Peace and Authority during the French Religious Wars c.1560–1600 (original) (raw)
Making Peace in the Wars of Religion
2015
The article considers why in the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598), the crown found it found it extremely difficult to make peace between Protestants and Catholics. The article uses modern political-science models of peace-making to improve our understanding of why Henri IV (reigned 1589-1610) succeeded in pacifying France while his predecessors did not. Previous accounts have seen Henri IV’s success as a product of his great personal qualities, but his achievement has been overstated. In fact, over the first fifteen years of the wars, Catholics learned that Protestants could not be eradicated from the country, and became more willing to negotiate. Henri’s success was due more to structural changes brought about by his position, rather than his personal qualities. Specifically, Henri’s questionable legitimacy forced him to adopt policies of persuasion rather than coercion, while his predecessors were hindered by their position as mediators within a conflict between the Protestant forces and the Catholic League.
Culture & History Digital Journal
Based on a close and detailed investigation of local and strangely neglected municipal sources, combined with the meticulous scrutiny of documents conserved in the Russian archives for the period 1559-1562, and a focus on institutional history, I demonstrate how the early Calvinistic consistories cleverly manipulated the particular municipal organization (the consulates) of Midi communities and managed to take them over with relative ease. In many of these communities, which greatly varied in size, we find that the consistories were turned into “political councils”; this subsequently enabled them to control the election of magistrates (consuls) and, even before the beginning of the wars of Religion, to ensure that they controlled the municipalities, though the Protestants were very much a minority. This is a major factor towards explaining the famous “Protestant crescent” that characterizes the South of France with its tones of civil religion.
Rhetorics of Peace: Ronsard and Michel de L'Hospital on the Eve of the French Wars of Religion
Itineraries in French Renaissance Literature, 2018
The Wars of Religion (1562-98) figure among the most brutal and murderous moments in French history. Leaders of opposing factions made strategic decisions throughout the wars that brought on a number of otherwise avoidable bloody battles. But before the violence exploded in the early 1560s, Pierre de Ronsard and Michel de L’Hospital had engaged in peace-making efforts—Ronsard in his Institution pour l’adolescence du Roy Tres-Chrestien Charles IXe de ce nom (1562), and Michel de L’Hospital in his speeches at the Estates General and following (1560-62). While these generically different writings share several common goals, notably the unification of France under a single Catholic faith, they also display quite distinct ideological and political positions. This chapter explores how the rhetoric of these important figures reveals their respective projects, both implicit and explicit and why certain of these strategies failed and others ultimately succeeded several decades later.