestien de France et de Navarre (Paris: Barthélemy Macé, 1610), p. 69. BNF, MS Fr. 11767, f. 53v, ‘Livre et registre de la congregation du Monastere de Saint Bernard des Feuillentins lez Paris’. J. Mauzaize, Histoire des Frères Mineurs Capucins de la Province de Paris (1601–1660) (Blois: Editions Notre-Dame de la Trinité, 1965), pp. 6–7. The Capuchins founded houses in at least six other cities by the king’s death in 1610, see BNF, MS Fr. 6451, pp. 203–73. J.-P. Willesme et al., Les ordres mendiants à Paris [Catalog of an exhibition at the Carnavalet Museum] (Paris: Paris-Musées, 1992), p. 135, citing Archives nationales [hereafter AN], S 3705, no. 6. The best recent work on Henri and the Jesuits is Eric Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy: Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590–1615) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). AN, S 4650: Lettres patentes of 8 June 1602.

178

Henri IV, the Dévots and the Making of a French Catholic Reformation

47. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, pp. 118–19, 122. Plans for Marie de Médici and the royal princesses to attend the installation of the Capucines in their convent in 1606 were cancelled because plague was abroad in Paris. 48. AN, L 1046, no. 70: Lettres patentes of July 1602; Raunié, Epitaphier du vieux Paris, ii, p. 158; Chroniques de l’ordre des Carmélites de la réforme de Sainte Thérèse depuis leur introduction en France, 5 vols (Troyes: Imprimerie d’Anner-André, 1846), i, p. 118. 49. H. Le Febvre, Histoire chronologique de la province des récollets de Paris (Paris: Denys Thierry, 1677), pp. 33–4. 50. Ibid; and F. Meyer, Pauvreté et assistance spirituelle: Les franciscains récollets de la province de Lyon aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Saint-Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 1997), p. 33. 51. Meyer, Pauvreté et assistance spirituelle, pp. 17–24, 26–35; C. Rapine, Histoire generale de l’origine et progrez des freres mineurs de S. François vulgairement appellés en France, Flandre, Italie, & Espagne, Recollets Reformez ou Deschaux (Paris: Claude Sonnius, 1631), pp. 18–27, 710–27. 52. Rapine, Histoire generale, p. 717. 53. Jean-Marie de Vernon, Histoire generale et particuliere du Tiers Ordre de S. François d’Assize, 3 vols (Paris: Georges Josse, 1667), iii, pp. 122–8. 54. Ibid., iii, pp. 128–31. 55. Ibid., ii, p. 615. 56. Ibid., ii, p. 613. 57. Ibid., iii, pp. 115–16. 58. C. Sutto, ‘Introduction’, in E. Pasquier (ed.), Le catéchisme des Jésuites (Sherbrooke: Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 1981), p. 78. 59. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, pp. 105–18. 60. Ibid., pp. 124–30. 61. L’Estoile, Journal, ii, p. 207. 62. Carmel de Pontoise, Procès apostolique de Marie de l’Incarnation, f. 738: testimonial letter from Pierre Coton. This testimony is corroborated by Marie de Jésus [de Tudert], f. 554. 63. J. Hennequin, Henri IV dans ses oraisons funèbres, ou la naissance d’une légende (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977), pp. 9–12; J.-P. Babelon, ‘Un monument hagiographique: les oraisons funèbres’, La légende de Henri IV (Paris: Société Henri IV, 1995), pp. 13–20. Over 30 funeral sermons were published, more than twice as many as for all of his sixteenth-century predecessors put together. 64. S. Michaëlis, Oraison funebre faicte aux funerailles du tres puissant & invincible Roy de France & de Navarre Henri IIII (Aix: Jean Tholosan, 1610), p. 20. 65. Hennequin, Henri IV dans ses oraisons funèbres, p. 101. 66. The quoted passage is from Matthieu d’Abbeville, Discours funebre en l’honneur du roy Henri le Grand, prononcé à Paris, en l’eglise S. Nicolas des Champs (Paris: Guillaume La Noue, 1610), pp. 27–8; similarly N. Coëffeteau, Harangue funebre prononcée à Paris, en l’eglise de Sainct-Benoist, au service faict pour le repos de l’ame de Henry IIII, Roy de France & de Navarre (Lyons: Claude Morillon, 1610), p. 27; Cospeau, Oraison funebre, p. 69; J. Suares, Sermon funebre fait aux obseques de Henry IIII, Roy de France et de Navarre . . . dans l’Eglise de S. Jacques de la Boucherie (Paris: Nicolas du Fossé, 1610), p. 24; P. Fenolliet, Discours funebre

Barbara Diefendorf 179

67. 68. 69. 70.

sur la mort de Henri le Grand Roy de France & de Navarre (Paris: Pierre Chevalier, 1611), p. 52. Cospeau, Oraison funebre, p. 69. Ibid., p. 48. Fenolliet, Discours funebre, p. 30. N. de Paris, Oraison funebre prononcée en l’église Saint Gervais à Paris le mardy 22 de juin 1610 (Paris: François Jacquin, 1610), p. 29.

8 Vincent de Paul: The Making of a Catholic Dévot Alison Forrestal

In late 1608, Vincent de Paul (1581–1660) travelled to Paris, a city in which he had previously spent little or no time. On his arrival, he lodged initially in a small apartment in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, from where he began to establish contact with prominent representatives of the Dévot reform movement that had redesigned the sacred landscape of Paris since the 1590s.1 Within less than a decade, he was poised to draw on the experiences of the Dévot apprenticeship that he served in Paris between 1608 and 1617. While serving as parish priest in Châtillon-les-Dombes near Lyon during 1617, de Paul established a lay female confraternity of charity to assist the sick poor of the locality ‘spiritually and corporally’.2 This provided the template for those that the Congregation of the Mission, the community of priests and brothers that he formed in 1625, sponsored during its missionary campaigns in provincial parishes in France, Italy and Poland. It was also the ﬁrst step towards the establishment of a confraternal community of unmarried women, the Daughters of Charity, by de Paul and Louise de Marillac in 1633, to assist the sick poor.3 By the time that de Paul died in September 1660, the Congregation had 21 houses devoted to its French mission, while the Daughters, in addition to bases in most Parisian parishes, possessed 42 establishments. Parochial branches of the confraternity of charity functioned in every area in which the Congregation and the Daughters operated. De Paul presided over a substantial network of missions and charitable enterprises through France, but especially prevalent in the north, west and south of the realm, and in the hinterlands of Warsaw, Turin, Genoa and Rome. He became a leading exponent of the missionary ethos that characterized the Catholic Reformation, and was canonized in 1737 for his exceptional skill in devising organizational structures, didactic strategies and spiritual principles that promoted it. 180

Alison Forrestal 181

When later recounting the events surrounding the foundation of the ﬁrst confraternity that precipitated these developments, de Paul used it as a means of instructing his associates on the benevolent omnipotence of divine providence. As a foundational episode of such spiritual signiﬁcance, the Châtillon experience has contributed hugely to the hagiographic cult of de Paul as the apostle of charity progressively attuned to the signals of the divine will.4 However, explored from fresh perspectives, the key events leading up to and inaugurating the confraternity in the parish are the outcome of de Paul’s exposure to Dévot currents in Paris, and provide unparalleled insights into the combination of inﬂuences that inspired his ﬁrst major intervention in the evangelizing mission of the Catholic Reformation. Underpinning the ﬁrst confraternity lay a tapestry of relationships that the future Dévot and leader of the French Catholic Reformation weaved between 1608 and 1617. De Paul possessed remarkable ability to plunder the intellectual resources and organizational conventions that he encountered in the Dévot milieu of Paris in order to create new pious enterprises. Of these, the constellation of the haute noblesse Gondi family, the eminent Oratorian founder Pierre de Bérulle, and the Spanish religious order, the Frères de la Charité provided de Paul with a range of key resources that directed him towards Châtillon and enabled him to establish his ﬁrst confraternity. They form three interdependent subsets within the Dévot movement: those of the wealthy lay activist, the clerical reformer and the new religious order; de Paul’s reliance on them in formulating his contributions to Catholic rehabilitation demonstrates the potency of the ideas and practices transmitted within this environment, and offers an instructive example of his ability to nurture and exploit patronage in the immediate and long terms. From these vantage points, the parish and confraternity of Châtillon form a microcosm characterized by key features of Catholic resurgence in France. The parish of Châtillon, in which de Paul arrived in late April 1617, was not his ﬁrst parochial cure.5 He had already acted as parish priest of Clichy in northeast Paris in 1612, and resigned the cure only in 1626, claiming an annual pension of 100 livres for four years.6 Before moving to Clichy, he acted as almoner in the household of Marguerite de Navarre in 1610 and 1611. Soon after he left Clichy in September 1613, he became preceptor to the children of the Gondi family and confessor to their mother Marguerite de Silly. He also held other beneﬁces during these years. In May 1610, he received the abbey of Saint-Léonard de Chaumes in Saints from the archbishop of Aix, Paul Hurault de l’Hôpital.7 In February 1614, he became curé of Gamaches parish in Rouen diocese, though he does not

182

Vincent de Paul: The Making of a Catholic Dévot

seem to have taken possession of the post.8 Gamaches lay close to de Paul’s ﬁnal acquisition; he became treasurer and canon in the collegiate chapter of Écouis in May 1615, though he only visited Écouis once, to the chagrin of the chapter.9 De Paul owed the beneﬁces of Gamaches and Écouis to PhilippeEmmanuel de Gondi, who, as baron Du Plessis, possessed rights of presentation to them.10 He acted as preceptor and confessor to members of the Gondi family for four years before travelling to Châtillon and returned to them once more in February 1618. The Gondi family proved to be among de Paul’s earliest and staunchest patrons and, as their client, he retained unshakeable loyalty to them. This became most famously evident when the Roman community of the Congregation, established in 1639, offered hospitality to the disgraced son of PhilippeEmmanuel, Cardinal de Retz, in 1654. In a conference with Congregation members in 1655, de Paul justiﬁed this ﬂouting of the crown’s wishes by arguing that it had enabled them to demonstrate ‘great gratitude’ to Monsieur de Gondi, their founder, and his son, their prelate.11 In April 1625, Philippe-Emmanuel and Marguerite de Gondi guaranteed de Paul’s incipient Congregation a capital sum of 45,000 livres, the income from which was to be devoted to maintaining at least six priests who would perform missions every ﬁve years on the rural Gondi lands and amongst galley convicts.12 Two years later, the foundation contract was modiﬁed, so that, excepting the plan for missions on their lands, the Gondi family agreed to withdraw all contractual clauses that had ascribed them any power over the Congregation’s missions as well as over ‘the manner of life’ of its members.13 From 1624, the embryonic community resided at the former university college, Bons-Enfants, provided by Jean-François de Gondi, brother to Philippe-Emmanuel and archbishop of Paris.14 The generosity of their donation in 1625 tends to overshadow the other substantial beneﬁts that his link with the Gondi couple gave to de Paul. They provided a perfect point of entry into a wider pool of benefactors within their family and household, in addition to their own perennial concern that they use their resources to sponsor de Paul’s works of evangelization and charity. As early as 1619, Madame de Gondi bequeathed de Paul 2400 livres.15 She earmarked a further 1800 livres ‘partly for the sick poor of the Association of Charity that is or will be established’ on Gondi estates in Picardy, Champagne and Montmirail, and partly to ﬁnance annual missions by the Jesuits or Oratorians. From early 1618, the Gondi estates formed the map on which de Paul plotted the geographical base for the early confraternities of charity and

Alison Forrestal 183

Madame de Gondi provided Trojan aid to de Paul as he established confraternities of charity on her estates.16 Her status meant that her patronage was an invaluable asset to recruitment, and de Paul even credited her with inspiring his initial efforts to improve rural piety through preaching and sacramental administration on her lands from 1614. Widower Philippe-Emmanuel de Gondi joined the Oratory in 1627, but enhanced his involvement in de Paul’s burgeoning enterprises. In 1632, he acted as guarantor for the Congregation when Adrien Le Bon donated the priory of Saint-Lazare to it.17 Gondi continued to monitor and assist de Paul and de Marillac in nurturing confraternal foundations on his lands until his death in 1662, resolving local disputes, providing provisions and ﬁnancial reimbursement to confraternal members.18 In addition, de Paul regularly approached him for counsel on strategic decisions important to the Congregation’s expansion, such as the plea in 1644 of the inhabitants of Montmirail that the Congregation should continue to maintain their presence in the town. Gondi energetically endorsed their appeal, and had recently encouraged de Paul to accept the Hôtel-Dieu de la Chaussée that his son, the duc de Retz, presented to fund the undertaking; the contract noted the duc’s wish to contribute to the ‘good work’ founded by his parents.19 In the same year, the duc’s secretary, Louis Toutblanc, bequeathed two nearby farms, in Fontaine-Essart and Vieux-Moulins, to the Congregation, indicating the enduring power of the Gondi circle to introduce de Paul to new champions.20 Madame de Gondi’s brother-in-law, Charles d’Angennes, comte de Rochepot, joined the Congregation in late 1647 and died at SaintLazare in late December 1648.21 But a sustained association of at least three decades is readily evident in the handsome patronage offered by Monsieur de Gondi’s sister, the pious widow, Claude-Marguerite de Gondi, marquise de Maignelay. Congregation priests established confraternities on her lands in Picardy when performing missions from the 1620s. In 1640, the marquise reported to de Paul from Nanteuille-Haudouin that he should send additional booklets on establishing the confraternity to her because she, with the co-operation of local curés, was ‘trying in our villages to revive this devotion, which the war has somewhat brought to a halt. People remember well, and rightly so, all the acts of charity your priests did there so effectively’.22 She participated fully in the charitable aid administered by the confraternity in Nanteuil, until her declining health prevented her from carrying out the home visits required of its members.23 She also successfully urged de Paul and Louise de Marillac to send the Filles de la Charité to the

184

Vincent de Paul: The Making of a Catholic Dévot

town in 1641 where they ran a small school for girls and provided welfare.24 Shortly before she died in 1650, she procured them for the parish of Saint-Roch in Paris, where she resided; a member of its confraternity of charity, she bestowed 1000 livres to it in her will ‘to meet [the needs] of the poor sick’.25 The marquise also bequeathed the sizeable capital sum of 18,000 livres to the Congregation, stipulating that its annual income of 1000 livres should pay for the maintenance of ordinands attending the conferences that de Paul had begun at Saint-Lazare under the instruction of her brother the archbishop of Paris in 1631. This was simply the ﬁnal gift to a cause that she had ﬁnanced since the early 1630s.26 It would undoubtedly have proved welcome; to feed and lodge an ordinand on retreat in Paris normally cost the Congregation approximately 20 sous per day in the 1640s, but it charged ordinands, the number of whom averaged around 85 at any given conference, only one-third of this cost.27 In fact, de Paul redirected this legacy in 1651, exchanging it for 175 arpents of land at Plessis-Trappes, which he bought from the administrators of the Hôpital des Incurables. He carefully speciﬁed in the contract that the farm’s revenue was to be used to maintain the ordinands, thus ensuring that he acquiesced to the wishes of his benefactor.28 De Paul’s employment in the Gondi household permitted him to forge close friendships with a number of staff who collaborated with him as he extended his network of evangelization and placed the Congregation on a sound material footing. While an inbuilt hierarchy governed de Paul’s role as a Gondi client, the friendships that he cultivated with these individuals meant that he was free to treat them as equals. Monsieur Belin, chaplain at the Gondi château in Villepreux, and Charles Du Fresne, secretary and later intendant to the Gondis, reciprocated the emotional attachment that de Paul frequently expressed for them in the efforts that each made to promote his organizations and missions through advice, management and negotiations at local levels, and recruitment. Once de Paul established a confraternity of charity in Villepreux in February 1618 Belin acted as a monitor of its conduct and local conditions.29 While in Paris, he spent some time ministering to the galley prisoners with Antoine Portail, and participated in missions carried out in the Paris basin in 1625. Although he decided not to join the Congregation, he contributed to its evangelical activities throughout the later 1620s and 1630s, circuiting the area around Villepreux to teach catechism on de Paul’s request, for example, in Saint-Nom-La-Bretèche and Les Clayes in 1634. In 1630, he temporarily taught young girls in Villepreux while de Paul and de Marillac organized a suitable female

Alison Forrestal 185

teacher. De Paul reminded him stirringly of his ex ofﬁcio status as a Congregation member when he asked him whether he was ‘really unaware that Our Lord has made you a Missionary when it is you who have one of the greatest shares in the conception, gestation, birth and development of the Mission, and that, were it not for the clear signs God has given that He wanted you in Villepreux, you would belong to the Mission completely?’30 Both Belin and Du Fresne proved constantly alert to attracting new members to de Paul’s associations.31 During their 45 year relationship, Du Fresne introduced de Paul to his mother and sister, Isabelle, who joined the Dames de la Charité at the Hôtel-Dieu.32 De Paul unsuccessfully resisted his monetary gifts to the de Paul family, while willingly applying his acumen in managing Gondi assets to transactions made on behalf of the Congregation. Of outstanding merit was the role that Du Fresne played when the Congregation, in a series of choreographed deals, gathered large tracts of land in Orsigny, which served as the main source of agricultural produce for Saint-Lazare. In November 1645, Du Fresne acted as the intermediary or agent in the purchase of 81 arpents, plus buildings, from Bernard Dupuis and Nicole Mallart. In early December, Edme Ranier, secretary to the Prince de Condé, assumed an identical role in the transfer of 44 arpents from these venders. It is not clear why the Congregation needed to use both men as fronts for its acquisition of the land, but, as their advocate, Du Fresne risked substantial personal losses by advancing 17,635 livres in order to ensure that the transfers were completed and he steered both deals to fruition for the Congregation.33 By 1617, de Paul had also built a reservoir of lucrative goodwill through another of his patrons, Pierre de Bérulle. The Oratorian founder acted as de Paul’s spiritual director to at least 1617, after meeting him around 1610. This relation led de Paul into the ambit of the Gondi family; Bérulle acted as the spiritual director of the marquise de Maignelay until the early 1620s and she, her brother and his wife ﬁnanced the foundation of the Oratory.34 Abelly claimed that de Paul lived with Bérulle’s community for two years, but his name does not appear on the list of the Oratory’s founding members from 11 November 1611 and he remained ofﬁcially resident at rue de la Seine until 7 December 1612. He may have stayed for short periods at the Oratory’s house, La Petit Bourbon, but visited Bérulle there regularly. In later years, de Paul certainly proved conversant with the early routines of the community, borrowed expressly from the teachings that Bérulle had delivered to his associates between 1611 and 1615, and although he preserved more

186

Vincent de Paul: The Making of a Catholic Dévot

monastic norms in his organization of congregational life, he included some devotional practices characteristic of the Oratory.35 In 1611, when François Bourgoing resigned as curé of Clichy to join the ﬂedgling Oratory, Bérulle suggested that de Paul succeed him. Through this intervention, Paul invested in a connection with a second prominent Dévot family, the Hennequins. Aléxandre Hennequin (d1623), seigneur of Clichy, was reared under the guardianship of his maternal grandparents, the Du Breuil, and the tutelage of either Michel or Louis de Marillac and Nicolas Hennequin de Vincy, seigneur Du Fey and Villecien, after his father Pierre was assassinated with Henri III in 1589. Three of de Paul’s early and most committed collaborators emerged from this extended family: Louise de Marillac, the daughter of Louis de Marillac; the children of Nicolas Hennequin de Vincy, Antoine, seigneur de Villecien, and Isabelle Hennequin Du Fey.36 In the 1630s, their cousin, Madame la présidente de Brou, was a Dame at the Hôtel-Dieu and president of the confraternity in Nogent, while she ﬁnanced the establishment of the Filles in Bernay in 1654. Mademoiselle de Brou, perhaps her relative, was the treasurer of the confraternity in Saint-Barthélemy parish.37 The Hennequin siblings liberally provided resources from at least the early 1620s for de Paul’s work. Until her death around 1635, Du Fey regularly funded refurbishments at the Congregation’s accommodation in Paris, donated money to de Paul’s missions and confraternities and supplied large quantities of pictures and beads for his priests to distribute on missions. She and her mother were Dames at the Hôtel-Dieu and, crucially for the consolidation of the confraternal network, she acted as a procuresse-générale for the confraternities in the Île de France.38 Before her brother entered the Congregation of the Mission in July 1645, he employed its missionaries on his estate in Villecien, and advised the confraternity in the Parisian parish of SaintLaurent. In June 1645, he donated 11,700 livres to the Congregation, less an annual pension of 585 livres.39 Abelly also credited Bérulle with a part in the arrival of de Paul in Châtillon in 1617. On this episode, however, he and later biographers have constructed a rather simplistic narrative that presents de Paul’s move to the parish as an escape from his confessee, Madame de Gondi. In reality, as Barbara Diefendorf remarks perceptively, when Madame de Gondi claimed that she ‘feared losing [de Paul’s] assistance’ she was driven by her realization that she would ﬁnd it difﬁcult, if not impossible, to replicate the excellent relationship of trust that she had built up with her confessor of four years. Just as crucially, she worried that, without him, her own salvation, and that of her family and residents on her lands

Alison Forrestal 187

would be placed in jeopardy; for some time, she had sponsored de Paul’s preaching and catechesis on her lands and had asked him to deal with ‘business affairs’ that involved approaching a religious community to perform missions. In fact, Madame’s husband had already expressed a similar worry and had requested that she write to de Paul.40 Bérulle’s lacklustre effort to persuade de Paul to return to Paris is usually taken to indicate that he deliberately shied of encouraging Madame de Gondi’s unhealthy obsession with her confessor.41 However, when the circumstances surrounding de Paul’s appointment to Châtillon are placed in complete context, it is plain that Bérulle, for his own reasons, did not have any wish for de Paul to return to the Gondi fold. The appointment was not principally the solution to an uncomfortable intimacy with Madame de Gondi. De Paul may have hankered to return to a parochial ministry for a term, but he moved to Châtillon to aid his Dévot director in expanding a Congregation with which he was closely acquainted. From 1611, Bérulle expanded the Oratory through the establishment of small communities in satellite locations. From the earliest stages of its formation, the Congregation proﬁted from the protection of Denis de Marquement, auditor of the Rota in Rome and archbishop of Lyon between 1612 and 1626.42 Although not formally resident in Lyon until 9 January 1617, the Oratorians had provided services to him for several years; two Oratorians, François Bourgoing and Paul Métezeau, accompanied Marquemont on his diocesan visitation in 1614, while Bourgoing performed a preaching mission in Châtillon in mid-1616. In October, Marquemont raised the prospect of a permanent Oratorian presence in Châtillon, writing to ask Bérulle ‘to give your blessing and send some of yours to serve Our Lord there’. He envisaged uniting the cure of Châtillon with the Congregation and compensating the previous incumbent with a canonry in the chapter of Saint Paul in Lyon, then held by an Oratorian, Nicolas Soulfour. Marquemont suggested that the experienced Bourgoing ‘or another of his weight’ assume the posts of curé and superior of the Oratory house, and later that of superior in Lyon. However, Bérulle may have considered that Bourgoing was indispensable in his incarnation as an itinerant inaugurator of communities, so the man of import that he chose to represent Oratorian interests in Châtillon was Vincent de Paul.43 At this stage in his career, over seven years since he had ﬁrst met Bérulle, did de Paul still contemplate joining the Oratory? This is possible, although Abelly later claimed that de Paul had said that he had never intended to do so.44 Bérulle was often stretched to ﬁnd sufﬁcient numbers

188

Vincent de Paul: The Making of a Catholic Dévot

of personnel to respond to calls to establish houses. He sometimes relied on individuals empathetic to the Oratory’s ethos and familiar with its habits to establish a preliminary presence in new locations.45 He surely worried also that if he did not stamp the Oratory’s mark upon the parish, he would lose the opportunity Marquemont offered.46 However, if the move was simply a favour to rescue Bérulle from a predicament, it is certainly indicative of de Paul’s intimacy with the Oratory and its superior at this formative point in his career. It also places a new connotation on his decision to live in community with ﬁve or six priests in the town, just as he had done in the ﬁrst parish to which Bérulle had recommended him; this suggests that he immediately established a common congregational routine.47 When de Paul arrived in Châtillon it was, contrary to hagiographical convention, in a tolerable state.48 The episcopal visitation recorded only minor criticisms of the religious services and infrastructure and did not refer to abuses in religious devotion.49 Shortly before Paul’s arrival, a side chapel in the town church was placed under the dutiful care of the female members of a new confraternity of the Rosary; they possessed a substantial range of linens and ornaments to decorate the chapel as well as vestments for masses held in it.50 This necessitates a reconﬁguration of the customary view of de Paul’s agenda when he arrived in the parish. Instead of encountering a neglected people on the road to perdition, he found a well-serviced parish and parishioners disposed towards a curé equipped to suggest an organizational method to assist the sick and poor, and spiritual incentives to sustain it. This explains why de Paul later celebrated the fact that he introduced the confraternity as a response to the willingness of local women to assume responsibility to alleviate hardship. Further incentive arose from the patent inability of the local Hôtel-Dieu to cater for this; just three years earlier, the episcopal visitors had observed that the hospital was in ruins, and housed only three adults and six children at the town’s expense.51 De Paul’s versions of the immediate events that inspired the foundation differ in detail, but he always maintained that female parishioners had been ‘touched’ when he recommended the sick from the pulpit and had walked to assist those in question. They proved inclined to listen when he proposed a format that would enable them ‘to aid these great necessities with great ease’: I proposed to all these good persons that charity had animated . . . to club together, each for a day, to do the pot . . . it is the ﬁrst place where the Charity was established.52

Alison Forrestal 189

De Paul already possessed a skilful ability to implant and inspire through emotional appeals and to suggest practical provisions to support pious desires. The confraternity was instituted on 23 August and the brief explanation of its ethos then produced metamorphosed into a complete rule when it was formally approved on 24 November 1617.53 Despite the fact that this rule was the prototype, the ﬁrst and most extensive piece of documentary evidence for the evolution of de Paul’s charitable initiatives, it has been subjected to little analysis, regarding either its distinctive characteristics or the sources that de Paul used in composing it.54 De Paul’s choice of the confraternal structure as a framework to stimulate devotion through charity had substantial precedent within Catholic religious practice since the middle ages, and was a method of evangelization that gained new force during the Catholic Reformation. The Jesuits proved notably adept in encouraging the development of confraternities that combined common prayer, sacramental practice, catechesis, formation of conscience and collective works of mercy.55 In Dévot Paris, pious women visited the Hôtel-Dieu to offer charitable assistance. Between 1611 and 1615, the widow Suzanne Habert composed a rule intended to guide their service or to describe activities that they already performed.56 The rule does not appear to have been in use beyond 1615, but it has been suggested that de Paul might have been directly inﬂuenced by it in 1617. Certainly, a shared obligation of christocentric charity, service of Jesus through the sick poor, as well as the fact that both were intended for laywomen, links the associations and their rules. However, de Paul did not use this rule in formulating his confraternal regulations. Firstly, the Châtillon rule did not refer to Saint Martha, who was the patroness of the Hôtel-Dieu association and a popular example of female sanctity articulated through action. Secondly, its structure differed to that of the Hôtel-Dieu, though each borrowed organizational frameworks that were common in other confraternities with female members. In Châtillon, a prioress and two assistants administered resources and organized welfare, and, unusually for female confraternal participants, each servant member possessed one vote in all decisions.57 Thirdly, the women’s activities in the Hôtel-Dieu were purely supplementary to the primary care instigated and carried out by the Augustinian nuns. Indeed, Habert was careful to warn the women to avoid upsetting or interfering with their labour and to limit their activity to cleaning wards, preparing food and offering spiritual consolation.58 Here lay a key distinction between the rules of the associations; the women of the Hôtel-Dieu did not possess the proactive management and exhaustive control of care ascribed to the women in Châtillon. These routinely oversaw almost the entire

190

Vincent de Paul: The Making of a Catholic Dévot

spiritual and physical care of patients in their homes from the moment that the prioress placed them under their care to the moment that she recorded their death or recovery. In this confraternity, the ‘circle of exclusions’, meaning the restricted access of women to most positions of early modern civil, political and ecclesiastical leadership, applied only to the extent that they used a male procurator and had to alert a priest to administer the sacraments.59 Yet, de Paul did resort to a particular manifestation of the Catholic Reformation to construct his version of charitable action: he borrowed principles of welfare from the Frères de la Charité. While the initial act of association in August did not refer to this order, de Paul used the interval between then and November to exercise his experiential memory in concluding that the confraternity’s name and rule should derive from the order: ‘The confraternity will be called the confraternity of Charity, in imitation of the hospital of Charity in Rome; and [the members] will be servants of the poor or charity’.60 Hitherto escaping scholarly scrutiny, this pivotal sentence, when interpreted in conjunction with further details of de Paul’s early career, demonstrates a creative alliance between de Paul and the hospitaler order. The Frères de la Charité was one of the religious orders that best conveyed the Catholic Reformation’s concern for active Christianity, was a prime expression of Dévot piety in seventeenth-century France, and a beneﬁciary of the monarchy’s ambition to re-assert its authority through support for inﬂuential representatives of Catholic reform. Originally founded by the Spaniard John of God (1495–1550) in Grenada around 1535 as a confraternity of lay brothers destined to care for the sick, the group quickly spread beyond the Iberian peninsula. After John of God’s death, Pope Gregory XIII granted them the hospital of Saint John Calybita in Rome (1584), and the association began to work in Naples, Milan and Florence before arriving in France in 1601. When formally recognized as a religious order in 1596 the Frères became bound to the Augustinian rule and obliged to take the three solemn vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as well as a fourth specially applicable vow of hospitality to the sick poor.61 De Paul’s ﬁrst biographer, Abelly, mentioned twice that he went ‘meticulously to visit, serve and exhort the poor sick of la Charité in the faubourg Saint-Germain’ for approximately three or four years after his arrival in Paris.62 This accords neatly with facts known about de Paul’s life in this period. He began his association with the Frères before he joined Marguerite’s household between February and early May 1610, and knew of their work in Rome from at least one trip there before 1608.63 As one

Alison Forrestal 191

of 11 almoners, de Paul had to participate in the regular almsgiving that characterized Marguerite’s ﬁnal years. In addition to the distribution of alms after her daily masses, she also visited and funded hospitals. One of those especially favoured was the Hôpital de la Charité. In visiting it, de Paul was eligible to participate in a slew of attractive papal indulgences newly awarded to the order in February 1607 to stimulate devotional charity and augment its popularity; these were offered for such virtuous acts as visiting the hospital sick, consoling and fortifying the dying, and washing of feet. These new indulgences complimented the order’s determined attempts to expand its institutional provision in Italy, Spain and France. In the latter, their installation and expansion received enthusiastic royal sponsorship. This mutually beneﬁcial relationship began in 1601 when Marie de Medici invited ﬁve Frères de la Charité to Paris. Led by Giovanni Bonnelli from Florence, they assumed responsibility for a hospital in a rented house on rue de la Petite Seine, following the issue of letters patent in March 1602. By 1660, the Frères managed 15 hospitals in France, including 2 foundations granted by the crown in recognition of the order’s medical services to the army during the sieges of La Rochelle in 1628 and the military campaign in Picardy in 1636. In Paris, it took over a decade for the Frères to become ﬁrmly established. Marie de Medici purchased their rented building on rue de la Petite Seine for them in February 1605, but they exchanged this for the Hôtel de Sansac offered by another royal benefactor, Marguerite de Valois, one year later. During these years, the Frères undertook signiﬁcant building and refurbishment projects in both premises, including the provision of inﬁrmary facilities, oratories, and sleeping cells. These demands, as well as the need to attract donations for the routine provision of medical care, placed the order under prolonged ﬁnancial strain, and it was obliged to petition the crown for further liberties. In January 1610, the king issued letters patent that granted the Frères leave to quest in all churches and to receive all donations; the regency government reconﬁrmed these rights in August 1611. Further awards quickly followed, such as proceeds from the salt harvest, tax exemptions, medical qualiﬁcations for their practitioners and new mendicant privileges.64 On 27 August 1611, Marguerite de Valois presented the old église de Saint Pierre to the order; this lay adjacent to the new house that she had already given and the Frères had used it for religious services since Marguerite loaned it to them in October 1606. Under the terms of the contract, the curé and marguilliers of Saint Sulpice formally ceded the use of the chapel and its cemetery in return

192

Vincent de Paul: The Making of a Catholic Dévot

for a token rent of one sol annually.65 In 1613 Marguerite laid the foundation for a new hospital that she agreed to construct beside this church. It eventually opened in 1631.66 As the royal family continued to direct their patronage to the Frères de la Charité, de Paul was positioned to participate in fundraising. On 20 October 1611, he donated an impressive 15,000 livres to the Frères, in order that they would have ‘greater means to nurse and care for the sick poor that come and go there daily to take refuge and to have their wounds dressed.’ He also intended ‘to help the hospital pay off what is due on the rest of the building they have had constructed there, and to complete the construction’.67 Although de Paul was now quite closely attached to the hospital’s work, his possession of 15,000 livres cannot be reconciled with his general history of impecuniosity during this period. An almoner in Marguerite de Valois’ household usually earned between 40 and 400 livres annually and de Paul’s only other serious source of revenue was the yet unrealized, and soon to be contested, revenue from the abbey of Saint-Léonard. His donation was not in reality a gift from him to the Frères, as has usually been suggested. Henri IV had initially issued it to four merchants in compensation for the loss of their 300-ton cargo ship from Biarritz in 1594. The previous day, Jean de La Thane, maître de la monnaie in Paris, whom de Paul had known in a formal capacity since at least May 1610, had given the sum to de Paul.68 La Thane in turn had received it from the maître de la monnaie for Béarn and Navarre, who acted in subrogation for the four merchants. As an individual who worked in the Hôpital and as an almoner of one of its principal patrons, de Paul provided the ﬁnal link in the chain of donation and the money remained in his possession for only one day before he forwarded it to the prior of the Hôpital. When de Paul composed the regulations for the new confraternity in his parish six years later, he consciously drew on his encounter with the Frères. At ﬁrst glance, it might appear that he simply chose to name the new association after their Roman hospital. If this were so, the hospital and confraternity would link simply by the common denominator of charitable service, itself already a general umbrella term for almsgiving, visits to the sick and other initiatives of welfare. It is generally hazardous to identify speciﬁc sources for the christocentric charity of service amongst Dévots because they drew upon a common corpus of spiritual writing, and the use of terms such as servants of the poor was certainly not exclusive to de Paul and the Frères. But de Paul clearly did not pick his model for the confraternal rule at random; his predilection for the language and discipline of service is directly indebted to the Frères who provided one of its

Alison Forrestal 193

strongest expositions during the Catholic Reformation. He deliberately sought to imprint the order’s inﬂuence, and the inﬂuence of its religious ethos, upon his new confraternal venture. Furthermore, the rule quite precisely referred to the name of the Roman hospital and to the hospital itself, rather than, for instance, to a confraternity, as one recent study suggested.69 Again, in its collective organization and promotion of service to the poor, the confraternity followed a tradition of charity that was ﬁrmly established in the Catholic church. Yet, crucially, when the Châtillon rule is compared to the text of the rule used by the Frères de la Charité in their hospitals, it becomes obvious that de Paul’s use of the term ‘imitation’ alluded not simply to the title ‘la charité’ or to the ethos of the religious order, but also to the forms of charitable care that its members practised. This was not primarily manifested in a word for word repetition of the Frères’ rule; the intimacy of the two rules is conﬁrmed less by the congruence of language than by the correspondence in the sequence and substance of their procedures. Systematically, both rules offered detailed instructions on the care of patients from the moment that they were admitted to care: Châtillon: The ﬁrst thing that she will do will be to see if he has need of a white chemise, in order that, if this is so, she will carry him one of those of the said confraternity, together with white bed drapes.70 Frères: He gives him a chemise/chemisette, a headpiece, all white, a bonnet, slippers, a dressing gown . . . a bed decorated with white drapes.71 The symmetry of materials and provision is striking and the degree of difference a reﬂection of the fact that the confraternity in Châtillon depended on moderate local donations and good will to provide for the care of patients. Both rules then recommended that the patient should attend confession in preparation to receive communion, before being given eating utensils.72 Immediately after this, the rules outlined the order for the two main meals: Châtillon: She who will be [scheduled] . . . will carry [the meal] to the patients, and, approaching them, will greet them gaily and charitably, will arrange the tray on the bed, put on a towel, a cup and spoon and bread, wash the hands of the sick and say the blessing, pour the soup into a bowl and put the meat on a plate, setting all on the said tray.

194

Vincent de Paul: The Making of a Catholic Dévot

Frères: A religious [goes] to wash the hands of the sick, and another wipes them and kisses them humbly, two others spread their towels, tidy their beds decently, and pray them to say a pater and an ave for the benefactors . . . the superior says the blessing, and the religious nurse sends what is prescribed to each patient; the others aid the sick to take their broth and other food. Each rule then proceeded directly to the manner in which patients should be encouraged to live well once recovered from their illness or to learn the art of Christian death. Both recommended that a devotional book be read aloud in the afternoon, but neither speciﬁed a particular text. They shared a concern that dying patients should receive extreme unction and that, should they die, they be accompanied to the grave by confraternal members or two Frères, as appropriate. However, the Châtillon rule was more expansive on the type of catechesis to be offered to patients, perhaps a reﬂection of the fact that the brothers in the hospital had more supervision and experience than many of the confreres in this task. The members were asked ‘to lead [souls] by the hand to God, exhorting to bear their illness patiently for love of God, to request forgiveness for their sins, to make acts of contrition and to resolve not to re-offend God once recovered’.73 The confraternity’s rule did not expose a thorough theology of charity, but it differed in degree from the Frères’ rule by emphasizing intermittently, and more explicitly, the service rendered to the confraternity’s patron, Jesus, through care of the sick poor. Its suggestion that confraternal members place a picture of the cruciﬁxion before patients so that they might ‘reﬂect on what the Son of God suffered for them’ signals the expectation that patient and benefactor would recognize the mirror image of servitude embodied in the symbol of the cross.74 Notably, the initial act of association, issued three months earlier, included the image of servitude to Christ, but it named the ‘Mother of God’ as the association’s patroness, along with the traditional patrons of Châtillon, Saints Martin and Andrew.75 Three months later, the deﬁnitive rule identiﬁed Jesus as the sole patron.76 As the confraternity took shape and de Paul deﬁned its purpose precisely, service to its divine protector that imitated his ‘humility, charity and simplicity’ became the deﬁning message of its rule.77 De Paul’s decision to exploit the rule of the Frères de la Charité in a parochial environment in 1617 was judicious. The extraction of speciﬁc sections of the rule permitted the ﬂedgling confraternity the type of primacy in care, detail in procedure, and service to the poor that was most suitable to its purpose, but did not seek to transform its members

Alison Forrestal 195

into replicas of the hospitaler religious order.78 At points where the rule of Châtillon diverged from that of the Frères it was usually because it chose modes of routine and organization that did not ﬁt the Augustinian regulations practised by the hospitalers. Therefore, members were directed to meet on every third Sunday to pray and hear mass, listen to a spiritual exhortation, and to discuss their spiritual progress as well as issues arising from their welfare activity. Delving further into the private sphere of interior piety, the rule included a personal rule for members, a parallel but not identical type to that contained in the Frères’ instruction. The development of a common spirit was to be fostered through daily prayer and regular attendance at mass. Members were also urged to read a chapter of François de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life daily, a recently published exposition of the lay vocation and an indirect endorsement of the confraternity.79 In addition, the rule, ﬁnely tailored to meet local circumstances in Châtillon parish, did not anticipate that the members would work in co-operation with or under the authority of hospitalers of a religious order. Instead, in domestic settings, these women performed, rather than supplemented, tasks that were normally the duty of the religious. From the moment that the prioress identiﬁed a sick patient, he or she moved under the nursing care of her associates, who provided clean clothing, basic medicines and food from provisions purchased by the treasurer. Finally, while the ordained religious were able to provide the full range of spiritual care from within their own ranks, the confraternity’s members were expected to partake in a public ministry of evangelical teaching through edifying compassion and patient tutoring in doctrine and through vigilantly ensuring that the patients were offered the sacraments. These ambitions, transmitted to the provincial parish by de Paul as the fruit of his encounter with activists in Paris, were fundamental characteristics of the Catholic Reformation and its Dévot wing. Between 1608 and 1617, de Paul spun a web of relations amongst Parisian Dévots, the material and intellectual fruits of which later sustained and frequently dictated the tactics that he pursued in rural evangelization, charitable welfare and clerical formation. His relationships with the Gondis, Bérulle and the Oratory, and the Frères de la Charité, enabled de Paul to ease his way into Dévot networks and engagements. They simultaneously exposed him to a stimulating distillation of pious practices that transformed Parisian religious life, and from which he extracted the organizational tools, examples, and spiritual principles that he ﬁrst translated into practical form in the provincial locality of Châtillon.

196

Vincent de Paul: The Making of a Catholic Dévot

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Paul Henzmann C. M., Bernard Koch C. M., Claude Lautissier C. M., and Joseph Bergin for assistance in the preparation of this essay.

Notes 1. L. Abelly, La Vie du venerable servant de Dieu Vincent de Paul, 2 vols (Paris: Florentin Lambert, 1664), i, p. 21. 2. I have used a facsimile of the original manuscript rule, because the published transcription of the text contains some errors: Archives de la Congrégation de la Mission, Paris (ACMP), ‘Second Règlement de la Charité de Femmes de Châtillon les Dombes’, f. 1r. 3. S. Dinan, Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth–Century France. The Early History of the Daughters of Charity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 4. Vincent de Paul. Correspondance, Conférences, Entretiens, P. Coste (ed.), 14 vols (Paris: Librairie Lecoffre, 1920), ix, pp. 208, 243. 5. De Paul’s ﬁrst biographer, Louis Abelly, stated that de Paul arrived in Châtillon in July, but this does not accord with the documentary record of de Paul’s activities in the parish: Abelly, Vie, i, p. 37; Archives départmentales (AD) du Rhône, 4 G 121, ancien registre 81, f. 93r–v. 6. De Paul’s appointment to Tilh in Dax, in 1600, had been successfully contested: Correspondance, Coste (ed.), xiii, pp. 7, 17–18. On Clichy, see Ibid., p. 85. 7. De Paul resigned the abbey in 1616, after six years of legal challenges to his possession: Correspondance, Coste (ed.), xiii, pp. 8–13, 37–9; AD de Charente Maritime: Série B 1340, ff. 66r, 221v, 264v–5v; Série B 1522, ff. 104r, 111r; Série 3 E 1173, f. 466r–v; Série 3 E 1203, ff. 229r–30v. 8. AD de Seine-Maritime, G. 9574, ff. 77v–8r. A note on the act of nomination suggests that the nomination was not honoured. 9. Correspondance, Coste (ed.), xiii, pp. 9–24. 10. A. Vautier, ‘Saint Vincent de Paul chanoine d’Ecouis’, Petites Annales de St. Vincent de Paul, 48 (1903), 356–64. 11. Correspondance, Coste (ed.), xi, p. 172. 12. In 1619, Gondi, as general of the galleys of France, had recommended that the king appoint de Paul chaplain general of the galleys, with an annual salary of 600 livres: Abelly, Vie, i, p. 80; Bibliothèque Nationale (BN), MS Fr. 26202; Correspondance, Coste (ed.), xiii, pp. 197–202. 13. Archives Nationale (AN), ET/lxxviii/225 (17 April 1627). 14. AN, M105. 15. ‘Testament de Madame de Gondi’, Annales de la Congrégation de la Mission, 98, no. 1 (1933), 65–80. 16. In Villepreux, Joigny, Montmirail, Folleville, Sérévillers and Paillart. With the exception of Villepreux, copies of the rules are in ACMP. The rules printed in Correspondance, Coste (ed.), xiii, are incomplete. 17. Correspondance, Coste (ed.), xiii, pp. 234–44; Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, MS 624, ff. 435, 440.

Alison Forrestal 197 18. See, for example: Correspondance, Coste (ed.), i, pp. 84–5, 95–9 and 126–7 (de Paul to Louise de Marillac, May 1630, 7 December 1630, and 15 September 1631). 19. AN, S6708; Correspondance, Coste (ed.), ii, pp. 495–7 (de Paul to Guillaume Delville, 20 November 1644). 20. AN, S6708. 21. Correspondance, Coste (ed.), iii, pp. 396–9 (de Paul to Étienne Blatiron, 25 December 1648); Ibid., vii, pp. 289–91 (de Paul to Jacques Pesnelle, 15 October 1658). 22. Correspondance, Coste (ed.), ii, pp. 93–4 (Marquise de Maignelay to de Paul, 21 August 1640). 23. Ibid., ii, pp. 94–5 (Marquise de Maignelay to de Paul, 26 August 1640). 24. Sainte Louise de Marillac. Écrits, É. Charpy (ed.) (Paris: Compagnie des Filles de la Charité de Saint Vincent de Paul, 1983), L. 69 (Louise de Marillac to de Paul, August 1642). 25. BN, MS Clairambault 1136, ‘Testament de la Marquise de Maignelay’, p. 8. 26. Ibid., p. 14; AN, M211; Oraison funebre de haute et puissante dame Charlotte Marguerite De Gondy, Marquise de Maignelay. Prononcée en la presence de Monseigneur l’Archevesque de Corinthe, Coadiuteur de Paris, celebrant Pontiﬁcalement dans l’Eglise des Prestres de l’Oratoire de Iesus (Paris: n. p.. 1651), pp. 53–5. 27. Correspondance, Coste (ed.), ii, pp. 74–81 (de Paul to Bernard Codoing, 26 July 1640); Ibid., iii, pp. 232–3 (de Paul to Jean-François de Gondi, 3 September 1647); Ibid., iv, pp. 252–3 (de Paul to Jean Martin, 15 September 1651); Ibid., iv, pp. 340–3 (de Paul to Lambert aux Couteaux, 22 March 1652); Ibid., v, pp. 587–9 (de Paul to Charles Ozenne, April 1656). 28. AN, S6681A. 29. Abelly, Vie, i, p. 47. 30. Correspondance, Coste (ed.), i, pp. 122–5, 128–9 (de Paul to Louise de Marillac, 13 September 1631, 22/3 September 1631); Ibid., i, , pp. 287–8 (de Paul to Belin, 16 December 1634). 31. Ibid., i, pp. 449–51 (de Paul to Antoine Lucas, 21 February 1638); Ibid., viii, p. 329 (Charles Du Fresne to de Paul, 25 July 1660). 32. ACMP, MS ‘Noms des premieres Dames de la Charité 1634–1660’ (unpaginated). I am grateful to Barbara Diefendorf for supplying a photocopy of this manuscript. 33. ACMP, ‘Transaction avec le seigneur de Limours, 25 Juin 1650’ (copy); AN, S8885; AN, S6687. 34. Oraison funebre . . . Maignelay, p. 47. 35. For example, Correspondance, Coste (ed.), xii, p. 45; G. Habert, La Vie du Cardinal de Berulle instituteur et premier Superieur General de la Congregation de l’Oratoire de Iesus-Christ nostre Seigneur (Paris: J Camusat and P. LePetit, 1646), p. 330. 36. J. Leviste, Les Château du Fey et la seigneurie de Villecien depuis le XVIe siècle (Villeneuve-sur-Yonne: Amis du Vieux Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, 1990), p. 9. 37. ACMP, MS ‘Noms’; Correspondance, Coste (ed.), i, pp. 280, 494–5 (de Paul to Louise de Marillac, post-1631, 1638). On Bernay, see P. Coste, Le Grand Saint du grand siècle, 3 vols (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1931), i, p. 449. 38. ACMP, MS ‘Noms’. See Correspondance, Coste (ed.), i, for letters between de Paul and Du Fay.

198

Vincent de Paul: The Making of a Catholic Dévot

39. AN, M211; Correspondance, Coste (ed.), i, pp. 38–9, 458–9 (de Paul to Louise de Marillac, 9 February 1628, March 1638). 40. Ibid., i, pp. 21–2 (Marguerite de Gondi to de Paul, September 1617); Ibid., i, p. 23 (Philippe-Emmannuel de Gondi to de Paul, 15 October 1617) – these letters are likely to have been written earlier than the dates usually assigned to them.; Abelly, Vie, i, pp. 38–46; B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity. Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 207. 41. Abelly, Vie, i, p. 36. 42. Correspondance de Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle, J. Dagens (ed.), 3 vols (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1937–39), i, pp. 158–9 (Pierre de Bérulle to Nicolas Soulfour, c. October 1612). 43. AD du Rhône, 1 G 48 [28], ff. 262r–8r; AD du Rhône, 19 H 1, ff. 32r–5r (Denis de Marquemont to Pierre de Bérulle, 18 October 1616). This letter has now been published, with other recently discovered correspondence, in M. Dupuy and B. Delahaye (eds), Pierre de Bérulle. Oeuvres complètes, 7 vols (Paris: Cerf, 1995–2006), iv, pp. 349–51, 357–8. 44. Abelly, Vie, i, p. 24. 45. Correspondance, Dagens (ed.), i, p. 232 (Pierre de Bérulle to André Jousseaume, 27 February 1617). 46. In fact, Marquemont approved the appointment of another priest in January 1617, presumably to ensure a curé for the parish even if Bérulle proved unable to do so; the alternative candidate exchanged his nomination for a canonry in March: AD du Rhône, 1 G 87, ff. 256v, 279r–v. 47. Abelly, Vie, i, pp. 37–8. 48. For the classic exposition of a parish in dire need of reform, see Coste, Grand Saint, i, p. 94. 49. AD du Rhône, 1 G 48 [28], ff. 262r–8r. 50. ACMP, ‘Inventaire des ornements de la chapelle des dames du saint rosaire, 26 mai 1617’ (copy, transcribed by Bernard Koch from the pre-1729 copy held by the Filles de la Charité in Châtillon). 51. AD du Rhône, 1 G 48 [28], f. 264r. 52. Correspondance, Coste (ed.), xiii, p. 203. See also Ibid., xiii, pp. 208, 243. 53. ACMP, ‘Règlement’, ff. 10v–11v. 54. See, for example, Dinan, Women and Poor Relief, p. 36. 55. M. Maher, ‘How the Jesuits Used Their Congregations to Promote Frequent Communion’, in J. Donnelly and M. Maher (eds), Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France and Spain (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999), pp. 75–95; M. Maher, ‘Confession and Consolation: The Society of Jesus and its Promotion of the General Confession’, in K. Jackson Lualdi and A. Thayer (eds), Penitence in the Age of Reformations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 184–200. 56. The rule is printed in H. de Coste, Les Vies et les éloges des reines, des princesses et dames illustres, 2 vols (Paris: Cramoisy, 1647), ii, p. 783; Diefendorf, Penitence, p. 229. 57. G. Casagrande, ‘Confraternities and Lay Female Religiosity in Late Medieval and Renaissance Umbria’, in N. Terpstra (ed.), The Politics of Ritual Kinship. Confraternities and Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 48–66.

Alison Forrestal 199 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79.

ACMP, ‘Règlement’, ff. 2r–v, 6r–v; Coste, Vies, ii, p. 783. Casagrande, ‘Confraternities’, p. 51. ACMP, ‘Règlement’, f. 1r. Bibliothèque Mazarine (BM), MS 1792, pp. 1–12, 66–73. Abelly, Vie, i, p. 21 and ii, p. 208. Biographers have generally suggested that de Paul joined the household in 1609, but he was not listed amongst the staff paid for the ﬁnal quarter of 1609: AN, KK180, f. 112r. BN, MS 1792, pp. 2–3, 8–19, 31–42 and 61–3. AN, M766. BM, MS 1792, p. 42. Correspondance, Coste (ed.), xiii, pp. 14–16. Ibid., p. 11. Diefendorf, Penitence, pp. 207–8. ACMP, ‘Règlement’, f. 3v. The rule is printed in P. Hélyot, Dictionnaire des ordres religieux, ou Histoire des ordres monastiques, religieux et militaires et des congrégations séculieres de l’un et l’autre sexe, qui ont été établis jusqu’à présente, J. Migne (ed.), 4 vols (Paris: Ateliers Catholiques du Petit-Montrouge, 1847–63), iv, pp. 620–2. A virtually identical manuscript copy of the rule, dating from the early eighteenth century, can be found in BM, MS 1792, pp. 19–22. Its transcriber, Père Romauld, a former provincial in the order, stated that this rule was used in the order’s hospitals since John of God established the ﬁrst hospital in Grenada. ACMP, ‘Règlement’, f. 4r; Hélyot, Dictionnaire, p. 621. ACMP, ‘Règlement’, ff. 5v–6r; Hélyot, Dictionnaire, p. 622. ACMP, ‘Règlement’, f. 4r. ACMP, ‘Acte d’association et prèmier règlement des Dames de la Confrèrie de la Charité de Châtillon-les-Dombes’. The regulatory element of this act is very brief. ACMP, ‘Règlement’, f. 9v. Ibid., f. 11r. Ibid., ff. 2r–3v, 6v–7r. This directive is not included in another confraternal rule until 1649 when de Paul considered establishing a confraternity of charity at the royal court: ACMP, ‘Règlement’, ff. 2r–3v, 6v–7r, 9v–10r.

This page intentionally left blank

Part V The Politics of Religion in the Provinces

This page intentionally left blank

9 The Origins of Counter Reform Piety in Nantes: The Catholic League and its Aftermath (1585–1617) Elizabeth Tingle

In 1608, Jean Christi, cathedral canon, théologal and former Leaguer in Nantes, made his will. It bears witness to traditional Catholic reformism. Christi commended his soul to God, asking that ‘He receive it in His heaven through the inﬁnite merit of the death and passion of His dear son, my saviour Jesus Christ’. He asked for the prayers of the Virgin, Saints John the Baptist, Peter, Paul, John the Evangelist, Vincent and Germain, his namesakes and the patrons of the churches in which he had served. The will was concerned with funeral details, which were simple: burial in the cathedral, customary services at funeral and octave, a trental and a perpetual anniversary obit. Bequests were left to the hospital of Nantes, the city’s four ‘old’ orders of friars, the choirboys for books and to the church of Saint-Germain de Rugles in Évreux diocese, where he had been baptized. Almost 20 years later, in 1625, Françoise Fradine, widow of Michel Touzelin, a leaguer échevin of Nantes, made her will. This was a classic dévote meditation upon sin, forgiveness and faith, several pages in length. Fradine called upon the Blessed Virgin and her guardian angel to intercede for her, she renounced Satan and gave herself, heart and body, to Christ.1 On appearances, Fradine’s will exempliﬁes the new spirituality of the seventeenth century, devout, interiorized, preoccupied with sin and the body, intensely Christological in tone, whereas Christi’s will echoes older traditions of saintly intercession and communal prayer. By the evidence of these and other similar wills, there seems to have been great changes in elite spirituality over a span of 20 years. During this period, ‘classical’ Tridentinism emerged in Nantes, associated with a dévôt group of clergy and laity such as Étienne Louytre, dean of the cathedral, who knew Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle in his youth, helped to 203

204

The Origins of Counter Reform Piety in Nantes, 1585–1617

introduce reformed Carmelites into the city, supported the Oratorians and created a confraternity of the Holy Sacrament in his parish.2 The Ursulines came in 1626–29 and an hôpital général was founded with the support of the Company of the Holy Sacrament in 1640.3 Christi and Fradine’s wills seem to exemplify the old and the new spiritual climate in Nantes, known from studies of other French cities during the counter reformation period after 1600. Yet the novelty of the early seventeenth century is deceptive. In Nantes, the ‘classic’ elements of Catholic reform were not a new product of the years after 1600. Their origins lay in the later wars of religion. Recent work on French cities has shown that the great catalyst of Catholic revival was religious conﬂict after 1560. The recent Histoire de la France religieuse describes these years as the era of ‘spectacular re-establishment of Catholicism on the political front’ supported by an internal renovation of religious institutions and spiritual life. This process properly constituted the early Catholic reform, which historians have often pushed into the early seventeenth century.4 Marc Venard has identiﬁed four phases in the reinvigoration of Catholicism.5 From 1560, in response to growing Protestant conﬁdence and the Crown’s hesitation to act against it, there was a vigorous, unexpected and initially uncoordinated, popular and violent reaction against heresy, stimulated by Huguenot iconoclasm, Catholic preaching and printed vernacular tracts. After the ﬁrst civil war, the regime of confessional co-existence of the 1560s saw the reinforcement of Catholicism, stiffened and enthused by the rulings of the Council of Trent. Popular spirituality vibrated with a new fervour and a renewal of pilgrimage, confraternities and processions, underpinned with an emphasis on instruction, through sermons and devotional texts. The period to 1572 saw both sectarianism and increasing levels of organization of lay Catholics against royal policies viewed as unfavourable to the faith, for example in penitent confraternities, the Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament in Burgundy and most dramatically in the Saint Bartholomew’s day massacres. After 1570, ‘Italian’ inﬂuences on French Catholicism became stronger, with the commitment of the French clergy to Tridentine reforms, the increasing appearance of new religious orders such as the Jesuits, novel devotions such as the oratoire and liturgical innovation.6 In all of this, the role of the laity was crucial. A. Barnes argues that ‘in no other era...was the clergy so dependent upon lay support and the laity so free to take the initiative in shaping its own religious life....Catholic laymen were free to create or to support devotions which expressed their spiritual need with comparatively little clerical inﬂuence’, although others such as Richard Gascon and Philip Hoffman have shown the importance of the new religious orders in stimulating spiritual revival.7

Elizabeth Tingle 205

Above all, the Catholic League movement after 1584 has been seen as the midwife of Catholic and counter reform in France.8 Philip Benedict argues for Rouen, that the succession crisis following the death of the duc d’Anjou and the emergence of the Protestant Henri of Navarre as heir to the French throne jolted the Catholic Church into more dynamic action than had been the case in previous decades. The result was the formation of a nation-wide organization whose aim was a crusade against heresy in all its guises. With its joint tactics of armed struggle and prayer, the League was underpinned by penitential piety, a sense that ‘religious devotions must be redoubled and morals reformed lest God send a heretic king to scourge the people . . . of their sins’.9 A number of links between the League and Catholic reform can be observed. The hallmarks of League piety, penitentialism, adoration of the holy sacrament, processions, confraternities and the foundation of new religious orders, would become important features of Tridentinism after 1600. The League supported the introduction into France of the Council of Trent’s rulings and was ultramontane in sentiment, calling on the papacy for support and legitimation of its actions. Most frequently observed is the support of individual Leaguers for Catholic reform after 1598. Michel Cassan, in his study of Limoges, observes of the Leaguers that ‘having swallowed the political failure of their enterprise, these soldiers of the holy league . . . transformed themselves into zealots of the counter reform. From the militia of the League they [became] the militia of Catholic reform’.10 Both ‘battles’ were inspired by the spirit of crusade and, if their means were different, their aims were the same: the triumph of the city of God on earth. Nantes participated in the Catholic League rebellion against Henri III and Henri IV for longer than any other French town. Although the municipality was previously loyal to the Crown, during the night of 6–7 April 1589 the duchesse de Mercoeur led a successful coup for the League, supported by the majority of the city’s elite.11 The rebellious royal governor, the duc de Mercoeur, formed a Parlement and a Conseil d’État at Nantes, in opposition to the institutions of royalist Rennes, and Nantes became the centre of his administration of Brittany. Supported by Spanish troops, Mercoeur and Nantes remained in opposition to the Crown until March 1598. As with other northern French cities, the League years in Nantes were notable for their public piety and concern to implement the reforms of Trent. Yet no detailed study has been made of the relationship between League piety and Catholic reform. The aim of this essay is, therefore, to examine the impact of the experience of the League on the origins of the Catholic and Counter Reformations in the city.

206

The Origins of Counter Reform Piety in Nantes, 1585–1617

Nantes provides an interesting case study of the nature and purpose of League religious policy, and of links between the Holy Union and Catholic reform, because of its position as a long-term and resolute bastion of the League. It is argued here that the religious politics and the piety of the League grew out of spiritual developments that began early in the 1580s, a time when Tridentine practices also appeared in the city. A changing spiritual climate emerged, characterized by enhanced interest in the body of Christ, good works and prayer. These had both indigenous and ‘foreign’ roots, and long-term origins. Equally, in this period, many traditional practices such as mortuary foundation and traditional confraternity membership declined. The ostentatious devotions of the Catholic League grew from these roots. But it is also argued that in some ways, the League after 1589 was a traditional, backwardlooking movement in Nantes, notable for its defence of traditions rather than its active reformism. Its spiritual hallmark was a revival of traditional religious practices that were starting to go out of fashion before 1588. Yet the League did also presage subsequent reform. Its piety was a hybrid of old and new, and the 1590s were a transitional phase between early and classic Catholic reform in the city. After 1598, down to 1617, the so-called Tridentine piety emergent in the city effectively marked a return to devotions that began in the early 1580s, often with the same members of the elite as their patrons. The Catholic reform movement was thus a long-term process, cutting across the years of the League. The seventeenth century, the ‘century of saints’ was built on long-term reform and change.

The piety of the Catholic League in Nantes 1589–1598 In Nantes, as in all League communities, religion was central to the causes and motives of the movement, while acts of faith characterized its outward forms. In his history of the League in Brittany, published in 1856, Louis Grégoire argued that the causes of rebellion against Henri III were threefold: religion, Breton separatist tendencies and the ambitions of the duc de Mercoeur.12 Similarly and more recently, Robert Descimon has argued that the aims of the Leaguers were tripartite: reform of the royal government, greater municipal autonomy and above all, religion.13 Its ﬁrst aim was the conservation of the Catholic faith, combating heresy and eliminating Protestantism from the realm.14 There was also a concern to reform the Church through the implementation of the Tridentine decrees. Thus, Robert Harding, in his work on Nantes, Rennes and Angers, has argued that in this movement,

Elizabeth Tingle 207

religion and politics were as one, an instrument of God for purifying and reforming the whole kingdom, Church, royal government and society alike.15 But the League was more than a party of religious politics, it was also a profoundly spiritual and pious movement and it is the devotional practices of the Holy Union that have been seen as the midwife of counter reform. From 1584, the threat of the accession of the Protestant Henri of Navarre to the French throne caused a wave of penitential piety, to plead with God to avert the coming disaster. Denis Crouzet’s arguments that the Catholic League was composed of ‘godly warriors’ motivated by faith have found support in a number of studies, of Rouen, Toulouse and, above all, Paris.16 In these cities the League’s ostentatious piety exhibited features that were to become hallmarks of Tridentine practice.17 If we look closely at contemporary concerns in Nantes, defence of the faith rather than reform predominate, although the two are not mutually exclusive. The clearest statement of objectives in the religious politics of the city during the League is found in the published sermons of the Parisian Benedictine Jacques Le Bossu, present in Nantes from Lent 1589 onwards. In a series of four devis, conversations between a Leaguer and a Politique, and in several funerary orations, Catholic defence emerges as the dominant theme. The League was above all opposed to heresy. The source of all current misery was the royal policy of toleration of Protestantism: ‘We have been forced to make a union and confederation between us which is called the Holy League . . . to employ our goods, our life and our blood for the support and defence of our faith . . . to conserve our Catholic religion, for ourselves and our posterity’.18 The only true source of peace was to have one religion in the kingdom. Henri III should be forced to uphold the edict of Union, which should become a fundamental, inviolable law of the kingdom and he should not be allowed to let the Crown pass to a heretic.19 The League would use all available means to prevent this.20 Further, Henri had violated the Church through taxation, alienation of lands, imprisonment of clerics such as the Cardinal de Bourbon and the Archbishop of Lyon, and the murder of the Cardinal de Guise.21 After Henri III’s assassination in August 1589, hailed as divinely ordained, the politico-religious motives of the League were reinforced. The succession of a Protestant king endangered the Catholic Church and faith, physically, for revenge would doubtless be sought for the Saint Bartholomew’s day murders, and morally, for the destruction of Catholicism would cause many souls to be damned.22 Le Bossu’s themes were repeated throughout the early League wars. For example, in March 1592, the doléances of the League provincial estates in Brittany requested

208

The Origins of Counter Reform Piety in Nantes, 1585–1617

that Mercoeur ‘maintain them always by his strength and authority, against the enterprises of heretics and their supporters. . . . Continue in the pious and holy devotion that he had always shown in the defence of the apostolic Roman religion, and in the extirpation of heresy’ and asked that the decrees of the Council of Trent be published.23 A vital feature of the Catholic League in Nantes as elsewhere in France was clerical support. The enhanced authority gained by clergy in the urban community during these years may have been important in the strengthened clericalism of the Catholic Reform period after 1600. Harding argues for the crucial importance of preachers as harbingers and interpreters of the League.24 In Nantes, the théologal Jean Christi gathered support for the League in 1588–89, through preaching for this purpose. In Lent 1589, Christi and others were joined by Le Bossu.25 Fiery preaching did not cause the rebellion in Nantes, but it did enthuse its listeners with commitment. Le Bossu and others reﬂected, shaped, inﬂuenced and gave words to widespread anxieties and galvanized support for particular causes and actions. They provided a clear expression of and justiﬁcation for the ideological basis of the League. The secular clergy of Nantes more generally were also keen supporters of the League. During the 1560s, the vicar general and the cathedral chapter had played active roles in the city’s ﬁght against Protestantism. From around 1576 there was a shift in focus, away from city politics to more ‘national’ concerns. Nantes’ upper clergy stood increasingly in opposition to royal policy, at the local level and in the kingdom at large. Already in February 1575, the two Nantes chapters and the deputies of the diocesan clergy met to name representatives to lobby Pope Gregory XIII and King Henri III against the Protestant churches.26 In November 1576, Bishop Philippe du Bec was at the Estates General of Blois, where he supported the anti-Calvinist deliberations of the ﬁrst estate, although he was quick to concede to demands to join Henri III’s League. From this time, however, increasing disaffection with royal religious policy appeared. In 1581, the cathedral chapter rejected the Edict of Fleix and after 1585, became increasingly involved in the League opposition to the Crown.27 Archdeacon Descourants, the chantre Michel Touzelin, and Canon de la Benaste supported the League by 1588.28 Jean Christi initiated an effort to have the city declare for the League in July 1588 and again in February 1589.29 Pierre de Lancy, canon of the collegiate church of Notre Dame and one Charon, recteur of the suburban parish of SaintSimilien were also supporters.30 Canons joined the Conseil de l’Union in April 1589, performed militia guard duty in person and lent money to League causes.31 In late April, Archdeacon Descourants was reimbursed

Elizabeth Tingle 209

for expenses incurred during journeys secretly made to Orléans and elsewhere.32 Canon Bouvre went on a mission to the duc de Mayenne in June 1589 and in August, the clergy of Nantes gave 2000 écus for the expenses of the League.33 There were two exceptions. The master of the Psalette, or cathedral choir school, refused to take the oath of union in 1589.34 Bishop du Bec, present at the early meetings of the Conseil de l’Union in Nantes in April and May 1589, began to absent himself from proceedings. The chapter accused him of favouring heretics and threatened to imprison him in the château. In September, the bishop ﬂed to Tours, to join the royalist party.35 Overall, the enhanced role of the clergy in defence of the urban community augmented their status and authority, which would bear fruit after 1600; but it was religious zeal, expressed in highly ritualized, communal and penitential ceremonies that constituted the most striking manifestation of the League, where ‘the streets...became theatres in which the inhabitants would act out their contrition...to avert political calamity’.36 Clergy and laity participated together. The most obvious feature to contemporaries was the expansion in religious ceremonials. The weeks leading up to Nantes’ League coup of April 1589 saw a rise in religious activity, coinciding with Lent. On 27 March, Maundy Thursday, a procession similar to that of Corpus Christi was ordered, passing through the main streets.37 Throughout the League years, Te Deums were celebrated in the cathedral at every possible opportunity, accompanied by processions and bonﬁres, for example after the capture of the comte de Soissons in June 1589 and for victories of the League in Brittany and elsewhere. But the hallmark of the movement was penitence both to invoke God’s pity and pacify his wrath. For example, in September 1590 there were three days of processions, to each of the three houses of friars in turn. The processions were held at night, the city clergy took part clad only in shifts, a torch in their right hands and a cruciﬁx in their left, chanting the seven penitential psalms.38 In August 1591, clergy and laity took part in a procession, during which the Bull of Gregory XIV excommunicating Henri IV was read aloud in front of the cathedral.39 On 13 May 1592, to plead for success in relieving the siege at Craon, the cathedral chapter organized holy sacrament devotions in all of the city’s churches. The municipality supplied bread to be blessed and distributed, and a procession took place. The duc’s success was celebrated with a Te Deum and the enemy’s captured banners were hung in the cathedral nave.40 The duc de Mercoeur was careful to demonstrate his piety. At his château on the Loire island of Indrets, he built a chapel and hermitage, and Pierre Biré comments that the duc frequently retired there to pray.41

210

The Origins of Counter Reform Piety in Nantes, 1585–1617

It is this penitential, sacramental devotional activity that presaged the Counter Reformation of the seventeenth century but much of this ostentatious piety quietened down during the later League wars after 1593. The abjuration of Henri IV initially caused a surge of anti-Protestant invective. As in other League centres, preachers claimed that the king was a hypocrite; that his was a false conversion and that Henri remained a heretic in his heart. The city elites justiﬁed their continued opposition to the king because the papal condemnation had not been lifted. Indeed, Clement VIII encouraged the duc de Mercoeur and the Bretons to continue the struggle against Henri IV.42 The city remained in opposition to the Crown even after papal absolution came in September 1595 and the legate wrote from Paris that Mercoeur would be excommunicated if he did not submit to the king.43 But there were increasing numbers of defections to the royalist cause. As early as the autumn of 1591, the two canons Touzelin, one the scholastique and ofﬁcial of the cathedral, the other, a dignitaire, were expelled from Nantes by Madame de Mercoeur under suspicion of having corresponded with the king and with Bishop du Bec, although municipal objections to their exile quickly caused their return.44 Ostentatious political gestures in support of the League continued but became fewer. In September 1595, a Te Deum with bonﬁres celebrated the defeat of royalist forces at Mont-Saint-Michel and the following June, a grand funeral was held for Charles de Gondi, duc de Retz, killed in another skirmish at the Mont.45 As early as 26 September 1593, the preacher Marcellin Cornet wrote to Philip II of Spain that ‘it is to be feared that the wishes of many turn towards the side of the heretic, being already shaken by the feeble conversion’.46 The cathedral chapter and city clergy were among those who favoured conciliation, although they were careful in their actions. In 1594, several processions were held to ask for successful peace negotiations between the duc de Mercoeur and his half-sister dowager Queen Louise, representative of Henri IV.47 In October 1596, the chapter led barefoot, torch-lit processions on three successive evenings and in the autumn of 1597, during a jubilee, prayers were said for peace between princes.48 These prayers were answered in the spring of 1598.

Spirituality before and after the League 1580–1617 The forms of Catholic piety seen in Nantes during the League were not new. The beginnings of a great resurgence of public piety occurred in the early 1580s, initially traditional in form but increasingly inﬂuenced by Tridentine or ‘Italian’ devotions. The west of France witnessed military and security crises, as war moved into the marches of southern Brittany

Elizabeth Tingle 211

and Poitou; plague broke out in Nantes in 1581–83 and there were serious food shortages between 1580 and 1586. These difﬁculties led to ‘dramatic manifestations of religious fervour (that) were part of a deeper culture of concern during these troubled years’.49 Penitence and prayers increased enormously in these periods of stress, to seek divine aid and to avert God’s wrath manifest in this series of disasters.50 The plague stimulated processions from the city’s parishes to the traditional site of SaintSebastien d’Aigne.51 The climate of heightened religiosity favoured new devotions, which appeared in the city as a result of ‘Tridentine’ or reformist inﬂuences from outside, such as the oratoire, the display of the holy sacrament and relics on the altars of each of the city’s churches for a week at a time, with special processions to carry the host to the next church. There was also revived interest in the city’s monastic orders. The Carthusians were revitalized. Pierre Quintin, recteur of Saint-Léonard, left 103 livres of rentes to add two new cenobites to the existing 12; in 1586, Widow Perrin added another two, making a total of 16.52 There was thus renewal of old and promotion of new forms of piety in the devotional response to the hardships of dearth and disease. The blending of local and external practices is exempliﬁed by the new Missal issued by Bishop du Bec in 1588. In this, he conserved all the saints’ feasts kept in the diocese, but in the order and with all the rubrics found in the Roman Missal.53 In contrast, one of the striking features of city piety in the 1580s among Nantes’ clergy and laity is the decline in traditional devotional forms. For example, foundations of chantry and obit masses for the dead, frequent until the 1560s, fell rapidly in the 1570s and early 1580s, declining to 50 per cent of the level of the 1550s. This cannot be explained by war and economic problems alone, as the 1570s was a relatively prosperous decade. At the same time, confraternity membership also seems to have declined, although detailed sources on membership are lacking. In 1577, the fraternity of Saint-Jean-de-l’Hôpital was suppressed, its numbers having fallen away in favour of the holy sacrament confraternity.54 Where new confraternities were founded, they were notably more austere and devotional. In 1588, the silk and woollen cloth merchants founded a confraternity to saints James and Christopher in the Carmelite church. Many of its functions were traditional ones: dedication to saints who were protectors of travellers, a weekly Mass and an annual procession on 26 July. But emphasis was more on devotion than festivity. The yearly feast was dominated by religious services, high Mass, vespers and matins; the following day saw a vigil for the dead, and requiem services. There was also devotion to the holy sacrament, for on the Sunday after Corpus

212

The Origins of Counter Reform Piety in Nantes, 1585–1617

Christi the brothers held a solemn procession around the Carmelite convent.55 Again, Catholic reformism can be seen enhancing and altering traditional devotions, with its greater emphasis on solemnity and penitence. These changes had parallels in other French cities. In Lyon, while pious bequests increased, older funeral ceremonies with processions, psalms and tolling bells, declined.56 In Troyes, confraternity membership also fell, particularly amongst groups dedicated to Corpus Christi, the Virgin and patron saints. Older confraternities also lost much of their male membership and became predominantly female.57 In the place of mortuary provision and traditional confraternity membership, there was more marked Christocentrism, continuing from earlier decades, focused on devotion to the body of Christ. This was certainly one of the great hallmarks of Counter Reform Catholicism, but was present well before 1600. The wills and foundations that survive for the 1580s show the importance of the eucharist, at least to devout members of the elite. Pierre Le Gallo, Archdeacon of Nantes, stated in his will of 1582, that ‘it has pleased God . . . to maintain me in his Catholic and apostolic church, always armed with its holy sacraments, and with the help of his blessed angels to fortify and defend, preserve and guarantee me against the temptations and assaults of the enemy’.58 Antoine de Gravoil founded a weekly Mass in Sainte-Croix in 1589 ‘to induce faithful Christians to adore with honour and remembrance His precious body which He left on this [earth] in the holy sacrament of the eucharist, so that we might remember His painful passion, for our consolation and the nourishment of our souls, until the last day’.59 There was a ﬂowering of other cults associated with the body of Christ, the Holy Name and Five Wounds. For foundations of annual Masses, Easter and Corpus Christi, and the feasts of the Virgin, were particularly popular. A second feature of this Christocentrism was a desire to emulate the life of Christ through good works and activism in the community. Again, the 1580s witnessed the emergence of what was to be a central tenet of seventeenth-century dévôt Catholicism, that of good works. In Nantes there was a shift in investment away from mortuary foundations to charitable works. The inﬂuence of Bishop du Bec was important. Charity was a constant theme of his preaching from the later 1560s, when he played a role in the reform of the city’s poor relief through the creation of a bureau des pauvres.60 In 1569, du Bec publicized the new regime from the pulpit and with it the imperative of good works: ‘Sell what you have and give alms and you will store up treasure in heaven that will never be exhausted and will never fail . . . . Invest alms in the pauper and he will pray for you . . . as water extinguishes ﬁre so almsgiving extinguishes sin’.61 Good works

Elizabeth Tingle 213

offered salvation to all social groups and anyone could participate. In 1580, women were authorized for the ﬁrst time by the municipality to make the Lenten alms collections in the city’s parishes.62 There was an immediate, practical spur to charity. The plague epidemic of 1582 cost the municipality at least 14–1500 écus while between 1584 and 1586 the municipality took out loans annually, to relieve the poor and pay for the bread supplied to the hospital.63 In 1586, for example, the municipality borrowed 100 écus each from eight of its wealthier citizens, six of whom went on to become staunch supporters of the Catholic League.64 In the context of the difﬁculties of the 1580s, charity was important in preserving the social as well as the religious fabric of the city, for Christ’s poor were visible on every street. Again, Lyon and Paris show similar trends, and Anne Ramsay has argued that will bequests in Paris show a change from penitential to charitable piety in these decades.65 Finally, the 1580s saw increased emphasis on public morality and discipline, and the appropriate use of sacred space and time, concerns again traditionally associated with Catholic reform after 1600. The Abbé Travers noted that it was a long-standing custom at Nantes, at Pentecost, to let free a white dove in the parish churches. Shots would then be ﬁred within the building. In May 1581, the chapter renewed its prohibition on ﬁring arms within churches, with increased vigour.66 The bishop repeated injunctions against the opening of taverns during high Mass and against the use of churches for entertainment and work.67 There were, however, a number of distinctive features of Catholic piety in Leaguer Nantes which made it distinct. What is striking about League piety is its return to traditional, almost old-fashioned practices, a turning back from the developments of the earlier 1580s. Firstly, parish religion took on a renewed importance, in a manner reminiscent of the 1560s. A feature of League piety was the extension of parish-based devotions that provided a public setting where commitment to the cause could be expressed. Secondly, and linked with the ﬁrst, traditional devotions that had hitherto declined in 1580s, underwent a revival. For example, mortuary foundations in parish churches increased, after two decades of decline. One reason for this was the encouragement given by the family of the duc de Mercoeur. Historically, the ducal family of Brittany patronized the houses of the religious orders and the Mercoeurs, whose duchesse was descended from the Breton dukes, also supported the regulars. In 1589, the Minims were established. The duc patronized the order and built part of the convent, despite opposition from the municipality.68 The Capuchins were founded in 1591, again with the duc’s support.69 The existing religious orders received gifts. A mass was founded in

214

The Origins of Counter Reform Piety in Nantes, 1585–1617

the Dominican church; the ducal couple augmented the foundation of the Franciscan confraternity of the rosary, and the cathedral chapter was also given gifts of ornaments for the Corpus Christi processions.70 But during the League, the Mercoeurs also used the parish to demonstrate their piety and to give popular legitimacy to their cause. Baby François, born 1590, and twins born in 1592, were baptized in their parish church of Saint-Vincent. Here, the duc founded a mass of Notre Dame de la Victoire in 1592 to give perpetual thanks for his victory at Craon.71 A similar foundation of the little ofﬁce of the Virgin was set up in Notre-Dame church. In 1594, the duchess’s mother, Madame de Martigues, founded two weekly masses in Saint-Vincent. The chaplain, whose appointment was reserved to her heirs, was to be a serving priest of the church.72 The parish enabled the Mercoeurs to emphasize the religious basis of their cause in public acts of piety, surrounded by the everyday population of the community. The ducal couple supported other acts of public devotion as well. The duchess attended the sermons of Le Bossu and took part in nocturnal processions. When her twins were born in 1592, paupers were chosen as godparents and given alms.73 Public righteousness was an important means of legitimizing their cause. Among the city population at large there was also a strong impulse to parish and public devotions, in opposition to a previously-observed trend of privatization and individualization in some devotional practices. For example, in 1596, there was a great public baptism of the son of the sieur de Laubier in the parish church of Saint-Nicolas. The duc de Mercoeur stood as ﬁrst godfather, the godmother was Demoiselle Colignon, wife of the captain of the château, while the bureau de ville seems to have acted as the third sponsor.74 An emphasis on parish-based religion, under the eye of the parish priest, was to become a hallmark of Counter Reformation Catholicism all over Europe. However, in Nantes in the 1590s, the emphasis on the parish takes us back to the earlier sixteenth century, especially the 1560s. There had been a growth in public Catholic ritual activity from the early religious wars onwards. Processions, pilgrimages and above all the sacraments, had several functions: ornate public spectacle of a doctrine challenged by Protestants, puriﬁcation of a community polluted by heresy and ‘public’ reafﬁrmation of important elements of the Catholic faith.75 During the early religious wars and again in the 1590s, confessional conﬂict stimulated an indigenous, popular and lay penitential movement to participate publicly in traditional and parish rituals as an outward sign of religious allegiance. Participation signiﬁed assent with the common cause, while shared experience of ritual bound together different social groups and gave a single purpose to a widely differentiated city

Elizabeth Tingle 215

population. It was a traditional form of eliciting divine aid for the defence of the community. To these ends, in August 1593 the Nantes Parlement published the decrees of the Council of Trent.76 Charles Cardot has shown that the Parlement also undertook to enforce canon law prerequisites for appointment to beneﬁces, ordered clerical residence in parishes and took measures against the laity for immorality, blasphemy and Sabbath breaking.77 The authority of Trent was an important buttress to the political legitimacy of the League, in theory and in practice. After the end of the League in March 1598, institutional Tridentism emerged more clearly in the city, as the decrees of Trent came to underpin both practical religious policies and the devotional practices of clergy and lay elites. After the relative freedom of the laity to set the religious agenda during the religious wars, bishops and clergy sought to reassert their authority and bring religious life more closely under clerical supervision, through closer regulation and enhanced priestly involvement, although the groundwork for at least some of this was achieved during the later religious wars. Bishop du Bec, after attending the Council of Trent in 1562–63, resided and preached in the diocese, held synods and issued regulations more frequently than his predecessors. Leaguer clergy were important in leading reforms in the city after the end of the wars. In 1598, Charles de Bourgneuf, former bishop of Saint-Malo and League supporter, was appointed bishop of Nantes. He immediately undertook a visitation of the city’s parishes and worked to impose greater episcopal authority over the diocese, after the absence of a resident bishop and years of clerical autonomy, particularly that of the cathedral chapter, during the League. Bishop de Bourgneuf’s episcopate was notable for his extension of episcopal authority, his encouragement of reformed religious orders and standardization of ritual in the diocese. Confraternities were taken under closer supervision. New statutes were approved for the guild of the Holy Trinity of the tailors in 1602, and in 1613, the foundation of a confraternity of the Holy Sacrament at Saint-Nicolas parish church stipulated that the appointment of their chaplain needed the approval of the bishop.78 The bishop showed a particular interest in the reform of female religious orders, by taking them more closely under episcopal supervision. In 1603, the female Carmelites of Couëts opted for spiritual direction by secular priests appointed by the bishop, in place of the Grands Carmes of Nantes. In the same year, some of the sisters of the Poor Clares of Nantes sought to reform their house by returning to a stricter observance of their founder’s rule. They obtained a papal letter releasing them from the supervision of the Franciscans and permitting their spiritual direction by

216

The Origins of Counter Reform Piety in Nantes, 1585–1617

secular priests appointed by the bishop. This time there was great opposition to the reform, by a group of the nuns themselves, by the Franciscans of Nantes and by Archdeacon Descourants and Canon Jean Christi, who feared the extension of episcopal authority. Ultimately, Marie de Medici adjudicated that the sisters should return to the strict rule of Saint Colette under the direction of her protégés, the Minims.79 The bishop encouraged new orders to come to Nantes. Recollets were founded in 1617 and the Oratorians gained permission to establish a house.80 Above all, de Bourgneuf’s episcopate was notable for the introduction of the Roman rite and usage into Nantes diocese, although there was never a direct order for the adoption of the new ritual. In 1610, the cathedral chapter began to adopt Roman usage, beginning with the tonal pitch, then the ofﬁces of the rite. In 1611, the bishop published a Proper of saints venerated at Nantes, following Roman usage, allowing only saints who had been born or lived in the diocese. This was augmented in 1615 with a Proper for saints’ masses. In 1613 a Processional according to Roman usage was produced, and ﬁnally, in 1617, the Ritual of Paul V was published. This contained notes and additions comprising a French translation of the rubrics of the mass, for priests who had a poor command of Latin.81 The outward forms of Tridentine ritual expression were in place. The devotional climate after 1600 owed much to the 1580s, however, and was in many respects a return to the pious practices which had emerged in this decade. On the one hand, leading Leaguers maintained a high proﬁle religiosity and the resurgence of traditional, rather oldfashioned devotions, such as mortuary foundations and confraternity membership, which had begun under the League, was maintained into the new century. For example, in four gifts made between 1607 and 1613, Michel Touzelin and his wife, Françoise Fradine, endowed the prisons of Bouffay with low masses for all Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, all major feasts and saints’ days, and the chaplain was to confess and give communion to the prisoners as well.82 On the other hand, there was a movement of patronage into more ‘private’ religious institutions, begun in the 1580s but reduced in the following decade. Although mortuary foundations increased, the parish declined in importance as a recipient of bequests, to the beneﬁt of the collegiate churches and religious houses, with the conventual churches of Carmelites and Franciscans becoming the most important sites of foundation. Private burial chapels increased in number. For example, in Notre-Dame collegiate church, in 1608, the Roussillon family paid 500 livres to the chapter for sole use of the chapel of Saint Marguerite and in 1615, Jean Fourché – a Leaguer mayor of Nantes – and Marie Toulain paid 640 livres

Elizabeth Tingle 217

for use of the chapel of Saint Maurice as a mausoleum; their two sons and their wives would also found masses and be buried here over the next 30 years.83 The return to pre-League piety is thus notable in the ﬁrst two decades of the new century. The ‘classic’ elements of Catholic reform in Nantes thus had their origins in the later wars of religion. The Catholic League linked together the old and the new. It saw the revival of what may be seen as increasingly old-fashioned practices, chantries and large-scale, public devotions, which gained enormously in numbers and signiﬁcance after 1600. Institutionally, the parish and the clergy – their authority already enhanced during the religious conﬂicts – grew in status and authority, which assisted the adoption of formal Tridentine reforms. The Leaguers themselves retained a crusading zeal to restore Catholicism, but moved away from religious politics and war to reform of spiritual life and social discipline. After 1600, this resulted in a waning of the communitarian ﬂavour of League piety. The geographical scope of the parish and its church, supervised by its curé, replaced city-wide manifestations of penitence; the elite moved into convents and collegiate churches for burial and commemoration, took up interiorized spiritual reﬂection, frequent confession and communion. These were not new, sudden departures, however, but long-term evolutions. After 1600, the League’s supporters laid down their swords and shields for the spiritual armour of God, but the aim was the same, to achieve the civitas dei in Nantes.

Notes 1. Both wills published in A. Croix, La Bretagne aux XVIème et XVIIème siècles. La vie- la mort – la foi, 2 vols (Paris: Maloine, 1981), ii, pp. 1372–5. 2. A. Croix, L’âge d’or de la Bretagne 1532–1675 (Rennes: Éditions Ouest-France, 1993), p. 487. Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629) was the founder of the French congregation of the Oratory (Oratorians) and supporter of the Carmelite order. 3. G. Saupin, Nantes au temps de l’Édit (La Crèche: Geste, 1998), pp. 230–1. 4. J. Le Goff and R. Rémond, Histoire de la France religieuse, 4 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1988), ii, p. 298. John Bossy was among the ﬁrst to argue that the early years of sectarian conﬂict witnessed major shifts in Catholicism, a view supported by Denis Crouzet, who argues that activism was embraced by many from the mid-century, as early confessional clashes were heightened by a growing sense of millenarian anguish and penitential fervour. J. Bossy, ‘Leagues and Associations in Sixteenth-Century French Catholicism’, Studies in Church History, 23 (1986), 171–89; D. Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion (c.1525–c.1610), 2 vols (Paris: Champ Vallon, 1990). 5. M. Venard, ‘Catholicism and Resistance to the Reformation in France 1555–1585’, in P. Benedict, G. Marnef, H. van Nierop and M. Venard (eds), Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands, 1555–1585

218

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

The Origins of Counter Reform Piety in Nantes, 1585–1617 (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1999), pp. 133–48. R. Gascon, Grand commerce et vie urbaine au XVIème siècle: Lyon et ses marchands environs de 1520–environs de 1580, 2 vols (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1971), ii, p. 511; A. Tallon, La France et le Concile de Trent, 1518–1563 (Rome: École française de Rome, 1997), p. 814. A. E. Barnes, ‘Religious Anxiety and Devotional Change in Sixteenth-Century French Penititential Confraternities’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 19 (1988), 391; Gascon, Grand commerce, ii, pp. 512–13; P. T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon 1500–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 35–40. André Latreille linked the Catholic renewal of seventeenth-century France directly to the wars of religion of the previous century, particularly those of the Catholic League. M. Cassan, ‘Laïcs, Ligue et Réforme Catholique à Limoges’, Histoire Économie et Société, 10 (1991), 159–60; André Latreille, Histoire du Catholicism français, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions Spes, 1963), ii, 269–70. Denis Richet also placed the origins of the parti dévôt and the beginnings of ‘Catholic action’ in the League years. D. Richet, ‘Aspects socio-culturels des conﬂits religieux à Paris dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle’, Annales Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 32 (1977), 778. P. Benedict, ‘The Catholic Response to Protestantism. Church Activity and Popular Piety in Rouen 1560–1600’, in J. Obelkevitch (ed.), Religion and the People 800–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), p. 178. Cassan, ‘Laïcs, Ligue et Réforme’, 164, 167. For details see E. Tingle, Authority and Society in Nantes during the French Wars of Religion 1558–98 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 178–207; Saupin, Nantes au temps de l’Édit. L. Grégoire, La Ligue en Bretagne (Paris: J. B. Dumoulin, 1856). R. Descimon, Qui étaient les Seize? Mythes et réalités de la ligue parisienne (1585–94) (Paris: Fédération des sociétés historiques et archéologiques de Paris et de l’Ile de France, 1983), p. 89. M. Holt, The French Wars of Religion 1562–1629 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 150. R. Harding, ‘Revolution and reform in the Holy League: Angers, Rennes, Nantes’, Journal of Modern History, 53 (1981), 379–416. P. Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); R. Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse 1463–1789: From Municipal Republic to Cosmopolitan City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross. Catholics and Huguenots in SixteenthCentury Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Cassan, ‘Laïcs, Ligue et Réforme’, 160. J. Le Bossu, Sermon funèbre pour l’anniversaire des Très-Illustres, Très-Magnanimes & très-Catholiques Princes feus Messeigneurs Henri & Loys de Lorraine, celuy-là cestuy-ci Cardinal de Guyse (Nantes: Desmaretz & Faverie, 1590). J. Le Bossu, Deux Devis d’un Catholique et d’un Politique sur l’exhortation faicte au peuple de Nantes, en la grande église de Sainct-Pierre, pour jurer l’Union des catholiques, le 8e jour de juin 1589 (Nantes: Desmaretz & Faverie, 1589), p. 22. Ibid., p. 131.

Elizabeth Tingle 219 21. Ibid., p. 81. 22. J. Le Bossu, Troisième devis du Catholique et du Politique qui a esté réuny sur la mort de Henri de Valois, selon ce qu’en a esté presché à, diverses fois en la grande église de Nantes (Nantes: Desmaretz & Faverie, 1589), pp. 48, 66; J. Le Bossu, Quatrième devis du Catholique et du Politique réuny, sur l’exemple de Nabuchodonosor, rapporté en l’église de Nantes, en un sermon, le dimanche 18e jour de novembre 1590 (Nantes: Desmaretz & Faverie, 1590), p. 41; J. Le Bossu, Sermon Funèbre pour la mémoire de dévote & réligieuse personne F. Edmond Bourgoing qui fut cruellement martyrisé à Tours par le supplice de quatre chevaux le 23 de février 1590 (Nantes: Desmaretz & Faverie, 1590). 23. A. de Barthélemy (ed.), Choix de documents inédits sur l’histoire de la Ligue en Bretagne, 2 vols (Nantes: Société des bibliophiles Bretons, 1880), i, p. 120. 24. Harding, ‘Revolution and reform’, 399. 25. Remonstrances aux habitants de Nantes Par un des Citoyens dicelle: Par où se void les practiques et menées dont a usé le duc de Mercoeur pour usurper le Duché de Bretaigne (Rennes, 1590) published in Revue de Bretagne et du Vendée, 27 (1883), 473–4. 26. Grégoire, La Ligue, pp. 24–5. 27. Ibid., p. 25. 28. Saupin, Nantes au temps de l’Édit, p. 160. 29. Harding, ‘Revolution and reform’, 399. 30. L’Abbé Travers, Histoire civile, politique et réligieuse de la ville de Nantes, 3 vols (Nantes: Forest, [1750] 1837), ii, p. 578. 31. F. Jouan des Longrais (ed.), ‘Information du sénéchal de Rennes contre les ligueurs 1589’, Bulletin de la société archéologique d’Ille-et-Vilaine, 41, no. 2 (1912), 218. 32. Travers, Histoire civile, iii, p. 23. 33. Ibid., iii, p. 31. 34. Ibid., iii, p. 25. 35. Archives Municipales de Nantes (A.M.N.), BB 21, Délibérations et assemblées de la municipalité 1588–89, f. 217r–v; Grégoire, La Ligue, pp. 60–1. 36. Benedict, Rouen, pp. 189–91. 37. Travers, Histoire civile, iii, p. 19. 38. Ibid., iii, pp. 38, 46. 39. Ibid., iii, p. 61. 40. Ibid., iii, p. 68. 41. P. Biré, Alliances Généalogicques de la Maison de Lorraine illustrées des faites et gestes des princes d’icelles (Nantes: Desmaretz & Faverie, 1593), p. 248. 42. F. Jouan des Longrais, ‘Le Duc de Mercoeur, d’après des documents inédits’, Bulletin archéologique de l’association Bretonne, 13 (1895), p. 277. 43. Travers, Histoire civile, iii, p. 88. 44. Ibid., iii, 61–2. 45. Ibid., iii, pp. 79, 86. 46. Saupin, Nantes au temps de l’Édit, p. 155. 47. Longrais, ‘Le Duc de Mercoeur’, 281; Travers, Histoire civile, iii, p. 78. 48. Travers, Histoire civile, iii, pp. 93–4. 49. Benedict, ‘The Catholic response to Protestantism’, 187–8. 50. S. Finley-Croswhite, Henri IV and the Towns. The Pursuit of Legitimacy in French Urban Society, 1589–1610 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 16.

220

The Origins of Counter Reform Piety in Nantes, 1585–1617

51. Croix, La Bretagne, i, p. 487. 52. A. Jarnoux, Le diocèse de Nantes au XVIème siècle 1500–1600. Étude historique (Quimper: Imprimerie cornouaillaise, 1976), p. 177. 53. Travers, Histoire civile, iii, p.15. 54. Ibid., ii, p. 470. 55. G. Durville, Études sur le vieux Nantes, d’après les documents originaux, 2 vols (Nantes: Durance, 1901–15), ii, pp. 168–9. 56. Hoffman, Church and Community, p. 40. 57. A. Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 190; P. Roberts, A City in Conﬂict. Troyes during the French Wars of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 164. 58. A.M.N., GG 692, Aumônerie. Bibliothèque Le Gallo 1582–95. 59. Archives Départementales de la Loire Atlantique (A.D.L.A.), G 467, SainteCroix Fondations. 60. M. Fardet, ‘L’assistance aux pauvres à Nantes à la ﬁn du XVIème siècle (1582–98)’, Actes du 98ème Congrès national des sociétés savantes, Nantes 1972 (1973), p. 392; Croix, La Bretagne, i, p. 587. 61. C. Mellinet, La commune et la milice de Nantes, 3 vols (Nantes: Mellinet, 1841), iii, p. 234. 62. A.M.N., GG 743, Secours aux pauvres 1532–80. 63. Travers, Histoire civile, ii, pp. 544, 563–4. 64. A.M.N., GG 744, Rôles des pauvres. 65. Hoffman, Church and Community, p. 40; A. Ramsey, Liturgy, Politics and Salvation. The Catholic League in Paris and the Nature of Catholic Reform 1540–1630 (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 1999), see discussion chapter 8. 66. Travers, Histoire civile, ii, p. 523. 67. A.M.N., FF 285, Police des cultes. 68. Travers, Histoire civile, iii, p. 33. 69. M. Fardet, ‘La vie municipale à Nantes sous le gouvernement du duc de Mercoeur. Le rôle militaire joué par cette ville (1582–1598)’ (Thèse, Ecole des Chartres, Paris, 1965), p. 182. 70. Travers, Histoire civile, iii, p. 54. 71. Biré, Alliances Généalogicques, p. 247. 72. A.D.L.A., G 521, Fabrique de Saint-Vincent. 73. Grégoire, La Ligue, p. 201. 74. Travers, Histoire civile, iii, pp, 82–3. 75. Benedict, Rouen , p. 63. 76. Travers, Histoire civile, iii, pp. 74–5. 77. C.-A. Chardot, ‘Le Parlement de la Ligue en Bretagne, 1589–98’, 3 vols (Thèse de Droit, Rennes, 1964), pp. 614–20; Travers, Histoire civile, iii, pp. 74–5. 78. Travers, Histoire civile, iii, pp. 125, 177–8. 79. Ibid., iii, p. 145–9. 80. Ibid., iii, p. 217. 81. Ibid., iii, pp. 166–7. 82. A.D.L.A., G 330, Notre Dame. Fondations. 83. A.D.L.A., G 323, Notre Dame. Fondations.

10 Obedience to the King and Attachment to Tradition: Senlis under the Early Bourbons (1598–1643) Thierry Amalou

How did society in French towns manage to overcome the political rivalry and religious or social hostility engendered by the Wars of Religion? Up until now, historians have mainly concentrated their attention on the period of the League, and much less so on the period of paciﬁcation, reconstruction and reconciliation following the Edict of Nantes.1 Admittedly, the major provincial towns which supported the League, such as Limoges or Poitiers, have shown us that the divisions within society continued until the reign of Louis XIII.2 In Lyons, the municipality tried to draw attention away from the wounds inﬂicted by the banishment of its leaders by setting up in their place a pacifying royal presence constructed in great measure by Henri IV’s publicists: the medieval ‘bonne ville’ was thus revived according to a model which gave greater emphasis to the physical or symbolic presence of the king than had been customary.3 We know too that Henri IV’s pragmatism induced him to intervene rather less in the urban government of his loyal towns, which displayed lesser desire for autonomy than those which had been strongholds of the League.4 But, in general, these royalist towns have been studied less than the towns of the League.5 This is why it is worth exploring the case of Senlis, a Catholic town that remained loyal to Henri III and Henri IV, despite a brief period of involvement with the League from February to April 1589. For this town experienced its loyalty to the king with great intensity, so much so that it developed it into a powerful urban myth, a fact attested by both speeches and ceremonies. Indeed, the ruling elite of Senlis, convinced that their town’s allegiance to the king had been ordained by God, constructed remembrance of monarchy based on the historical permanence of its loyalty.6 221

222

Obedience to King in Fidelity to Traditions

This process of myth-building drew strength from a peculiarity which is worth recalling here: Senlis, a medium-sized town with a population of 8000 or 9000, lying about ten leagues north of Paris, displayed an exemplary degree of loyalty to the crown, in stark contrast to the disobedience of the capital and other towns in Île-de-France. Here the ruling oligarchy, dominated by ofﬁcers of the crown, preferred to opt for a form of moderation, of rational action (based in particular on its strong attachment to a monarchical sovereignty) which did not, however, lead it to renounce its desire for religious unity within the bosom of a restored Catholic Church.7 Nonetheless, the small number of extremist followers of the League within the town, foremost among them being Bishop Guillaume Rose, were unable to achieve dominance within the ranks of the town notables, and the more intransigent among them were expelled by the town after 25 April 1589. The dual loyalty that Senlis displayed towards its legitimate sovereigns and towards Catholicism is the main distinguishing characteristic of this bastion of royalism, which was to be the place from which Henri IV, shortly after his coronation in Chartres, set out to achieve the submission of Paris.8 The case of Senlis highlights the skill with which the servants of the monarchy were able to take advantage of the work accomplished by the Church over the previous half century in healing the religious divide. Indeed, the town, which had been deprived of its bishop who was banished until 1596, developed an extremely effective system of feasts and commemorative celebrations. A number of Te Deum and extraordinary processional masses marked the king’s military victories, reinforcing a providentialist vision of history, one which upheld the notion that Henri IV had been chosen by God, while at the same time a full-blown cult of monarchy was blended together with local traditions. These same traditions, in particular those involving devotion to Saint Rieul, the patron saint who had brought the Gospel to the town, were capable of promoting social consensus. Furthermore, they had beneﬁted from Gallican ‘restoration’ undertaken by successive bishops since the 1520s.9 Like many French towns, after 1598 Senlis had to deal with the reintegration of numerous former supporters of the League and the need to appease past enmities while resolving the differences in political and religious opinion between royalist Catholics, politiques and Protestants.10 Just like any other community emerging from civil war, the people of Senlis had to rediscover how to live together and build a lasting consensus. They succeeded in this by means of adopting an innovative approach, whose success was due to three factors: the ability of the local elites to adapt absolutist theories of royal power to the sphere of municipal governance; the preservation of consensus through celebration of

Thierry Amalou 223

the cult of monarchy resting on civic traditions; the Tridentine Catholic Reformation undertaken as much by lay ﬁgures as by the bishops and which itself helped to build consensus through its emphasis on and attachment to local saints. The culture of obedience to the crown among the families of the royal ofﬁciers who, in Senlis, as elsewhere in France, governed the town, was founded on their support for the emergent theories of royal absolutism, which was the most appropriate expression of the need for order within the towns.11 Could this political culture be reconciled with Tridentine Catholicism, which was to take such vigorous hold at the start of the seventeenth century? We will attempt here to substantiate the idea of the ﬂexible nature of local traditions, which were integrated on the one hand into the cult of monarchy and on the other into Tridentine devotional practice, and which were the source of consensus and of lay participation in the successful reform of the Catholic Church.12 Having ﬁrst examined the mechanisms of the construction of a commemorative vision of monarchy, we will go on to analyze the reign of Henri IV, during which Senlis became a sounding-board for the debates of Gallican juristes before becoming a stronghold of the Counter Reformation under Louis XIII.

A royal town’s memory Evidence of royal muniﬁcence is easy to recognize in Senlis: individuals raised to the nobility and the bestowal of public ofﬁces both show that the town’s royalists derived a certain pay off from their loyalty to the king.13 Similarly, an increase in urban privileges saw the town exempted from both taille and franc-ﬁef dues. This latter concession was guaranteed to please the elite of the ofﬁcier class who were in the process of acquiring ﬁefs as a ﬁrst step towards becoming noble.14 In the following years, the échevins succeeded, not without difﬁculty, in getting these privileges recognized in the sovereign courts. On several occasions, Henri IV had to formally approve the rights of his loyal subjects in Senlis,15 a fact which undoubtedly strengthened the relationship of trust between the town, its privileged class and the king.16 But their loyalty also had an emotional dimension: speeches and ceremonies testiﬁed to the town’s love for a king of peace now reconciled with the Catholic Church. It was undoubtedly in its commemorative ceremonies that Senlis most clearly set the seal on its unity with the king. Was it really possible to reconcile the increasingly internalized piety of the elite classes with the development of a cult of monarchy conveyed outwardly by these ceremonies?

224

Obedience to King in Fidelity to Traditions

The epidemic of commemorative ceremonies The tragic events of the League period gave rise to commemorative events which intensiﬁed civic life in Senlis.17 Indeed a double anniversary came to be inserted in the liturgical calendar, celebrating both the battle which saw the lifting of the League’s siege of the town on 17 May 1589 and the escalade which marked the failure of a plot by the League on 4 July 1590.18 These festivities continued for many years: in 1635 the ‘Feryé de la bataille’ was still being celebrated, having become the town’s main festival day, with care being taken to keep 17 May as a holiday.19 How was the introduction of these new forms of commemoration into the liturgical calendar to be justiﬁed? The procureur, Romain de Thiel, saw them as a means to keep loyalty to the crown alive: ‘the memory of which victory must be conserved for posterity all the more so that it will be able to serve as a memorable example of the obedience of subjects towards the prince’.20 In a context where national and patriotic concerns were heavily present in royalist propagandist discourse, the contrôleur du grenier à sel, Jean Vaultier, selected other examples garnered from the work of French historiographers of the Middle Ages. Accordingly, Philippe Auguste’s victory at Bouvines was commemorated by founding the Abbaye de la Victoire on the plain of Montépilloy, in the very place where the duke of Aumale’s army was defeated on 17 May 1589. This parallel between the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century inevitably reinforced Vaultier’s sense of his town having been specially chosen to support the monarchy; such an interpretation provided powerful motivation for preserving the memory of victories which were at one and the same time those of the king and of the town. These commemorative ceremonies were rooted in local traditions and the cult of the evangelizing bishop, Saint Rieul. And so, on the eve of the commemoration day, the people of the town would run through the streets to the sound of drums and, on returning after Vespers, would go to pay homage to Saint Rieul in his sanctuary. Finally, on the anniversary itself, against a background of sound involving all the chimes and bells of the town, a general procession wound its way to the church of Saint-Rieul, where the faithful then attended mass. The chantre of NotreDame, whose duty it was to attend the various commemorative processions, was also expected to sing and to see to it that all the bells of the cathedral and of Saint-Rieul were rung.21 Following this phase of devotional activity, it was time for rejoicing in honour of the king: ‘legal and honest games making bonﬁres in the streets and lighting them crying “long live the king” ’.22

Thierry Amalou 225

These ceremonies, which were paid for and organized by the town, were in line with civic religion.23 It must be added that the town militia, this additional complement to urban patriotism, also reinforced the new civic events. And so, the compagnie des Royalistes fusiliers, created by Guillaume de Montmorency-Thoré when, as lieutenant général for the gouvernement of the Île-de-France, he took Senlis on 24 April 1589, regularly deployed the symbols of loyalty to the Crown. This way of channelling civic religion was not new. Michaud-Fréjaville has shown that in the ﬁfteenth century the town councillors of Orléans succeeded in constructing a shared memory of the town’s past through ceremonies commemorating the lifting of the siege of 1429.24 Accordingly, the civic procession recalling the town’s deliverance quickly became the ‘town festival’, just as it would do in Senlis. A genuine ‘rite of self-congratulation’ was instituted, which centered largely on the relics of its holy bishops. In other words, as in Senlis later on, the municipality successfully took possession of a Christian tradition and reinforced its potential as a founding myth by integrating it more closely into the town’s identity. In Chartres, the ‘miraculous’ deliverance of the town, besieged by Protestant forces in 1568, boosted the town’s devotion to the Virgin: the municipality obliged the clergy to celebrate ‘the anniversary of the breach’ each year.25 These commemorations functioned as powerful means to mobilize society. When, in 1593, Angers, under royalist control, decided to suspend the annual procession celebrating its victory over the Protestants in 1562, it had good reason to do so: the municipal authorities feared that such processions would rekindle religious animosity.26 However, civic religion as practised in Senlis offered more scope for the cult of monarchy, the town’s self-congratulation being expressed mainly through the exemplary quality of its loyalty to the king. In this manner, the people of Senlis conﬁrmed their union with the king by commemoration and corporate solidarity. In addition, the system of ceremonies was matched by a social form of memory built up by the king’s servants: the funerals of the échevins grew into public events, celebrated with a degree of pomp formerly reserved for major nobility and kings. And so, in 1614, the funeral service for Jacques Regnault, conseiller au présidial and échevin, was celebrated in the cathedral church, in the presence of the town’s religious orders and the entire body of royal ofﬁciers.27 Similar ceremonies took place under Louis XIII. Each time, the intention was to honour men who had served the king and the town during the League.28 These same men had played their role as promoters of monarchical absolutism which, in turn, ensured their own domination of the town.

226

Obedience to King in Fidelity to Traditions

Absolutism as an effective expression of the need for urban order A fertile terrain for loyalty to the monarchy had developed in the culture of the elite classes of Senlis in the second half of the sixteenth century, especially among a group of ofﬁciers of middle rank who gravitated around the présidial and the hôtel de ville. Constituting a small nucleus of late humanists, under inﬂuence from Paris (Parlement) and that of the Montmorency clan, the group in question was made up of at least ten or so notables, justice or ﬁnance ofﬁcers, who since 1566 had presided over the town’s destiny and shared the town’s honours and municipal posts among themselves to such an extent that they had now grown into a genuine urban oligarchy.29 These men, who formed an inner circle, if not an actual milieu, were in every sense what their contemporaries and adversaries called politiques. Consequently, they were convinced of the need to ﬁnd a political solution for the religious crisis and so were well disposed towards strong monarchical power. These men were heavily inﬂuenced by two major intellectual trends or doctrines: Gallicanism (in the version current in the Parlements) and neo-stoicism.30 These trends were sustained by a shared passion for a form of historical erudition which expressed a genuine fascination with monarchy; this sentiment was to develop into full-blown patriotism during the League. Some of these politiques distinguished themselves during the League by their writings in favour of the king. One such ﬁgure was François Le Jay, conseiller au présidial de Senlis, and one of Henri III’s publicists who then passed into the service of Henri IV and who in October 1589 published what amounted to a treatise on obedience under the title De la dignité des rois et des princes souverains: du droit inviolable de leurs successeurs legitimes: et du devoir des peuples et subiectz envers eux.31 The polemical perspectives in this work are evocative of the more sensational writings of Pierre de Belloy, a modest avocat and conseiller au présidial in Toulouse, who in reaction to the revocation of the edicts of paciﬁcation went over to the Navarrist camp32. All in all, Le Jay defended the principle of subjects’ obedience in order to maintain a social order ordained by God. In this way Christian obedience ﬁtted neatly into a framework of monarchical sovereignty, based in particular on legislative power which, not being shared, was absolute. François Le Jay’s brother-in-law, Jean Mallet, a conseiller au présidial who was an échevin during the League, used similar terms shortly after the assassination of Henri III, to justify, in a passage which constitutes the ﬁnal peroration in his personal journal, the unquestionable necessity to obey a king, even a tyrannical one: ‘whoever resists kings and legitimate princes resists the will of God’.33 This last axiom, which is

Thierry Amalou 227

well-known, is borrowed from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (XIII, 1), and is also found in a famous contemporary propagandist text: the politique Etienne Pasquier’s Antimartyre.34 Finally, for Mallet tyranny is just one scourge among others which are the consequence of collective guilt: if God ‘permits that sometimes there might be bad kings who govern their subjects badly or too rigorously it is because of the sins of the people and [God] gives such kings in his fury to punish men hardened in their faults and sins’.35 Moreover, as it happens, disobedience to the king is a grave sin of precisely the kind which incurs the wrath of God. In order to justify this point of view, Mallet takes support from the Book of Kings of the Old Testament to remind us of the fate of the Jewish people who refused to obey Roboam.36 A return to obedience on the part of the king’s subjects ought to bring about ‘the restoration of this State’.37 But more than anything else Mallet provides us with a programme of individual and collective devotional practices which, if strictly observed, cannot but bring peace: God and our legitimate king pray incessantly with tears, fasts and prayers . . . . It is certain that the prayers of those who remain of a will to do bad to their neighbour are not able to be agreeable to God. On the contrary those of them who have his fear before the eyes and love of neighbour in recommendation are pleasant to him. We force ourselves to be good and then we address our prayers to him and he will give us the peace that he sends only between men of good will.38 However individual piety and the internalization of one’s faith are not the only things which matter to Mallet. He is convinced of the usefulness of collective outbursts of piety and says so several times in his journal. But these devotions must ﬁt into an existing tradition. From this point of view, devotion to Saint Rieul is an excellent example: Several of the ancients remarked that, all the times that the said reliquary (of saint Rieul) was brought down and that these people stood in such devotion, either for wars or mortality, God made known to them that he [found] their prayers agreeable and appeased his ire.39 These collective devotional practices centered on Saint Rieul are given even more value by the fact that Mallet displays scornful indifference for the newly invented spectacular parading of the 1589 processions blanches devised by supporters of the League.40 Contrary to the image conveyed by J. Boucher, we can see from this that there is no

228

Obedience to King in Fidelity to Traditions

exact match between the external displays of faith adopted by the members of the League and the royalist Catholics.41 So, collective acts of devotion had to be linked to a tradition – as was the case of the commemorative ceremonies based on veneration of the cult of Saint Rieul – if they were to earn the esteem of royalist Catholics and politiques. The maintenance of equal representation within municipal institutions (two magistrates from among the merchants and two from the robe) should not fool anyone. The control exercised by the king’s ofﬁciers, which as we saw was extended during the reign of Henri III, still remained the characteristic trait of the municipal government at the start of the seventeenth century. Thus, the superior ranks of the ofﬁcier elite continued to dominate the public magistracy. Yet, at the start of the seventeenth century, only the Loisel managed to get beyond the limits of merely local success and move closer to the robins in Paris. Claude Loisel, succeeded his father as general lieutenant of the baillage in 1596. He presided over and directed most of the municipal assemblies in the absence of the bailli Louis de Montmorency-Bouteville. In 1608 he became president of the cour des Aides.42 This elitism did not rule out large demonstrations of unanimity during ceremonies which were both civil and monarchical, due to fact that these illuminated, stabilized and gloriﬁed social order. The strength of unanimous sentiment brought about by associating the cult of monarchy with local traditions gave renewed vigour to the municipality in its undertaking to defend public welfare. In the town’s display of union there was more than a hint of the mystique of Union, which was dear to the ligueurs, yet with a different orientation: it was as much about being united before God as before the king. So much so, that unlike the traditional League towns of Meaux or Paris, the corps de ville emerged from this ﬁnal ordeal of the Wars of Religion in a stronger position. The reconciliation within the town, carried out in the context of the promotion of a cult of monarchy ﬁrmly attached to local traditions, was soon to be threatened by the views of a new prelate, Antoine Rose, nephew of the previous bishop, who had supported the League.

A bastion of Gallicanism (1602–1610) What then is the explanation for Senlis having become, at the time of a trial which set it up in opposition to its bishop, a sounding board for the Gallican ‘nation’, capable of mobilizing the great Parisian Gallicans?

Thierry Amalou 229

The rejection of Antoine Rose—a prelate with little respect for tradition The notables and town authorities intended to force the clergy, and in particular, the bishop, to respect the franchises, rights and freedoms of the town, founding their arguments on established custom, traditions and practice. Within the conﬁnes of their town, they ensured that their prerogatives would be respected in a manner similar to Gallican parlementaires and scholars who justiﬁed the superiority of the king over the Pope on both spiritual and temporal grounds. Within this context, the entry of Antoine Rose on 24 March 1602 followed a symbolic course, during which the new bishop entered into unilateral commitments, while still honouring Saint Rieul, as the evangelist and the ﬁrst bishop of the town.43 However, the bishop refused to make the offering of a length of silk, which tradition required of him in respect of the canons of the collegial church of Saint-Rieul. In all other respects, he conformed to the normal rituals, including taking an oath to respect urban liberties. In any case, apart from the incident concerning the offering of silk, Antoine Rose’s entry seemed to please the municipal magistrates.44 The situation between the bishop and the municipality quickly worsened. In 1603, certain members of the clergy, supported by the bishop, protested against the commemorations of the siege and the escalade, which were considered an imposition.45 The situation became so bitter that Antoine Rose went so far as to hurl insults at the municipal magistrates; they in turn brought the case to the Parlement, who pronounced in their favour.46 This decision was the ﬁrst of a series of judgements that were to isolate Rose from not only the governing elite, who were unwilling to allow the commemorative system put in place after the League to be called into question, but also from the main bodies of canons (the cathedral chapter and that of Saint-Rieul). In encouraging unanimity against him, Antoine Rose gave additional strength to urban unanimity. This conﬂict with the Saint-Rieul chapter, resulting from Rose’s refusal to make the offering of silk cloth, gave rise to a long trial (which lasted long after Rose’s departure in 1610) marked by a ﬁrst decision of the Parlement in December 1609, which condemned Rose to pay for the customary golden silk.47 We may assume that this trial undertaken by the college of clerics attached to the sanctuary of the town’s patron saint did nothing to dispel the anti-civic reputation of a bishop who had already tried to oppose commemorations of the siege and the escalade. To add to this, a new trial instigated by the cathedral chapter, represented on this occasion by a reputable Gallican lawyer with an established reputation, brought public humiliation on the bishop.

230

Obedience to King in Fidelity to Traditions

The Leschassier Affair and the liberties of the Gallican Church Jacques Lechassier, the son of one of the king’s secretaries, owed his ofﬁce as substitut du procureur général of the Parlement to Henri III’s favour. He had therefore, since the middle of the 1570’s, frequented the Gallican circles which emerged from the school of French law (Pierre Pithou and Antoine Loisel, in particular). A loyal servant to Henri IV, his reputation was to grow when the Venetian Republic asked him to draw up a ‘defence’ against the claims of Pope Paul V during the Interdict. In fact, this learned humanist was regularly in correspondence with his friend Paulo Sarpi.48 However, it was at the time of his defence of the chapter of Senlis against Antoine Rose that Leschassier published a small work, De la liberté ancienne et canonique de l’Église gallicane, which was to take its place among the Gallican treatises and polemical works and would guarantee its author the respect of jurists and of the king’s major ofﬁciers, if one is to believe the testimonies of Pierre de l’Estoile and of Jacques-Auguste de Thou.49 What lay at the heart of the case? The bishop claimed to be entitled to revoke the chapter’s right to grant dimissorial letters, that is, to authorize clerics to receive their ordination in a diocese other than that of Senlis (a practice that had probably developed during the period when the episcopal seat lay vacant between 1589 and 1596). As such, it merely made use of statutory dispositions set down by the provincial Council of Reims of 1583, dispositions which themselves were inspired by the Council of Trent.50 By 1605 Rose had excommunicated one of the canons, Hercule Dufresnoy, precisely on the grounds that he had just received dimissiorial letters from the chapter.51 The canons took a united front in support of their colleague and brought an action against the bishop. In addition, the personal involvement of Dufresnoy affected one of the members of an inﬂuential family in Senlis – the son of Waast Dufresnoy – and contributed to the urban oligarchy’s growing resentment of Rose. The canons and their lawyer brought their case to the king’s Privy Council in an attempt to use this special case as an example to publicly vindicate the notion of a Gallican Church that had at its disposal not just privileges but franchises that were in line with a traditional canonical code dating back to apostolic times.52 Implicitly saying the exact opposite of what was contained in the disciplinary and ecclesiastical reforms put forward by the Council of Trent, Leschassier was of the view that the chapter ‘had formerly been the bishop’s council, independent, with its own jurisdiction’.53 These views provoked the anger of Antoine Rose, no less Tridentine and ‘Roman’ than his uncle Guillaume. At the start of the year 1606, the

Thierry Amalou 231

latter sent a request to the king’s Grand Conseil asking that Leschassier’s scandalous memorandum be examined by the Sorbonne.54 The bishop was ﬁnally ordered to abandon his stance and, after having refused to appear before the Grand Conseil, was sentenced in absentia (22 December 1607). The trial orchestrated by Leschassier was symbolic of the action taken by Gallican scholars who, at the start of the seventeenth century, when confronted with an episcopate that already ﬁrmly supported the Tridentine reform, acted as defenders of Gallican liberties by seizing upon local conﬂicts on which they conferred national signiﬁcance. In Senlis, the victory of Leschassier contributed to a reinforcement of the union between the elites in Senlis and their king as well as a strengthening of the internal cohesion of bodies within the town. The governing elites adopted a spectacular retaliatory measure with respect to their bishop: in July of 1607, the town assembly ordered the removal of Antoine Rose’s arms from the church of Saint-Aignan, leaving only those of the king and the dauphin.55 Saint-Aignan was one of the town’s main civic sanctuaries, the closest to the town hall, where during the Middle Ages the bourgeois of the town were buried and founded chapels, and where a Mass of the Holy Spirit was celebrated upon every election of a new magistrate. We can, therefore, see the symbolic impact of a decision, which was intended as much to humiliate the bishop as to display the desire to serve only the king. Following such a public humiliation, Antoine Rose left Senlis for Clermont, exchanging posts with François de La Rochefoucauld on 1 March 1610. Should the attitudes of the local elites be seen as a sign of growing secularization, or indeed as a form of deconfessionalization (blurring of confessional boundaries)?56 Nothing could be further from the truth. The notables who displayed such mistrust with regard to Antoine Rose were nonetheless staunch Catholics, in favour of the establishment of new orders including the Capuchins in 1609, with a strong attachment to Eucharistic piety through the foundation of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament in 1618, and devoted to active charity as can be seen in the establishment of a hospital in 1610 to aid the poor. These are all indicators that show their closeness to the Catholicism of the Counter Reformation. In fact, the failure of Antoine Rose is due to two main points: his neglect of the weight of corporatism (cathedral chapter); his wish to extend Tridentine reform without considering local Gallican traditions (like the cult of Saint-Rieul as part of civic commemorations), of which his predecessors (and particularly his uncle Gauillaume Rose) had been able to take advantage.

232

Obedience to King in Fidelity to Traditions

A citadel of devoutness: the ‘Little Milan’ of Senlis (1611–1643) The ﬁrst Catholic initiatives to regain lost territory that marked the start of the seventeenth century should be credited to the lay people, royalist Catholics as well as former ligueurs. A similar situation can be observed in the Limousin between 1590 and 1630: new orders and Jesuit colleges were founded there thanks to the initiatives of lay people.57 Yet, in Senlis, from the reign of Louis XIII onwards, the clergy once again became the spearhead of the Catholic recovery. The personality of Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld and that of his successor Nicolas Sanguin played a big part in this Tridentine offensive.58 Joseph Bergin has provided excellent evidence of how La Rochefoucauld, who belonged to the second generation of Tridentine bishops, tried to ensure that the pastoral ideas of his cousin Charles Borromeo would prevail, by intense activity among the devout circles of the court and by the reform of the regular clergy.59 Despite gaps in the ecclesiastical sources, the nine or ten years he effectively spent as bishop of Senlis seem to have given fresh impetus to the reform of the local clergy. Upon his return from Rome, La Rochefoucauld is believed to have visited his little diocese of Senlis every year. The involvement of La Rochefoucauld in the reformation of the clergy is confirmed by the holding of synods and the publication of the Avertissement pour les curés de Senlis in 1618 which was inspired by synodal legal measures.60 As was quite usual among French bishops in the seventeenth century, he supported the foundation of new orders.61 Finally, in the years that followed, Saint-Vincent de Senlis, the cradle of the reform of the regular clergy, was to receive within its walls a seminary for children, at the instigation of Father Charles Faure, who was close to La Rochefoucauld and Adrien Bourdoise.62 However, the recruitment involved primarily the children of the Parisian noblesse de robe, who were destined for careers in the Church. The Génofévains wanted to train future generations of religious, without necessarily wishing to teach the local elites, as their refusal to manage the college of Senlis despite the requests of the town in 1650 proves.63 How was it possible for Tridentine enthusiasm to take hold in the Gallican bastion of Senlis? More speciﬁcally, how did this gap between the ideals of the clergy and those of the lay elites manage to close to such an extent?

Thierry Amalou 233

The encouragement of eucharistic piety by episcopal authorities It was not surprising that La Rochefoucauld regularly called upon the Jesuits in 1618 and 1621 to organize missions in the countryside of Senlis diocese. This aspiration to evangelize by mobilizing the new orders was very commonplace among Tridentine prelates.64 It seems, however, that the Jesuits were merely auxiliary helpers because by 1615 the bishop of Senlis had devised a system of preaching which granted the Cordeliers the monopoly of preaching stations in the ‘plat pays’ during Advent and Lent. Each religious found himself entrusted with between 5 and 12 parishes, thereby allowing the whole of the little diocese of Senlis to be covered.65 This regular division of the territory into preaching stations is reminiscent of a similar system employed by Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet in his reform of the diocese of Meaux a century earlier.66 Quite apart from the popularity and long-established specialization of the Cordeliers in preaching during Advent and Lent, granting them such a role was not so straightforward: their sermons ran the risk of competing with those of the parish priests.67 However, La Rochefoucauld’s choice can no doubt be explained by his desire to establish a system of preaching, which would be effective because it was orchestrated by an order in which local elites had conﬁdence.68 As in Paris, the Cordeliers enjoyed the patronage of the greatest in the land.69 In fact, since the ﬁfteenth century, the Montmorency clan had made the Cordeliers monastery in Senlis one of their family basilicas.70 The priority granted to preaching also reﬂects a pastoral matter of urgency that was clearly deﬁned in the synodal statutes: the reinforcement of catechism in order to improve the use of the sacraments.71 Yet how could a form of piety that now more than ever was focused on the Eucharist – which was also the very foundation of communal bonding – be reconciled with the desire to internalize faith, displayed by certain members of the elite?72 The establishment of a Brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament was precisely the answer to this challenge. The year of the publication of his Avertissement pour les curés de Senlis, François de La Rochefoucauld chose to set up the headquarters of the Brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament in the church of Saint-Aignan which, as we already noted, was one of the main civic sanctuaries of the town.73 The success of this pious association, which brought together both clerics and lay people, was beyond dispute among Catholic notables and former ligueurs, but especially among women who, like in Lille, subscribed in huge numbers.74 The statutes clearly show the wish to promote a eucharistic cult by means of a more frequent administration of the sacraments of communion and confession, a wish that we already witnessed

234

Obedience to King in Fidelity to Traditions

during the white processions of 1583 and even more so during the Borromeo-inspired reforms that Guillaume Rose implemented the following year. Thus, members of the brotherhood were invited to celebrate Holy Thursday and Corpus Christi, which ‘are the brotherhood’s biggest days’, to carry a candle during the Holy Sacrament processions on the ﬁrst Sunday of every month, to recite once a week the litanies of the Holy Sacrament (or the rosary three time a week for those who could not read), and to kneel in prayer to the Holy Sacrament on a daily basis. The desire to occupy the entire liturgical calendar with devotions and a paraliturgy that prepared members for confession and then communion was not restricted to the public sphere. Every day, while kneeling to pray to God morning and evening, the faithful had to ‘search for their wrongdoings by examining their conscience before resting’.75 This last step, intended to go beyond attrition in order to gain true repentance, is testament to the real attention paid to the internalization of piety, in accordance with the religious sensibilities of the elite that we have already mentioned. We are therefore witness here to the triumph of a form of piety developed by the League which, despite its political defeat, became a rallying point for the elites. It was not just coincidence that the Company of the Holy Sacrament, heavily inﬂuenced by Tridentine spirituality, chose to establish itself in Senlis in 1645, at the same time as its establishment in the major Catholic citadels of northern France including Rouen, Amiens and Reims.76 Frequent communion and its power to unite the community were a direct reﬂection of Charles Borromeo’s pastoral directives.77 Borromeo’s inﬂuence and the respect for local traditions Unlike his predecessor, La Rochefoucauld scrupulously respected local rituals. So, at the time of his solemn entry, he submitted to the custom which sought to honour the bishop, who had brought Christianity to Senlis, and presented liturgical ornaments to the two main ecclesiastical establishments: the cathedral of Notre-Dame and the collegiate of Saint-Rieul, headquarters of the cult of Senlis’ evangelizing bishop.78 Signiﬁcantly, in 1614 the bishop dedicated the Capuchin Church of Senlis ‘in honour of Our Lady and the eight saint bishops of Senlis’.79 The liturgy celebration was in line with the initial wish of the lawyer Nicolas de Cornoailles, who in founding the Capuchin church in Senlis hoped to honour Saint Rieul and the apostolic succession.80 Neither La Rochefoucauld nor his successor Nicolas Sanguin (1622–51) displayed excessive imagination: their pastoral model was a blatant copy of that of the archbishop of Milan.81 Thus, while writing the ‘feasts of the

Thierry Amalou 235

bishops of Senlis, the dean of the Saint-Rieul collegiate church, Charles Jaulnay,82 mingling general history and that of his own diocese, displays utmost admiration for Saint Charles Borromeo whom he succeeds in associating with the Bourbon dynasty: S. Charles Borromeo archbishop of Milan, nephew of Pope Pius IV, named Jean Ange de Medicis, brother of Marguerite de Medicis, mother of Saint Charles. And by thus our good and just Louis XIII father of our young king Louis XIV was borne of two great saints, that is, of Saint Louis from the side of his father Henri IV dit the great and of Saint Charles from the side of his mother Marie de Medicis.83 This establishment of a direct line was perhaps intended to overcome the Gallican reticence of the Senlis notables. This was quite necessary. After the canonization of the archbishop of Milan in 1610, La Rochefoucauld, followed by Jaulnay, introduced a cult of Saint Charles Barromeo in Senlis. Therefore, before 1623, the bishop of Senlis consecrated to him a chapel in the Saint-Aignan parish church (the church in which he had founded the Brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament and which was a municipal sanctuary).84 A few years later, when the reconstruction of the parish church of Saint-Geneviève was nearing completion, this example was imitated by Jaulnay himself, who was parish priest at the time, and who begged Bishop Nicolas Sanguin to carry out this consecration.85 However, these initiatives seem not to have given rise to the extremes of popular enthusiasm that the cult of Saint Charles Borromeo had met with in the Provence region since 1615.86 The merchant Jacques Debonnaire’s ‘livre de raison’ (1625–60) allows us to gauge the degree to which Senlis, which was anxious to emphasize its status as royal city, remained attuned to dynastic or national events.87 In addition to royal entries accompanied by the chanting of the Te Deum with the same intensity as during the League, the municipal authorities and the bishop supported the military actions of the monarchy by prayer or festival.88 The most obvious example was without doubt that of the siege of La Rochelle, which was widely publicized for its double dimension of struggle against heresy and against rebellion. First, Bishop Nicolas Sanguin mobilized the local resources of corporate Catholicism to beseech God for a royal victory in the Protestant city. Then, on 21 May 1628, the bishop, bearing in person the relics of the True Cross, took the lead in a general procession. The entire clergy walked behind him, each carrying particular relics from the main sanctuaries. The procession

236

Obedience to King in Fidelity to Traditions

wound its way through the town to the cathedral where the bishop celebrated a mass before calling upon the faithful to pray for the king’s success. Some months later, the news of Louis XIII’s victory gave rise to a celebration that mixed the profane with the sacred, including a Te Deum at the cathedral and celebrations and festivities in front of the Hôtel de ville.89 In the year of Louis XIII’s vow, the feast of the Assumption acquired an unusual prominence: the different ecclesiastical establishments led by the bishop took out the Marian relics in their possession. The cult of the Virgin could therefore develop on a local substratum. This local response to Louis XIII’s vow continued until the birth of the Dauphin with a month of thanksgiving prayers.90 These extraordinary demonstrations combined with the commemorations already mentioned, which regularly celebrated the union between Senlis and the monarchy, should not hide the fact that the forms of public penitence, which had ﬂourished so strongly during the League, experienced a sharp decline. The decline of public penitence and the strength of the evangelical bishop’s cult Was this disappearance of certain external ceremonies including the processions blanches the sign of a society henceforth reconciled with itself? Or should we read it as being the consequence of an internalization of piety that was encouraged by prevailing Christocentric trends and active charity of the elites?91 We should consider here the Brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament’s exercises of devotion or indeed the development of eremitism. This last phenomenon, which was particularly intense in the north-east of France, was a consequence of the League. The bourgeois Pierre Seguin, who was one of the League’s leaders in Senlis, had chosen exile in the Netherlands with the duc de Feria in 1594.92 Back in France in 1599, Seguin settled down in Lorraine in the hermitage of SainteMarguerite close to Nancy, and then, thanks to the support of the duc’s family, in Vendeuvre, where in 1605 he built a new hermitage in which he lived until his death in 1636. He expressed his mystical sensitivity there, which was without doubt inﬂuenced by Spanish spirituality. While a hermit, he kept in contact with his family and with former ligueurs in Senlis.93 He also corresponded with devout families in Senlis, such as the Cornoailles and the Charmolues.94 It was deﬁnitely Pierre Seguin’s vocation as a recluse which gave rise to the foundation of hermitages in the Senlis region under Louis XIII.95 But did this taste for mysticism and inner prayer, often nurtured by Marian piety, directly weaken collective enthusiasm for penitence?

Thierry Amalou 237

In our view, it seems rather that these grand external ceremonies, such as the processions blanches of 1583 or 1589, had an objective which by the start of the seventeenth century had been achieved: the ‘overpowering of heresy’. In fact, despite the regime of the Edict of Nantes, the reformed religion disappeared from public life. In 1626, Bishop Nicolas Seguin managed to obtain a resounding conversion: that of Anne de Cornoailles, one of the rare Calvinist notables of the town, a widow of the royal lawyer and provost Philippe Le Grand. Signiﬁcantly, this conversion gave rise to a public ceremony: the eight parish priests of the town, singing psalms and thanksgiving hymns, brought the Holy Sacrament to Anne de Cornoailles’ place of residence, accompanied by a large crowd carrying candles and torches.96 The bishop’s triumph was complete in 1633 when he obtained the razing of the Protestant church near Senlis. Only Catholic sources recount the circumstances surrounding the event. At the time of the Easter festivities, a Catholic procession passed through Aumont-en-Halatte, a village situated to the north of Senlis, in which the reformed cult was practised in accordance with the Edict of Nantes. The march of the Catholics was said to have been disrupted by the provocations of approximately 60 Protestants on their way to the temple.97 The local parish priest complained to the bishop who made his dissatisfaction known to Louis XIII and then to the Parlement, which ordered the destruction of the temple. During the following years, the bishop of Senlis had the controversial Jesuit François Véron preach at Aumont.98 The Catholic publicists emphasized with satisfaction the conversions and abjurations that were on the increase.99 It seems to us that some account must be taken of this spectacular decline in Protestantism in order to explain the drop in external penitence rituals during the seventeenth century. Moreover, the vivacity of the patron saint’s cult, which continued to be the focus of collective devotions, was to perpetuate the townspeople’s reconciliation in an alliance of episcopal traditions and the monarchical cult. The central role played by Saint Rieul in the sanctoral of Senlis made him the guiding and protective ﬁgure of the town. Occasions on which the saint’s reliquary was brought out had increased during the Wars of Religion, allowing a ‘recharging’ of the sanctuaries and a strengthening of town unity. However, there were more than just special ceremonies to maintain the presence of the saint: every year, on the third day of the feast of the Rogations, a procession led the city as a community towards the church of Saint-Rieul, where the faithful would kiss a reliquary containing the blood of Saint Rieul. Honouring the blood of Rieul was also a powerful metaphor for the blood of Christ.

238

Obedience to King in Fidelity to Traditions

At the close of the Rogation ceremonies, the reminder of the redemptive action of Christ provided a transition to the feast of the Ascension, which the next day celebrated his elevation into heaven. We can understand better why the Saint Rieul cult was supported by the Church and the Catholic municipal authorities: just like the feast of the Holy Sacrament, it was a matter of strengthening community unity and answering Protestant protests about the Eucharist.100 Finally, the bishops and their assistants managed to take a central role in the scholarly debate by supporting and spreading the work of the Theology professor, Antoine de Mouchy, who in 1562 edited a set of episcopal lists that proved the apostolic succession, a work which was to enjoy widespread circulation among lay elites and the local clergy.101 It was therefore with the certainty of meeting an audience familiar with local hagiographical legends that the Capuchin friar Paulin, from the friary in Beauvais, came to preach in Senlis in 1639 on the anniversary of the patron saint’s feast.102 In his sermon, he follows the main lines of the Saint Rieul cult, as they had become ﬁrmly established during the Wars of Religion. Accordingly, Rieul’s apostolicity, the foundation of the identity and urban pride of Senlis, is recalled: It is true that we have no certainty that even one of the apostles might have come to France: but it is assured that their disciples came there to plant the faith, a saint Denys to Paris, a saint Martial to Limoges, saint Ursin to Bourges, saint Savinian to Sens, saint Rieul to Senlis, and a saint Lucien to Beauvais. In addition, the sermon picks up on the homonymy between Regulus (the Latin name for Rieul) and the Roman sovereign Regulus. Much in the same way that Regulus king of Rome, the inverse archetype of the tyrants, was a liberating king (and whose generosity towards the poor similarly contrasted with the vices of tyrants), Paulin explains how Regulus liberated the people of Senlis from paganism by destroying their idols. Extending the analogy between royalty and holiness, the preacher establishes a similarity between the legend of Saint Rieul, which tells us how the latter miraculously opened the prisons where Christians were detained, and the clemency of Louis XIII who himself also liberated some prisoners at the time of his entry into Senlis in 1631. In 1636, the year of Corbie,103 a harangue delivered in the name of the corps de ville, praised in closely related terms the paternal and protecting figure of the sovereign.104 This speech of love publicly proclaimed the inhabitants’ desire for union with their sovereign.

Thierry Amalou 239

The multiple orientations of the Saint Rieul cult – an evangelizing bishop who was close to Saint Denys, destroyer of idols, the initial link in the apostolic succession, supporter of Eucharistic devotions – were connected both with the power of the patron saint to reunite the community and the town’s sentiment of having been specially chosen. The plasticity of this cult which allowed it to be easily associated with monarchical devotions provided the bishops, through apostolic succession,105 as well as the king’s servants who ruled the town with a powerful source of legitimization. The development of external ceremonies and of paraliturgical forms of Eucharistic and Marian devotion, were carried out in Senlis in a way which respected local traditions. This is precisely what the thunderous preaching of the Jansenist Jean Deslyons denounced. While he was a théologal canon in Senlis, he caused a scandal in 1647 by preaching on the day of the Assumption against the use of rosaries, roundly condemning those who attached too much importance to sculpted representations and to paintings. Deslyons advised his listeners to read the Holy Scripture and the Church Fathers, rather than being taken in by external ceremonies. Deslyons’ internalized piety, which was both austere and not very respectful of ancestral customs, caused a scandal in the town and provoked the censorship of Bishop Nicolas Sanguin. We have already seen that Sanguin managed to unite Tridentine reform and the promotion of the traditional forms of corporative Catholicism.106 The case of Senlis, with its successful reconciliation between former ligueurs and Catholic royalists, proves that there was not necessarily a contradiction between the internalization of faith, clerical mediation and ‘Catholic corporatism’. The association of these three elements allowed the town to put the League behind it as a momentary digression, while integrating a fundamental element of the identity inherited from the League: monarchical loyalty. This is precisely where the value of the ﬂexibility of traditions lies: the appropriation of the local liturgy by the royalists allowed them to sanctify a political regime, which through absolutism, guaranteed a society of orders.107 This same plasticity made it possible to develop a gentle form of confessionalization:108 Tridentine reform, therefore, appears as a work of synthesis, which incorporated local Gallican traditions to a large extent, and cannot be reduced to simply disciplining morals.109

Notes Translated by Declan Webb. 1. M. De Waele, ‘Autorité, légitimité, ﬁdélité: le Languedoc ligueur et la reconnaissance d’Henri IV’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 53 (2006), 5–34.

240

Obedience to King in Fidelity to Traditions

2. M. Cassan, Le Temps des guerres de Religion. L’exemple du Limousin (vers 1530–vers 1630) (Paris: Publisud, 1996); Hilary J. Bernstein, Between Crown and Community. Politics and Civic Culture in Sixteenth-Century Poitiers (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2004). 3. Y. Lignereux, Lyon et le roi. De ‘la bonne ville’ à l’absolutisme municipal (1594–1654) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2003), p. 46. 4. S. A. Finley-Croswhite, Henri IV and the Towns. The Pursuit of Legitimacy in French Urban Society, 1589–1610 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 100. 5. M. Konnert, Local Politics in the French Wars of Religion. The towns of Champagne, the duc de Guise, and the Catholic League (1560–95) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 6. Nicolas Barthélemy, avocat au Parlement originaire de Senlis, whose father was one of the town notables, and one of Henri IV’s most faithful supporters, rejoices in his position as ‘habitant d’une ville inviolablement attachée au service de ses roys et dont la gloire luy a merité cette devise, Qu’elle n’a jamais souillé de la moindre tâche d’inﬁdélité la blancheur de ses lys’, as he puts it in the letter of dedication to his Apologie du banquet sanctiﬁé de la veille des roi (Paris: G. Tompère,1664), épître dédicatoire. 7. Th. Amalou, Le lys et la mitre. Loyalisme monarchique et pouvoir épiscopal à Senlis pendant la Ligue (vers 1580–vers 1610) (Paris: Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientiﬁques, 2007). 8. M. Vallès-Bled (ed.), 1594 Le sacre d’Henri IV à Chartres (Chartres: Musée des beaux-arts de Chartres, 1994), p. 266. 9. Th. Amalou, Une concorde urbaine. Senlis au temps des réformes (1520–1580) (Limoges: Presses universitaires de Limoges, 2007), pp. 177–270. 10. Following a period of exile in the Netherlands in the entourage of the Duke of Féria, Pierre Séguin, a supporter of the League, returned to Senlis just after the Peace of Vervins; see R. Descimon and J. J. Ruiz Ibanez, Les Ligueurs de l’exil. Le refuge catholique français après 1594 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005), p. 216. 11. Laurent Coste, Les Lys et le chaperon. Les oligarchies municipales en France de la Renaissance à la Révolution (Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2007), pp. 301–9. 12. We share the view of Simon Ditchﬁeld who has shown that, contrary to the notion of central Roman control over devotional practices and of Sozialdisziplinierung which is commonly attributed to the Counter Reformation, a bishop like Charles Borromeo, in his pastoral experience in Milan, was perfectly able to accommodate local liturgical rites and the saints of the Milanese sovereignty: see Simon Ditchﬁeld, ‘San Carlo and the cult of saints’, Cultura e spiritualità borromaica tra cinque et seicento, Franco Buzzi and Maria-Luisa Frosio (eds) (Milan: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 2006), pp. 145–54. 13. N. Zemon Davis, Essai sur le don dans la France du XVIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2003), p. 149; R. Mousnier, La vénalité des ofﬁces sous Henri IV et Louis XIII (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris, 1971), pp. 579–94. 14. R. Doucet, Les institutions municipales de la France au XVIe siècle, 2 vols (Paris: Picard, 1948), ii, p. 485. 15. Mémoires originaux concernant principalement les villes d’Amiens, de Beauvais, de Clermont, de Compiègne, de Crépy, de Noyon de Senlis et de leurs environs,

Thierry Amalou 241

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

A. Bernier (ed.) (Senlis: Regnier, 1834), pp. 501–507; Archives départementales (AD) Oise, annexe de Senlis, CC12 (December 1609). M. De Waele, ‘Henri IV, politicien monarchomaque? Les contrats de ﬁdélité entre le roi et les Français’, J.-F. Labourdette, J.-P. Poussou and M.-C. Vignal (eds), Le Traité de Vervins (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2000), pp. 117–31; M. Cassan, ‘La réduction des villes ligueuses à l’obéissance’, Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle, 22 (2004), 159–74. E. Muir, Civic ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); E. Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 256. Jean Vaultier, ‘Histoire et discours d’une partie des choses faites et passées en ce royaume qui ont eu cours depuis le 13 mai 1588 jusqu’au 16 juin 1598’, in A. Bernier (ed.), Monuments inédits de l’histoire de France (Paris: Regnier, 1834), p. 177 and 211; Bibliothèque municipale (BM) de Senlis, Coll. Afforty, vol. XXV, p. 678. BM de Senlis, Coll. Afforty, vol. VI, p. 3107. ‘Récit véritable de la surprise de Senlis par la Ligue, écrit par un auteur contemporain’, in A. Bernier (ed.), Monuments inédits de l’histoire de France (Senlis : Regnier, 1834), p. 424. AD Oise, annexe de Senlis, CC 106 (accounts for 1614–18), ff. 34 v–35 r; (1615–16), f. 40 r (1616–17). Vaultier, ‘Histoire et discours’, pp. 178 and 211. R. Descimon, ‘Le corps de ville et le système cérémoniel parisien au début de l’âge moderne’, in Marc Boone and Maarten Prak (eds.), Statuts individuels, statuts corporatifs et statuts judiciaires dans les villes européennes (Leuven: Garant, 1995), pp. 73–128 and 352–63; B. Chevalier, ‘La religion civique dans les bonnes villes : sa portée et ses limites. Le cas de Tours’, La religion civique à l’époque médiévale et moderne (Rome: L’École française de Rome, 1995), pp. 335–50. F. Michaud-Fréjaville, ‘Les processions à Orléans au XVe siècle’, Revue Mabillon, 67 (1995), 205–23. A. Sanfaçon, ‘Légendes, histoire et pouvoir à Chartres sous l’Ancien Régime’, Revue historique, 566 (1988), 346–7. L. Bourquin, Les nobles, la ville et le roi. L’autorité nobiliaire en Anjou pendant les guerres de Religion (Paris: Belin, 2001), p. 169. BM de Senlis, Coll. Afforty, vol. XII, p. 7621 (copie du cartulaire 1611–29). Ibid., p. 7642: ‘funeral ceremonies of the échevins Claude Guérin (procureur au bailliage) in 1619 and Pierre Truyart (élu) en 1625’. J. Flammermont, Histoire des institutions municipales de Senlis (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1881), p. 96. The spread of neo-stoic ideas in Senlis was largely due to Guillaume Durand, conseiller au présidial, and translator of and commentator on several works of Stoic philosophy, among them his translation of the satires of Perse (1575) and his Enchiridion (1582), a paraphrase of the Old Testament. F. Le Jay, De la dignité des rois et des princes souverains : du droit inviolable de leurs successeurs legitimes : et du devoir des peuples et subiectz envers eux (Tours, Mathurin Le Mercier, 1589); W. F. Church, Constitutional Thought in SixteenthCentury France (New York: Octagon, 1969), pp. 260–71.

242

Obedience to King in Fidelity to Traditions

32. J.-H. M. Salmon, ‘Le royalisme politique’, in J. H. Burns (ed.), Histoire de la pensée politique moderne (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1991), p. 212; Quentin Skinner, Les fondements de la pensée politique moderne (Paris, A. Michel, 2001), p. 759. 33. Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), Nouvelles Acquisitions Françaises (nouv. acq. Fr) 11120, ff. 27r–30 v. 34. E. Pasquier, Écrits politiques, D. Thickett (ed.) (Geneva: Droz, 1966), p. 198. 35. BNF, nouv. acq. fr.11120, f. 28 r. 36. Ibid., f. 28 v. 37. BNF, Manuscrits français (MS Fr.) 3958, f. 380 v. 38. BNF., nouv. acq. fr. 11120, f. 30. 39. Jean Mallet, Extrait en bref de ce qui s’est passé en la ville de Senlis . . . , Mouments inédits de l’Histoire de France, A. Bernier (ed) (Senlis: Regnier, 1834), p. 110. 40. Ibid., pp. 68 and p. 88. 41. J. Boucher, ‘Catholiques royaux et ligueurs : une même sensibilité religieuse, des frères ennemis’, Mélanges André Latreille (Lyon: Audin, 1972), in particular pp. 75–81. 42. M. de Beaufort, ‘Les Loisel, une famille de lieutenants généraux du bailliage de Senlis, XVIe–XVIIIe’, Mémoires de la Société d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de Senlis, 3 (1899), 10. 43. Antoine Rose, a doctor of canon law, son of Nicolas Rose, sécrétaire de la chambre du roi, and the nephew of his predecessor as bishop, Guillaume Rose, was only 26 when he received his bulls of provision on 12 November 1601: J. Bergin, The making of the French episcopate 1589–1661 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 692. 44. AD Oise, annexe de Senlis, BB 6, f. 511v–512v. 45. Vaultier, ‘Histoires et discours’, p. 211; AD Oise, annexe de Senlis, BB6, f. 517r. 46. AD Oise, annexe de Senlis, BB 6, f. 561r–v. 47. AD Oise à Beauvais, G 2720, dossiers 9–10. 48. Les œuvres de M. Jacques Leschassier, parisien, avocat en Parlement, contenant plusieurs excellents traittez tant du droit public des Romains que celuy des François. Ensemble quelques mémoires servans à l’antiquité de l’Église eet à l’illustration de l’Histoire de France (Paris, n.p., 1649). 49. Pierre de L’Estoile, Mémoires-journaux de Pierre de L’Estoile, 11 vols, G. Brunet et al (eds) (Paris, Librairie des bibliophiles, 1875–1883, new edn 1982), ix, pp. 19 and 72; J.-A. de Thou, Histoire universelle, 11 vols (La Haye: H. Scheurleer, 1740), x, p. 229. 50. Le premier concile provincial tenu a Rheims, l’an 1583 par monseigneur l’illustrissime et reverendissime cardinal de Guyse, archevesque duc de Rheims...le tout corrigé par nostre saint pere le Pape Grégoire XIII et mis en françois par M. H. Meurier doyen et chanoine theologal de Reims (Reims: Jean de Foigny, 1586), p. 44. 51. AD Oise à Beauvais, G 2013 (7 February 1605). 52. J. Lecler, ‘Qu’est-ce que les libertés de l’église gallicane?’, 24 (1934), pp. 49–50. 53. J. Lechassier, De la liberté ancienne et canonique de l’Église gallicane (Paris: Claude Morel, 1606). 54. Les œuvres de M. Jacques Leschassier, pp. 317–21. 55. AD Oise, annexe de Senlis, BB 6, f. 532v–533r. 56. A. Jouanna, ‘L’Édit de Nantes et le processus de sécularisation de l’État’, in P. Mironneau and I. Pébay-Clottes (eds), Paix des armes, paix des âmes (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 2000), pp. 481–6.

Thierry Amalou 243 57. Cassan, Le temps des guerres de Religion, pp. 311–23; M. Cassan, ‘Laïcs, Ligue et réforme catholique à Limoges’, Histoire, économie et société, 10 (1991), 159–75. 58. According to Gallia Christiana, 16 vols, Denis de Sainte-Marthe et al. (eds) (Paris: V. Palmé, 1715–1865), x, p. 1447, La Rochefoucauld was nominated to Senlis on 21 April 1610. His successor, Nicolas Sanguin, took possession of the episcopal seat in 1622 after the Cardinal resignated in his favour: BM de Senlis, Coll. Afforty, vol. VII, p. 3875. 59. Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld, pp. 110–18. 60. Ibid., p. 110. 61. Jaulnay, Le parfait prélat, p. 637. 62. I. Brian, Messieurs de Sainte-Geneviève. Religieux et curés de la Contre-réforme à la Révolution (Paris: Cerf, 2001), pp. 29–31. 63. M.-M. Compère and D. Julia, Les collèges français, Répertoire 2. France du Nord et de l’Ouest (Paris: Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique: Centre National de la Recherche Scientiﬁque, 1988), pp. 498–9. 64. Bergin, Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld, p. 111. 65. BM de Senlis, Coll. Afforty, t. VII, p. 3873 (24 November 1615). 66. M. Veissière, L’évêque Guillaume Briçonnet (1470–1534) (Provins: Société d’histoire et d’archéologie, 1986), pp. 132–3. 67. Signiﬁcantly, in the neighbouring town of Compiègne, the preaching of the Capuchins, from 1611, was reglemented in a very strict fashion. They were only authorized to preach on demand of the priests – particularly when it was a question of aiding the sick in cases of contagion – and provided that they did not disrupt other stations. See P. Raoul de Sceaux (Jean Mauzaize), Histoire des frères mineurs Capucins de la province de Paris (1601–1660) (Blois: Éditions Notre-Dame de la Trinité, 1965), i, p. 292. 68. Since the Middle Ages, the municipality had called upon the Cordeliers to preach during advent and lent. 69. M. Armstrong, The Politics of Piety. Franciscan Preachers during the Wars of Religion (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004), p. 97. 70. BNF, nouv. acq. Latin 1687. 71. Bergin, Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld, p. 117. 72. J. Bossy, ‘Essai de sociographie de la messe, 1200–1700’, Annales économies, sociétés, civilisations, January/February (1981), 44–70; M. Rubin, The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 243–71. 73. AD Oise at Beauvais, J 2654/49 (20 June 1618). 74. A. Lottin, Lille citadelle de la Contre-Réforme? (1598–1668) (Dunkerque, Westhoek-Éditions and Éditions des Beffrois, 1984), p. 259. 75. AD Oise, J 2654/ 49. 76. A. Tallon, La compagnie du Saint-Sacrement (Paris: Cerf, 1990), pp. 30–2. 77. R. Sauzet, Contre-Réforme et réforme catholique en Bas-Languedoc au XVIIe siècle, le diocèse de Nîmes de 1598 à 1694 (Lille: Service de reproduction des thèses, Université de Lille III, 1978), p. 250. 78. Jaulnay, Le parfait prélat, p. 635. 79. Ibid., pp. 630–1. 80. AD Oise, annexe de Senlis, BB 6, f. 550 v (27 July 1614); AD Oise à Beauvais, G 660 and 2201. 81. A. Bonzon, L’esprit de clocher. Prêtres et paroisses dans le diocèse de Beauvais (1535–1650) (Paris: Cerf, 1999), pp. 57–67; R. Sauzet, Contre-Réforme, p. 339.

244 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98.

99. 100. 101.

102.

Obedience to King in Fidelity to Traditions Gallia Christiana, x, pp. 1471–2. Jaulnay, Le parfait prélat, p. 585. Ibid., p. 633. Ibid., p. 640 (10 August 1628). M. Venard, ‘L’inﬂuence de Charles Borromée sur l’Église de France’, Le catholicisme à l’épreuve dans la France du XVIe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 2000), p. 167. BM Senlis, Coll. Afforty, vol. XI, pp. 134–5. BM Senlis, Coll. Afforty, vol. VI, p. 208; Th. Amalou, ‘La célébration de la monarchie et le loyalisme des notables de Senlis (1589–1610)’, in P. Mironneau and I. Pébay-Clottes (eds), Paix des armes (Paris: Société Henri IV, 2000), pp. 427–44. BM Senlis, Coll. Afforty, vol. XI, p. 134. BM Senlis, Coll. Afforty, vol. XXIII, p. 218. The prayers took place from 15 August to 10 September 1638. B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity. Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 203–38. J. Sainsaulieu, Les ermites français (Paris: Cerf, 1974), p. 60; R. Descimon and X. Ruiz Ibanez, Les ligueurs de l’exil. Le refuge catholique français après 1594 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005), pp. 154 and 241. A. Margry and E. Müller, ‘Pierre Seguin, ligueur, reclus et écrivain (1558–1636)’, Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Senlis, 1 (1895), p. 37. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 5. AD Oise, annexe de Senlis, GG 8, f. 52. ‘Vie de Monseigneur Nicolas Sanguin (1680)’, E. Muller (ed.), Mémoires de la Société académique d’archéologie, sciences et arts du département de l’Oise, 13 (1886), p. 35. Le rasement du temple de Senlis. Ensemble les honteuses fuittes du sieur de Beau-lieu ministre dudit Senlis et de Chantilly poursuivy un an durant par le P.V. et terminées aux octaves dernières du S. sacrement. Le tout recueilly et d’escry par un gentilhomme present (Paris: Claude Morlot, 1635). Ibid., p. 27. Amalou, Concorde, pp. 248–68. Antoine de Mouchy, Christianae religionis institutionisque Domini nostri JesuChriti et apostolicae traditionis, adversus misoliturgorum blasphemias ac novorum hujus temporis sectariorum imposturas, praecipue Joannis Calvini contra sacram Missam catholica et historica propugnatio, 4 vols (Paris: Claudium Fremy, 1562). See S. Ditchﬁeld, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy. Pietro Maria Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 285–6, who highlights the impetus of Charles Borromeo in the drafting of these episcopal-diocesan stories where erudition came to the aid of local hagiography. Sermon given on 30 March 1639 and edited by Charles Jaulnay in Recueil de plusieurs discours, titres et pieces authentiques servant d’apologie pour la defense de monsieur Jaulnay doyen et chanoine de l’eglise St Rieule de Senlis sur ce qu’il a mis en avant dans son istoire et antiquitez de la ville de Senlis touchant l’ancienne dignité de l’eglise dudit St Rieule et comme elle a esté autrefois la cathedrale et ou saint Rieule, son premier evesque a tenu son siege episcopal (Paris: Jean Paslé, 1653).

Thierry Amalou 245 103. J. Joly, ‘1636: l’année de Corbie dans la région de Senlis’, Mémoires de la Société d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de Senlis, années 2000 et 2001 (2002), p. 34. 104. Harangue au roy par les habitans de Senlis à l’arrivée de sa Majesté (Paris: Jean Brunet, 1636). This lampoon is indicative also of the intensiﬁcation of royal propaganda which extolled military victories in Flanders and Artois. See Hélène Ducini, Faire voir, faire croire. L’opinion publique sous Louis XIII (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2003), p. 474. 105. A very signiﬁcant example is provided in 1652 during an extraordinary procession of the Saint-Rieul reliquary. Nicolas Sanguin, former bishop of Senlis who had resigned from his position one year earlier, carried the reliquary to the new bishop, his nephew Denis Sanguin, who took over from him during the procession: Chronique du monastère de la Présentation NotreDame (1680), E. Muller (ed.), Mémoires de la Société académique d’archéologie, sciences et arts du département de l’Oise, 13 (1886), p. 51. 106. BNF, nouv. acq. fr. 10973; Bibliothèque Mazarine, ms 2001. Biography and list of works of the dean of Senlis in Jean Lesaulnier, Port-royal insolite. Édition critique du recueil des choses diverses (Paris: Klincksiek, 1992), pp. 745–54. 107. Muir, Ritual, pp. 258–60. 108. P. Benedict, ‘Confessionalisation in France? Critical reﬂexions and new evidence’, The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Huguenots (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 307–25. 109. Contrary to J. A. Bossy, ‘The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe’, Past and Present, 47 (1970), 51–70 who views the Tridentine reforms as having accentuated the individualization of the faithful and of the discipline. This point of view is discussed by W. Reinhard, ‘La ContreRéforme: une forme de modernisation? Prolégomènes à une théorie du temps des confessions’, Papauté, confessions, modernité (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1998), pp. 160–1.

Epilogue Régime Change: Restoration, Reconstruction and Reformation Mark Greengrass

Anyone who has read Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s eye-popping account of the illconceived attempt to build American democracy in the rubble of war-torn Iraq will readily understand the current preoccupation, both scholarly and publicly, with the problems of reconstruction and reconciliation after periods of mass violence and civil war.1 This interest in ‘transitional politics’ (as it has come to be termed) has largely focused on the contemporary world. But there are longer historical parallels, and this volume serves to emphasize how much we can learn from them. It focuses on the period ‘after the League’ at the end of the wars of religion (at least as they have traditionally been conceived). Transitional politics tends to revolve around what Paul Ricœur has termed ‘foundational events’, ones which are constructed (in memory and language) as breaking decisively with the past, and marking a new beginning. There are plenty to choose from in France’s political past (post-1453; post-1789; post-1815; post-1945 . . . ). In each case they have become a constitutive element in the inevitably selective process through which collective memory has served to consolidate identity. That process has a bipolar functionality. Negative foundational periods (e.g. the ‘ancien régime’) create a memory which legitimates patterns of behaviour or institutional forms that serve to prevent the reappearance of the world that has been lost, or (rather) consigned to oblivion. Positive foundational events provide an essential legitimation for a new status quo which is itself (socially and institutionally) active in the consolidation of the identity in question. As historians, we are bound, however, to be ambivalent towards such foundational processes. We prefer to see events in a causal chain. Foundational events tend to deconcatenate the past, fracturing (often for political and institutional ends) what we, as historians, see as the inevitable continuities of the past. We are inclined to be sceptical towards the myths that are inevitably associated with them. And yet, for better or for worse, we have inherited the foundational canonicity of the past, and it shapes the periods with which we work and the foundational myths that surround them. So we should not be surprised that the contributions to this volume seek, in various ways, to redeﬁne what we mean by the ‘end’ of the wars of religion. They are not the ﬁrst to do so. There is an emerging historiography – presented articulately by Mack Holt – that emphasizes continuity.2 The League was primarily a ‘war 246

Epilogue 247 of succession’ which marked the culmination of one phase of the wars of religion. The underlying issues of sectarian conﬂict and its resolution, the challenges to royal authority and how to rebuild monarchical rule on a more solid basis, what kind of reformation (if any) should be attempted in the French church and how it should be attempted, were still as uppermost in the French polity a generation after the ﬁnal negotiated settlement of the League as they had been for the generation before it. This collection enables us both to appreciate those continuities and also to reassess the particularities of the transitional politics of Henri IV’s regime. The contributions focus on both ecclesiastical and secular continuities, through a combination of overviews and case-studies. Elizabeth Tingle emphasizes (in the context of the Atlantic seaboard city of Nantes) how Catholic ‘performative’ piety had been stimulated among the laity as (initially) an auto-defence of sacralities from early on in the wars of religion.3 These sacralities had never been far from manifestations of local identity and well-being. They had always been well-integrated into expressions of Catholic civism. Catholic activism in Nantes, one of the League’s Breton strongholds, brought laity and clergy together to create a nexus upon which the powerful devotional currents of the next generation could be built. Thierry Amalou investigates that ‘Catholic civism’, using the example of the town of Senlis, a royalist stronghold in the shadow of League Paris.4 He demonstrates how, on the basis of civic rituals based around the local patron saint (Saint Rieul), the notables of Senlis were able to historicize the town’s identity into an urban loyalism. Such urban loyalism was reinforced by fears for local order and stability during the civil wars. Some city fathers were attracted to the practical aspects of neo-stoic moral philosophy, which had (both in France and the Netherlands) a particular appeal in civil war. We should not yield to our passions (greed, joy, fear, and sorrow) but learn how to accept what God (and the powers that be) afﬂict us with. The result was a fertile ground for a consensus among those who mattered locally upon how to rebuild obedience to the monarchy. The notables of Senlis cannot have been unique. The League had garnered support from every province in the French kingdom; but in no region had it monopolized political loyalties. Everywhere there were zones of loyalism. As the League faltered, these zones were nurtured by the natural prudence of notables, the exclusionist tendencies within the urban League itself, and inevitably by shrewd Navarrist propaganda and patronage. It would have been natural, a generation ago, to have equated such ‘civic loyalism’ with the ‘politiques’, and to have explained the consolidation of Henri IV’s authority after the League through the rise of the ‘politique’ party – those moderate, royal Catholics whom the political language of the Catholic League alienated. It is a measure of how substantially that explanation has been abandoned that the word ‘politique’ hardly appears in this volume. We now understand it as a term of abuse, deployed by frustrated Leaguers to damn all those – from convinced Navarrists through civic loyalists to prudential realist notables – who were willing to consider peace overtures with the Bourbon king.5 The League’s discourse of collective mobilization, its tendency to ridicule those in established positions of authority for their hypocrisy, its authentication of alternative sources and legitimation of power, its deconstruction of those of the absolute monarchy – these were anti-royalist tendencies in the League that we should not ignore. The regicidal impulses of the League, conﬁrmed in this volume by Robert Descimon’s analysis of

248

Epilogue

Jean Chastel’s attempted assassination of Henri IV on 27 December 1594, were no myth.6 Yet they became embroiled in the Gallican agenda of the Parlement of Paris, which turned into a game of high stakes for the soul of the absolute monarchy. Henri IV won it hands down and it was of a piece with his efforts to normalize the political climate. So to analyse Henri IV’s reign as the ‘triumph of the politiques’ is to misconstrue rhetoric and reality. Royalists who made their peace with Navarre never used the language of ‘party’ to delineate their afﬁliation. How could they? To be a royalist was to be above party. The essence of being a ‘politique’ was accommodation – the accommodation of one religion by another; and it was not a political creed, still less the basis for a party. It was an uncomfortable consequence of accepting political realities, and best dressed up as something else. The papal absolution accorded to Henri IV in 1595 was the most signal act of political accommodation of the post-League period. How had it come about? Alain Tallon, examining it from the perspective of Rome in this volume, demonstrates that it was a much contested decision within the papacy.7 We should best understand it not as the reversal by a ‘politique’ Pope Clement VIII of the failed ‘hardline’ strategies of Pope Sixtus V. Rather, it was the complex resolution of internal tensions within the Papacy around the status and inﬂuence of the Congregation of the Holy Ofﬁce (taking its responsibility to combat heresy seriously) in which the intensely uneasy relationships of the Papacy with Philip II played a signiﬁcant role. Clement VIII’s eventual decision of August 1595 was a way of asserting the absolute authority of the Pope over the Holy Ofﬁce and realigning its international diplomatic stance. In order for it to be successful, however, it was essential that the decision was not presented as the accommodation of heresy but the proper application of Christian ethics of reconciliation to a former heretic for whom playing by the rule-book of the Holy Ofﬁce was neither appropriate nor commensurate with the potential political gains. So it was dressed about with appropriate gestures, recognizing the signiﬁcance of pursuing heresy, ones to which Henri IV duly responded in kind. Henri IV knew very well how to play this game of ‘compromise by the back door’ (‘accommodement à rebours’). Barbara Diefendorf examines his relationship with the small group of devout Catholic activists commonly referred to (the term was used at the time) as dévots. They were generally, though by no means exclusively, former supporters of the League who had their own struggles with their conscience and their reputation in order to make peace with the new king. But he assisted them by covering the traces of the defeat of the League (and then the war with Spain and the Edict of Nantes) with strategically timed and carefully stagemanaged demonstrations of his Catholic commitments, eventually emerging as a champion of emerging Catholic reform movements. Those reform movements focused on the establishment of the newer Catholic orders in the realm – the Jesuits, but also the various branches of the Franciscan Order, especially the Capuchins, the Minims, and the Récollets, and (later) the Oratory. Here again the emphasis should be on continuity rather than novelty. Promoting and establishing the houses of new religious orders, reﬂecting broader changes within the Catholic church, had already begun in France on a substantial scale. By Henri IV’s entry into Paris in 1594, the Capuchin province of Paris had c.15 houses; the French Minims c.7, the Jesuits c.13 colleges. These foundations had depended on the dedicated and coordinated activities of committed lay Catholic protagonists, at least as much as the adherents of the Orders themselves. These groups focused

Epilogue 249 their efforts at selected individuals in the high aristocracy (particularly those whose devout credentials made them soft targets), with the necessary resources and political inﬂuence at court. Aristocratic women proved particularly signiﬁcant patronesses – Anne de Batarnay, comtesse of Bouchage (the Nantes Capuchins); Marguerite de Savoie (Verdun), Henriette de Clèves (Nevers), Marguerite de Valois (the Jesuits at Agen). They were sometimes in active collaboration with their spouses – the duc and duchesse de Nevers (the Minim house at Rethel; the Récollets foundation at Nevers), the duc and duchesse de Retz (the Minim house at Noisy-le-Grand), and so on. The choices made by the members of the higher aristocracy as to which religious foundations to support, where, and when, were part of their wider political and dynastic strategies, whilst also reﬂecting their personal preferences. The League certainly complicated things, at least for a time, in respect of these newer orders. Certain Catholic, aristocratic families (especially the French branches of the House of Lorraine, important sustainers of new foundations) were temporarily eclipsed. Gallican lawyers and university theologians seized upon the opportunities afforded by the collapse of the League to launch a well-organized offensive against the new orders as ‘ultramontane’ and threatening royal authority. The attempted regicide by Jean Chastel on 27 December 1594 was easily exploited, leading to the expulsion of the Jesuits from the legislative area covered by the Parlement of Paris in December 1594, and then (on royal orders) from that covered by the Parlements of Rouen and Dijon.8 The Capuchins narrowly escaped the same fate two years later, when they (in their turn) became implicated in the Spanish seizure of Amiens. In time, however, these fences were mended. Signiﬁcant ﬁgures in France’s higher aristocracy became once more implicated in the foundation and support of new orders, and Alison Forrestal’s investigation of the early Parisian career of Vincent de Paul indicates how much he owed to it. Catholic accommodation at the court of Henri IV was part of a wider process of reorchestrating the relationship between the crown and signiﬁcant elements in the higher aristocracy during the post-League period. These new foundations played their role in the strategic distancing of the recent past and refocusing the present on changing the world of the present for the better. In this volume, Michael Wolfe examines a fascinating and much publicized royal engagement with religious polemic, the famous ‘Conference of Fontainebleau’ of May 1600.9 He analyzes how all the technologies for delineating truth from falsehood that had been developed in the Reformation (the careful citation of Patristic sources from the best editions, the historicizing of texts, the glossing of the language and context of texts, and so on) were deployed by the skilful Jacques-Davy Du Perron in an elaborately stage-managed and orchestrated event to expose the weaknesses in an important publication on the Eucharist by the Protestant theologian and man of affairs, Philippe Duplessis Mornay. The inevitable result (partly because of the way the exercise was conducted) was to show how royal authority could manipulate religious polemic to its own purposes by posing as the ultimate arbiter of truth. The victory was used by the king to demonstrate that he had championed an alternative to armed conﬂict for the settlement of religious differences, one which did not compromise on truth or on royal authority. The injuries were to honour, not to lives, and no one escaped the important, albeit not very comfortable, point about the signiﬁcance of royal favour.

250

Epilogue

Like Clement VIII, Henri IV (and his Bourbon successors) had a repertoire of political ethics, drawn from contemporary understandings of moral philosophy and a panoply of classical and Christian exempla, that could be deployed to reinforce royal authority. Here, again, there were substantial continuities with the politics of Valois France, where issues of moral philosophy, fashioned as political precepts, were often debated, albeit not always with quite such an explicit neo-Stoic gloss as occurred after the League. As Michel de Waele illustrates here, ‘clemency’, exercised through the deliberate decision to ‘forget’ the wrongs of the past and wipe the slate clean, was an instrument by which monarchical authority was exalted, even though everyone knew that both qualities were also capable (and had been in the recent past) of being misinterpreted as signs of royal weakness.10 The same was true of ‘kindness’ (débonnaireté; douceur). Megan Armstrong indicates how these qualities were conjugated in Franciscan texts on the achievement of peace in the post-League period.11 Yet ‘clemency’ and ‘kindness’ only worked in the certain knowledge that their opposites were also possible. And the application of moral philosophy to political practice was not an applied science of derived precepts but more an invitation to contemplate the inscrutability and ultimate unaccountability of royal actions. Much the same was true of royal favour as well, as Philippe Duplessis Mornay, the bruised and vanquished Protestant protagonist of the Conference of Fontainebleau, discovered to his chagrin. What of the political transition at the end of the League? One of the conclusions of this volume has to be just how nail-biting and confusing it was. From Henri IV’s accession to power in August 1589 through to his scripted encounter with a delegation of magistrates from the Parlement of Paris a decade later in early 1599 to persuade them to register the Edict of Nantes of the previous year (analyzed here by Eric Nelson), the majority of the political events were neither easily foreshadowed nor was their outcome capable of being predicted in advance.12 They all involved substantial degrees of risk, militarily and/or politically. In that sense, the whole decade could be categorized as a ‘perilous leap’ (‘saut périlleux’) and not just the king’s announced intention to abjure Protestantism in July 1593. As one surveys the major events of that decade touched on in this collection (the abjuration (July 1593); the coronation at Chartres (February 1594); the entry into Paris (March 1594); Jean Chastel’s attempted assassination (27 December 1594), it is clear just to what extent the transitional politics of the decade was dominated by the restoration of a status quo ante: a royalist ‘Restoration’. The key to that restoration was a re-legitimization of the monarchy, a ‘battle for hearts and minds’, Bourbon-style. At the heart of it was institutional continuity and Catholic monarchical resacralization. Institutions, of course, were the embodiment of the monarchical claims to legitimacy and to the exclusive exercise of the power of law. In the civil wars, the French monarchy and its notables – the jurists, administrators and tame aristocrats at court – were tempted to believe that they could only truly overcome the forces (‘passions’) that had overwhelmed the kingdom in the ﬁrst place if it reasserted its moral rights to rule. That meant reforming the royal state, cleansing its institutions of corruption from within.13 Such corruption was reﬂected in the transaction of royal ofﬁces (the purchase and sale of ofﬁces and their inheritance having become so widespread during the civil wars) and the reform of the French Catholic church (the need for which was universally recognized both from within and

Epilogue 251 without). A series of Estates Generals and Assemblies of Notables, culminating in that of Rouen in 1596–97, testiﬁed to the widespread strength of the ‘ideology’ that the French state and its institutions needed radical reform.14 Their individual and cumulative failure witnessed to the political impossibility of carrying it out, despite a good deal of public heart-searching and appeals to the importance of restoring virtue to the res publica and the signiﬁcance of the commonwealth (‘bien public’) in general. In the transitional politics of the early Bourbons, ‘reconstruction’ (of public institutions) took second stage to the restoration of monarchical legitimacy. In the political discourse of its notables, the signiﬁcance of acting in accordance with, and being shaped by, the ‘public good’ (‘bien public’) was occluded. The word ‘republic’ (having been, in the civil wars, a way of delineating the community of people subjected to authority, monarchical or otherwise) became conﬂated, thanks to the overwhelming inﬂuence of very royalist readings of Jean Bodin’s Six Livres, with the notion of ‘sovereignty’ before becoming subsumed in the semantic imperialism of the word ‘state’.15 In Senlis, Lyon, and no doubt elsewhere, municipal notables rescripted their sense of public service in terms of monarchical exaltation and the recovery of a pre-existent golden age of harmony and concord.16 References to the ‘public good’ faded, or transmuted into more feeble evocations of ‘the public thing’ (‘la chose publique’).17 The fate of one of those who attempted to hold a candle to both ‘reform’ and ‘republic’ in the changing circumstances of the Bourbon restoration is instructive. Louis Turquet de Mayerne was a Protestant publicist and father of Théodore, one of Europe’s leading physicians.18 He had absorbed Protestant reformist writings during the civil wars (where he had spent the majority of his time after St Bartholomew in semi-exile in Geneva).19 With the advent of Henri IV, a true ‘Reformator’, Turquet thought the time had come for putting them into practice and he set out from Geneva in the Spring of 1590 to present his plan, copied into three volumes in his own hand, to present to him. The king must be ‘the great and most devoted reformer’ and that way he would secure his legitimacy, because ‘the just will regard [it as] the Realm of honour’. ‘We must, I say (Sire) reform everything, and I believe that nothing will have been achieved by correcting little errors unless we tackle the large ones’. He eventually secured an audience with Henri IV at Tours in October 1591. The king received him graciously enough, but ﬁrmly consigned his proposal to the bin. It was no time to give his enemies among the League a hostage to fortune. So Turquet was left to publish a prospectus for what he had in mind, a sketch of a political new order.20 To this, he eventually would return when (in 1611) another political transition seemed to offer another occasion when (as he saw it) his advice might be auspicious. This time, it was not a sketch but a fully developed blueprint that made it into print, albeit only just.21 Within weeks of its publication, copies of Turquet’s extraordinary Monarchie Aristodémocratique were seized on the orders of the chancellor, and its author interrogated by the lieutenant civil for the French equivalent of seditious libel. Reform, in the terms that Louis Turquet and his generation had understood it, was not merely sidelined, it was actively discouraged and its adherents left in no doubt about how it would be viewed. Were there, then, no institutional changes to the early Bourbon years? Was reform out of the question? Here we are in the back-eddies of one of the fundamental problems in the historiography of the French ancien régime. How far back did that régime go? In the search for a fundamental moment, there are various

252

Epilogue

candidates (1715; 1661; 1624; 1610; 1589 . . . ) and they have all been propounded at various stages, generally on the grounds that something fundamental happened at that date to the institutions of the absolute monarchy, and particularly to its administrative capacities.22 In reality, however, each one of these developments (secretaries of state; controllers or superintendants of ﬁnance, intendants, the collapse of representative institutions, and so on) has necessarily to be viewed in a long genesis stretching back at least before the civil wars, and certainly to the reigns of François I and Henri II. Whatever there was of novelty in the post-war administration of Sully was the result of his remarkable energy and single-minded determination to manage things, his willingness to bully others into going along with the king’s will (at the ultimate cost to his own reputation). He breathed new life into old regulations and was ultimately defeated (if he had ever intended) in all his efforts to reform France’s royal ﬁnances. His introduction of the Paulette (a new tax, devised by the ﬁnancier Charles Paulet to enable ofﬁce-holders to ensure the hereditability of their ofﬁces by paying one-sixtieth of its purchase price) was, as the magistrates of the day reminded Sully, the institutionalization of a corruption rather than the inauguration of a reform. Annette Finley-Croswhite makes an excellent case for Henri IV’s agenda towards the towns being dependant on the deployment of informal power structures of clientage and management rather than any systematic institutional changes in the relationship between centre and periphery in the post-League urban world.23 In the case of the Parlement of Paris, Michel de Waele analyzes the magistrates’ opposition to the king – vocal and powerful (as we see in this volume) up to the opening months of 1599 – as based not upon some proposed institutional novelties, not even on a calculated estimation of their narrow self-interest, or on the king’s desire to ride roughshod over their privileges, but on a long-held view of themselves as the guardians of the public interest from what they regarded as a regime that was according itself too large a margin of initiative in declaring what was, and was not, lawful.24 Similarly, faced with the abolition of their posts by Sully in 1596, the regional treasurers (the lynchpins of the monarchy’s ordinary administration) sought to argue that they would accept such a sacriﬁce if it was in the public interest, necessary for the ‘restoration of the state’. Like the ancient Romans such as Quintus Curtius Rufus, they would happily lay down their lives and fortunes for ‘the public necessity’. But, they argued, their sense of injustice came precisely from the fact that their sacriﬁce was not to advance the public good, but to line the pockets of greedy individuals and courtiers, especially Sully himself, ‘a courtier who, against the public faith’ and for personal gain was removing them from ofﬁce.25 This was the kind of language which became progressively atrophied in early Bourbon transitional politics. When reconstruction and reform occurred in the post-League transition years, it was along ﬁrmly-established monarchical foundations and accomplished through royal ﬁat. The Edict of Nantes embodied transitional politics, Bourbon-style. Firstly, it relied upon the deployment of established instruments of state to deﬁne the ‘boundaries’ between Protestant and Catholic religious communities. The act laid down (in considerable detail) the ‘privileges’ accorded to the Protestant minority by way of what kinds of local communities and individuals should enjoy rights of public worship. Fortunately, earlier edicts of paciﬁcation during the civil wars had proved what worked and what did not, and trained a generation of crown servants in how to negotiate such matters, and with whom. The commissioners for

Epilogue 253 the Edict of Nantes were its unsung heroes (unsung because, with the notable exception of the province of Dauphiné the detailed documentation relating to their activities has been lost).26 They were chosen by the king from both Protestant and Catholic backgrounds, leaning towards a balance of legal skills, known moderation, and respect for the individuals from the locality to which they were despatched. We can follow them, however, through various provinces in the wake of 1598, summoning local notables, lecturing them on their responsibilities, painstakingly listening to remonstrances from both sides, and conducting on-site visitations where necessary to decide on where to build a temple, or where to site a cemetery. Eventually they arrived at judgments of Solomon which, not surprisingly, often suited neither side. We should not overestimate their success, either immediately or in the longer term. They might be able to decide upon the composition of a local consulate on the basis of a power-sharing arrangement in the short-term, but it was anyone’s guess as to how long it might last into the future. The gathering weight of dévot inﬂuence and activity, both at court and locally, was hardly auspicious, and French Protestants anxiously sized up their own options of augmenting theirs. Dealing with the sensitive issues of religious practice – the routes of Catholic processions, whether Huguenots should be required to stop work on Catholic feast-days, contestations over the performative practices of penitential confraternities – were never likely to be resolved by the application of law alone. Local communities with access to favour in high places, and the stubbornness or resourcefulness to pursue their case in law beyond the judgment of the commissioners, continued to do so, and they waited to choose the most propitious moment to launch their next moves. Issues of mixed marriages, the education of children, social welfare, and so on took the commissioners far beyond the public arena and into the domestic environment, and there were limits – contested within as much as across the religious divide – as to the extent to which the state should be expected to decide such matters. So Nantes was not a ﬁnal word in transitional justice, still less a foundational moment in Bourbon transitional politics. Nineteenth-century liberal and lay historiography readily interpreted it as a key moment when the distinction between loyalty to the state (being a citizen) and loyalty to a religion (being a believer) was enunciated and applied through royal law. In reality, it was the beginning of an epoch of ‘toleration in intolerance’, one in which the edict itself became eventually the instrument for enforcing strict and restrictive notions of demarcation, the mask for that accommodement à rebours behind which the proponents of religious uniformity could mobilize and deploy.27 The Edict of Nantes also stipulated the formation of specialist legal tribunals for hearing lawsuits from the Protestant minority. These chambres de l’édit were bi-confessional, though generally not mi-partie as in Languedoc.28 They built on ﬂagship models in the most divided parts of France during the civil wars. These were not, however, examples of ‘transitional justice’ in action. The terms of the Edict of Nantes had made it clear that, save in exceptional cases (cas exécrables) no tribunals were to hear and adjudge cases resulting from the civil wars. They were not commissions of justice and reconciliation. They spent most of their time trying to adjudicate on the difﬁcult issues of intermarriage and resulting family disputation, slander, violence and judicial malfeasance caused by bad blood at difﬁcult boundary points between the two confessions. What they could do by way of diffusing and channelling such hostilities was distinctly

254

Epilogue

limited. The evidence, such as we have it at the moment, is that religious coexistence was not just imposed by law, but grown organically and generically from below, and based in undemonstrative everyday practice. Catholic monarchical resacralization was an essential component of the post-League transitional period. Barbara Diefendorf documents how essential a component of the ﬁrst Bourbon’s self-representation it proved to be. Saint-Denis provides a classic example, the focus of an intense sacralizing cult of the French monarchy from the late Middle Ages, when the Grandes Chroniques of the abbey chronicled the destiny of the monarchy. In the sixteenth century, the cult of SaintDenis grew richer as attention focused on his identiﬁcation with Denis the Areopagite, the Athenian convert mentioned by St Paul in the Acts of the Apostles, and presumed author of the Corpus Areopagiticum.29 The relics of Saint-Denis were, with increasing frequency, carried in procession around the cloisters of the abbey at times of national emergency, to be reverently restored to their rightful place in the sanctuary, close by the accumulated remains of the Valois kings and their ancestors, in the sixteenth century. During the League, however, the abbey and town of Saint-Denis were no longer in royal hands and the saint’s relics, with those of Saint-Louis as well, were carried in grand procession to Paris where they became the focus for prayers and processions for the preservation of the city, a ‘New Jerusalem’, and the Catholic cause.30 In April and May 1593, his relics were once more carried solemnly in procession within the capital in the hope that he would extend his protection to the League deputies negotiating for a Catholic king and peace at Suresnes. Meanwhile, the town of Saint-Denis fell to royalist forces in July 1590 and became the headquarters of a shadow Paris government for Navarre and, by May 1593, some 7000 Parisians are recorded as making a Marial pilgrimage to the town, despite the threatening injunctions of League preachers in the capital. Henri IV’s abjuration there on 25 July, the Feast of Saint James the Apostle, was therefore a highly symbolic event, a formal reuniting with the ancient traditions of the French monarchy and part of a wider resacralization of its authority which would be conﬁrmed by the ﬁrst Bourbon’s burial there (his heart only later being moved to the Jesuit college at La Flèche) and by a change to the coronation order to include an explicit invocation for the blessing of Saint-Denis. So the transitional politics of the post-League period was dominated by ‘restoration’ and not ‘reform’; by the relegitimation and resacralization of the Bourbon monarchy. The governing rhetoric was the ‘hyper-reality’ of the royalist cause. The ‘legend’ of Henri IV was a conscious creation of his own propagandists and mythmakers, and it began long before his assassination in 1610 created a Vulgate which would outlast the ancien régime itself. Already in 1590, in the aftermath of the battle of Ivry, the characteristic elements of it were coalescing: the famous panache (the sign of being God’s anointed, whose victory in battle was a providential sign of his divine election as king), his energy and daring, but also his clemency and kindness towards those on the losing side. In the early 1590s, the royalist printers and engravers at Tours combined to create a heroic royal image which was complex in its use of symbolism, mnemonics and mythology to create a meta-narrative of French royalism which placed it in the context of a distant and continuous past, whilst explaining and excusing the more recent past, and offering a manifest destiny for the future.31 Corrado Vivanti has analyzed just one of these themes – the identiﬁcation of Henri IV with the Gallic Hercules – to reveal the richness of the rhetorical vocabulary.32 Like so much of the Henrician myth, it was destined

Epilogue 255 to smooth over the inevitable ambiguities that are the stuff of transitional periods, and lay claim to underlying verities. The handling of the abjuration, the entry into Paris, the coronation and the negotiated entries into a succession of former League strongholds were all exquisitely managed pieces of political propaganda. That of the king’s entry into Paris on 22 March 1594, for example, is a classic in the arts of orchestrating political transition. Immediately after the event, the ink still wet on the copies of the famous Satyre Ménippée, printed at Saint-Denis for distribution in the capital by Jamet Mettayer (the leading royalist printer) the engraver Jean Leclerc got to work and published three placards, accompanied by commentaries, in which time, mood and moment were exquisitely captured. Here was ‘after the League’ encapsulated. In the ﬁrst, the king was portrayed moving along the quai, having passed through the Porte Saint-Honoré (a heavily military presence, the people muted, a sense of suspicion). In the second, a triumphal royal procession is depicted, in transit across the Ile de la Cité towards Notre Dame for a celebratory Te Deum (the righteous king of a resacralized monarchy, surrounded by his nowrepentant and hyper-loyal people). In the last, the Spanish garrison is being shown the door at the Porte Saint-Denis, their hats off to salute the king, who looks down upon them from an adjacent window with a malicious grin (a patriotic apotheosis around a royalist presence). The engravings would be reworked a decade later in 1606 by two former-Leaguer engravers (Thomas de Leu and Léonard Gaultier) and came to dominate the Parisian visual memory of that event and its context. Eric Nelson’s contribution to this volume focuses us on another of these iconic moments: the famous royal discourse before delegates of the Paris Parlement of 7 January 1599 to overcome their reluctance to register the Edict of Nantes. In it, the king plays (as he often would) upon the rhetoric of ‘non-rhetoric’, of being interested in actions rather than words. The dominant message was an end to discursive politics and pointless discussions. The acting realpolitik was the absolute power of the king. The decision-making process was an arcanum which was not for public inspection, but for acclaim. This was of a piece with the construction of the king’s persona more generally. Like the ambiguous (‘Mona Lisa’?) smile attributed to him in contemporary engravings and portraits, he alternately ‘appears’ and ‘disappears’ in the anecdotes and ‘bons mots’ that were already in wide circulation, and which were at the cusp between gossip, iconographic representation, and active myth-making. Behind the hyper-reality of royalist rhetoric lay an emerging metaphysic of power,‘metaphysic’ in the sense that it was conceived as being out of time and in the world, but not of it. Because of the foundational myths surrounding the end of the League, which distorted and attenuated the normal processes of memorialization, we cannot immediately document how profoundly the experiences of the civil wars (and not just their apotheosis in the League) affected people’s attitudes to power and authority. That they had a profound impact is clear. Two ﬁgures are emblematic, and worth evoking brieﬂy by way of conclusion. The ﬁrst is Charles Loyseau, avocat at the Parlement of Paris, someone with close relatives who had been activists in the Paris League, a conservative lawyer and a clever jurist. His three major works appeared successively in each year from 1608 to 1610 and integrally relate to one another.33 They each (implicitly) tackled a major issue which had been provoked by the civil wars. In the ﬁrst, on Seigneuries, his starting point was the corruption in the exercise of local justice. In the second, on Ofﬁces, it was the sale and inheritance of ofﬁces. In the last, on Orders, it was how society was

256

Epilogue

ordered. Loyseau’s objective was to show that there was an underlying unity to these three apparently disparate domains. It lay where the great jurist of the French civil wars, Jean Bodin, had placed it: in the State as the embodiment of an absolute, perpetual plenitude of power. Its sovereignty was indivisible and ‘wholly inseparable from the State, in such a way that, if it were removed from it, it would no longer be a State’. His method was Aristotelian. He sought to lay out a taxonomy of lordship, ofﬁce and order, such that they could each be understood largely as the ‘qualities’ of individual persons (such as, in the case of an ‘order’, the ‘estate’ to which they might belong) or of particular inheritances (such as, in the case of ‘lordship’, the land to which a title may be attached). Ofﬁce was more complicated, however, for it seemed to be both a ‘quality’ which an individual assumed for as long they held the ofﬁce, but also a ‘substance’, rather like a possession, something which could be bought, sold and exchanged. And behind this brilliant exposition lay a vision of monarchical power which was itself an ofﬁce, who exercises the quality of sovereignty as a power (delegated from God) but who possesses the substance of sovereignty as a power over the people (as a lord): The king is the perfect ofﬁcer, having the perfect exercise of all public power; and he is also the perfect seigneur, having in perfection the property of all public power. Firstly, he is the ofﬁcer of God, such that he is his lieutenant who represents Him in all that which is within his temporal power [ . . . ] and it is truly the case that, as the power of an ofﬁce-holder is merely the scintilla and glimmer of the power of the prince, so the prince is merely the scintilla and glimmer of the omnipotence of God [ . . . ] The ‘perfection’ of monarchical power is a glimpse of the omnipotence of God; so, too, the ‘perfection’ of the society of orders is a glimpse of the ‘celestial hierarchy’, organized in an ascending chain of ‘orders and powers’ (explicitly citing the Corpus Areopagiticum) in terms of its ‘illumination’ and ‘fellowship’ with God. Loyseau did not think that such perfection existed in the world as it was – on the contrary, the models of ‘lordship’, ‘ofﬁce’ and ‘order’ highlighted what he regarded as ‘madness’, ‘absurdity’ or ‘corruption’ in the world around him. But none of this amounted to reform. It was all part of his rationalization of the sublunary world, modelled on a picture of hierarchical order that was taken outside time and place, and a perception of the unity of power that could sustain it. Our second emblematic ﬁgure of the post-League period is the spiritual director of the dévot movement, Pierre de Bérulle.34 Bérulle was descended from the topmost echelons of the senior magistrates in Paris. His family had made difﬁcult choices during the League. He was present at the Conference of Fontainebleau, by which time he had begun to build up the network of dévot afﬁliations (they included, as Alison Forrestal illustrates for us in this volume, St Vincent de Paul) that led him to becoming the sustainer of the Capuchins and Jesuits, the introducer of the Carmelites into France, the founder of the Congregation of the Oratory in Paris.35 For Bérulle, too, ‘reform’ was not a word that found its way often into his lexicon. When it did, it was synonymous with the spiritual path of abnegation, self-surrender and the ‘perfection’ of the individual soul that he outlined in the earliest treatise in which he had a hand (On Interior Abnegation, 1597).36 Much of the authority and force of dévot spirituality in the post-League period, however, came from how he resituated the individual in relation to himself, and the world around.

Epilogue 257 Bérulle consciously affected a disdain for the ‘mire’ and ‘misery’ of worldly affairs, refusing the bishoprics to which he was nominated by Henri IV, despising the damaging compromises that it necessarily involved. That was what had happened for his family at the end of the League; it was what would happen with the Edict of Nantes. The ofﬁcial recognition of Protestantism represented for Bérulle an immense rupture to the unity that was at the heart of his religious cosmology. Protestants were ‘heretics’ (like Barbe Acarie, he had no language of political correctness). Heresy was the agent of Satan. His early biographer would later recall his being asked by an Oratorian if he thought it would not be a good idea to study polemical controversy (like the texts of the Conference at Fontainebleau) in order to understand how better to win the Huguenots back to Catholicism. Bérulle’s reply was ‘That [study] will do little good. Heresy was born in the disturbances of the State, and it can only be ended by some coup d’état’.37 That was what many people in the League had thought too. For Bérulle, the ‘state’ that really mattered was that of one’s soul.38 The ‘state’ of the church, and that of political authority were of minor signiﬁcance by comparison. That said, however, his mystical sense of what united human and divine society was as highly developed as Loyseau’s. Here is Bérulle in his Opuscule Of Piety, 107, writing in around 1612: There are two great societies: that of the Father, and the divine Persons [the Trinity], the origin of all society in divinity. We adore both its unity and its society. Because of that unity, there is a world. Because of its society, there are many societies in this world. For this society is altogether the ﬁrst both as the image and as the origins of the others. Oh! What there is to love, adore, and imitate in this society!39 Like Loyseau, he drew on the Corpus Areopagiticum for his inspiration. So, in Bérulle’s political theology, the state may be, like the world, subject to all sorts of muddy compromises. But the absolute monarch was a sacral ﬁgure, exercising a sacred power. In 1623, he would remind Louis XIII: A monarch is a God, according to the language of Scripture; a God not in essence, but by power; a God, not by nature, but by grace; a God not for always, but for a season; a God not for Heaven, but on Earth; a God, not by being, but by depending on the one who is the Being, of Himself, who, being the God of Gods, makes kings into the likeness of gods [ . . . ]40 In the convergence of Bérulle’s political theology and Loyseau’s juridical idealism, born of complex reactions to the preceding civil wars, we see the emerging lineaments of absolutism.

Notes 1. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2006). 2. M. P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

258

Epilogue

3. See above, Chapter 9. 4. See above, Chapter 10. 5. J. Miernowski, ‘ “Politique” comme injure dans les pamphlets au temps des guerres de Religion.’, in Thierry Wanegffelen (ed.), De Michel de l’Hospital à l’édit de Nantes. Politique et religion face aux églises (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise-Pascal, 2002), pp. 337–56; C. Bettinson, ‘The Politiques and the Politique Party: A Reappraisal’, From Valois to Bourbon: Dynasty, State and Society in Early-Modern France, Keith Cameron (ed.) (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1989), pp. 35–49; P. Papin, ‘Duplicité et traîtrise: l’image des “politiques” durant la Ligue’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 38 (1991), 3–21. 6. See above, Chapter 4. 7. See above, Chapter 1. 8. E. Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy. Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590–1615) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 9. See above, Chapter 3. 10. See above, Chapter 6. 11. See above, Chapter 2. 12. See above, Chapter 5. 13. M. Greengrass, Governing Passions. Paciﬁcation and Reformation in the Kingdom of France, 1576–1585 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 14. The events of the Rouen Assembly of Notables need reassessment; for the present, we have R. Charlier-Meniolle, L’Assemblée des Notables, tenue à Rouen en 1596 (Paris: H. Champion, 1911). 15. E. Gojosso, Le concept de république en France (XVIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Aix: l’Université d’Aix-Marseille, 1998). 16. T. Amalou, Le lys et la mitre. Loyalisme monarchique et pouvoir épiscopal à Senlis pendant la Ligue (vers 1580-vers 1610) (Paris: Editions du comité des travaux historiques et scientiﬁques, 2007); Y. Lignereux, Lyon et le roi. De la ‘bonne ville’ à l’absolutisme municipal (1594–1654) (Paris: Seyssel, 2003). 17. J. Collins, ‘La guerre de la Ligue et le bien public’, in J.-F. Labourdette, J.-P. Poussou and M.-C. Vignal (eds), Le Traité de Vervins (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2000), pp. 81–95. 18. H. Trevor-Roper, Europe’s Physician. The Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne, 1573–1635 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 19. For further details, see M. Greengrass, ‘The Calvinist and the Chancellor: The Mental World of Louis Turquet de Mayerne’, Francia - Forschungen zur westeuropäischen Geschichte, 34/2 (2007), 1–23. 20. Louis Turquet de Mayerne, Epistre au roy. Presentee à sa Majesté au mois d’Octobre 1591 (Tours: Iamet Mettayer, 1592). 21. Louis Turquet de Mayerne, La Monarchie Aristodemocratique, ou Le Gouvernement Composé et Meslé des Trois Formes de legitimes Republiques. Aux Estats Generaux des Provinces Confederees des Pays-bas (Paris: Iean Berjon et Jean le Bouc, 1611). 22. James Collins, ‘State Building in Early Modern Europe: The Case of France’, in Victor Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories. Re-imagining Eurasia to c.1830 (Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 159–89. 23. S. A. Finley-Croswhite, Henri IV and the Towns. The Pursuit of Legitimacy in French Urban Society, 1589–1610 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Epilogue 259 24. Michel de Waele, Les relations entre le Parlement de Paris et Henri IV (Paris: Publisud, 2000). For the longer-term background, see S. Daubresse, Le Parlement de Paris, ou la voix de la raison (1559–1589) (Geneva: Droz, 2005). 25. Their memorandum, drafted probably by Scévole Gaucher de Sainte-Marthe, treasurer at Poitiers, was edited in A. Chamberland, ‘La tournée de Sully et de Rybault dans les généralités en 1596’, Cinquantenaire de la société archéologique d’Eure-et-Loir (1909), 3–15. 26. E. Rabut, Le Roi, l’Eglise et le Temple. L’exécution de l’Edit de Nantes en Dauphiné (Grenoble: Editions de la Pensée Sauvage, 1987); E. Rabut, ‘Vie de foi et vie de la cité: l’exécution de l’édit de Nantes en Dauphiné’, in Paul Mironneau and Isabelle Pébay-Clottes (eds), Paix des armes: paix des âmes (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 2000), pp. 287–94; D. Hickey, ‘Enforcing the Edict of Nantes: The 1599 Commissions and Local Elites in Dauphiné and PoitouAunis’, in Keith Cameron, Mark Greengrass and Penny Roberts (eds), The Adventure of Rligious Pluralism in Early-Modern France (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 65–83; F. Garrisson, Essai sur les Commissions d’Application de l’Edit de Nantes, Université de Paris: Faculté de droit (Montpellier: Imprimerie Paul Déhan, 1964). 27. Michel Grandjean and Bernard Roussel (eds), Coexister dans l’intolérance. L’Edit de Nantes (Paris: Labor et Fides, 1998); E. Labrousse, Une foi, une loi, un roi: essai sur la révocation de l’édit de Nantes (Paris: Payot, 1985). 28. S. Capot, Justice et religion en Languedoc au temps de l’édit de Nantes. La chambre de l’édit de Castres (1579–1679) (Paris: École des Chartes, 1998). 29. J.-M. Le Gall, Le mythe de Saint-Denis entre Renaissance et Révolution (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2007), especially chapter 3. 30. J.-M. Le Gall, ‘Saint-Denis, les Guise et Paris sous la Ligue, 1588–1590’, French Historical Studies, 24 (2001), 157–84. 31. M. Reinhard, La légende de Henri IV (Saint-Brieuc: Les presses bretonnes, 1935); F. Bardon, Le portrait mythologique à la cour de France sous Henri IV et Louis XIII. Mythologie et politique (Paris: Éditions A. and J. Picard, 1974); S. Beguin, ‘Contribution à l’iconographie d’Henri IV’, Les arts au temps d’Henri IV. Colloque l’avènement d’Henri IV (Fontainebleau and Pau: Imprimerie Nationale, 1992), pp. 41–61. 32. C. Vivanti, ‘Henry IV, the Gallic Hercules’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 30 (1967), 176–97; C. Vivanti, Lotta politica e pace religiosa in Francia fra Cinque a Seicento (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1963). 33. For incomparably the best introduction to Loyseau’s thought, see H. Lloyd (ed.), Loyseau. A Treatise of Orders and Plain Dignities, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and H. Lloyd, ‘The Political Thought of Charles Loyseau (1564–1627)’, European Studies Review, 11 (1984), 53–82. 34. The standard general work on Bérulle is still J. Dagens, Bérulle et les origines de la restauration catholique (1575–1611) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1952). 35. See above, Chapter 8. 36. Pierre de Bérulle, Oeuvres complètes, 6 vols (Paris: Le Cerf, 1995–2006), ii, p. 37. 37. Germain Habert de Cérisy, La vie du cardinal de Bérulle (Paris: Sebastian Hure, 1648), p. 513. 38. G. Preckler, “Etat” chez le Cardinal de Bérulle. Théologie et spiritualité des “états” bérulliens (Rome: Università Gregoriana Editrice, 1974).

260

Epilogue

39. P. Bérulle, ‘Oeuvres de Piété’ [in Oeuvres completes, 1.3, p. 306], cited in S.-M. Morgain, La théologie politique de Pierre de Bérulle, 1598–1629 (Paris: Publisud, 2001), pp. 106–7. 40. In the preface to the Etat et grandeurs de Jésus cited in S.-M. Morgain, La théologie politique, pp. 146–7.

Index Abelly, Louis, 185–7, 190 Acarie, Barbe, 4, 158, 163, 166, 170–1, 173, 257 Acarie, Pierre, 163, 171 Acquaviva, Claudio, 95 Aiguebonne, monsieur d’, 143 Aiguillon, duc de, see Puylaurens Albret, Jeanne de (queen of Navarre), 23 Aldobrandini, Pietro (Cardinal), 79 Alexandria, Cyril of, 78 Almain, Jacques, 93 Amboise, Conspiracy of, 139 Amiens, 2, 119, 125, 249 Ancre, maréchal d’, see Concini Angelini, Giandomenico, 23 Angennes, Charles d’ (comte de Rochepot), 183 Angennes, Claude d’ (bishop of Mans), 32 Anjou, duc d’, see Valois Aquinas, Thomas, 137 arcane imperii, 113, 255 Armand, Ignace, 94 Arnauld, Antoine, 95 Assembly of Notables (1596–1597), 251 Atlantic World, French engagement with, 14 Aubigné, Agrippa d’, 67, 79 Augustinian Order, 169, 189 rule, 190 Aumale, duc de, see Lorraine Auvergne, comte d’, see Valois Avila, Teresa of, 32, 170, 173 Ayala, Philippe, 132, 147 Barbezières, Eméry de, 45, 47–8, 51–4, 56–7 Barbiche, Bernard, 30 Barnes, A. E., 204 Baronius, Cesar, 27–8 Barrière, Pierre, 86

Batarnay, Anne de (comtesse de Bouchage), 249 Béarn, province, 2, 134 Beaune, Renaud de (bishop of Mende, archbishop of Bourges and Sens), 30 Béguin, Katia, 133 Beines, Madame de, 68 Belin, Monsieur, 184–5 Bellarmine/o, Roberto (Cardinal), 70, 76, 81 Bellegarde, duc de, see Saint Lary Bellièvre, Albert de (archbishop of Lyon), 75 Bellièvre, Pomponne de, 72, 75, 80–1, 95, 125, 161 Benaste, Canon de la, 208 Benedict, Philip, 6, 13, 205 Benoist, René (parish priest of Saint-Eustace in Paris and bishop of Troyes), 29, 34 Bergin, Joseph, 4, 7, 30, 168, 232 Berthaut, Jean, 79 Bérulle, Pierre de (Cardinal), 11, 75, 166, 181, 185–8, 195, 203, 256–7 Béthune, Maximilien de (duc de Sully), 13, 75, 79, 252 Béthune, Philippe de, 29 Beza, Theodore, 69–70, 79 Biré, Pierre, 209 Biron, maréchal de, see Gontaut Blois, reform ordinance of, 50 Bodin, Jean, 28, 113, 251, 256 Bologna, Concordat of, 31, 115 Bonnelli, Giovanni, 191 Bordeaux, colloquy at, 66 Bordeaux, Parlement of, 94, 142 Borghese, Camillo, see Paul V, Pope Borromeo, Charles (Saint and Cardinal), 232, 234–5 Borromeo, Federico (Cardinal), 33 Bouchage, comtesse de, see Batarnay 261

262

Index

Boucher, Jacqueline, 227 Boucher, Jean (Franciscan), 45–6 Henri as peacemaker, 51–4, 56–8 obedience to the Crown, 47–8 Boucher, Jean (parish priest of Saint-Benoît), 94 Bouillon, duc de, see La Tour d’Auvergne, Henri de Boulanger, Jules César, 69–70 Bourbon, Antoine de (comte de Moret), 132 Bourbon, Antoine de (king of Navarre), 140 Bourbon, Catherine de, 66, 74 Bourbon, César de (duc de Vendôme), 141 Bourbon, Charles de (comte de Soissons), 209 Bourbon Dynasty, 1–5, 9–15, 43 Bourbon, Henri II de (prince de Condé), 2, 10, 66, 132–3, 140–1, 143 Bourbon, Louis de (comte de Soissons), 10, 146–8 Bourbon, political culture, 107–53, 250–4 Bourbon-Vendôme, Charles de (Cardinal), 67, 207 Bourdoise, Adrien, 232 Bourgeois, Charles (pseud.?), 8 Bourgneuf, Charles de (bishop of Nantes), 215–16 Bourgoing, François, 186–7 Bouteville, see MontmorencyBouteville Bouvre, Canon, 209 Braudel, Fernand, 14 Briçonnet, Guillaume (bishop of Meaux), 233 Brigueil, vicomte de, see Crevant Brisson, Barnabé, 96 Brossier, Marthe, 42, 165–6, 168 Brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament, 231, 233, 235 Brou, Madame la présidente de, 186 Brou, Mademoiselle de, 186 Brûlart, Nicholas (sieur de Sillery), 13, 42, 110, 116, 126, 165

Brûlart de Sillery, Jean, 42, 110, 116, 126, 165 Brutum fulmen, see papacy Canaye, Phillippe (sieur de Fresne), 32, 73 Canﬁeld, Benet of, 11 Capuchins, 8, 10, 14, 42–4, 58, 90, 110, 116, 120, 125, 162, 166, 169–70, 173, 213, 231, 248–9, 256 Carafa, Gian Pietro, see Paul IV, Pope Carmelite, Discalced, 32, 170, 173, 204, 215, 256 Carmelite Order, 211–12, 215–16 Carroll, Stuart, 52 Carthusians, 162 Casaubon, Isaac, 73 Cassan, Michel, 205 Castres, Parlement of, 73 Catholic League, see League, Catholic Catholic Reformation bishops, 4, 7 Gallican hostility toward, 93 Henri IV and the Dévots, 157–75 League, 5–6, 8, 11 Nantes, 203–17 Paris, 10–11, 181–5 provinces, 6–7, 11, 168–73, 186–95, 203–17 religious orders, 13–14, 168–73 roots in the Wars of religion, 203–17 royal patronage, 10, 50–1 Senlis, 221–39 see also Brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament; Carmelite, Discalced; Daughters of Charity; Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement; Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament; Dévot; Congregation of the Mission; Franciscans; Inquisition; Jansenism; Minims; Nantes; Oratorians; papacy; Senlis; Paul, Vincent de; Society of Jesus; Trent, Council of; Ursuline Order Chalais, marquis de, see Talleyrand Chandrasekaran, Rajiv, 246 Charles II (king of Spain), 36 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor), 25 Charles IX (king of France), 117

Index 263 Charmolues, family, 236 Charon, recteur of Saint Similien, Nantes, 208 Chastel, Catherine, 88–9 Chastel, family, 86–90 Chastel, Jean, 9, 86–94, 96–8, 248–50 Chastel, Pierre, 86–9, 93 Chastel, Pyramid, 88, 93 Château-Thierry, Edict of, 144 Châtillon/Châtillon-les-Dombes Confraternity of Charity, 180–1, 189–90, 192–5 parish of, 188 Chaumont, sieur de, 67 Cheffontaine, Christophe de, 52 Christi, Jean, 203–4, 208, 216 Chrysostom, John, 77 Cinq-Mars, marquis de, see Ruzé Clairvaux, Bernard of, 78 Clément, Jacques, 92, 146–7 Clement VIII, Pope, 8, 21–2, 25, 27–30, 32–3, 67, 70, 79, 160, 162, 164, 168, 171, 210, 248, 250 Clercq, A. de, 148 Clermont, Claude-Catherine (duchesse de Retz), 249 Clermont, College, see Society of Jesus Cléves, Henriette de (duchesse de Nevers), 249 Cognet, Louis, 4 Colignon, Demoiselle, 214 Coligny, Gaspard de (amiral), 68, 148 Coligny, Louise de (princesse d’Orange), 70–1 Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement, 13, 204, 234 Compans, Jean de, 87 Concini, Concino (maréchal d’Ancre), 142 Condé, prince de, see Bourbon Confraternity of Charity, 11 Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament, 204, 215 Congregation of the Holy Ofﬁce, 22–8, 34 see also papacy Congregation of the Mission, 180, 182–8 Constant, Jean-Marie, 6

Constant, Pierre, 79–80 Cornet, Marcellin, 210 Cornoailles, Anne de, 237 Cornoailles, family, 236 Cornoailles, Nicolas de, 234 Cospeau, Philippe, 169 Coton, Pierre, 94–5, 174 Council of Nicea, see Nicea, Council of Council of Trent, see Trent, Council of Counter Reformation, see Catholic Reformation coup d’état, 115 Creté, Liliane, 138 Crevant, Louis II de (vicomte de Brigueil), 142 Croquants, 135, 137 Crouzet, Denis, 5–6, 207 Cueilly, Jacques de, 161 Cujas, Jacques, 72 Dagens, Jean, 4 Dames de la Charité, Hôtel-Dieu, Paris, 185–6, 189 Damiens, Robert François, 88, 97 Daughters of Charity, 180, 183, 189 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 147 Dazès, Jean, 96 Debonnaire, Jacques, 235 Delaistre, Florent, 89 Delaistre, Nicolas, 89 Deschamps, Pierre, 162 Descimon, Robert, 5, 9, 206 Descourants, archdeacon, 208, 216 Deslyons, Jean, 239 Desportes, Philippe, 67 Dethan, George, 132 De Thou, François-Auguste, 10, 133, 146, 148 De Thou, Jacques-Auguste, 69, 72–3, 79, 91–3, 96, 230 Dévot, 2–7, 10–11, 13, 96, 168, 170, 172–4, 212, 248, 253, 256 Brossier, affair of Marthe, 165–6 Fontainebleau, Conference at, 166–8 Henri IV’s conversion, 158–63, 248 Nantes, Edict of, 163–5 Paris, 180–2, 186–7, 189–90, 192, 195 Trent, Council of, 166 Diefendorf, Barbara, 4, 6, 186

264

Index

Dijon, Parlement of, 3, 94, 249 Ditchﬁeld, Simon, 22 Dominican Order, 169, 214 Du Bec, Philippe (bishop of Nantes), 208–13, 215 Du Breuil, family, 186 Du Duc, Fronton, 69 Du Fey, see Hennequin Du Fey Du Fresne, Charles, 184–5 Dufresnoy, Hercule, 230 Du Moulin, Pierre, 73, 75 Du Perron, Jacques Davy (Cardinal) Fontainebleau, Conference of, 9, 65–82, 166–8, 249 Du Perron, Jean Davy, 67, 70–1 Dupes, Day of the, 96 Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe (sieur de Mornay) Fontainebleau, Conference of, 9, 65–81, 166–7, 249–50 Dupuy, Bernard, 185 Dupuy, Jacques, 82 Dupuy, Pierre, 82 Durand, Guillaume, 76–7 Du Vair, Guillaume, 141 Duval, André, 166 Écouis, collegiate chapter, 182 Elbeuf, duc de, see Lorraine England, 28 Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe, travel to, 68 English support for Huguenots in 1620s, 134–5 Enlightenment, 9, 97–8 Enríquez, Pedro de Acevedo (count of Fuentes), 147 Entraigues, François d’, 132 Epaules, Henri aux (sieur de SainteMarie du Mont), 70–1 Epernon, duc d’, see Nogaret Epinac, Pierre d’ (archbishop of Lyon), 207 Estates General, 251 of 1576, 208 of 1614, 2–3, 5, 12, 96, 141 Estrées, Gabrielle d’, 86 Eugenia, Isabella Clara (Infanta), 25

Faculty of Theology, University of Paris, see Paris, University of Farr, Jim, 6 Faure, Charles, 232 Fenolliet, Pierre, 175 Feria, duke of, see Suarez Feuardent, François, 42, 44–5, 48 Feuillants, 10, 162, 169, 173 Filles de la Charité, see Daughters of Charity Finley-Croswhite, Annette, 2, 252 Fleix, Edict of, 208 Florence, Cardinal of, see Medici, Alexandre de Fonlebon, Madame de, 46 Fontainebleau, Conference of, 9, 65–82, 158, 166–8, 174–5, 249, 257 Fossé, Jean de (bishop of Castres), 75 Fourché, Jean, 216 Fourth Lateran Council, 69, 76 Fradine, Françoise, 203 Fragnito, Gigliola, 27 Francis of Assisi (Saint), 47, 51, 55–7 Franciscans branches of, 43, 248 Capuchin and Observant relations in Paris, 42–4 Confraternity of the Rosary, Nantes, 214 Henri IV, patronage, 168–73 League, support of, 42–4 Nantes, 216 obedience, thought on, 46–8 peace, thought on, 43, 48–9, 51–9, 250 preaching in countryside, 233 see also Capuchins, Francis of Assisi; Observant Franciscans, Récollets, Third Order Penitents François I (king of France), 115, 252 François II (king of France), 139 Frères de la Charité, 11, 181, 190–5 Fresne, sieur de, see Canaye Fuentes, count of, see Enríquez Gallican, 4, 22, 28, 30–2, 34, 69, 72–3, 86, 91–6, 98, 112, 172, 222–3, 226, 228, 229–32, 235, 239, 248–9 Gamaches, parish, 181–2

Index 265 Garin, Jean, 42, 48 Garnier, Jean (bishop of Montpellier), 30 Gascon, Richard, 204 Gastine, Croix de, 93 Gastine, Jean de, 93 Gaultier, Léonard, 255 Gazaignes, Jean Antoine, 96–7 Geneva Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe, travel to, 68 Escalade, 30 Génofévains, 232 Gerson, Jean, 93 Ghislieri, Michele, see Pius V, Pope Givry, Anne d’Escars de, 33 Gondi, Albert de (duc de Retz), 67, 183, 249 Gondi, Charles de, 210 Gondi, Claude-Marguerite de (marquise de Maignelay), 183–5 Gondi, family, 11, 181–2, 185, 195 Gondi, household, 182, 184 Gondi, Jean-François-Paul (Cardinal), 182 Gondi, Marguerite de Silly de, 181–3, 186–7, 190–1 Gondi, Philippe-Emmanuel, 182–3 Gondi, Pierre de (Cardinal), 28, 162, 182 Gontaut, Charles de (maréchal de Biron), 2, 132–3, 147 Gonzague, Louis de (duc de Nevers), 141, 249 Gosselin, Jean, 73 Grands Carmes, 215 Gravoil, Antoine de, 212 Greengrass, Mark, 2–3 Grégoire, Louis, 206 Gregory XIII, Pope, 29, 190, 208 Gregory XIV, Pope, 26, 209 Guarinus, preacher, 87 Guéret, Father, 87 Guignard, Jean, 91 Guise, see Lorraine Habert, Suzanne, 189 Habsburgs marriage alliance with, 141 war with, 148

Hanlon, Gregory, 13 Harding, Robert, 206, 208 Harley, Nicolas de (sieur de Sancy), 66 Hayden, Michael, 5, 12 Hennequin, Aléxandre (seigneur de Clichy), 186 Hennequin, Antoine (seigneur de Villecien), 186 Hennequin de Vincy, Nicolas (seigneur Du Fey and Villecien), 186 Hennequin Du Fey, Isabelle, 186 Hennequin, family, 186 Henri II (king of France), 149, 252 Henri III (king of France), 1, 3, 22, 25, 32, 47–8, 67, 72–3, 82, 95, 98, 116–18, 146, 170, 186, 205–8, 221, 226, 228, 230 Henri IV (king of France) abjuration and absolution, 8, 21, 29, 159–60, 210, 248, 250 assassination attempts on, 9, 35, 58, 86–104, 158, 162, 248–50, 254 Capuchins in Paris, 162–3 Catholic Reformation, 10, 29, 50, 157–75 clemency and douceur, 10, 51–9, 135–7, 145, 161, 250, 254 conﬂict resolution, 132–49 conversion, 66, 159–62 Fontainebleau, Conference at, 9, 65–82, 166–8 Franciscans, 42–59, 169–72 Huguenots, see Protestants judgement, 118–20 League, 8, 42 legacy, 1–3 Nantes, Edict of, 107–27, 158, 163–4 papacy, relations with, 21–36, 72, 112 Paris, siege of, 42, 44 Parlements, 9, 90–7, 107–27, 248–9, 252, 255 peacemaker, as, 8, 10, 159 political style, 6–7, 107–26, 254–5 Protestants, relations with, 70, 72, 158, 252 religious co-existence, 49–50, 252 royal authority, 107–26

266

Index

Henri IV (continued) Senlis, 221–39 throne, claim to, 111–15 tyranny, 115–18 Henry IV (king of England), 47 Heuzard, Denise, 88–9 see also Chastel, family Hoffmann, Philip, 6, 204 Holt, Mack, 246 Holy Ofﬁce, see papacy Hotman, François, 23, 72 Huguenots, 1, 2, 6, 9–10 Béarn and Navarre, 134 Catholic opposition to in Nantes, 204, 208 confessional co-existence, 13, 50–1, 109, 204, 252–4, 257 cross-confessional colloquys, 65–6 military opposition to the Crown, 66, 134–5, 142, 145, 235 Senlis, 237 see also Nantes, Edict of Hurault de L’Hôpital, Paul (archbishop of Aix), 30, 181 Index of Prohibited Books, Roman, 28, 72 Inquisition authority of the pope over, 27–8 declining inﬂuence, 36 heresy, struggle against, 29 introduction into France, opposition to, 28 Roman, 23–4, 27–9, 34 Spain, 34 theocratic concepts of, 26 James I (king of England), 73 Jansenism, 7, 97–8, 239 Jaulnay, Charles, 235 Jesuits, see Society of Jesus John of God, 190 Joinville, prince de, see Lorraine Joseph, Père, see Tremblay Joyeuse, Ange de, 165 Joyeuse, François de (Cardinal), 165 La Chatre, Claude (maréchal), 107, 124 La Flèche, College of, 169

Lancy, Pierre de, 208 La Rivière, Physician, 78 La Rochefoucauld, Alexandre de, 168 La Rochefoucauld, François de (Cardinal), 168, 231–5 La Thane, Jean de, 192 La Tour d’Auvergne, Henri de (duc de Bouillon), 2, 70, 111, 141, 148 Laubier, sieur de, 214 Laurent, Father (Capuchin), 70 Laval, comte de, see Tremouille La Valette, Louis de Nogaret de (Cardinal), 135 League, Catholic, 2, 4, 5–6, 8–9, 11, 13, 21, 23, 28, 31, 33, 42, 44–5, 87, 90–5, 108–10, 118, 120, 122, 127, 136, 144–5, 157–63, 168–70, 172, 203, 205–10, 213–17, 221–2, 224, 226–9, 232, 234, 236, 239, 247–52, 254–7 Le Bon, Adrien, 183 Le Bossu, Jacques, 207–8, 214 Leclerc, François, 90 Leclerc, Jean, 255 Le Clerc, Jean (sieur de Bussy), 87 Leconte, Elizabeth, 89 see also Delaistre, Florent; Delaistre, Nicolas Leconte, family, 88 see also Chastel, family Leconte, Jean, 88–9 Lefebvre, George, 138 Le Gallo, Pierre, 212 Le Grand, Philippe, 237 Le Jay, François, 226 Le Person, Xavier, 3 Lepeuple, family, 87 Le Puy, canon of Bazas, 69 Leschassier, Jacques, 230–1 L’Estoile, Pierre de, 79, 94, 107, 124, 163, 173, 230 Leu, Thomas de, 255 lit de justice, 109, 117, 119 Loisel, Antoine, 230 Loisel, Claude, 228 Loisel, family, 228 Longueville, Henri II (duc de), 141 Lorraine, Charles de (duc d’Aumale), 224

Index 267 Lorraine, Charles de (duc d’Elbeuf), 75 Lorraine, Charles de (duc de Mayenne), 2, 21, 75, 122, 127, 132, 141, 209 Lorraine, Claude de (prince de Joinville), 75 Lorraine, François de (comte de Vaudémont), 75 Lorraine, Henri de (duc de Guise), 23, 47, 107, 124, 142 Lorraine, house of, 88, 139, 249 Lorraine, Louis de (Cardinal de Guise), 32, 47, 207 Lorraine, Philippe Emmanuel de (duc de Mercœur), 21, 75, 109, 205–6, 208–10, 213–14 Loudun, conference of, 143 Louis XIII (king of France), 2, 5, 7, 10, 12, 35, 117, 123, 132–6, 140, 143, 145–6, 147–9, 221, 223, 225, 232, 235–8 clemency, 132–6 Louis XIV (king of France), 5, 14, 35, 82, 123, 133, 138, 149, 235 Louytre, Étienne, 203 Loyseau, Charles, 255–7 Luria, Keith, 6, 13 Luxembourg, Marie de (duchesse de Mercœur), 169, 205, 210, 213–14 Luynes, Charles Albert de, 12 Lyon, Treaty of, 30 Machiavelli, Nicolo, 112, 147 Mallart, Nicole, 185 Mallet, Jean, 226–7 Mantes, conference at, 66 Marescot, Michel, 166 Marillac, Louis de (maréchal), 133, 186 Marillac, Louise de, 4, 180, 183–4, 186 Marillac, Michel de, 158, 186 Marquement, Denis de (archbishop of Lyon), 187–8 Martigues, Madame de, 214 Martin, Jean, 73 Mathieu, Pierre, 79 Matignon, Charles de (maréchal), 142 Mayenne, duc de, see Lorraine Mayerne, Louis Turquet de, 251 Mayerne, Théodore Turquet de, 251

Mazarin, Jules (Cardinal), 4, 7 Medici, Alexandre de (Cardinal of Florence), 29, 31, 33 Medici, Catherine de (queen of France), 65, 142 Medici, Jean Ange de, 235 Medici, Marguerite de, 235 Medici, Marie de (queen of France), 2–3, 10, 12, 140–2, 147, 171, 191, 235 regency government, 134 Mediterranean, French missionary, commercial and political engagement with, 14 Melun, reform ordinance of, 50 Mercœur, duc de, see Lorraine Messier, family, 87 Métezeau, Paul, 187 Mettayer, Jamet, 255 Michaëlis, Sébastien, 174 Michaud-Fréjaville, F, 225 Minims, 162, 213, 216, 248–9 Molin, Protestant Preacher, 45–6 Montmirail, 183 Montmorency-Bouteville, François Henri de (duc de Piney, called de Luxembourg), 132 Montmorency-Bouteville, Louis de (bailli), 228 Montmorency, family, 226, 233 Montmorency, Henri II (duc de), 132–3, 135, 148 Montmorency-Thor, Guillaume de, 225 Moret, comte de, see Bourbon Mouchy, Antoine de, 238 Mousnier, Roland, 92 Mussart, Vincent, 171–2 Nantes, 2, 11, 203–17 Conseil de l’Union, 208–9 Nantes, Edict of, 1, 3, 9, 29, 35, 42–4, 46, 50, 53, 57, 72, 95, 107–27, 134, 158, 164, 166–8, 174–5, 221, 237, 248–50, 252–3, 255, 257 Revocation of, 81 Nantes, Leaguer Parlement, 205, 215 Nanteuil, comte de, see Schomberg Navarre, king of, see Bourbon, Antoine; Henri IV Navarre, Marguerite de, 73, 181

268

Index

Nelson, Eric, 3, 10, 50 Nemours, Charles Emmanuel (duc de), 75 Neufville, Nicolas de (sieur de Villeroy), 13, 32, 95, 125, 141 Nevers, duc de, see Gonzague Nevers, duchesse de, see Cléves Neveux, Hugues, 138 Nicea, Council of, 71 Nicholas, Jean, 138 Nogaret, Jean-Louis de (duc d’Epernon), 167 Observant Franciscans, 8, 42–51, 58–9 Confraternity of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, 49 Holy Land, in, 51 Paris friary, 43, 48–9 Paris studium, 43, 45, 48–9 patronage, Henri IV, 50–1 Protestants, interaction with, 46 Récollets, relations with in France, 170–1 see also Franciscans Oratorians, 33, 181–3, 185–8, 195, 204, 216, 248, 256–7 Orléans, Gaston (duc de), 132, 136, 143 Ornano, Jean-Baptiste (maréchal), 10, 132–3, 146, 148 Ossat, Arnaud d’ (Cardinal), 27–9, 31, 67, 92 Ottoman Turks, 14, 28, 30, 51 Holy League against, 25 Palluau, Denis, 90 Palma-Cayet, Pierre-Victor, 66, 79 papacy Brutum fulmen, 23, 25, 26 Curia, Roman, 22, 24, 33–4 Henri IV, 22–36 Holy Ofﬁce, 8, 22–30, 33–4, 248 inquisitorial papacy, 25, 27, 29 Sacred College, 33 Sovereign Pontiff, 22, 24, 26–7, 35 see also Clement VIII; Congregation of the Holy Ofﬁce; Gregory XIII; Gregory XIV; Index of Prohibited Books; Paul IV; Paul V; Pius IV; Pius V; Sixtus V

Paris, Parlement of, 3, 9, 44, 49–50, 69, 86–7, 90–5, 98, 133, 168, 226, 229–30, 237 authority of, 90–7, 107–27, 252 Gallicanism, 72, 86, 91–6, 98, 112, 166, 248–9 Henri IV, 107–26 Nantes, Edict of, 107–27, 164–5, 175, 249, 255 public policy, role in, 118–22 royalist and Leaguer factions, 118–19 Trent, Council of, 166 Paris, University of Faculty of Theology, 29, 49 Franciscans, study at the Faculty of Theology, 43, 45, 48 Jesuits, court case against, 92 Sorbonne, 30, 69, 93, 231 Parrott, David, 7 Pasquier, Étienne, 94–5, 227 Paulet, Charles, 252 Paulette, 252 Paulin, Father (Capuchin), 238 Paul IV, Pope, 24 Paul V, Pope, 33, 216, 230 Paul, Vincent de, 10, 256 in Châtillon, 180, 181, 186–7, 188–95 in Paris, 181–5, 249 Pellejay (maître des comptes), 46 Peña, Francisco, 27 Père Joseph, see Tremblay Perrens, François-Tommy, 12 Perrin, Widow, 211 Philip II (king of Spain), 24–5, 28, 210, 248 Pithou, François, 72–3 Pithou, Pierre, 230 Pius IV, Pope, 235 Pius V, Pope, 24–5, 170 Poissy, Collquy of, 66 politiques, 8, 24, 26, 222, 227, 247–8 Poncet, Olivier, 23 Poncet, Theologian, 90 Poor Clares, 215 Portail, Antoine, 184 Potier, René (bishop of Beauvais), 75 Prévôt, assistant to Tilénus, 68

Index 269 Protestants, 4, 8, 13–14, 30, 45–6, 52–3, 93, 110, 163, 167, 206–8, 225, 237–8 see also Huguenots Pucci, Francesco, 26 Puylaurens, Antoine de Laage (duc d’Aiguillon), 75 Quintin, Pierre, 211 Ramsay, Anne, 213 Ranier, Edme, 185 Ravaillac, François, 35, 88, 147, 158 Récollets, 10, 169–71, 173, 216, 248–9 Regnault, Jacques, 225 Reims, Council of, 230 Rennes, Parlement of, 3 Retz, Cardinal de, see Gondi Retz, duc de, see Gondi Retz, duchesse de, see Clermont Reuchlin, Johann, 65 Richelieu, Armand-Jean du Plessis (Cardinal), 1, 4, 7, 12–14, 82, 96, 117, 123, 132–3, 136, 147–8 Richeome, Louis, 69, 95 Richet, Denis, 6 Ricœur, Paul, 246 Rochepot, comte de, see Angennes Rohan, Henri (duc de), 141 Rose, Antoine (bishop of Senlis), 228–31 Rose, Guillaume (bishop of Senlis), 222, 231, 234 Rouen, 6 Rouen, Edict of, 94 Rouen, Parlement of, 3, 249 Roussillon, family, 216 Ruzé, Henri Coifﬁer de (marquis de Cinq-Mars), 10, 133, 135, 146, 148 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 5–6, 68, 72, 107, 110, 124, 142, 147, 204, 207, 251 Saint Denis, see Henri IV, abjuration and absolution Sainte-Foi, Arnaud Sorbin de (bishop of Nevers), 75 Saintes, diocese of, 181

Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Colloquy of, 66 Saint John Calybita, hospital of, 190 Saint Lary, Roger de (duc de Bellegarde), 145 Saint-Léonard de Chaumes, abbey of, 181, 192 Saint Rieul, 222, 224, 227–9, 231, 234–5, 237–9, 247 Sales, François de, 195 Sancy, Sieur de, see Harley Sanguin, Nicolas (bishop of Senlis), 232, 234–5, 239 Santarelli Affair, 96 Santori, Giulio Antonio (Cardinal), 23, 25–7 Sarpi, Paolo, 230 Savoy, Charles Emmanuel (duke of), 30, 132, 147 Savoy, Marguerite of, 249 Scalinger, Joseph, 70, 93 Schomberg, Henri (maréschal de, comte de Nanteuil), 132 Scotus, John Duns, 76 Scudéry, George de, 137 Secusi, Bonaventura (of Caltagirone), 170–1 Séguier, Antoine, 109 Seguin, Nicolas (bishop of Senlis), 237 Seguin, Pierre, 236 Senlis, 221–39, 251 Catholic Reformation, 232–9 commemoration ceremonies, 224–5 Gallicanism, bastion of, 228–32 Leaguer forces, siege by, 224 urban order, 226–8 Seven Years War, 97 Sfondrati/o, Paolo Emilio (Cardinal), 26 Silingardi, Gasparo (Cardinal), 29 Sillery, sieur de, see Brûlart Sismondi, Jean-Charles Léonard de, 97 Sixtus V, Pope, 23–5, 32, 35, 248 Society of Jesus, 3, 9, 14, 32, 43, 50, 69, 72–3, 86, 91–9, 168–9, 172, 182, 189, 204, 232–3, 237, 248–9, 256 Clermont, College of, 87, 91 expulsion in, 96, 1762–3 La Flèche, College of, 169

270

Index

Soissons, comte de, see Bourbon Soissons, conference of, 143 Sorbonne, see Paris, University of Soulfour, Nicolas, 187 Souzy, Paciﬁque de, 162 Spain, 8, 21, 24–6, 28, 33–4, 36, 95, 109 Spanish tyranny, 144–5 Sponde, Henri de, 68 Sponde, Jean de, 66, 68 Suarez de Figueroa, Lorenzo (duke of Feria), 236 Suarez, Jacques, 43, 45–7, 50–1, 53–4, 56–8 Sully, duc de, see Béthune Talleyrand, Henri de (marquis de Chalais), 10, 132–3, 135, 146, 148 Tallon, Alain, 13 Tards-avisés, revolt of, 142 Targer, family, 87 Thiel, Romain de, 224 Third Order Penitents, 169–72 Thumery, Jean de, 137 Tilénus, Daniel, 67–8 Toledo, Francisco, 28 Toulain, Marie, 216 Toulouse, Parlement of, 94 Tours, Royalist Parlement of, 137 Toutblanc, Louis, 183 Touzelin, Michel, 203, 208, 210, 216 Travers, Abbot, 213 Tremblay, François Leclerc Du (Père Joseph), 14, 90 Tremouille, Fréderic de la (comte de Laval), 67 Trent, Council of, 3, 5, 25, 32, 65, 93, 204–5, 208, 215, 223, 230–4, 239

Turks, see Ottoman Turks Tuscany, 21, 33 Ursuline Order, 173, 204 Valla, Lorenzo, 65 Valois, Charles de (comte de Auvergne), 147 Valois, Dynasty, 3, 7, 50 Valois, François (duc d’Anjou), 23 Valois, Marguerite de, 95, 191–2, 249 Varade, Ambrose de, 86 Vaudémont, comte de, see Lorraine Vaultier, Jean, 224 Vega, Diego de la, 46–7, 53, 55 Venard, Marc, 204 Vendôme, duc de, see Bourbon Venetian Republic, 21, 24, 32, 34, 109, 230 Venice, Interdict of, 34, 96 Venice, see Venetian Republic Vernon, François, 237 Vernon, Jean-Marie de, 172 Vervins, Treaty of, 30, 109 Viamort, doctor of theology, 81 Vicq, Méri de, 73 Villeroy, sieur de, see Neufville Vivanti, Corrado, 254 Voltaire, 9, 96–8 Wars of Religion, France, 5–6, 8, 15, 32, 44–5, 48, 65–6, 221–8 impact on Catholic Reformation, 203–17 zelanti, 25 Zeller, Gaston, 12