The Age of the Reformation

CHAPTER III

SWITZERLAND

SECTION 1. ZWINGLI

[Sidenote: The Swiss Confederation]

Amid the snow-clad Alps and azure lakes of Switzerland there grew up a race of Germans which, though still nominally a part of the Empire, had, at the period now considered, long gone on its own distinct path of development. Politically, the Confederacy arose in a popular revolt against the House of Austria. The federal union of the three forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, first entered into in 1291 and made permanent in 1315, was strengthened by the admission of Lucerne (1332), Zug (1352), Glarus (1351) and of the Imperial Cities of Zurich (1351) and Berne (1353). By the admission of Freiburg and Solothurn (1481), Basle (1501), Schaffhausen (1501) and Appenzell (1513) the Confederacy reached the number of thirteen cantons at which it remained for many years. By this time it was recognized as a practically independent state, courted by the great powers of Europe. Allied to this German Confederacy were two Romance-speaking states of a similar nature, the Confederacies of the Valais and of the Grisons.

The Swiss were then the one free people of Europe. Republican government by popular magistrates prevailed in all the cantons. Liberty was not quite democratic, for the cantons ruled several subject provinces, and in the cities a somewhat aristocratic electorate held power; nevertheless there was no state in Europe approaching the Swiss in self-government. Though they were generally accounted the best soldiers of the {147} day, their military valor did not redound to their own advantage, for the hardy peasantry yielded to the solicitations of the great powers around them to enter into foreign, mercenary service. The influential men, especially the priests, took pensions from the pope or from France or from other princes, in return for their labors in recruiting. The system was a bad one for both sides. Swiss politics were corrupted and the land drained of its strongest men; whereas the princes who hired the mercenaries often found to their cost that such soldiers were not only the most formidable to their enemies but also the most troublesome to themselves, always on the point of mutiny for more pay and plunder. The Swiss were beginning to see the evils of the system, and prohibited the taking of pensions in 1503, though this law remained largely a dead letter. [Sidenote: September 13-14, 1515] The reputation of the mountaineers suffered a blow in their defeat by the French at Marignano, followed by a treaty with France, intended by that power to make Switzerland a permanent dependency in return for a large annual subsidy payable to each of the thirteen cantons and to the Grisons and Valais as well. The country suffered from faction. The rural or "Forest" cantons were jealous of the cities, and the latter, especially Berne, the strongest, pursued selfish policies of individual aggrandizement at the expense of their confederates.

As everywhere else, the cities were the centers of culture and of social movements. Basle was famous for its university and for the great printing house of Froben. Here Albert Dürer had stayed for a while during his wandering years. Here Sebastian Brant had studied and had written his famous satire. Here the great Erasmus had come to publish his New Testament.

But the Reformation in Switzerland was only in [Sidenote: 1521-9] {148} part a child of humanism. Nationalism played its rôle in the revolt from Rome, memories of councils lingered at Constance and Basle, and the desire for a purer religion made itself felt among the more earnest. Switzerland had at least one great shrine, that of Einsiedeln; to her Virgin many pilgrims came yearly in hopes of the plenary indulgence, expressly promising forgiveness of both guilt and penalty of sin. Berne was the theater of one of the most reverberating scandals enacted by the contemporary church. [Sidenote: The Jetzer scandal] A passionately contested theological issue of the day was whether the Virgin had been immaculately conceived. This was denied by the Dominicans and asserted by the Franciscans. Some of the Dominicans of the friary at Berne thought that the best way to settle the affair was to have a direct revelation. For their fraudulent purposes they conspired with John Jetzer, a lay brother admitted in 1506, who died after 1520. Whether as a tool in the hands of others, or as an imposter, Jetzer produced a series of bogus apparitions, bringing the Virgin on the stage and making her give details of her conception sufficiently gross to show that it took place in the ordinary, and not in the immaculate, manner. [Sidenote: 1509] When the fraud was at last discovered by the authorities, four of the Dominicans involved were burnt at the stake.

But the vague forces of discontent might never have crystallized into a definite movement save for the leadership of Ulrich Zwingli. [Sidenote: Zwingli] He was born January 1, 1484, on the Toggenburg, amidst the lofty mountains, breathing the atmosphere of freedom and beauty from the first. As he wandered in the wild passes he noticed how the marmots set a sentry to warn them of danger, and how the squirrel crossed the stream on a chip. When he returned to the home of his father, a local magistrate in easy circumstances, he heard {149} stirring tales of Swiss freedom and Swiss valor that planted in his soul a deep love of his native land. The religion he learned was good Catholic; and the element of popular superstition in it was far less weird and terrible than in Northern Germany. He remembered one little tale told him by his grandmother, how the Lord God and Peter slept together in the same bed, and were wakened each morning by the housekeeper coming in and pulling the hair of the outside man.

Education began early under the tuition of an uncle, the parish priest. At ten Ulrich was sent to Basle to study. Here he progressed well, becoming the head scholar, and here he developed a love of music and considerable skill in it. Later he went to school at Berne, where he attracted the attention of some friars who tried to guide him into their cloister, an effort apparently frustrated by his father. In the autumn of 1498 he matriculated at Vienna. For some unknown cause he was suspended soon afterwards, but was readmitted in the spring of 1500. Two years later he went to Basle, where he completed his studies by taking the master's degree. [Sidenote: 1506] While here he taught school for a while. Theology apparently interested him little; his passion was for the humanities, and his idol was Erasmus. Only in 1513 did he begin to learn Greek.

If, at twenty-two, before he had reached the canonical age, Zwingli took orders, and became parish priest at Glarus, it was less because of any deep religious interest than because he found in the clerical calling the best opportunity to cultivate his taste for letters. He was helped financially by a papal pension of fifty gulden per annum. His first published work was a fable. [Sidenote: 1510] The lion, the leopard, and the fox (the Emperor, France, and Venice) try to drive the ox {150} (Switzerland) out of his pasture, but are frustrated by the herdsman (the pope). The same tendencies--papal, patriotic, and political--are shown in his second book, [Sidenote: 1512] an account of the relations between the Swiss and French, and in The Labyrinth, [Sidenote: 1516] an allegorical poem. The various nations appear again as animals, but the hero, Theseus, is a patriot guided by the Ariadne thread of reason, while he is vanquishing the monsters of sin, shame, and vice. Zwingli's natural interest in politics was nourished by his experiences as field chaplain of the Swiss forces at the battles of Novara [Sidenote: 1513] and Marignano. [Sidenote: 1515]

Was he already a Reformer? Not in the later sense of the word, but he was a disciple of Erasmus. Capito wrote to Bullinger in 1536: "While Luther was in the hermitage and had not yet emerged into the light, Zwingli and I took counsel how to cast down the pope. For then our judgment was maturing under the influence of Erasmus's society and by reading good authors." Though Capito over-estimated the opposition of the young Swiss to the papacy, he was right in other respects. Zwingli's enthusiasm for the prince of humanists, perfectly evident in his notes on St. Paul, stimulated him to visit the older scholar at Basle in the spring of 1516. Their correspondence began at the same time. Is it not notable that in The Labyrinth the thread of Ariadne is not religion, but reason? His religious ideal, as shown by his notes on St. Paul, was at this time the Erasmian one of an ethical, undogmatic faith. He interpreted the Apostle by the Sermon on the Mount and by Plato. He was still a good Catholic, without a thought of breaking away from the church.

[Sidenote: October, 1516-December, 1518]

From Glarus Zwingli was called to Einsiedeln, where he remained for two years. Here he saw the superstitious absurdities mocked by Erasmus. Here, too, {151} he first came into contact with indulgences, sold throughout Switzerland by Bernard Samson, a Milanese Franciscan. Zwingli did not attack them with the impassioned zeal of Luther, but ridiculed them as "a comedy." His position did not alienate him from the papal authorities, [Sidenote: September 1, 1516] for he applied for, and received, the appointment of papal acolyte. How little serious was his life at this time may be seen from the fact that he openly confessed that he was living in unchastity and even joked about it.

Notwithstanding his peccadillos, as he evidently regarded them, high hopes were conceived of his abilities and independence of character. When a priest was wanted at Zurich, [Sidenote: January 1, 1519] Zwingli applied for the position and, after strenuous canvassing, succeeded in getting it.

Soon after this came the turning-point in Zwingli's life, making of the rather worldly young man an earnest apostle. Two causes contributed to this. The first was the plague. Zwingli was taken sick in September and remained in a critical condition for many months. As is so often the case, suffering and the fear of death made the claims of the other world so terribly real to him that, for the first time, he cried unto God from the depths, and consecrated his life to service of his Saviour.

[Sidenote: 1519]

The second influence that decided and deepened Zwingli's life was that of Luther. He first mentions him in 1519, and from that time forth, often. All his works and all his acts thereafter show the impress of the Wittenberg professor. Though Zwingli himself sturdily asserted that he preached the gospel before he heard of Luther, and that he learned his whole doctrine direct from the Bible, he deceived himself, as many men do, in over-estimating his own originality. He was truly able to say that he had formulated some {152} of his ideas, in dependence on Erasmus, before he heard of the Saxon; and he still retained his capacity for private judgment afterwards. He never followed any man slavishly, and in some respects he was more radical than Luther; nevertheless it is true that he was deeply indebted to the great German.

Significantly enough, the first real conflict broke out at Zurich early in 1520. Zwingli preached against fasting and monasticism, and put forward the thesis that the gospel alone should be the rule of faith and practice. He succeeded in carrying through a practical reform of the cathedral chapter, but was obliged to compromise on fasting. Soon afterwards Zurich renounced obedience to the bishop. The Forest Cantons, already jealous of the prosperity of the cities, endeavored to intervene, but were warned by Zwingli not to appeal to war, as it was an unchristian thing. Opposition only drove his reforming zeal to further efforts.

In the spring of 1522 Zwingli formed with Anna Reinhard Meyer a union which he kept secret for two years, when he married her in church. In the marriage itself, though it was by no means unhappy, there was something lacking of fine feeling and of perfect love.

[Sidenote: Reformation in Zurich]

As the reform progressed, the need of clarification was felt. This was brought about by the favorite method of that day, a disputation. The Catholics tried in vain to prevent it, and it was actually held in January, 1523, on 67 theses drawn up by Zwingli. Here, as so often, it was found that the battle was half won when the innovators were heard. They themselves attributed this to the excellence of their cause; but, without disparaging that, it must be said that, as the psychology of advertising has shown, any thesis presented with sufficient force to catch the public ear, is {153} sure to win a certain number of adherents. [Sidenote: October 27, 1523] The Town Council of Zurich ordered the abolition of images and of the mass. The opposition of the cathedral chapter considerably delayed the realization of this program. In December the Council was obliged to concede further discussion. It was not until Wednesday, April 12, 1525, that mass was said for the last time in Zurich. Its place was immediately taken, the next day, Maundy Thursday, by a simple communion service. At the same time the last of the convents were suppressed, or put in a condition assuring their eventual extinction. Other reforms included the abolition of processions, of confirmation and of extreme unction. With homely caution, a large number of simple souls had this administered to them just before the time allotted for its last celebration. Organs were taken out of the churches, and regular lectures on the Bible given.

Alarmed by these innovations the five original cantons,--Unterwalden, Uri, Schwyz, Lucerne and Zug,--formed a league in 1524 to suppress the "Hussite, Lutheran, and Zwinglian heresies." For a time it looked like war. Zwingli and his advisers drew up a remarkably thorough plan of campaign, including a method of securing allies, many military details, and an ample provision for prayer for victory. War, however, was averted by the mediation of Berne as a friend of Zurich, and the complete religious autonomy of each canton was guaranteed.

The Swiss Reformation had to run the same course of separation from the humanists and radicals, and of schism, as did the German movement. Though Erasmus was a little closer to the Swiss than he had been to the Saxon Reformers, he was alienated by the outrageous taunts of some of them and by the equally unwarranted attempts of others to show that he agreed {154} with them. "They falsely call themselves evangelical," he opined, "for they seek only two things: a salary and a wife."

Then came the break with Luther, of which the story has already been told. The division was caused neither by jealousy, nor by the one doctrine--that of the real presence--on which it was nominally fought. There was in reality a wide difference between the two types of thought. The Saxon was both mystic and a schoolman; to him religion was all in all and dogma a large part of religion. Zwingli approached the problem of salvation from a less personal, certainly from a less agonized, and from a more legal, liberal, empiric standpoint. He felt for liberty and for the value of common action in the state. He interpreted the Bible by reason; Luther placed his reason under the tuition of the Bible in its apparent meaning.

[Sidenote: Anabaptists, 1522]

Next came the turn of the Anabaptists--those Bolsheviki of the sixteenth century. Their first leaders appeared at Zurich and were for a while bosom friends of Zwingli. But a parting of the ways was inevitable, for the humanist could have little sympathy with an uncultured and ignorant group--such they were, in spite of the fact that a few leaders were university graduates--and the statesman could not admit in his categories a purpose that was sectarian as against the state church, and democratic as against the existing aristocracy.

[Sidenote: 1523]

His first work against them shows how he was torn between his desire to make the Bible his only guide and the necessity of compromising with the prevailing polity. As he was unable to condemn his opponents on any consistent grounds he was obliged to prefer against them two charges that were false, though probably believed true by himself. As they were {155} ascetics in some particulars he branded them as monastic; for their social program he called them seditious.

The suppression of the Peasants' Revolt had the effect in Switzerland, as elsewhere, of causing the poor and oppressed to lose heart, and of alienating them from the cause of the official Protestant churches. A disputation with the Anabaptist leaders was held at Zurich; [Sidenote: November 6-8, 1525] they were declared refuted, and the council passed an order for all unbaptized children to be christened within a week. The leaders were arrested and tried; Zwingli bearing testimony that they advocated communism, which he considered wrong as the Bible's injunction not to steal implied the right of private property. The Anabaptists denied that they were communists, but the leaders were bound over to keep the peace, some were fined and others banished. As persecuting measures almost always increase in severity, it was not long before the death penalty was denounced against the sectaries, and actually applied. In a polemic against the new sect entitled In Catabaptistarum Strophas Elenchus, [Sidenote: July 1527] Zwingli's only argument is a criticism of some inconsistencies in the Anabaptists' biblicism; his final appeal is to force. His strife with them was harder than his battle with Rome. It seems that the reformer fears no one so much as him who carries the reformer's own principles to lengths that the originator disapproves. Zwingli saw in the fearless fanatics men prepared to act in political and social matters as he had done in ecclesiastical affairs; he dreaded anarchy or, at least, subversion of the polity he preferred, and, like all the other men of his age, he branded heresy as rebellion and punished it as crime.

[Sidenote: Theocracy]

By this time Zurich had become a theocracy of the same tyrannical type as that later made famous by {156} Geneva. Zwingli took the position of an Old Testament prophet, subordinating state to church. At first he had agreed with the Anabaptists in separating (theoretically) church and state. But he soon came to believe that, though true Christians might need no government, it was necessary to control the wicked, and for this purpose he favored an aristocratic polity. All matters of morals were strictly regulated, severe laws being passed against taverns and gambling. The inhabitants were forced to attend church. After the suppression of the Catholics and the radicals, there developed two parties just as later in Geneva, the Evangelical and the Indifferent, the policy of the latter being one of more freedom, or laxity, in discipline, and in general a preference of political to religious ends.

[Sidenote: Basle November, 1522]

The Reformation had now established itself in other cities of German Switzerland. Oecolampadius coming to Basle as the bearer of Evangelical ideas, won such success that soon the bishop was deprived of authority, [Sidenote: 1524] two disputations with the Catholics were held, [Sidenote: 1525] and the monasteries abolished. [Sidenote: 1527] Oecolampadius, after taking counsel with Zwingli on the best means of suppressing Catholic worship, branded the mass as an act worse than theft, harlotry, adultery, treason, and murder, called a meeting of the town council, and requested them to decree the abolition of Catholic worship. [Sidenote: October 27, 1527] Though they replied that every man should be free to exercise what religion he liked, on Good Friday, 1528, the Protestants removed the images from Oecolampadius's church, and grumbled because their enemies were yet tolerated. Liberty of conscience was only assured by the fairly equal division of the membership of the town council. On December 23, 1528, two hundred citizens assembled and presented a petition, drawn up by Oecolampadius, for the suppression of {157} the mass. On January 6, 1529, under pressure from the ambassadors of Berne and Zurich, the town council of Basle decreed that all pastors should preach only the Word of God, and asked them to assemble for instruction on this point. The compromise suited no one and on February 8 the long prepared revolution broke out. Under pretence that the Catholics had disobeyed the last decree, a Protestant mob surrounded the town hall, planted cannon, and forced the council to expel the twelve Catholic members, meanwhile destroying church pictures and statues. "It was indeed a spectacle so sad to the superstitious," Oecolampadius wrote to Capito, "that they had to weep blood. . . . We raged against the idols, and the mass died of sorrow."

A somewhat similar development took place in Berne, St. Gall, Schaffhausen, and Glarus. The favorite instrument for arousing popular interest and support was the disputation. Such an one was held at Baden in May and June, 1526. Zwingli declined to take part in this and the Catholics claimed the victory. This, however, did them rather harm than good, for the public felt that the cards had been stacked. A similar debate at Berne in 1528 turned that city completely to the Reformation. A synod of the Swiss Evangelical churches was formed in 1527. This made for uniformity. The publication of the Bible in a translation by Leo Jud and others, with prefaces by Zwingli, proved a help to the Evangelical cause. [Sidenote: 1530] This translation was the only one to compete at all successfully with Luther's.

The growing strength of the Protestant cantons encouraged them to carry the reform by force in all places in which a majority was in favor of it. Zwingli's far-reaching plans included an alliance with Hesse and with Francis I to whom he dedicated his {158} two most important theological works, True and False Religion and An Exposition of the Christian Faith. [Sidenote: April, 1529] The Catholic cantons replied by making a league with Austria. War seemed imminent and Zwingli was so heartily in favor of it that he threatened resignation if Zurich did not declare war. This was accordingly done on June 8. Thirty thousand Protestant soldiers marched against the Catholic cantons, which, without the expected aid from Austria, were able to put only nine thousand men into the field. Seeing themselves hopelessly outnumbered, the Catholics prudently negotiated a peace without risking a battle. [Sidenote: First Peace of Cappel] The terms of this first Peace of Cappel forced the Catholics to renounce the alliance with Austria, and to allow the majority of citizens in each canton to decide the religion they would follow. Toleration for Protestants was provided for in Catholic cantons, though toleration of the old religion was denied in the Evangelical cantons.

This peace marked the height of Zwingli's power. He continued to negotiate on equal terms with Luther, and he sent missionaries into Geneva to win it to his cause and to the Confederacy. The Catholic cantons, stung to the quick, again sought aid from Austria and raised another and better army. [Sidenote: Defeat of Zwingli] Zwingli heard of this and advocated a swift blow to prevent it--the "offensive defence." Berne refused to join Zurich in this aggression, but agreed to bring pressure to bear on the Catholics [Sidenote: May 1531] by proclaiming a blockade of their frontiers. An army was prepared by the Forest Cantons, but Berne, whose entirely selfish policy was more disastrous to the Evangelical cause than was the hostility of the league, still refused to engage in war. Zurich was therefore obliged to meet it alone. An army of only two thousand Zurichers marched out, accompanied by Zwingli as field chaplain. Eight thousand Catholic troops attacked, utterly defeated them, and {159} killed many on the field of battle. [Sidenote: October 11, 1531] Zwingli, who, though a non-combatant, was armed, was wounded and left on the field. Later he was recognized by enemies, killed, and his body burned as that of a heretic.

The defeat was a disaster to Protestant Switzerland not so much on account of the terms of peace, which were moderate, as because of the loss of prestige and above all of the great leader. His spirit however, continued to inspire his followers, and lived in the Reformed Church. Indeed it has been said, though with exaggeration, that Calvin only gave his name to the church founded by Zwingli, just as Americus gave his name to the continent discovered by Columbus. In many respects Zwingli was the most liberal of the Reformers. In his last work he expressed the belief that in heaven would be saved not only Christians and the worthies of the Old Testament but also "Hercules, Theseus, Socrates, Aristides, Antigonus, Numa, Camillus, the Catos and Scipios. . . . In a word no good man has ever existed, nor shall there exist a holy mind, a faithful soul, from the very foundation of the world to its consummation, whom you will not see there with God." Nevertheless, Zwingli was a persecutor and was bound by many of the dogmatic prepossessions of his time. But his religion had in it less of miracle and more of reason than that of any other founder of a church in the sixteenth century. He was a statesman, and more willing to trust the people than were his contemporaries, but yet he was ready to sacrifice his country to his creed.

For a short time after the death of so many of its leading citizens in the battle of Cappel, Zurich was reduced to impotence and despair. Nor was she much comforted or assisted by her neighbors. Oecolampadius died but a few weeks after his friend; while {160} Luther and Erasmus sang paeans of triumph over the prostration of their rivals. Even Calvin considered it a judgment of God. Gradually by her own strength Zurich won her way back to peace and a certain influence. [Sidenote: Bullinger, 1504-75] Zwingli's follower, Henry Bullinger, the son of a priest, was a remarkable man. He not only built up his own city but his active correspondence with Protestants of all countries did a great deal to spread the cause of the Evangelical religion. In conjunction with Myconius, he drew up the first Swiss confession, [Sidenote: 1536] accepted by Zurich, Berne, Basle, Schaffhausen, St. Gall, Mülhausen and Biel; [Sidenote: 1549] and later he made the agreement with Calvin known as the Consensus Tigurinus. In this the Zwinglian and Calvinistic doctrines of the eucharist were harmonized as far as possible. But while the former decreased the latter increased, and Geneva took the place of Zurich as the metropolis of the Reformed faith.

SECTION 2. CALVIN

On January 15, 1527, Thomas von Hofen wrote Zwingli from Geneva that he would do all he could to exalt the gospel in that city but that he knew it would be vain, for there were seven hundred priests working against him. This letter gives an insight into the methods by which new territory was evangelized, the quarters whence came the new influences, and the forces with which they had to contend.

Among the early missionaries of "the gospel" in French-speaking lands, one of the most energetic was William Farel. [Sidenote: Farel, 1489-1565] He had studied at Paris under Lèfevre d'Étaples, and was converted to Lutheranism as early as 1521. He went first to Basle, where he learned to know Erasmus. Far from showing respect to the older and more famous man, he scornfully told him to his face that Froben's wife knew more theology than {161} did he. Erasmus's resentment showed itself in the nickname Phallicus that he fastened on his antagonist. From Basle Farel went to Montbéliard and Aigle, preaching fearlessly but so fiercely that his friend Oecolampadius warned him to remember rather to teach than to curse. [Sidenote: 1528] After attending the disputation at Berne he evangelized western Switzerland. His methods may be learned from his work at Valangin on August 15, 1530. He attended a mass, but in the midst of it went up to the priest, tore the host forcibly from his hands, and said to the people: "This is not the God whom you worship: he is above in heaven, even in the majesty of the Father." In 1532 he went to Geneva. Notwithstanding the fact that here, as often elsewhere, he narrowly escaped lynching, he made a great impression. His red hair and hot temper evidently had their uses.

[Sidenote: Calvin, 1509-64]

The Reformer of French Switzerland was not destined to be Farel, however, but John Calvin. Born at Noyon, Picardy, his mother died early and his father, who did not care for children, sent him to the house of an aristocratic friend to be reared. In this environment he acquired the distinguished manners and the hauteur for which he was noted. When John was six years old his father, Gerard, had him appointed to a benefice just as nowadays he might have got him a scholarship. At the age of twelve Gerard's influence procured for his son another of these ecclesiastical livings and two years later this was exchanged for a more lucrative one to enable the boy to go to Paris. Here for some years, at the College of Montaigu, Calvin studied scholastic philosophy and theology under Noel Beda, a medieval logic-chopper and schoolman by temperament. At the university Calvin won from his fellows the sobriquet of "the accusative case," on account of his censorious {162} and fault-finding disposition. At his father's wish John changed from theology to law. For a time he studied at the universities of Orleans and Bourges. At Orleans he came under the influence of two Protestants, Olivetan and the German Melchior Volmar. On the death of his father, in 1531, he began to devote himself to the humanities. His first work, a commentary on Seneca's De Clementia, witnesses his wide reading, his excellent Latin style, and his ethical interests.

It was apparently through the humanists Erasmus and Lefèvre that he was led to the study of the Bible and of Luther's writings. Probably in the fall of 1533 he experienced a "conversion" such as stands at the head of many a religious career. A sudden beam of light, he says, came to him at this time from God, putting him to the proof and showing him in how deep an abyss of error and of filth he had been living. He thereupon abandoned his former life with tears.

In the spring of 1534 Calvin gave up the sinecure benefices he had held, and towards the end of the year left France because of the growing persecution, for he had already rendered himself suspect. After various wanderings he reached Basle, where he published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. [Sidenote: Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1536] It was dedicated, like two of Zwingli's works, to Francis I, with a strong plea for the new faith. It was, nevertheless, condemned and burnt publicly in France in 1542. Originally written in Latin it was translated by the author into French in 1541, and reissued from time to time in continually larger editions, the final one, of 1559, being five times as bulky as the first impression. The thought, too, though not fundamentally changed, was rearranged and developed. Only in the redaction of 1541 was {163} predestination made perfectly clear. The first edition, like Luther's catechism, took up in order the Decalogue, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Sacraments. To this was added a section on Christian liberty, the power of the church, and civil government. In the last edition the arrangement followed entirely the order of articles in the Apostles' Creed, all the other matter being digested in its relation to faith.

[Sidenote: A system of theology]

In the Institutes Calvin succeeded in summing up the whole of Protestant Christian doctrine and practice. It is a work of enormous labor and thought. Its rigid logic, comprehensiveness, and clarity have secured it the same place in the Protestant Churches that the Summa of Aquinas has in the Roman theology. It is like the Summa, in other ways, primarily in that it is an attempt to derive an absolute, unchangeable standard of dogma from premises considered infallible. Those who have found great freshness in Calvin, a new life and a new realism, can do so only in comparison with the older schoolmen. Calvin simply went over their ground, introducing into their philosophy all the connotations that three centuries of progress had made necessary. This is not denying that his work was well written and that it filled a need urgently felt at the time. Calvin cultivated style, both French and Latin, with great care, for he saw its immense utility for propaganda. He studied especially brevity, and thought that he carried it to an extreme, though the French edition of the Institutes fills more than eight hundred large octavo pages. However, all things are relative, and compared to many other theologians Calvin is really concise and readable.

There is not one original thought in any of Calvin's works. I do not mean "original" in any narrow sense, for to the searcher for sources it seems that {164} there is literally nothing new under the sun. But there is nothing in Calvin for which ample authority cannot be found in his predecessors. Recognizing the Bible as his only standard, he interpreted it according to the new Protestant doctors. First and foremost he was dependent on Luther, and to an extent that cannot be exaggerated. Especially from the Catechisms, The Bondage of the Will, and The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Calvin drew all his principal doctrines even to details. He also borrowed something from Bucer, Erasmus and Schwenckfeld, as well as from three writers who were in a certain sense his models. Melanchthon's Commonplaces of Theology, Zwingli's True and False Religion, and Farel's Brief Instruction in Christian Faith had all done tentatively what he now did finally.

[Sidenote: Theocentric character]

The center of Calvin's philosophy was God as the Almighty Will. His will was the source of all things, of all deeds, of all standards of right and wrong and of all happiness. The sole purpose of the universe, and the sole intent of its Creator, was the glorification of the Deity. Man's chief end was "to glorify God and enjoy him forever." God accomplished this self-exaltation in all things, but chiefly through men, his noblest work, and he did it in various ways, by the salvation of some and the damnation of others. And his act was purely arbitrary; he foreknew and predestined the fate of every man from the beginning; he damned and saved irrespective of foreseen merit. "God's eternal decree" Calvin himself called "frightful." [1] The outward sign of election to grace he thought was moral behavior, and in this respect he demanded the uttermost from himself and from his followers. The elect, he thought, were certain of salvation. The highest virtue was faith, a matter more {165} of the heart than of the reason. The divinity of Christ, he said, was apprehended by Christian experience, not by speculation. Reason was fallacious; left to itself the human spirit "could do nothing but lose itself in infinite error, embroil itself in difficulties and grope in opaque darkness." But God has given us his Word, infallible and inerrant, something that "has flowed from his very mouth." "We can only seek God in his Word," he said, "nor think of him otherwise than according to his Word."

Inevitably, Calvin sought to use the Bible as a rigid, moral law to be fulfilled to the letter. His ethics were an elaborate casuistry, a method of finding the proper rule to govern the particular act. He preached a new legalism; [Sidenote: Legalism] he took Scripture as the Pharisees took the Law, and Luther's sayings as they took the Prophets, and he turned them all into stiff, fixed laws. Thus he crushed the glorious autonomy of his predecessor's ethical principles. It was Kant, who denied all Luther's specific beliefs, but who developed his idea of the individual conscience, that was the true heir of his spirit, not Calvin who crushed the spirit in elaborating every jot and tittle of the letter. In precisely the same manner Calvin killed Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. To Calvin the church was a sacramental, aristocratic organization, with an authoritative ministry. The German rebelled against the idea of the church as such; the Frenchman simply asked what was the true church. So he brought back some of the sacramental miracle of baptism and the eucharist. In the latter he remained as medieval as Luther, never getting beyond the question of the mode of the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine. His endeavor to rationalize the doctrine of Augsburg, especially with reference to the Zwinglians, had disastrous results. Only two {166} positions were possible, that the body and blood were present, or that they were not. By endeavoring to find some middle ground Calvin upheld a contradiction in terms: the elements were signs and yet were realities; the body was really there when the bread was eaten by a believer, but really not there when the same bread was eaten by an infidel. The presence was actual, and yet participation could only occur by faith. While rejecting some of Luther's explanations, Calvin was undoubtedly nearer his position than that of Zwingli, which he characterized as "profane."

As few instructed and thinking persons now accept the conclusions of the Institutes, it is natural to underestimate the power that they exercised in their own day. This book was the most effective weapon of Protestantism. This was partly because of the style, but, still more because of the faultless logic. [Sidenote: His logic] The success of an argument usually depends far less on the truth of the premises than on the validity of the reasoning. And the premises selected by Calvin not only seemed natural to a large body of educated European opinion of his time, but were such that their truth or falsity was very difficult to demonstrate convincingly. Calvin's system has been overthrown not by direct attack, but by the flank, in science as in war the most effective way. To take but one example out of many that might be given: what has modern criticism made of Calvin's doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture? But this science was as yet all but unknown: biblical exegesis there was in plenty, but it was only to a minute extent literary and historical; it was almost exclusively philological and dogmatic.

Calvin's doctrine of the arbitrary dealing out of salvation and damnation irrespective of merit has often excited a moral rather than an intellectual revulsion. To his true followers, indeed, like Jonathan {167} Edwards, it seems "a delightful doctrine, exceeding bright, pleasant and sweet." [Sidenote: Eternal damnation] But many men agree with Gibbon that it makes God a cruel and capricious tyrant and with William James that it is sovereignly irrational and mean. Even at that time those who said that a man's will had no more to do with his destiny than the stick in a man's hand could choose where to strike or than a saddled beast could choose its rider, aroused an intense opposition. Erasmus argued that damnation given for inevitable crimes would make God unjust, and Thomas More blamed Luther for calling God the cause of evil and for saying "God doth damn so huge a number of people to intolerable torments only for his own pleasure and for his own deeds wrought in them only by himself." An English heretic, Cole of Faversham, said that the doctrine of predestination was meeter for devils than for Christians. "The God of Calvin," exclaimed Jerome Bolsec, "is a hypocrite, a liar, perfidious, unjust, the abetter and patron of crimes, and worse than the devil himself."

But there was another side to the doctrine of election. There was a certain moral grandeur in the complete abandon to God and in the earnestness that was ready to sacrifice all to his will. And if we judge the tree by its fruits, at its best it brought forth a strong and good race. The noblest examples are not the theologians, Calvin and Knox, not only drunk with God but drugged with him, much less politicians like Henry of Navarre and William of Orange, but the rank and file of the Huguenots of France, the Puritans of England, "the choice and sifted seed wherewith God sowed the wilderness" of America. These men bore themselves with I know not what of lofty seriousness, and with a matchless disdain of all mortal peril and all earthly grandeur. Believing themselves chosen vessels and elect instruments of grace, they could neither {168} be seduced by carnal pleasure nor awed by human might. Taught that they were kings by the election of God and priests by the imposition of his hands, they despised the puny and vicious monarchs of this earth. They remained, in fact, what they always felt themselves to be, an elite, "the chosen few."

Having finished his great work, Calvin set out on his wanderings again. For a time he was at the court of the sympathetic Renée de France, Duchess of Ferrara. When persecution broke out here, he again fled northward, and came, by chance, to Geneva. [Sidenote: Geneva] Here Farel was waging an unequal fight with the old church. Needing Calvin's help he went to him and begged his assistance, calling on God to curse him should he not stay. "Struck with terror," as Calvin himself confessed, he consented to do so.

Beautifully situated on the blue waters of Lake Leman in full view of Mont Blanc, Geneva was at this time a town of 16,000 inhabitants, a center of trade, pleasure, and piety. The citizens had certain liberties, but were under the rule of a bishop. As this personage was usually elected from the house of the Duke of Savoy, Geneva had become little better than a dependency of that state. The first years of the sixteenth century had been turbulent. The bishop, John, had at one time been forced to abdicate his authority, but later had tried to resume it. The Archbishop of Vienne, Geneva's metropolitan, had then excommunicated the city and invited Duke Charles III of Savoy to punish it. The citizens rose under Bonivard, renounced the authority of the pope, expelled the bishop and broke up the religious houses. To guard against the vengeance of the duke, a league was made with Berne and Freiburg.

On October 2, 1532, William Farel arrived from Berne. At Geneva as elsewhere tumult followed his {169} preaching, but it met with such success that by January, 1534, he held a disputation which decided the city to become evangelical. The council examined the shrines [Sidenote: 1535] and found machinery for the production of bogus miracles; provisionally abolished the mass; [Sidenote: May 21, 1536] and soon after formally renounced the papal religion.

At this point Calvin arrived, and began preaching and organizing at once. He soon aroused opposition from the citizens, galled at his strictness and perhaps jealous of a foreigner. [Sidenote: Calvin expelled, February 1538] The elections to the council went against him, and the opposition came to a head shortly afterwards. The town council decided to adopt the method of celebrating the eucharist used at Rome. For some petty reason Calvin and Farel refused to obey, and when a riot broke out at the Lord's table, the council expelled them from the city.

Calvin went to Strassburg, where he learned to know Bucer and republished his Institutes. Here he married Idelette de Bure, the widow of an Anabaptist, [Sidenote: August, 1540] who was never in strong health and died, probably of consumption, on March 29, 1549. Calvin's married life lacked tenderness and joy. The story that he selected his wife because he thought that by reason of her want of beauty she would not distract his thoughts from God, is not well founded, but it does illustrate his attitude towards her. The one or more children born of the union died in infancy.

Calvin attended the Colloquy at Ratisbon, [Sidenote: 1541] in the result of which he was deeply disappointed. In the meantime he had not lost all interest in Geneva. When Cardinal Sadoleto wrote, in the most polished Latin, an appeal to the city to return to the Roman communion, Calvin answered it. [Sidenote: September 1, 1539] The party opposed to him discredited itself by giving up the city's rights to Berne, and, was therefore overthrown. The perplexities presenting themselves to the council were {170} beyond their powers to solve, and they felt obliged to recall Calvin, [Sidenote: Calvin returns, 1541] who returned to remain for the rest of his life.

[Sidenote: Theocracy]

His position was so strong that he was able to make of Geneva a city after his own heart. The form of government he caused to prevail was a strict theocracy. The clergy of the city met in a body known as the Congregation, a "venerable company" that discussed and prepared legislation for the consideration of the Consistory. In this larger body, besides the clergy, the laity were represented by twelve elders chosen by the council, not by the people at large. The state and church were thus completely identified in a highly aristocratic polity.

"The office of the Consistory is to keep watch on the life of every one." Thus briefly was expressed the delegation of as complete powers over the private lives of citizens as ever have been granted to a committee. The object of the Ecclesiastical Ordinances was to create a society of saints. The Bible was adopted as the norm; all its provisions being enforced except such Jewish ceremonies as were considered abrogated by the New Testament. The city was divided into quarters, and some of the elders visited every house at least once a year and passed in review the whole life, actions, speech, and opinions of the inmates. The houses of the citizens were made of glass; and the vigilant eye of the Consistory, served by a multitude of spies, was on them all the time. In a way this espionage but took the place of the Catholic confessional. A joke, a gesture was enough to bring a man under suspicion. The Elders sat as a regular court, hearing complaints and examining witnesses. It is true that they could inflict only spiritual punishments, such as public censure, penance, excommunication, or forcing the culprit to demand pardon in church on his knees. But when {171} the Consistory thought necessary, it could invoke the aid of the civil courts and the judgment was seldom doubtful. Among the capital crimes were adultery, blasphemy, witchcraft, and heresy. Punishments for all offences were astonishingly and increasingly heavy. During the years 1542-6 there were, in this little town of 16,000 people, no less than fifty-eight executions and seventy-six banishments.

In judging the Genevan theocracy it is important to remember that everywhere, in the sixteenth century, punishments were heavier than they are now, and the regulation of private life minuter.[2] Nevertheless, though parallels to almost everything done at Geneva can be found elsewhere, it is true that Calvin intensified the medieval spirit in this respect and pushed it to the farthest limit that human nature would bear.

First of all, he compelled the citizens to fulfil their religious duties. He began the process by which later the Puritans identified the Jewish Sabbath and the Lord's Day. Luther had thought the injunction to rest on the Seventh Day a bit of Jewish ceremonial abrogated by the new dispensation and that, after attending church, the Christian might devote the day to what work or pleasure he thought proper. Calvin, however, forbade all work and commanded attendance on sermons, of which an abundance were offered to the devout. In addition to Sunday services there were, as in the Catholic church, morning prayers every work day and a second service three days a week. All ceremonies with a vestige of popery about them were forbidden. [Sidenote: 1555] The keeping of Christmas was prohibited under pain of fine and imprisonment.

"As I see that we cannot forbid men all diversions," sighed Calvin, "I confine myself to those that are really bad." This class was sufficiently large. The {172} theater was denounced from the pulpit, especially when the new Italian habit of giving women's parts to actresses instead of to boys was introduced. According to Calvin's colleague Cop, "the women who mount the platform to play comedies are full of unbridled effrontery, without honor, having no purpose but to expose their bodies, clothes, and ornaments to excite the impure desires of the spectators. . . . The whole thing," he added, "is very contrary to the modesty of women who ought to be shamefaced and shy." Accordingly, attendance on plays was forbidden.

[Sidenote: Supervision of conduct]

Among other prohibited amusements was dancing, especially obnoxious as at that time dances were accompanied by kisses and embraces. Playing cards, cursing and swearing were also dealt with, as indeed they were elsewhere. Among the odd matters that came before the Consistory were: attempted suicide, possessing the Golden Legend (a collection of saints' lives called by Beza "abominable trash"), paying for masses, betrothing a daughter to a Catholic, fasting on Good Friday, singing obscene songs, and drunkenness. A woman was chastized for taking too much wine even though it did not intoxicate. Some husbands were mildly reprimanded, not for beating their wives which was tolerated by contemporary opinion, but for rubbing salt and vinegar into the wales. Luxury in clothing was suppressed; all matters of color and quality regulated by law, and even the way in which women did their hair. In 1546 the inns were put under the direct control of the government and strictly limited to the functions of entertaining--or rather of boarding and lodging--strangers and citizens in temporary need of them. Among the numerous rules enforced within them the following may be selected as typical:

[Sidenote: Rules for inns]

If any one blasphemes the name of God or says, "By {173} the body, 'sblood, zounds" or anything like, or who gives himself to the devil or uses similar execrable imprecations, he shall be punished. . . .

If any one insults any one else the host shall be obliged to deliver him up to justice.

If there are any persons who make it their business to frequent the said inns, and there to consume their goods and substance, the host shall not receive them.

Item the host shall be obliged to report to the government any insolent or dissolute acts committed by the guests.

Item the host shall not allow any person of whatever quality he be, to drink or eat anything in his house without first having asked a blessing and afterwards said grace.

Item the host shall be obliged to keep in a public place a French Bible, in which any one who wishes may read, and he shall not prevent free and honest conversation on the Word of God, to edification, but shall favor it as much as he can.

Item the host shall not allow any dissoluteness like dancing, dice or cards, nor shall he receive any one suspected of being a debauche or ruffian.

Item he shall only allow people to play honest games without swearing or blasphemy, and without wasting more time than that allowed for a meal.

Item he shall not allow indecent songs or words, and if any one wishes to sing Psalms or spiritual songs he shall make them do it in a decent and not in a dissolute way.

Item nobody shall be allowed to sit up after nine o'clock at night except spies.

Of course, such matters as marriage were regulated strictly. When a man of seventy married a girl of twenty-five Calvin said it was the pastor's duty to reprehend them. The Reformer often selected the women he thought suitable for his acquaintances who wanted wives. He also drew up a list of baptismal names which he thought objectionable, including the names of "idols,"--i.e. saints venerated near Geneva--the names of kings and offices to whom God alone {174} appoints, such as Angel or Baptist, names belonging to God such as Jesus and Emanuel, silly names such as Toussaint and Noel, double names and ill-sounding names. Calvin also pronounced on the best sort of stoves and got servants for his friends. In fact, there was never such a busy-body in a position of high authority before nor since. No wonder that the citizens frequently chafed under the yoke.

If we ask how much was actually accomplished by this minute regulation accompanied by extreme severity in the enforcement of morals, various answers are given. When the Italian reformer Bernardino Occhino visited Geneva in 1542, he testified that cursing and swearing, unchastity and sacrilege were unknown; that there were neither lawsuits nor simony nor murder nor party spirit, but that universal benevolence prevailed. Again in 1556 John Knox said that Geneva was "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth since the days of the apostles. In other places," he continued, "I confess Christ to be truly preached, but manners and religion so sincerely reformed I have not yet seen in any place besides." But if we turn from these personal impressions to an examination of the acts of the Consistory, we get a very different impression. [Sidenote: Morals of Geneva] The records of Geneva show more cases of vice after the Reformation than before. The continually increasing severity of the penalties enacted against vice and frivolity seem to prove that the government was helpless to suppress them. Among those convicted of adultery were two of Calvin's own female relatives, his brother's wife and his step-daughter Judith. What success there was in making Geneva a city of saints was due to the fact that it gradually became a very select population. The worst of the incorrigibles were soon either executed or banished, and their places taken by a large influx of {175} men of austere mind, drawn thither as a refuge from persecution elsewhere, or by the desire to sit at the feet of the great Reformer. Between the years 1549 and 1555 no less than 1297 strangers were admitted to citizenship. Practically all of these were immigrants coming to the little town for conscience's sake.

[Persecution]

Orthodoxy was enforced as rigidly as morality. The ecclesiastical constitution adopted in 1542 brought in the Puritan type of divine service. Preaching took the most important place in church, supplemented by Bible reading and catechetical instruction. Laws were passed enforcing conformity under pain of losing goods and life. Those who did not expressly renounce the mass were punished. A little girl of thirteen was condemned to be publicly beaten with rods for saying that she wanted to be a Catholic. Calvin identified his own wishes and dignity with the commands and honor of God. One day he forbade a citizen, Philibert Berthelier, to come to the Lord's table. Berthelier protested and was supported by the council. "If God lets Satan crush my ministry under such tyranny," shrieked Calvin, "it is all over with me." The slightest assertion of liberty on the part of another was stamped out as a crime. Sebastian Castellio, a sincere Christian and Protestant, but more liberal than Calvin, fell under suspicion because he called the Song of Songs obscene, and because he made a new French version of the Bible to replace the one of Olivetan officially approved. He was banished in 1544. Two years later Peter Ameaux made some very trifling personal remarks about Calvin, for which he was forced to fall on his knees in public and ask pardon.

But opposition only increased. The party opposing Calvin he called the Libertines--a word then meaning something like "free-thinker" and gradually getting {176} the bad moral connotation it has now, just as the word "miscreant" had formerly done. [Sidenote: January, 1547] One of these men, James Cruet, posted on the pulpit of St. Peter's church at Geneva a warning to Calvin, in no very civil terms, to leave the city. He was at once arrested and a house to house search made for his accomplices. This method failing to reveal anything except that Gruet had written on one of Calvin's tracts the words "all rubbish," his judges put him to the rack twice a day, morning and evening, for a whole month. The frightful torture failed to make Gruet incriminate anyone else, and he was accordingly tried for heresy. He was charged with "disparaging authors like Moses, who by the Spirit of God wrote the divine law, saying that Moses had no more power than any other man. . . . He also said that all laws, human and divine, were made at the pleasure of man." He was therefore sentenced to death for blasphemy and beheaded on July 26, 1547, "calling on God as his Lord." After his death one of his books was found and condemned. To justify this course Calvin alleged that Gruet said that Jesus Christ was a good-for-nothing, a liar, and a false seducer, and that he (Gruet) denied the existence of God and immortality. Evangelical freedom had now arrived at the point whore its champions first took a man's life and then his character, merely for writing a lampoon!

Naturally such tyranny produced a reaction. The enraged Libertines nicknamed Calvin Cain, and saved from his hands the next personal enemy, Ami Perrin, whom he caused to be tried for treason. [Sidenote: October 16, 1551] A still more bitter dose for the theocrat was that administered by Jerome Bolsec, who had the audacity to preach against the doctrine of predestination. Calvin and Farel refuted him on the spot and had him arrested. Berne, Basle and Zurich intervened and, when solicited for {177} an expression on the doctrine in dispute, spoke indecisively. The triumph of his enemies at this rebuke was hard for Calvin to bear and prepared for the commission of the most regrettable act of his career.

[Sidenote: Servetus, 1531]

The Spanish physician Michael Servetus published, in Germany, a work on the Errors concerning the Trinity. His theory was not that of a modern rationalist, but of one whose starting point was the authority of the Bible, and his unitarianism was consequently of a decidedly theological brand, recalling similar doctrines in the early church. Leaving Germany he went to Vienne, [Sidenote: 1553] in France, and got a good practice under an assumed name. He later published a work called, perhaps in imitation of Calvin's Institutio, The Restitution of Christianity, setting forth his ideas about the Trinity, which he compared to the three-headed monster Cerberus, but admitting the divinity of Christ. He also denied the doctrine of original sin and asserted that baptism should be for adults only. He was poorly advised in sending this book to the Reformer, with whom he had some correspondence. With Calvin's knowledge and probably at his instigation, though he later issued an equivocating denial, William Trie, of Geneva, denounced Servetus to the Catholic inquisition at Vienne and forwarded the material sent by the heretic to Calvin. On June 17, 1553, the Catholic inquisitor, expressly stating that he acted on this material, condemned Servetus to be burnt by slow fire, but he escaped and went to Geneva.

Here he was recognized and arrested. Calvin at once appeared as his prosecutor for heresy. The charges against him were chiefly concerned with his denial of the Trinity and of infant baptism, and with his attack on the person and teaching of Calvin. As an example of the point to which Bibliolatry could suppress candor it may be mentioned that one of the {178} charges against him was that he had asserted Palestine to be a poor land. This was held to contradict the Scriptural statement that it was a land flowing with milk and honey. The minutes of the trial are painful reading. It was conducted on both sides with unbecoming violence. Among other expressions used by Calvin, the public prosecutor, were these: that he regarded Servetus's defence as no better than the braying of an ass, and that the prisoner was like a villainous cur wiping his muzzle. Servetus answered in the same tone, his spirit unbroken by abuse and by his confinement in a horrible dungeon, where he suffered from hunger, cold, vermin, and disease. He was found guilty of heresy and sentenced to be burnt with slow fire. Calvin said that he tried to alter the manner of execution, but there is not a shred of evidence, in the minutes of the trial or elsewhere, that he did so. Possibly, if he made the request, it was purely formal, as were similar petitions for mercy made by the Roman inquisitors. At any rate, while Calvin's alleged effort for mercy proved fruitless, he visited his victim in prison to read him a self-righteous and insulting lecture. Farel, also, reviled him on the way to the stake, at which he perished on October 26, 1553, [Sidenote: Death of Servetus] crying, "God preserve my soul! O Jesus, Son of the eternal God, have mercy on me!" Farel called on the bystanders to witness that these words showed the dying man to be still in the power of Satan.

This act of persecution, one of the most painful in the history of Christianity, was received with an outburst of applause from almost all quarters. Melanchthon, who had not been on speaking terms with Calvin for some years, was reconciled to him by what he called "a signal act of piety." Other leading Protestants congratulated Calvin, who continued persecution systematically. Another victim of his was Matthew {179} Gribaldi, whom he delivered into the hands of the government of Berne, with a refutation of his errors. [Sidenote: 1564.] Had he not died of the plague in prison he would probably have suffered the same fate as Servetus.

[Sidenote: Complete theocracy, 1555]

Strengthened by his victory over heresy, Calvin now had the chance to annihilate his opponents. On May 15, 1555, he accused a number of them of treason, and provided proof by ample use of the rack. With the party of Libertines completely broken, Calvin ruled from this time forth with a rod of iron. The new Geneva was so cowed and subservient that the town council dared not install a new sort of heating apparatus without asking the permission of the theocrat. But a deep rancor smouldered under the surface. "Our incomparable theologian Calvin," wrote Ambrose Blaurer to Bullinger, "labors under such hatred of some whom he obscures by his light that he is considered the worst of heretics by them." Among other things he was accused of levying tribute from his followers by a species of blackmail, threatening publicly to denounce them unless they gave money to the cause.

[Sidenote: International Calvinism]

At the same time his international power and reputation rose. Geneva became the capital of Protestantism, from which mandates issued to all the countries of Western Europe. Englishmen and Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Italians, thronged to "this most perfect school of Christ since the apostles" to learn the laws of a new type of Christianity. For Calvin's Reformation was more thorough and logical than was Luther's. The German had regarded all as permitted that was not forbidden, and allowed the old usages to stand in so far as they were not repugnant to the ordinances of the Bible. But Calvin believed that all was forbidden save what was expressly allowed, and hence abolished as superstitious accretions all the elements of the medieval cult that could find no warrant in the {180} Bible. Images, vestments, organs, bells, candles, ritual, were swept away in the ungarnished meeting-house to make way for a simple service of Bible-reading, prayer, hymn and sermon. The government of the church was left by Calvin in close connection with the state, but he apparently turned around the Lutheran conception, making the civil authority subordinate to the spiritual and not the church to the state.

Whereas Lutheranism appealed to Germans and Scandinavians, Calvinism became the international form of Protestantism. Even in Germany Calvin made conquests at the expense of Luther, but outside of Germany, in France, in the Netherlands, in Britain, he moulded the type of reformed thought in his own image. It is difficult to give statistics, for it is impossible to say how far each particular church, like the Anglican for example, was indebted to Calvin, how far to Luther, and how far to other leaders, and also because there was a strong reaction against pure Calvinism even in the sixteenth century. But it is safe to say that the clear, cold logic of the Institutes, the good French and Latin of countless other treatises and letters, and the political thought which amalgamated easily with rising tides of democracy and industrialism, made Calvin the leader of Protestantism outside of the Teutonic countries of the north. His gift for organization and the pains he took to train ministers and apostles contributed to this success.

[Sidenote: Death of Calvin, May 27, 1564]

On May 27, 1564 Calvin died, worn out with labor and ill health at the age of fifty-five. With a cold heart and a hot temper, he had a clear brain, an iron will, and a real moral earnestness derived from the conviction that he was a chosen vessel of Christ. Constantly tortured by a variety of painful diseases, he drove himself, by the demoniac strength of his will, to perform labor that would have taxed the strongest. {181} The way he ruled his poor, suffering body is symbolic of the way he treated the sick world. To him the maladies of his own body, or of the body politic, were evils to be overcome, at any cost of pain and sweat and blood, by a direct effort of the will. As he never yielded to fever and weakness in himself, so he dealt with the vice and frivolity he detested, crushing it out by a ruthless application of power, hunting it with spies, stretching it on the rack and breaking it on the wheel. But a gentler, more understanding method would have accomplished more, even for his own purpose.

[Sidenote: Beza, 1519-1605]

His successor at Geneva, Theodore Beza, was a man after his own heart but, as he was far weaker, the town council gradually freed itself from spiritual tyranny. Towards the end of the century the pastors had been humbled and the questions of the day were far less the dogmatic niceties they loved than ethical ones such as the right to take usury, the proper penalty for adultery, the right to make war, and the best form of government.

[1] "Decretum Dei aeternum horribile."

[2] See below. Chapter X, section 3.

{182}

CHAPTER IV

FRANCE

SECTION 1. RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION

[Sidenote: France]

Though, at the opening of the sixteenth century, the French may have attained to no greater degree of national self-consciousness than had the Germans, they had gone much farther in the construction of a national state. The significance of this evolution, one of the strongest tendencies of modern history, is that it squares the outward political condition of the people with their inward desires. When once a nation has come to feel itself such, it cannot be happy until its polity is united in a homogeneous state, though the reverse is also true,--that national feeling is sometimes the result as well as the cause of political union. With the growth of a common language and of common ideals, and with the improvement of the methods of communication, the desire of the people for unity became stronger and stronger, until it finally overcame the centrifugal forces of feudalism and of particularism. These were so strong in Germany that only a very imperfect federation could be formed by way of national government, but in France, though they were still far from moribund, external pressure and the growth of the royal power had forged the various provinces into a nation such as it exists today. The most independent of the old provinces, Brittany, was now united to the crown by the marriage of its duchess Anne to Louis XII. [Sidenote: Louis XII, 1498-1515]

{183}

[Transcriber's note: "d." has been used here as a substitute for the "dagger" symbol (Unicode U+2020) that signifies the person's year of death.]

Geographically, France was nearly the same four hundred years ago as it is today, save that the eastern {184} frontier was somewhat farther west. The line then ran west of the three Bishoprics, Verdun, Metz and Toul, west of Franche Comté, just east of Lyons and again west of Savoy and Nice.

Politically, France was then one of a group of semi-popular, semi-autocratic monarchies. The rights of the people were asserted by the States General which met from time to time, usually at much longer intervals than the German Diets or the English Parliaments, and by the Parlements of the various provinces. These latter were rather high courts of justice than legislative assemblies, but their right to register new laws gave them a considerable amount of authority. The Parlement of Paris was the most conspicuous and perhaps the most powerful.

[Sidenote: Concordat, 1516]

The power of the monarch, resting primarily on the support of the bourgeois class, was greatly augmented by the Concordat of 1516, which made the monarch almost the supreme head of the Gallican church. For two centuries the crown had been struggling to attain this position. It was because so large a degree of autonomy was granted to the national church that the French felt satisfied not to go to the extreme of secession from the Roman communion. It was because the king had already achieved a large control over his own clergy that he felt it unnecessary or inadvisable to go to the lengths of the Lutheran princes and of Henry VIII. In that one important respect the Concordat of Bologna took the place of the Reformation.

[Sidenote: Francis I, 1515-47]

Francis I was popular and at first not unattractive. Robust, fond of display, ambitious, intelligent enough to dabble in letters and art, he piqued himself on being chivalrous and brave. But he wasted his life and ruined his health in the pursuit of pleasure. His face, as it has come down to us in contemporary paintings, is disagreeable. He was, as with unusual candor a {185} contemporary observer put it, a devil even to the extent of considerably looking it.

While to art and letters Francis gave a certain amount of attention, he usually from mere indolence allowed the affairs of state to be guided by others. Until the death of his mother, Louise of Savoy, [Sidenote: 1531] he was ruled by her. Thereafter the Constable Anne de Montmorency was his chief minister. The policy followed was the inherited one which was, to a certain point, necessary in the given conditions. In domestic affairs, the king or his advisors endeavored to increase the power of the crown at the expense of the nobles. The last of the great vassals strong enough to assert a quasi-independence of the king was Charles of Bourbon. [Sidenote: 1523-4] He was arrested and tried by the Parlement of Paris, which consistently supported the crown. Fleeing from France he entered the service of Charles V, [Sidenote: 1526] and his restoration was made an article of the treaty of Madrid. His death in the sack of Rome closed the incident in favor of the king. [Sidenote: May, 1527]

The foreign policy of France was a constant struggle, now by diplomacy, now by arms, with Charles V. The principal remaining powers of Europe, England, Turkey and the pope, threw their weight now on one side now on the other of the two chief antagonists. Italy was the field of most of the battles. Francis began his reign by invading that country and defeating the Swiss at Marignano, thus conquering Milan. [Sidenote: September 14-15, 1515] The campaigns in Italy and Southern France culminated in the disastrous defeat of the French at Pavia. [Sidenote: February 24, 1525] Francis fought in person and was taken prisoner. "Of all things nothing is left me but honor and life," he wrote his mother.

Francis hoped that he would be freed on the payment of ransom according to the best models of chivalry. He found, however, when he was removed to {186} Madrid in May, that his captor intended to exact the last farthing of diplomatic concession. Discontent in France and the ennui and illness of the king finally forced him to sign a most disadvantageous treaty, [Sidenote: January 14, 1526] renouncing the lands of Burgundy, Naples and Milan, and ceding lands to Henry VIII. The king swore to the document, pledged his knightly honor, and as additional securities married Eleanor the sister of Charles and left two of his sons as hostages.

Even when he signed it, however, he had no intention of executing the provisions of the treaty which, he secretly protested, had been wrung from him by force. The deputies of Burgundy refused to recognize the right of France to alienate them. Henry VIII at once made an alliance against the "tyranny and pride" of the emperor. Charles was so chagrined that he challenged Francis to a duel. This opera bouffe performance ended by each monarch giving the other "the lie in the throat."

Though France succeeded in making with new allies, the pope and Venice, the League of Cognac, [Sidenote: May, 1526] and though Germany was at that time embarrassed by the Turkish invasion, the ensuing war turned out favorably to the emperor. The ascendancy of Charles was so marked that peace again had to be made in his favor in 1529. The treaty of Cambrai, as it was called, was the treaty of Madrid over again except that Burgundy was kept by France. She gave up, however, Lille, Douai and other territory in the north and renounced her suzerainty over Milan and Naples. Francis agreed to pay a ransom of two million crowns for his sons. Though he was put to desperate straits to raise the money, levying a 40 per cent. income tax on the clergy and a 10 per cent. income tax on the nobles, he finally paid the money and got back his children in 1530.

By this time France was so exhausted, both in {187} money and men, that a policy of peace was the only one possible for some years. Montmorency, the principal minister of the king, continued by an active diplomacy to stir up trouble for Charles. While suppressing Lutherans at home he encouraged the Schmalkaldic princes abroad, going to the length of inviting Melanchthon to France in 1535. With the English minister Cromwell he came to an agreement, notwithstanding the Protestant tendencies of his policy. An alliance was also made with the Sultan Suleiman, secretly in 1534, and openly proclaimed in 1536. In order to prepare for the military strife destined to be renewed at the earliest practical moment, an ordinance of 1534 reorganized and strengthened the army.

Far more important for the life of France than her incessant and inconclusive squabbling with Spain was the transformation passing over her spirit. It is sometimes said that if the French kings brought nothing else back from their campaigns in Italy they brought back the Renaissance. [Sidenote: Reformation] There is a modicum of truth in this, for there are some traces of Italian influence before the reign of Francis I. But the French spirit hardly needed this outside stimulus. It was awakening of itself. Scholars like William Budé and the Estiennes, thinkers like Dolet and Rabelais, poets like Marot, were the natural product of French soil. Everywhere, north of the Alps no less than south, there was a spontaneous efflorescence of intellectual activity.

The Reformation is often contrasted or compared with the Renaissance. In certain respects, where a common factor can be found, this may profitably be done. But it is important to note how different in kind were the two movements. One might as well compare Darwinism and Socialism in our own time. The one was a new way of looking at things, a fresh {188} intellectual start, without definite program or organization. The other was primarily a thesis: a set of tenets the object of which was concrete action. The Reformation began in France as a school of thought, but it soon grew to a political party and a new church, and finally it evolved into a state within the state.

[Sidenote: Christian Renaissance]

Though it is not safe to date the French Reformation before the influence of Luther was felt, it is possible to see an indigenous reform that naturally prepared the way for it. Its harbinger was Lefèvre d'Étaples. This "little Luther" wished to purify the church, to set aside the "good works" thereof in favor of faith, and to make the Bible known to the people. He began to translate it in 1521, publishing the Gospels in June 1523 and the Epistles and Acts and Apocalypse in October and November. The work was not as good as that of Luther or Tyndale. It was based chiefly on the Vulgate, though not without reference to the Greek text. Lefèvre prided himself on being literal, remarking, with a side glance at Erasmus's Paraphrases, that it was dangerous to try to be more elegant than Scripture. He also prided himself on writing for the simple, and was immensely pleased with the favorable reception the people gave his work. To reach the hearts of the poor and humble he instituted a reform of preaching, instructing his friends to purge their homilies of the more grossly superstitious elements and of the scholastic theology. Instead of this they were to preach Christ simply with the aim of touching the heart, not of dazzling the mind.

Like-minded men gathering around Lefèvre formed a new school of thought. It was a movement of revival within the church; its leaders, wishing to keep all the old forms and beliefs, endeavored to infuse into them a new spirit. To some extent they were in conscious reaction against the intellectualism of Erasmus {189} and the Renaissance. On the other hand they were far from wishing to follow Luther, when he appeared, in his schism.

Among the most famous of these mystical reformers were William Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, and his disciple, Margaret d'Angoulême, sister of Francis I. Though a highly talented woman Margaret was weak and suggestible. She adored her dissolute brother and was always, on account of her marriages, first with Charles, duke of Alençon, [Sidenote: 1509] and then with Henry d'Albret, king of Navarre, [Sidenote: 1527] put in the position of a suppliant for his support. She carried on an assiduous correspondence with Briçonnet as her spiritual director, being attracted first by him and then by Luther, chiefly, as it seems, through the wish to sample the novelty of their doctrines. She wrote The Mirror of the Sinful Soul in the best style of penitent piety. [Sidenote: 1531] Its central idea is the love of God and of the "debonnaire" Jesus. She knew Latin and Italian, studied Greek and Hebrew, and read the Bible regularly, exhorting her friends to do the same. She coquetted with the Lutherans, some of whom she protected in France and with others of whom in Germany she corresponded. She was strongly suspected of being a Lutheran, though a secret one. Capito dedicated to her a commentary on Hosea; Calvin had strong hopes of winning her to an open profession, but was disappointed. Her house, said he, which might have become the family of Jesus Christ, harbored instead servants of the devil. Throughout life she kept the accustomed Catholic rites, and wrote with much respect to Pope Paul III. But fundamentally her religious idealism was outside of any confession.

This mystically pious woman wrote, in later life, the Heptameron, a book of stories published posthumously. Modelled on the Decameron, it consists {190} almost entirely of licentious stories, told without reprobation and with gusto. If the mouth speaketh from the fullness of the heart she was as much a sensualist in thought as her brother was in deed. The apparent contradictions in her are only to be explained on the theory that she was one of those impressionable natures that, chameleon-like, always take on the hue of their environment.

But though the work of Lefèvre and of Briçonnet, who himself gave his clergy an example of simple, biblical preaching, won many followers not only in Meaux but in other cities, it would never have produced a religious revolt like that in Germany. The Reformation was an importation into France; "The key of heresy," as John Bouchet said in 1531, "was made of the fine iron of Germany." At first almost all the intellectuals hailed Luther as an ally. Lefèvre sent him a greeting in 1519, and in the same year Budé spoke well of him. His books were at this time approved even by some doctors of the Sorbonne. But it took a decade of confusion and negation to clarify the situation sufficiently for the French to realize the exact import of the Lutheran movement, which completely transformed the previously existing policy of Lefèvre. The chief sufferer by the growth of Lutheranism was not at first the Catholic church but the party of Catholic reform. The schism rent the French evangelicals before it seriously affected the church. Some of them followed the new light and others were forced back into a reactionary attitude.

[Sidenote: Luther's books.]

The first emissaries of Luther in France were his books. Froben exported a volume containing nearly all he had published up to October, 1518, immediately and in large quantities to Paris. In 1520 a student there wrote that no books were more quickly bought. At first only the Latin ones were intelligible to the {191} French, but there is reason to believe that very early translations into the vernacular were made, though none of this period have survived. It was said that the books, which kept pouring in from Frankfort and Strassburg and Basle, excited the populace against the theologians, for the people judged them by the newly published French New Testament. A bishop complained that the common people were seduced by the vivacity of the heretic's style. [Sidenote: 1523]

It did not take the Sorbonne long to define its position as one of hostility. The university, which had been lately defending the Gallican liberties and had issued an appeal from pope to future council, was one of the judges selected by the disputants of the Leipzig debate. Complete records of the speeches, taken by notaries, were accordingly forwarded to Paris by Duke George of Saxony, with a request for an opinion. After brief debate the condemnation of Luther by the university was printed. [Sidenote: April 15, 1521]

Neither was the government long in taking a position. That it should be hostile was a foregone conclusion. Francis hated Lutheranism because he believed that it tended more to the overthrow of kingdoms and monarchies than to the edification of souls. He told Aleander, the papal nuncio, that he thought Luther a rascal and his doctrine pernicious. [Sidenote: March, 1521]

[Sidenote: April 1523]

The king was energetically seconded by the Parlement of Paris. A royal edict provided that no book should be printed without the imprimatur of the university. The king next ordered the extirpation of the errors of Martin Luther of Saxony, and, having begun by burning books, continued, as Erasmus observed was usually the case, by burning people. The first to suffer was John Vallière. At the same time Briçonnet was summoned to Paris, [Sidenote: 1523] sharply reprimanded for leniency to heretics and fined two hundred livres, in {192} consequence of which he issued two decrees against the heresy, charging it with attempting to subvert the hierarchy and to abolish sacerdotal celibacy. [Sidenote: 1524] When Lefèvre's doctrines were condemned, he submitted; those of his disciples who failed to do so were proscribed. But the efforts of the government became more strenuous after 1524. Francis was at this time courting the assistance of the pope against the emperor, and moreover he was horrified by the outbreak of the Peasants' War in Germany. Convinced of the danger of allowing the new sect to propagate itself any further he commanded the archbishops and bishops of his realm to "proceed against those who hold, publish and follow the heresies, errors and doctrines of Martin Luther." [Sidenote: 1525] Lefèvre and some of his friends fled to Strassburg. Arrests and executions against those who were sometimes called "heretics of Meaux," and sometimes Lutherans, followed.

The theologians did not leave the whole burden of the battle to the government. A swarm of anti-Lutheran tracts issued from the press. Not only the heresiarch, but Erasmus and Lefèvre were attacked. Their translations of the Bible were condemned as blasphemies against Jerome and against the Holy Ghost and as subverting the foundations of the Christian religion. Luther's sacramental dogmas and his repudiation of monastic vows were refuted.

Nevertheless the reform movement continued. At this stage it was urban, the chief centers being Paris, Meaux, and Lyons. Many merchants and artisans were found among the adherents of the new faith. While none of a higher rank openly professed it, theology became, under the lead of Margaret, a fashionable subject. Conventicles were formed to read the Bible in secret not only among the middle classes but also at court. Short tracts continued to be the best {193} methods of propaganda, and of these many were translations. Louis de Berquin of Artois, [Sidenote: Berquin, 1490-1529] a layman, proved the most formidable champion of the new opinions. Though he did little but translate other men's work he did that with genius. His version of Erasmus's Manual of a Christian Knight was exquisitely done, and his version of Luther's Tesseradecas did not fall short of it. Tried and condemned in 1523, he was saved by the king at the behest of Margaret. [Sidenote: 1526] The access of rigor during the king's captivity gave place to a momentary tolerance. Berquin, who had been arrested, was liberated, and Lefèvre recalled from exile. But the respite was brief. Two years later, Berquin was again arrested, tried, condemned, and executed speedily to prevent reprieve on April 17, 1529. But the triumph of the conservatives was more apparent than real. Lutheranism continued to gain silently but surely.

While the Reformation was growing in strength and numbers, it was also becoming more definite and coherent. Prior to 1530 it was almost impossible to tell where Lutheranism began and where it ended. There was a large, but vague and chaotic public opinion of protest against the existing order. But after 1530 it is possible to distinguish several parties, three of which at first reckoned among the supporters of the Reformation, now more or less definitely separated themselves from it. The first of these was the party of Meaux, the leaders of which submitted to the government and went their own isolated way. Then there was a party of Erasmian reform, mainly intellectual but profoundly Christian. Its leader, William Budé, felt, as did Erasmus, that it was possible to unite the classical culture of the Renaissance with a purified Catholicism. Attached to the church, and equally repelled by some of the dogmas and by the apparent {194} social effects of the Reformation, Budé, who had spoken well of Luther in 1519, repudiated him in 1521.

[Sidenote: Humanists]

Finally there was the party of the "Libertines" or free-thinkers, the representatives of the Renaissance pure and simple. Revolutionaries in their own way, consciously rebels against the older culture of the Middle Ages, though prepared to canvass the new religion and to toy with it, even to use it as an ally against common enemies, the interest of these men was fundamentally too different from that of the Reformers to enable them to stand long on the same platform. There was Clement Marot, [Sidenote: Marot] a charming but rather aimless poet, a protégé of Margaret and the ornament of a frivolous court. Though his poetic translation of the Psalms became a Protestant book, his poetry is often sensual as well as sensuous. Though for a time absenting himself from court he re-entered it in 1536 at the same time "abjuring his errors."

[Sidenote: Rabelais]

Of the same group was Francis Rabelais, whose Pantagruel appeared in 1532. Though he wrote Erasmus saying that he owed all that he was to him, he in fact appropriated only the irony and mocking spirit of the humanist without his deep underlying piety. He became a universal skeptic, and a mocker of all things. The "esprit gaulois," beyond all others alive to the absurdities and inconsistency of things, found in him its incarnation. He ridiculed both the "pope-maniacs" and the "pope-phobes," the indulgence-sellers and the inquisitors, the decretals "written by an angel" and the Great Schism, priests and kings and doubting philosophers and the Scripture. Paul III called him "the vagabond of the age." Calvin at first reckoned him among those who "had relished the gospel," but when he furiously retorted that he considered Calvin "a demoniacal imposter," the theologian of Geneva loosed against him a furious invective in his {195} Treatise on Offences. Rabelais was now called "a Lucian who by his diabolic fatuity had profaned the gospel, that holy and sacred pledge of life eternal." William Farel had in mind Rabelais's recent acceptance from the court of the livings of Meudon and St. Christophe de Jambet, when he wrote Calvin on May 25, 1553: "I fear that avarice, that root of evil, has extinguished all faith and piety in the poets of Margaret. Judas, having sold Christ and taken the biretta, instead of Christ has that hard master Satan." [1]

[Sidenote: Catholic reform]

The stimulus given by the various attacks on the church, both Protestant and infidel, showed itself promptly in the abundant spirit of reform that sprang up in the Catholic fold. The clergy and bishop braced themselves to meet the enemy; they tried in some instances to suppress scandals and amend their lives; they brushed up their theology and paid more attention to the Bible and to education.

But the "Lutheran contagion" continued to spread and grow mightily. In 1525 it was found only at Paris, Meaux, Lyons, Grenoble, Bourges, Tours and Alençon. Fifteen years later, though it was still confined largely to the cities and towns, there were centers of it in every part of France except in Brittany. The persecution at Paris only drove the heretics into hiding or banished them to carry their opinions broadcast over the land. The movement swept from the north and east. The propaganda was not the work of one class but of all save that of the great nobles. It was not yet a social or class affair, but a purely intellectual and religious one. It is impossible to {196} estimate the numbers of the new sect. In 1534 Aleander said there were thirty thousand Lutherans in Paris alone. On the contrary René du Bellay said that there were fewer in 1533 than there were ten years, previous. [Sidenote: Protestant progress] True it is that the Protestants were as yet weak, and were united rather in protest against the established order than as a definite and cohesive party. Thus, the most popular and successful slogans of the innovators were denunciation of the priests as anti-Christs and apostates, and reprobation of images and of the mass as idolatry. Other catchwords of the reformers were, "the Bible" and "justification by faith." The movement was without a head and without organization. Until Calvin furnished these the principal inspiration came from Luther, but Zwingli and the other German and Swiss reformers were influential. More and more, Lefèvre and his school sank into the background.

For a time it seemed that the need of leadership was to be supplied by William Farel. His learning, his eloquence, and his zeal, together with the perfect safety of action that he found in Switzerland, were the necessary qualifications. The need for a Bible was at first met by the version of Lefèvre, printed in 1532. But the Catholic spirit of this work, based on the Vulgate, was distasteful to the evangelicals. Farel asked Olivetan, an excellent philologist, to make a new version, which was completed by February 1535. Calvin wrote the preface for it. It was dedicated to "the poor little church of God." In doctrine it was thoroughly evangelical, replacing the old "évêques" and "prêtres" by "surveillants" and "anciens," and omitting some of the Apocrypha.

Encouraged by their own growth the Protestants became bolder in their attacks on the Catholics. The situation verged more and more towards violence; {197} neither side, not even the weaker, thought of tolerance for both. On the night of October 17-18 some placards, written by Anthony de Marcourt, were posted up in Paris, Orleans, Rouen, Tours and Blois and on the doors of the king's chamber at Amboise. They excoriated the sacrifice of the mass as a horrible and intolerable abuse invented by infernal theology and directly counter to the true Supper of our Lord. The government was alarmed and took strong steps. Processions were instituted to appease God for the sacrilege. Within a month two hundred persons were arrested, twenty of whom were sent to the scaffold and the rest banished after confiscation of their goods.

But the government could not afford to continue an uninterruptedly rigorous policy. The Protestants found their opportunity in the exigencies of the foreign situation. In 1535 Francis was forced by the increasing menace of the Hapsburgs to make alliance not only with the infidel but with the Schmalkaldic League. He would have had no scruples in supporting abroad the heresy he suppressed at home, but he found the German princes would accept his friendship on no terms save those of tolerance to French Protestants. Accordingly on July 16, 1535, Francis was obliged to publish an edict ordering persecution to cease and liberating those who were in prison for conscience's sake.

But the respite did not last long. New rigors were undertaken in April 1538. Marot retracted his errors, and Rabelais, while not fundamentally changing his doctrine, greatly softened, in the second edition of his Pantagruel, [Sidenote: 1542] the abusive ridicule he had poured on the Sorbonne. But by this time a new era was inaugurated. The deaths of Erasmus and Lefèvre in 1536 gave the coup de grace to the party of the Christian {198} Renaissance, and the publication of Calvin's Institutes in the same year finally gave the French Protestants a much needed leader and standard.

[1] Harvard Theological Review, 1919, p. 209. Margaret had died several years before, but Rabelais was called her poet because he had claimed her protection and to her wrote a poem in 1545. Oeuvres de Rabelais, ed. A. Lefranc, 1912, i, pp. xxiii, cxxxix. Cf. also Calvin's letter to the Queen of Navarre, April 28, 1545. Opera, xii, pp. 65 f.

SECTION 2. THE CALVINIST PARTY. 1536-1559

[Sidenote: Truce of Nice, 1538]

The truce of Nice providing for a cessation of hostilities between France and the Hapsburgs for ten years, was greeted with much joy in France. Bonfires celebrated it in Paris, and in every way the people made known their longing for peace. Little the king cared for the wishes of his loyal subjects when his own dignity, real or imagined, was at stake. The war with Charles, that cursed Europe like an intermittent fever, broke out again in 1542. Again France was the aggressor and again she was worsted. The emperor invaded Champagne in person, arriving, in 1544, at a point within fifty miles of Paris. As there was no army able to oppose him it looked as if he would march as a conqueror to the capital of his enemy. But he sacrificed the advantage he had over France to a desire far nearer his heart, that of crushing his rebellious Protestant subjects. Already planning war with the League of Schmalkalden he wished only to secure his own safety from attack by his great rival. [Sidenote: Treaty of Crépy, 1544] The treaty made at Crépy was moderate in its terms and left things largely as they were.

[Sidenote: Henry II, 1547-59]

On March 31, 1547, Francis I died and was succeeded by his son, Henry II, a man of large, strong frame, passionately fond of all forms of exercise, especially of hunting and jousting. He had neither his father's versatility nor his fickleness nor his artistic interests. His policy was influenced by the aim of reversing his father's wishes and of disgracing his father's favorites.

[Sidenote: 1533]

While his elder brother was still alive, Henry had married Catharine de' Medici, a daughter of Lorenzo {199} II de' Medici of Florence. The girl of fourteen in a foreign country was uncomfortable, especially as it was felt, after her husband became Dauphin, that her rank was not equal to his. The failure to have any children during the first ten years of marriage made her position not only unpleasant but precarious, but the birth of her first son made her unassailable. In rapid succession she bore ten children, seven of whom survived childhood. Though she had little influence on affairs of state during her husband's reign, she acquired self-confidence and at last began to talk and act as queen.

[Sidenote: Diana of Poitiers]

At the age of seventeen Henry fell in love with a woman of thirty-six, Diana de Poitiers, to whom his devotion never wavered until his death, when she was sixty. Notwithstanding her absolute ascendancy over her lover she meddled little with affairs of state.

[Sidenote: Admiral Coligny, 1519-72]

The direction of French policy at this time fell largely into the hands of two powerful families. The first was that of Coligny. Of three brothers the ablest was Gaspard, Admiral of France, a firm friend of Henry's as well as a statesman and warrior. Still more powerful was the family of Guise, the children of Claude, Duke of Guise, who died in 1527. [Sidenote: Francis of Guise] The eldest son, Francis, Duke of Guise, was a great soldier. His brother, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, won a high place in the councils of state, and his sister Mary, by her marriage with James V of Scotland, brought added prestige to the family. The great power wielded by this house owed much to the position of their estates, part of which were fiefs of the French king and part subject to the Empire. As suited their convenience they could act either as Frenchmen or as foreign nobles.

[Sidenote: Expansion]

Under Henry France enjoyed a period of expansion such as she had not had for many years. The {200} perpetual failures of Francis were at last turned into substantial successes. This was due in large part to the civil war in Germany and to the weakness of England's rulers, Edward VI and Mary. It was due in part to the irrepressible energy of the French bourgeois and gentlemen, in part to the genius of Francis of Guise. The co-operation of France and Turkey, rather an identity of interests than a formal alliance, a policy equally blamed by contemporaries and praised by historians, continued. But the successes achieved were due most of all to the definite abandonment of the hope of Italian conquests and to the turning of French arms to regions more suitable for incorporation under her government.

War having been declared on Charles, the French seized the Three Bishoprics, at that time imperial fiefs, Metz, Verdun, and Toul. A large German army under Alva besieged Metz, but failed to overcome the brilliant defence of Francis of Guise. Worn by the attrition of repulsed assaults and of disease the imperial army melted away. When the siege was finally raised Guise distinguished himself as much by the humanity with which he cared for wounded and sick enemies as he had by his military prowess.

Six years later Guise added fresh laurels to his fame and new possessions to France by the conquest of Calais and Guines, the last English possessions in French territory. The loss of Calais, which had been held by England since the Hundred Years War, was an especially bitter blow to the islanders. These victories were partly counterbalanced by the defeats of French armies at St. Quentin on the Somme [Sidenote: 1557] and by Egmont at Gravelines. [Sidenote: 1558] When peace was signed at Cateau-Cambrésis, [Sidenote: Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, 1559] France renounced all her conquests in the south, but kept the Three Bishoprics and Calais, all of which became her permanent possessions.

[Sidenote: Calvinism]

{201} While France was thus expanding her borders, the internal revolution matured rapidly. The last years of Francis and the reign of Henry II saw a prodigious growth of Protestantism. What had begun as a sect now became, by an evolution similar to that experienced in Germany, a powerful political party. It is the general fate of new causes to meet at first with opposition due to habit and the instinctive reaction of almost all minds against "the pain of a new idea." But if the cause is one suited to the spirit and needs of the age, it gains more and more supporters, slowly if left to itself, rapidly if given good organization and adequate means of presenting its claims. The thorough canvassing of an idea is absolutely essential to win it a following. Now, prior to 1536, the Protestants had got a considerable amount of publicity as well through their own writings as through the attacks of their enemies. But not until Calvin settled at Geneva and began to write extensively in French, was the cause presented in a form capable of appealing to the average Frenchman. Calvin gave not only the best apology for his cause, but also furnished it with a definite organization, and a coherent program. He supplied the dogma, the liturgy, and the moral ideas of the new religion, and he also created ecclesiastical, political, and social institutions in harmony with it. A born leader, he followed up his work with personal appeals. His vast correspondence with French Protestants shows not only much zeal but infinite pains and considerable tact in driving home the lessons of his printed treatises.

Though the appeal of Calvin's dogmatic system was greater to an age interested in such things and trained to regard them as highly important, than we are likely to suppose at present, this was not Calvinism's only or even its main attraction to intelligent people. Like {202} every new and genuine reform Calvinism had the advantage of arousing the enthusiasm of a small but active band of liberals. The religious zeal as well as the moral earnestness of the age was naturally drawn to the Protestant side. As the sect was persecuted, no one joined it save from conscientious motives. Against the laziness or the corruption of the prelates, too proud or too indifferent to give a reason for their faith, the innovators opposed a tireless energy in season and out of season; against the scandals of the court and the immorality of the clergy they raised the banner of a new and stern morality; to the fires of martyrdom they replied with the fires of burning faith.

The missionaries of the Calvinists were very largely drawn from converted members of the clergy, both secular and regular, and from those who had made a profession of teaching. For the purposes of propaganda these were precisely the classes most fitted by training and habit to arouse and instruct the people. Tracts were multiplied, and they enjoyed, notwithstanding the censures of the Sorbonne, a brisk circulation. The theater was also made a means of propaganda, and an effective one.

Picardy continued to be the stronghold of the Protestants throughout this period, though they were also strong at Meaux and throughout the north-east, at Orleans, in Normandy, and in Dauphiné. Great progress was also made in the south, which later became the most Protestant of all the sections of France.

[Sidenote: Catholic measures]

Catholics continued to rely on force. There was a counter-propaganda, emanating from the University of Paris, but it was feeble. The Jesuits, in the reign of Henry II, had one college at Paris and two in Auvergne; otherwise there was hardly any intellectual effort made to overcome the reformers. Indeed, the Catholics hardly had the munitions for such a combat. {203} Apart from the great independents, holding themselves aloof from all religious controversy, the more intelligent and enterprising portion of the educated class had gone over to the enemy.

But the government did its best to supply the want of argument by the exercise of authority. New and severe edicts against "the heresies and false doctrines of Luther and his adherents and accomplices" were issued. The Sorbonne prohibited the reading and sale of sixty-five books by name, including the works of Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Dolet, and Marot, and all translations of the Bible issued by the publishing house of Estienne.

The south of France had in earlier centuries been prolific in sects claiming a Protestantism older than that of Augsburg. Like the Bohemian Brethren they eagerly welcomed the Calvinists as allies and were rapidly enrolled in the new church. Startled by the stirring of the spirit of reform, the Parlement of Aix, acting in imitation of Simon de Monfort, [Sidenote: 1540] ordered two towns, Merindol and Cabrières, destroyed for their heresy. The sentence was too drastic for the French government to sanction immediately; it was therefore postponed by command of the king, but it was finally executed, at least in part. [Sidenote: 1545] A ghastly massacre took place in which eight hundred or more of the Waldenses perished. A cry of horror was raised in Germany, in Switzerland, and even in France, from which the king himself recoiled in terror.

Only a few days after his accession Henry issued an edict against blasphemy, and this was followed by a number of laws against heresy. A new court of justice was created to deal with heretics. [Sidenote: October 8, 1547] From its habit of sending its victims to the stake it soon became known as the Chambre Ardente. Its powers were so extensive that the clergy protested against them as {204} infringements of their rights. In its first two years it pronounced five hundred sentences,--and what sentences! Even in that cruel age its punishments were frightful. Burning alive was the commonest. If the heretic recanted on the scaffold he was strangled before the fire was lit; if he refused to recant his tongue was cut out. [Sidenote: June, 1551] Those who were merely suspected were cast into dungeons from which many never came out alive. Torture was habitually used to extract confession. For those who recanted before sentence milder, but still severe, punishments were meted out: imprisonment and various sorts of penance. By the edict of Chateaubriand a code of forty-six articles against heresy was drawn up, and the magistrate empowered to put suspected persons under surveillance.

In the face of this fiery persecution the conduct of the Calvinists was wonderfully fine. They showed great adroitness in evading the law by all means save recantation and great astuteness in using what poor legal means of defence were at their disposal. On the other hand they suffered punishment with splendid constancy and courage, very few failing in the hour of trial, and most meeting death in a state of exaltation. Large numbers found refuge in other lands. During the reign of Henry II fourteen hundred fled to Geneva, not to mention the many who settled in the Netherlands, England, and Germany.

[Sidenote: Protestant growth]

Far from lying passive, the Calvinists took the offensive not only by writing and preaching but by attacking the images of the saints. Many of these were broken or defaced. One student in the university of Paris smashed the images of the Virgin and St. Sebastian and a stained glass window representing the crucifixion, and posted up placards attacking the cult of the saints. For this he was pilloried three times and then shut into a small hole walled in on all sides {205} save for an aperture through which food was passed him until he died.

Undaunted by persecution the innovators continued to grow mightily in numbers and strength. The church at Paris, though necessarily meeting in secret, was well organized. The people of the city assembled together in several conventicles in private houses. By 1559 there were forty fully organized churches (églises dressées) throughout France, and no less than 2150 conventicles or mission churches (églises plantées). Estimates of numbers are precarious, but good reason has been advanced to show that early in the reign of Henry the Protestants amounted to one-sixth of the population. Like all enthusiastic minorities they wielded a power out of proportion to their numbers. Increasing continually, as they did, it is probable, but for the hostility of the government, they would have been a match for the Catholics. At any rate they were eager to try their strength. A new and important fact was that they no longer consisted entirely of the middle classes. High officers of government and great nobles began to join their ranks. In 1546 the Bishop of Nîmes protected them openly, being himself suspected, probably with justice, of Calvinism. In 1548 a lieutenant-general was among those prosecuted for heresy. Anthony of Bourbon, a descendant of Louis IX, a son of the famous Charles, Constable of France, and husband of Joan d 'Albret, queen of Navarre, who was a daughter of Margaret d'Angoulême, became a Protestant. [Sidenote: 1555] About the same time the great Admiral Coligny was converted, though it was some years before he openly professed his faith. His brother, d'Andelot, also adhered to the Calvinists but was later persuaded by the king and by his wife to go back to the Catholic fold.

So strong had the Protestants become that the {206} French government was compelled against its will to tolerate them in fact if not in principle, and to recognize them as a party in the state with a quasi-constitutional position. The synod held at Paris in May, 1559, was evidence that the first stage in the evolution of French Protestantism was complete. This assembly drew up a creed called the Confessio Gallicana, setting forth in forty articles the purest doctrine of Geneva. Besides affirming belief in the common articles of Christianity, this confession asserted the dogmas of predestination, justification by faith only, and the distinctive Calvinistic doctrine of the eucharist. The worship of saints was condemned and the necessity of a church defined. For this church an organization and discipline modelled on that of Geneva was provided. The country was divided into districts, the churches within which were to send to a central consistory representatives both clerical and lay, the latter to be at least equal in number to the former. Over the church of the whole nation there was to be a national synod or "Colloque" to which each consistory was to send one clergyman and one or two lay elders.

Alarmed by the growth of the Protestants, Henry II was just preparing, after the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, to grapple with them more earnestly than ever, when he died of a wound accidentally received in a tournament. [Sidenote: July 10, 1559] His death, hailed by Calvin as a merciful dispensation of Providence, conveniently marks the ending of one epoch and the beginning of another. For the previous forty years France had been absorbed in the struggle with the vast empire of the Hapsburgs. For the next forty years she was completely occupied with the wars of religion. Externally, she played a weak rôle because of civil strife and of a contemptible government. Indeed, all her interests, both foreign and domestic, were from this {207} time forgotten in the intensity of the passions aroused by fanaticism. The date of Henry's demise also marks a change in the evolution of the French government. Hitherto, for some centuries, the trend had been away from feudalism to absolute monarchy. The ideal, "une foi, une loi, un roi" had been nearly attained. But this was now checked in two ways. The great nobles found in Calvinism an opportunity to assert their privileges against the king. The middle classes in the cities, especially in those regions where sectionalism was still strong, found the same opportunity but turned it to the advantage of republicanism. A fierce spirit of resistance not only to the prelates but to the monarch, was born. There was even a considerable amount of democratic sentiment. The poor clergy, who had become converted to Calvinism, were especially free in denouncing the inequalities of the old régime which made of the higher clergy great lords and left the humbler ministers to starve. The fact is that the message of Calvinism was essentially democratic in that the excellence of all Christians and their perfect equality before God was preached. [Sidenote: Equality preached] Interest in religion and the ability to discuss it was not confined to a privileged hierarchy, but was shared by the humblest. In a ribald play written in 1564 it is said:[1]

If faut que Jeanne [a servant] entre les pots Parle de reformation; La nouvelle religion A tant fait que les chambrières, Les serviteurs et les tripières En disputent publiquement.

But while the gay courtier and worldling sneered at the religion of market women and scullerymaids, he had little cause to scoff when he met the Protestants {208} in debate at the town hall of his city, or on the field of battle.

Finally, the year 1559 very well marks a stage in the development of French Protestantism. Until about 1536 it had been a mere unorganized opinion, rather a philosophy than a coherent body. From the date of the publication of the Institutes to that of the Synod of 1559 the new church had become organized, self-conscious, and definitely political in aims. But after 1559 it became more than a party; it became an imperium in imperio. There was no longer one government and one allegiance in France but two, and the two were at war.

[Sidenote: The Huguenots]

It was just at this time that the name of Huguenot applied to the Protestants, hitherto called "Lutherans," "heretics of Meaux" and, more rarely, "Calvinists." The origin of the word, first used at Tours in 1560, is uncertain. It may possibly come from "le roi Huguet" or "Hugon," a night spectre; the allusion then would be to the ghostly manner in which the heretics crept by night to their conventicles. Huguenot is also found as a family name at Belfort as early as 1425. It may possibly come from the term "Hausgenossen" as used in Alsace of those metal-workers who were not taken into the gild but worked at home, hence a name of contempt like the modern "scab." It may also come from the name of the Swiss Confederation, "Eidgenossen," and perhaps this derivation is the most likely, though it cannot be considered beyond doubt. Whatever the origin of the name the picture of the Huguenot is familiar to us. Of all the fine types of French manhood, that of the Huguenot is one of the finest. Gallic gaiety is tempered with earnestness; intrepidity is strengthened with a new moral fibre like that of steel. Except in the case of a few great lords, who joined the party without serious conviction, the high standard of the Huguenot morals was recognized even by their enemies. In an age of profligacy the "men of the religion," as they called themselves, walked the paths of rectitude and sobriety.

[1] Remy Belleau: La Reconnue, act 4, scene 2.

{209}

Charles, Duke of Bourbon, Constable of France, d. 1527 | | +-------------------------+-----+------------------+ | | | Anthony, Duke of Vendôme Charles, Cardinal Louis, Prince ==Joan d'Albret, Queen of of Bourbon of Condé | Navarre, d. 1562 | | Henry IV 1589-1610 ==(1)Margaret of France ==(2)Mary de' Medici

_____________________________________________________________________

[Transcriber's note: "d." has been used here as a substitute for the "dagger" symbol (Unicode U+2020) that signifies the person's year of death.]

{210}

SECTION 3. THE WARS OF RELIGION. 1559-1598

[Sidenote: Francis II, 1559-60]

Henry II was followed by three of his sons in succession, each of them, in different degrees and ways, a weakling. The first of them was Francis II, a delicate lad of fifteen, who suffered from adenoids. Child as he was he had already been married for more than a year to Mary Stuart, a daughter of James V of Scotland and a niece of Francis of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine. As she was the one passion of the morose and feeble king, who, being legally of age was able to choose his own ministers, the government of the realm fell into the strong hands of "the false brood of Lorraine." Fearing and hating these men above all others the Huguenots turned to the Bourbons for protection, but the king of Navarre was too weak a character to afford them much help. Finding in the press their best weapon the Protestants produced a flood of pamphlets attacking the Cardinal of Lorraine as "the tiger of France."

A more definite plan to rid the country of the hated tyranny was that known as the Conspiracy of Amboise. Godfrey de Barry, Sieur de la Renaudie, pledged several hundred Protestants to go in a body to present a petition to the king at Blois. How much further their intentions went is not known, and perhaps was not definitely formulated by themselves. The Venetian ambassador spoke in a contemporary dispatch of a plot to kill the cardinal and also the king if he would not assent to their counsels, and said that the conspirators relied, to justify this course, on the {211} declaration of Calvin that it was lawful to slay those who hindered the preaching of the gospel. Hearing of the conspiracy, Guise and his brother were ready. They transferred the court from Blois to Amboise, by which move they upset the plans of the petitioners and also put the king into a more defensible castle. Soldiers, assembled for the occasion, met the Huguenots as they advanced in a body towards Amboise, [Sidenote: The tumult of Amboise, March 1560] shot down La Renaudie and some others on the spot and arrested the remaining twelve hundred, to be kept for subsequent trial and execution. The suspicion that fastened on the prince of Condé, a brother of the king of Navarre, was given some color by his frank avowal of sympathy with the conspirators. Though the Guises pressed their advantage to the utmost in forbidding all future assemblies of heretics, the tumult of Amboise was vaguely felt, in the sultry atmosphere of pent-up passions, to be the avant-courier of a terrific storm.

The early death of the sickly king left the throne to his brother Charles IX, a boy of nine. [Sidenote: Charles IX, 1560-74] As he was a minor, the regency fell to his mother, Catharine de' Medici, who for almost thirty years was the real ruler of France. [Sidenote: Policy of Catharine de' Medici] Notwithstanding what Brantôme calls "ung embonpoint très-riche," she was active of body and mind. Her large correspondence partly reveals the secrets of her power: much tact and infinite pains to keep in touch with as many people and as many details of business as possible. Her want of beauty was supplied by gracious manners and an elegant taste in art. As a connoisseur and an indefatigable collector she gratified her love of the magnificent not only by beautiful palaces and gorgeous clothes, but in having a store of pictures, statues, tapestries, furniture, porcelain, silver, books, and manuscripts.

A "politique" to her fingertips, Catharine had neither sympathy nor patience with the fanatics who {212} would put their religion above peace and prosperity. Surrounded by men as fierce as lions, she showed no little of the skill and intrepidity of the tamer in keeping them, for a time, from each others' throats. Soon after Charles ascended the throne, she was almost hustled into domestic and foreign war by the offer of Philip II of Spain to help her Catholic subjects against the Huguenots without her leave. She knew if that were done that, as she scrawled in her own peculiar French, "le Roy mon fils nave jeames lantyere aubeysance," [1] and she was determined "que personne ne pent nous brouller en lamitie en la quele je desire que set deus Royaumes demeurent pendant mauye." [2] Through her goggle eyes she saw clearly where lay the path that she must follow. "I am resolved," she wrote, "to seek by all possible means to preserve the authority of the king my son in all things, and at the same time to keep the people in peace, unity and concord, without giving them occasion to stir or to change anything." Fundamentally, this was the same policy as that of Henry IV. That she failed where he succeeded is not due entirely to the difference in ability. In 1560 neither party was prepared to yield or to tolerate the other without a trial of strength, whereas a generation later many members of both parties were sick of war.

[Sidenote: December 13, 1560]

Just as Francis was dying, the States General met at Orleans. This body was divided into three houses, or estates, that of the clergy, that of the nobles, and that of the commons. The latter was so democratically chosen that even the peasants voted. Whether they had voted in 1484 is not known, but it is certain that they did so in 1560, and that it was in the interests of the crown to let them vote is shown by the increase in {213} the number of royal officers among the deputies of the third estate. The peasants still regarded the king as their natural protector against the oppression of the nobles.

The Estates were opened by Catharine's minister, Michael de L'Hôpital. Fully sympathizing with her policy of conciliation, he addressed the Estates as follows: [Sidenote: February 24, 1561] "Let us abandon those diabolic words, names of parties, factions and seditions:--Lutherans, Huguenots, Papists; let us not change the name of Christians." Accordingly, an edict was passed granting an amnesty to the Huguenots, nominally for the purpose of allowing them to return to the Catholic church, but practically interpreted without reference to this proviso.

But the government found it easier to pass edicts than to restrain the zealots of both parties. The Protestants continued to smash images; the Catholics to mob the Protestants. Paris became, in the words of Beza, "the city most bloody and murderous among all in the world." Under the combined effects of legal toleration and mob persecution the Huguenots grew mightily in numbers and power. Their natural leader, the King of Navarre, indeed failed them, for he changed his faith several times, his real cult, as Calvin remarked, being that of Venus. His wife, Joan d'Albret, however, became an ardent Calvinist.

At this point the government proposed a means of conciliation that had been tried by Charles V in Germany and had there failed. The leading theologians of both confessions were summoned to a colloquy at Poissy. [Sidenote: Colloquy of Poissy, August, 1561] Most of the German divines invited were prevented by politics from coming, but the noted Italian Protestant Peter Martyr Vermigli and Theodore Beza of Geneva were present. The debate turned on the usual points at issue, and was of course indecisive, {214} though the Huguenots did not hesitate to proclaim their own victory.

[Sidenote: January, 1562]

A fresh edict of toleration had hardly been issued when civil war was precipitated by a horrible crime. Some armed retainers of the Duke of Guise, coming upon a Huguenot congregation at Vassy in Champagne, [Sidenote: Massacre of Vassy, March 1, 1562] attacked them and murdered three hundred. A wild cry of fury rose from all the Calvinists; throughout the whole land there were riots. At Toulouse, for example, fighting in the streets lasted four days and four hundred persons perished. It was one of the worst years in the history of France. A veritable reign of terror prevailed everywhere, and while the crops were destroyed famine stalked throughout the land. Bands of robbers and ravishers, under the names of Christian parties but savages at heart, put the whole people to ransom and to sack. Indeed, the Wars of Religion were like hell; the tongue can describe them better than the imagination can conceive them. The whole sweet and pleasant land of France, from the Burgundian to the Spanish frontier, was widowed and desolated, her pride humbled by her own sons and her Golden Lilies trampled in the bloody mire. Foreign levy was called in to supply strength to fratricidal arms. The Protestants, headed by Condé and Coligny, raised an army and started negotiations with England. The Catholics, however, had the best of the fighting. They captured Rouen, defended by English troops, and, under Guise, defeated the Huguenots under Coligny at Dreux. [Sidenote: December 19, 1562]

[Sidenote: February 18, 1563]

Two months later, Francis of Guise was assassinated by a Protestant near Orleans. Coligny was accused of inciting the crime, which he denied, though he confessed that he was glad of it. [Sidenote: Edict of Amboise March 19, 1563] The immediate beneficiary of the death of the duke was not the Huguenot, {215} however, so much as Catharine de' Medici. Continuing to put into practise her policy of tolerance she issued an edict granting liberty of conscience to all and liberty of worship under certain restrictions. Great nobles were allowed to hold meetings for divine service according to the reformed manner in their own houses, and one village in each bailiwick was allowed to have a Protestant chapel.

How consistently secular was Catharine's policy became apparent at this time when she refused to publish the decrees of the Council of Trent, fearing that they might infringe on the liberties of the Gallican church. In this she had the full support of most French Catholics. She continued to work for religious peace. One of her methods was characteristic of her and of the time. She selected "a flying squadron" of twenty-four beautiful maids of honor of high rank and low principles to help her seduce the refractory nobles on both sides. In many cases she was successful. Condé, in love with one--or possibly with several--of these sirens, forgot everything else, his wife, his party, his religion. His death in 1569 threw the leadership of the Huguenots into the steadier and stronger grasp of Coligny.

But such means of dealing with a profoundly dangerous crisis were of course but the most wretched palliatives. The Catholic bigots would permit no dallying with the heretics. In 1567 they were strong enough to secure the disgrace of L'Hôpital and in the following year to extort a royal edict unconditionally forbidding the exercise of the reformed cult. The Huguenots again rebelled and in 1569 suffered two severe defeats [Sidenote: Huguenots defeated] at Jarnac and at Moncontour. The Catholics were jubilant, fully believing, as Sully says, that at last the Protestants would have to submit. But nothing is more remarkable than the apparently slight effect of military success or failure on the {216} strength and numbers of the two faiths. "We had beaten our enemies over and over again," cried the Catholic soldier Montluc in a rage, "we were winning by force of arms but they triumphed by means of their diabolical writings."

The Huguenots, however, did not rely entirely on the pen. Their stronghold was no longer in the north but was now in the south and west. The reason for this may be partly found in the preparation of the soil for their seed by the medieval heresies, but still more in the strong particularistic spirit of that region. The ancient provinces of Poitou and Guienne, Gascony and Languedoc, were almost as conscious of their southern and Provençal culture as they were of their French citizenship. The strength of the centralizing tendencies lay north of the Loire; in the south local privileges were more esteemed and more insisted upon. While Protestantism was persecuted by the government at Paris it was often protected by cities of the south. [Sidenote: La Rochelle] The most noteworthy of these was La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast near Bordeaux. Though coming late to the support of the Reformation, its conversion was thorough and lasting. To protect the new religion it successfully asserted its municipal freedom almost to the point of independence. Like the Dutch Beggars of the Sea its armed privateers preyed upon the commerce of Catholic powers, a mode of warfare from which the city derived immense booty.

The Huguenots tried but failed to get foreign allies. Neither England nor Germany sent them any help. [Sidenote: Battle of Mons, July 17, 1572] Their policy of supporting the revolt of the Low Countries against Spain turned out disastrously for themselves when the French under Coligny were defeated at Mons by the troops of Philip.

The Catholics now believed the time ripe for a decisive blow. Under the stimulus of the Jesuits they {217} had for a short time been conducting an offensive and effective propaganda. Leagues were formed to combat the organizations of the Huguenots, armed "Brotherhoods of the Holy Spirit" as they were called. The chief obstacle in their path seemed to be a small group of powerful nobles headed by Coligny. Catharine and the Guises resolved to cut away this obstacle with the assassin's knife. Charles, who was personally on good terms with Coligny, hesitated, but he was too weak a youth to hold out long. There seems to be good reason to believe that all the queen dowager and her advisers contemplated was the murder of a few leaders and that they did not foresee one of the most extensive massacres in history.

Her first attempt to have Coligny assassinated [Sidenote: August 22, 1572] aroused the anger of the Huguenot leaders and made them more dangerous than before. A better laid and more comprehensive plan was therefore carried out on the eve of St. Bartholomew's day. [Sidenote: Massacre of St. Bartholomew, August 24, to October 3] Early in the evening of August 23, Henry of Guise, a son of Duke Francis, and Coligny's bitterest personal enemy, went with armed men to the house of the admiral and murdered him. From thence they proceeded to the houses of other prominent Huguenots to slay them in the same manner. News of the man-hunt spread through the city with instant rapidity, the mob rose and massacred all the Huguenots they could find as well as a number of foreigners, principally Germans and Flemings. De Thou says that two thousand were slain in Paris before noon of August 24. A general pillage followed.

The king hesitated to assume responsibility for so serious a tumult. His letters of August 24 to various governors of provinces and to ambassadors spoke only of a fray between Guise and Coligny, and stated that he wished to preserve order. But with these very {218} letters he sent messengers to all quarters with verbal orders to kill all the leading Protestants. On August 27 he again wrote of it as "a great and lamentable sedition" originating in the desire of Guise to revenge his father on Coligny. The king said that the fury of the populace was such that he was unable to bring the remedy he wished, and he again issued directions for the preservation of order. But at the same time he declared that the Guises had acted at his command to punish those who had conspired against him and against the old religion. In fact, he gave out a rapid series of contradictory accounts and orders, and in the meantime, from August 25 to October 3 terrible series of massacres took place in almost all the provinces. [Sidenote: Other massacres] Two hundred Huguenots perished at Meaux, from 500 to 1000 at Orleans, a much larger number at Lyons. It is difficult to estimate the total number of victims. Sully, who narrowly escaped, says that 70,000 were slain. Hotman, another contemporary, says 50,000. Knowing how much figures are apt to be exaggerated even by judicious men, we must assume that this number is too large. On the other hand the lowest estimate given by modern Catholic investigators, 5000, is certainly too small. Probably between 10,000 and 20,000 is correct. Those who fell were the flower of the party.

Whatever may have been the precise degree of guilt of the French rulers, which in any case was very grave, they took no pains to conceal their exultation over an event that had at last, as they believed, ground their enemies to powder. In jubilant tone Catharine wrote to her son-in-law, Philip of Spain, that God had given her son the king of France the means "of wiping out those of his subjects who were rebellious to God and to himself." Philip sent his hearty congratulations and heard a Te Deum sung. The pope struck a medal {219} with a picture of an avenging angel and the legend, "Ugonotorum strages," and ordered an annual Te Deum which was, in fact, celebrated for a long time. But on the other hand a cry of horror arose from Germany and England. Elizabeth received the French ambassador dressed in mourning and declared to him that "the deed had been too bloody."

Though the triumph of the Catholics was loudly shouted, it was not as complete as they hoped. The Huguenots seemed cowed for a moment, but nothing is more remarkable than the constancy of the people. Recantations were extremely few. The Reformed pastors, nourished on the Old Testament, saw in the affliction that had befallen them nothing but the means of proving the faithful. Preparations for resistance were made at once in the principal cities of the south. [Sidenote: Siege of La Rochelle] La Rochelle, besieged by the royal troops, evinced a heroism worthy of the cause. While the men repulsed the furious assaults of the enemy the women built up the walls that crumbled under the powerful fire of the artillery. A faction of citizens who demanded surrender was sternly suppressed and the city held out until relief came from an unhoped quarter. The king's brother, Henry Duke of Anjou, was elected to the throne of Poland on condition that he would allow liberty of conscience to Polish Protestants. In order to appear consistent the French government therefore stopped for the moment the persecution of the Huguenots. The siege of La Rochelle was abandoned and a treaty made allowing liberty of worship in that city, in Nîmes and Montauban and in the houses of some of the great nobles.

In less than two years after the appalling massacre the Protestants were again strong and active. A chant of victory sounded from their dauntless ranks. More than ever before they became republican in principle. {220} Their pamphleteers, among them Hotman, fiercely attacked the government of Catharine, and asserted their rights.

Charles was a consumptive. The hemorrhages characteristic of his disease reminded him of the torrents of blood that he had caused to flow from his country. Broken in body and haunted by superstitious terrors the wretched man died on May 30, 1574. [Sidenote: Henry III, 1547-89] He was succeeded by his brother, Henry III, recently elected king of Poland, a man of good parts, interested in culture and in study, a natural orator, not destitute of intelligence. His mother's pet and spoiled child, brought up among the girls of the "flying squadron," he was in a continual state of nervous and sensual titillation that made him avid of excitement and yet unable to endure it. A thunderstorm drove him to hide in the cellar and to tears. He was at times overcome by fear of death and hell, and at times had crises of religious fervour. But his life was a perpetual debauch, ever seeking new forms of pleasure in strange ways. He would walk the streets at night accompanied by gay young rufflers in search of adventures. He had a passion for some handsome young men, commonly called "the darlings," whom he kept about him dressed as women.

His reign meant a new lease of power to his mother, who worshipped him and to whom he willingly left the arduous business of government. By this time she was bitterly hated by the Huguenots, who paid their compliments to her in a pamphlet entitled A wonderful Discourse on the Life, Deeds and Debauchery of Catharine de' Medici, perhaps written in part by the scholar Henry Estienne. She was accused not only of crimes of which she was really guilty, like the massacre of St. Bartholomew, but of having murdered {221} the dauphin Francis, her husband's elder brother, and others who had died natural deaths, and of having systematically depraved her children in order to keep the reins of authority in her own hands.

Frightened by the odium in which his mother was held, Henry III thought it wise to disavow all part or lot in St. Bartholomew and to concede to the Huguenots liberty of worship everywhere save in Paris and in whatever place the court might be for the moment.

So difficult was the position of the king that by this attempt to conciliate his enemies he only alienated his friends. The bigoted Catholics, finding the crown impotent, began to take energetic measures to help themselves. In 1576 they formed a League to secure the benefit of association. [Sidenote: The League] Henry Duke of Guise drew up the declaration that formed the constituent act of the League. It proposed "to establish the law of God in its entirety, to reinstate and maintain divine service according to the form and manner of the holy, Catholic and apostolic church," and also "to restore to the provinces and estates of this kingdom the rights, privileges, franchises, and ancient liberties such as they were in the time of King Clovis, the first Christian king." This last clause is highly significant as showing how the Catholics had now adopted the tactics of the Huguenots in appealing from the central government to the provincial privileges. It is exactly the same issue as that of Federalism versus States' Rights in American history; the party in power emphasizes the national authority, while the smaller divisions furnish a refuge for the minority.

The constituency of the League rapidly became large. The declaration of Guise was circulated throughout the country something like a monster petition, and those who wished bound themselves to support it. The {222} power of this association of Catholics among nobles and people soon made it so formidable that Henry III reversed his former policy, recognized the League and declared himself its head.

[Sidenote: Estates General of Blois]

The elections for the States General held at Blois in 1576 proved highly favorable to the League. The chief reason for their overwhelming success was the abstention of the Protestants from voting. In continental Europe it has always been and is now common for minorities to refuse to vote, the idea being that this refusal is in itself a protest more effective than a definite minority vote would be. To an American this seems strange, for it has been proved time and again that a strong minority can do a great deal to shape legislation. But the Huguenots reasoned differently, and so seated but one Protestant in the whole assembly, a deputy to the second, or noble, estate. The privileged orders pronounced immediately for the enforcement of religious unity, but in the Third Estate there was a warm debate. John Bodin, the famous publicist, though a Catholic, pleaded hard for tolerance. As finally passed, the law demanded a return to the old religion, but added the proviso that the means taken should be "gentle and pacific and without war." So impossible was this in practice that the government was again obliged to issue a decree granting liberty of conscience and restricted liberty of worship. [Sidenote: 1577]

Under the oppression of the ruinous civil wars the people began to grow more and more restless. The king was extremely unpopular. Perhaps the people might have winked even at such outrages against decency as were perpetrated by the king had not their critical faculties been sharpened by the growing misery of their condition. The wars had bankrupted both them and the government, and the desperate expedients of the latter to raise money only increased the poverty {223} of the masses. Every estate, every province, was urged to contribute as much as possible, and most of them replied, in humble and loyal tone, but firmly, begging for relief from the ruinous exactions. The sale of offices, of justice, of collectorships of taxes, of the administration, of the army, of the public domain, was only less onerous than the sale of monopolies and inspectorships of markets and ports. The only prosperous class seemed to be the government agents and contractors. In fact, for the first time in the history of France the people were becoming thoroughly disaffected and some of them semi-republican in feeling.

[Sidenote: 1584]

The king had no sons and when his only remaining brother died a new element of discord and perplexity was introduced in that the heir to the throne, Henry of Navarre, was a Protestant. Violent attacks on him were published in the pamphlet press. The League was revived in stronger form than before. Its head, Guise, selected as candidate for the throne the uncle of Henry of Navarre, Charles, Cardinal of Bourbon, a stupid and violent man of sixty-four. The king hastened to make terms with the League and commanded all Protestants to leave the country in six months. At this point the pope intervened to strengthen his cause by issuing the "Bull of Deprivation" [Sidenote: 1585] declaring Henry of Navarre incapable, as a heretic, of succeeding to the throne. Navarre at once denounced the bull as contrary to French law and invalid, and he was supported both by the Parlement of Paris and by some able pamphleteers. Hotman published his attack on the "vain and blind fulmination" of the pontiff.

[Sidenote: Battle of Coutras, October 20, 1587]

An appeal to arms was inevitable. At the battle of Coutras, the Huguenots, led by Henry of Navarre, won their first victory. While this increased {224} Navarre's power and his popularity with his followers, the majority of the people rallied to the League. In the "war of the three Henrys" as it was called, the king had more to fear from Henry of Guise than from the Huguenot. Cooped up at the Tuileries the monarch was under so irksome a restraint that he was finally obliged to regain freedom by flight, on May 12, 1588. The elections for the States General gave an enormous majority to the League. In an evil hour for himself the king resorted again to that much used weapon, assassination. By his order Guise was murdered. "Now I am king," he wrote with a sigh of relief. But he was mistaken. The League, more hostile than ever, swearing to avenge the death of its captain, was now frankly revolutionary.

It continued to exercise its authority under the leadership of a Committee of Sixteen. These gentlemen purged the still royalist Parlement of Paris. By the hostility of the League the king was forced to an alliance with Henry of Navarre. This is interesting as showing how completely the position of the two leading parties had become reversed. The throne, once the strongest ally of the church, was now supported chiefly by the Huguenots who had formerly been in rebellion. Indeed by this time "the wars of religion" had become to a very large extent dynastic and social.

On August 1, 1589, the king was assassinated by a Dominican fanatic. His death was preceded shortly by that of Catharine de' Medici.

[Sidenote: Henry IV, 1589-1610]

Henry IV was a man of thirty-five, of middle stature, but very hardy and brave. He was one of the most intelligent of the French kings, vigorous of brain as of body. Few could resist his delicate compliments and the promises he knew how to lavish. The glamour of his personality has survived even until now. In a song still popular he is called "the gallant king who knew {225} how to fight, to make love and to drink." He is also remembered for his wish that every peasant might have a fowl in his pot. His supreme desire was to see France, bleeding and impoverished by civil war, again united, strong and happy. He consistently subordinated religion to political ends. To him almost alone is due the final adoption of tolerance, not indeed as a natural right, but as a political expedient.

The difficulties with which he had to contend were enormous. The Catholics, headed by the Duke of Mayenne, a brother of Guise, agreed to recognize him for six months in order that he might have the opportunity of becoming reconciled to the church. But Mayenne, who wished to be elected king by the States General, soon commenced hostilities. The skirmish at Arques between the forces of Henry and Mayenne, resulting favorably to the former, was followed by the battle of Ivry. [Sidenote: Battle of Ivry, March 14, 1590] Henry, with two thousand horse and eight thousand foot, against eight thousand horse and twelve thousand foot of the League, addressed his soldiers in a stirring oration: "God is with us. Behold his enemies and ours; behold your king. Charge! If your standards fail you, rally to my white plume; you will find it on the road to victory and honor." At first the fortune of war went against the Huguenots, but the personal courage of the king, who, with "a terrible white plume" in his helmet led his cavalry to the attack, wrested victory from the foe.

[Sidenote: Siege of Paris]

From Ivry Henry marched to Paris, the headquarters of the League. With thirteen thousand soldiers he besieged this town of 220,000 inhabitants, garrisoned by fifty thousand troops. With their usual self-sacrificing devotion, the people of Paris held out against the horrors of famine. The clergy aroused the fanaticism of the populace, promising heaven to those who died; women protested that they would eat {226} their children before they would surrender. With provisions for one month, Paris held out for four. Dogs, cats, rats, and grass were eaten; the bones of animals and even of dead people were ground up and used for flour; the skins of animals were devoured. Thirteen thousand persons died of hunger and twenty thousand of the fever brought on by lack of food. But even this miracle of fanaticism could not have saved the capital eventually, but for the timely invasion of France from the north by the Duke of Parma, who joined Mayenne on the Marne. Henry raised the siege to meet the new menace, but the campaign of 1591 was fruitless for both sides.

[Sidenote: Anarchy]

France seemed to be in a state of anarchy under the operation of many and various forces. Pope Gregory XIV tried to influence the Catholics to unite against Henry, but he was met by protests from the Parlements in the name of the Gallican Liberties. The "Politiques" were ready to support any strong de facto government, but could not find it. The cities hated the nobles, and the republicans resented the "courteous warfare" which either side was said to wage on the other, sparing each other's nobles and slaughtering the commons.

[Sidenote: 1593]

At this point the States General were convoked at Paris by the League. So many provinces refused to send deputies that there were only 128 members out of a normal 505. A serial publication by several authors, called the Satyre Menippée, poured ridicule on the pretentious of the national assembly. Various solutions of the deadlock were proposed. Philip II of Spain offered to support Mayenne as Lieutenant General of France if the League would make his daughter, as the heiress through her mother, Elizabeth of Valois, queen. This being refused, Philip next proposed that the young Duke of Guise should marry his daughter {227} and become king. But this proposal also won little support. The enemies of Henry IV were conscious of his legitimate rights and jealous of foreign interference; the only thing that stood in the way of their recognizing him was his heresy.

[Sidenote: Henry's conversion]

Henry, finding that there seemed no other issue to an intolerable situation, at last resolved, though with much reluctance, to change his religion. On July 25, 1593, he abjured the Protestant faith, kneeling to the Archbishop of Bourges, and was received into the bosom of the Roman church. That his conversion was due entirely to the belief that "Paris was worth a mass" is, of course, plain. Indeed, he frankly avowed that he still scrupled at some articles, such as purgatory, the worship of the saints, and the power of the pope. And it must be remembered that his motives were not purely selfish. The alternative seemed to be indefinite civil war with all its horrors, and Henry deliberately but regretfully sacrificed his confessional convictions on the altar of his country.

The step was not immediately successful. The Huguenots were naturally enraged. The Catholics doubted the king's sincerity. At Paris the preachers of the League ridiculed the conversion from the pulpit. "My dog," sneered one of them, "were you not at mass last Sunday? Come here and let us offer you the crown." But the "politiques" rallied to the throne and the League rapidly melted away. The Satyre Menippée, supporting the interests of Henry, did much to turn public opinion in his favor.

A further impression was made by his coronation at Chartres in 1594. When the surrender of Paris followed, the king entered his capital to receive the homage of the Sorbonne and the Parlement of Paris. The superstitious were convinced of Henry's sincerity when he touched some scrofulous persons and they {228} were said to be healed. Curing the "king's evil" was one of the oldest attributes of royalty, and it could not be imagined that it would descend to an impostor.

Henry showed the wisest statesmanship in consolidating his power. He bought up those who still held out against him at their own price, remarking that whatever it cost it would be cheaper than fighting them. He showed a wise clemency in dealing with his enemies, banishing only about 130 persons. Next came absolution by Pope Clement VIII, who, after driving as hard a bargain as he could, finally granted it on September 17, 1595.

But even yet all danger was not past. Enraged at seeing France escape from his clutches, Philip of Spain declared war, and he could still count on the support of Mayenne and the last remnant of the League. The daring action of Henry at Fontaine-Française on June 5, 1595, where with three hundred horse he routed twelve hundred Spaniards, so discouraged his enemies that Mayenne hastened to submit, and peace was signed with Spain in 1598. The finances of the realm, naturally in a chaotic state, were brought to order and solvency by a Huguenot noble, the Duke of Sully, Henry's ablest minister.

The legal status of the Protestants was still to be settled. It was not changed by Henry's abjuration, and the king was determined at all costs to avoid another civil war. [Sidenote: Edict of Nantes, April 13, 1598] He therefore published the Edict of Nantes, declared to be perpetual and irrevocable. By it liberty of conscience was granted to all "without being questioned, vexed or molested," and without being "forced to do anything contrary to their religion." Liberty of worship was conceded in all places in which it had been practised for the last two years; i.e. in two places in every bailiwick except large towns, where services were to be held outside the walls, and {229} in the houses of the great nobles. Protestant worship was forbidden at Paris and for five leagues (twelve and one-half miles) outside the walls. Protestants had all other legal rights of Catholics and were eligible to all offices. To secure them in these rights a separate court of justice was instituted, a division of the Parlement of Paris to be called the Edict Chamber and to consist of ten Catholic and six Protestant judges. But a still stronger guarantee was given in their recognition as a separately organized state within the state. The king agreed to leave two hundred towns in their hands, some of which, like Montpellier, Montauban, and La Rochelle, were fortresses in which they kept garrisons and paid the governors. As they could raise 25,000 soldiers at a time when the national army in time of peace was only 10,000, their position seemed absolutely impregnable. So favorable was the Edict to the Huguenots that it was bitterly opposed by the Catholic clergy and by the Parlement of Paris. Only the personal insistence of the king finally carried it.

[Sidenote: Reasons for failure of French Protestantism]

Protestantism was stronger in the sixteenth century in France than it ever was thereafter. During the eighty-seven years while the Edict of Nantes was in force it lost much ground, and when that Edict was revoked by a doting king and persecution began afresh, the Huguenots were in no condition to resist. [Sidenote: 1685] From a total constituency at its maximum of perhaps a fifth or a sixth of the whole population, the Protestants have now sunk to less than two per cent. (650,000 out of 39,000,000). The history of the rise and decline of the Huguenot movement is a melancholy record of persecution and of heroism. How great the number of martyrs was can never be known accurately. Apart from St. Bartholomew there were several lesser massacres, the wear and tear of a generation of war, and {230} the unremitting pressure of the law that claimed hundreds of victims a year.

[Sidenote: Hostility of government]

Three principal causes can be assigned for the failure of the Reformation to do more than fight a drawn battle in France. The first and least important of these was the steady hostility of the government. This hostility was assured by the mutually advantageous alliance between the throne and the church sealed in the Concordat of Bologna of 1516. But that the opposition of the government, heavily as it weighed, was not and could not be the decisive force in defeating Protestantism is proved, in my judgment, by the fact that even when the Huguenots had a king of their own persuasion they were unable to obtain the mastery. Had their faith won the support not only of a considerable minority, but of the actual majority of the people, they could surely at this time have secured the government and made France a Protestant state.

[Sidenote: Protestantism came too late]

The second cause of the final failure of the Reformation was the tardiness with which it came to France. It did not begin to make its really popular appeal until some years after 1536, when Calvin's writings attained a gradual publicity. This was twenty years later than the Reformation came forcibly home to the Germans, and in those twenty years it had made its greatest conquests north of the Rhine. Of causes as well as of men it is true that there is a tide in their affairs which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, but which, once missed, ebbs to defeat. Every generation has a different interest; to every era the ideals of that immediately preceding become stale and old-fashioned. The writings of every age are a polemic against those of their fathers; every dogma has its day, and after every wave of enthusiam [Transcriber's note: enthusiasm?] a reaction sets in. Thus it was that the Reformation {231} missed, though it narrowly missed, the propitious moment for conquering France. Enough had been said of it during the reign of Francis to make the people tired of it, but not enough to make them embrace it. By the time that Calvin had become well known, the Catholics had awakened and had seized many of the weapons of their opponents, a fresh statement of belief, a new enthusiasm, a reformed ethical standard. The Council of Trent, the Jesuits, the other new orders, were only symptoms of a still more widely prevalent Catholic revival that came, in France, just in the nick of time to deprive the Protestants of many of their claims to popular favor.

[Sidenote: Beaten by the Renaissance]

But probably the heaviest weight in the scale against the Reformation was the Renaissance--far stronger in France than in Germany. The one marched from the north, while the other was wafted up from Italy. They met, not as hostile armies but rather--to use a humble, commercial illustration--as two competing merchants. The goods they offered were not the same, not even similar, but the appeal of each was of such a nature that few minds could be the whole-hearted devotees of both. The new learning and the beauties of Italian art and literature sapped away the interest of just those intelligent classes whose support was needed to make the triumph of the Reformation complete. Terrible as were the losses of the Huguenots by fire and sword, considerable as were the defections from their ranks of those who found in the reformed Catholic church a spiritual refuge, still greater was the loss of the Protestant cause in failing to secure the adherence of such minds as Dolet and Rabelais, Ronsard and Montaigne, and of the thousands influenced by them. And a study of just these men will show how the Italian influence worked and how it grew stronger in its rivalry with the religious interest. {232} Whereas Marot had found something to interest him in the new doctrines, Ronsard bitterly hated them. Passionately devoted, as he and the rest of the Pleiade were, to the sensuous beauties of Italian poetry, he had neither understanding of nor patience with dogmatic subtleties. In the Huguenots he saw nothing but mad fanatics and dangerous fomentors of rebellion. In his Discourses on the Evils of the Times, he laid all the woes of France at the door of the innovators. And powerfully his greater lyrics seduced the mind of the public from the contemplation of divinity to the enjoyment of earthly beauty.

The same intensification of the contrast between the two spirits is seen in comparing Montaigne with Rabelais. It is true that Rabelais ridiculed all positive religion, but nevertheless it fascinated him. His theological learning is remarkable. But Montaigne ignored religion as far as possible. [Sidenote: Montaigne's aloofness] Nourished from his earliest youth on the great classical writers, he had no interest apart from "the kingdom of man." He preferred to remain in the old faith because that course caused him the least trouble. He had no sympathy with the Protestants, but he did not hate them, as did Ronsard. During the wars of religion, he maintained friendly relations with the leaders of both parties. And he could not believe that creed was the real cause of the civil strife. "Take from the Catholic army," said he, "all those actuated by pure zeal for the church or for the king and country, and you will not have enough men left to form one company." It is strange that beneath the evil passions and self-seeking of the champions of each party he could not see the fierce flame of popular heroism and fanaticism; but that he, and thousands of men like him, could not do so, and could not enter, even by imagination, into the causes {233} which, but a half century earlier, had set the world on fire, largely explains how the religious issue had lost its savour and why Protestantism failed in France.

[1] "The king my son will never have entire obedience."

[2] "That no one may embroil us in the friendship in which I desire that these two kingdoms shall remain during my lifetime."

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