to the Reformation, the monarchy and the Church were wedded without religious competition. Kelley states that “within a generation the ostensibly religious upheaval precipitated by Luther involved not only the formal break-up of Christendom but a whole range of secular disturbances.” He further affirms that the Reformation must be understood “not merely as a changing design upon a historical fabric but as a violent, multi-dimensional, and perhaps multi-directional process which needs examining from several angles.”66 Scholars uniformly look to the Reformation as the beginning of religious, social, and political turmoil in France which would destabilize both the monarchy and the Church. Eugène Réveillard, deputy of Charente-Inférieure, wrote in 1907 that the Reformation, in the measure it brought back religion and Christian churches to the purity of their origins according to the intention of the Reformers, marked the beginning of the restoration of the principles of liberty of conscience and of worship, and at the same time, the separation of powers—civil and ecclesiastical.67
Xavier de Montclos considers it a mistake to only see reciprocal rejection and condemnation in the Reformation or Counter-Reformation. He believes that these two great branches of Christianity in modern times both responded to calls for a deeper and more evangelical religious life.68 Monod regards the sixteenth century as marked by several significant changes. First, it was the beginning of the individualization of faith which made adherence to faith traditions possible but not obligatory. Second, it was the time of the pluralization of the faith which in time would find protection by law. Monod considers that the religious revolution and schism of the sixteenth century, characterized by pluralism and individualism, led to relativism and the possibility of the “subjectivation of religious teaching.”69
In a few decades, the Reformation’s influence in France “not only shattered the unity of religion, but it led to the contesting of the monarchy itself.”70 This new religion became known as Calvinism and its followers were called Huguenots.71 According to Kelley, “The origin of the term ‘Huguenot’ has been long debated. The present consensus is that it derives from the word for the resisting Swiss confederations (Eidgenossem), but it seems to have emerged during the conspiracy of Amboise, and opponents of the ‘foreign house’ of Guise construed it as designating their allegiance to the descendants of the royal dynasty of ‘Hughes’ Capet.”72 However, Carter Lindberg states that “the French Calvinists preferred the term Réformés, the Reformed. Catholic satires of the time called them la Religion Déformée.”73 The first Reformed churches appeared in France beginning in 1555. In 1559 a national synod gathered in Paris and adopted a confession of faith which was ratified in 1571 at La Rochelle and called La Confession de la Rochelle.74 By 1561–1562 Calvinism became a considerable power in the kingdom, about two million people. Among them were academics and former religious workers, bourgeoisie from legal and commercial professions, representatives of high and low nobility, whose conversion led to the conversion of entire cities and villages.75 This Protestant religious expression “threatened the perception of nation forged by both king and subjects, because the king’s own coronation oath required him to protect and defend his realm and his subjects from heresy.”76 Montclos asserts that beginning in 1540 persecution became practically systematic with many Protestants dying at the stake. Their strength and determination frightened the Catholic hierarchy and constrained the authorities to seek a solution.77 The growth of this new faith raised fears and concerns that needed to be addressed by the royal family since the converts to Protestantism “were simply too numerous to suppress.”78
Wars of Religion
The concept of the inseparability of King and Church would initially lead to compromises under Catherine de Medici (1519–1589). The Edict of January accorded the Huguenots partial rights to privately practice their religion in government approved places in January 1562. Religious gatherings were forbidden in population centers where the Huguenots were concentrated. According to Lindberg, “Huguenot public worship was allowed in private homes in towns and outside the towns’ walls. This was the watershed for French Protestantism.”79 The edict was rejected by most French Catholics who raised the question, “How could the regent, wife, and mother of a king of France advocate the Huguenots’ legal right to exist within the kingdom, when the king’s own coronation required their suppression?”80 It was a fundamental principle that the “coronation oath required him to protect and defend his realm and his subjects from heresy” and that “much of the symbolism and ritual of the coronation itself served to imbricate the monarchy and the Catholic Church together, making Protestantism or any other form of heresy a threat to royal authority.”81 The authorities of the Church considered Catherine’s edict in contradiction with the Council of Trent (1545–1563) which had anathematized the heresy of Luther and Calvin. She soon became aware of the dangerous situation in which the edict placed her and sought to side with and placate the Catholic faction. War seemed inevitable. “The Huguenot political and military resources were not sufficient to bring France into Protestantism, but they were strong enough to ensure their existence as a rebellious minority.”82
The massacre of Protestants in Vassy in March 1562 by the Duke of Guise foreshadowed the bloodshed which would follow in the Wars of Religion for almost forty years. At stake was the status of the Reformed religion in the kingdom.83 At Vassy, the Duke, with 200 armed men, came across a large congregation of Huguenots gathered in a barn for worship and set upon them. Some 70 Huguenots were killed and many more wounded. The incident sparked more massacres, and the religious wars were on.84 The result was tragic and “only after four decades of civil war would the nation re-emerge with any semblance of community, imagined or otherwise.”85 Around this time, Sébastian Castellion (1515–1564), who ministered alongside Calvin for a time in Geneva, wrote in the preface of his Traité des hérétiques (1554), “Who would want to become a Christian when they see that those who confess the name of Christ are bruised at the hands of Christians, by fire, by water, by sword, and treated more cruelly than robbers and murderers?”86
The landscape of post-Reformation France was permanently altered. There would follow in the next centuries an innumerable succession of contestations, religious suppression, upheavals, bloodshed, governmental turbulence, and riots in the streets. It seemed that under then-present structures of government there could be no peaceful coexistence between two competing religions especially now that “when the Huguenots took up arms they lost the image of a persecuted church. And when in 1562 they looked to English Protestants for assistance . . . they lost their patriotic credibility.”87 However, Catherine de Medici’s Edict of January 1562 had broken with the past and “made France the first Western European kingdom to grant legal recognition to two forms of Christianity at once.”88 According to historian Philip Benedict,
Within three months, violent Catholic rejection of the legitimacy of toleration combined with Protestant hopes for the imminent triumph of their faith to plunge the country into the first of a deadly cycle of wars that would recur eight times over the next three decades. So frequent and gruesome were the massacres accompanying these conflicts, so searing the sieges, and so numerous the assassinations of leading political actors, that the events of the “time of religious troubles” burned themselves into French and European historical memory for centuries to come.89
In short order, the inability for two incompatible faiths to live peacefully side-by-side led to the massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day on August 24, 1572, which then spread from Paris to other cities.90 What began as a “controlled operation against the leading Protestant noblemen grew into a vast bloodletting by ardently anti-Protestant members of the civic militia, who had allowed themselves to believe that the king had finally sanctioned the long-hoped-for eradication of all Huguenots.”91 Benedict claims that “if the exact division of responsibility for the massacre may never be apportioned with certainty, its broader ramifications are clear.”92 The massacre “precipitated a massive wave of defections from the Protestant cause. In the wake of the killing, Charles IX forbade the Reformed believers from gathering for worship—to protect them against violence, his edict proclaimed, but also because he undoubtedly realized that the massacre might end the Protestant problem once and for all.”93
As the massacres continued in the provinces for several months, fearful Protestants defected
