Rise of French Laïcité. Stephen M. Davis

ways. First, as political subject, the individual was expected to obey the king, regardless of confession. Second, as a believer, the subject was free to choose his religion which was now considered a private matter. It is said that in the life of Henry IV, also known as Henry of Navarre, former Protestant and Huguenot leader, there “had never been a consistent practice of Huguenot morality.”104 However, his conversion to Catholicism and the Edict of Nantes brought the Wars of Religion to an end. His edict opened access for Protestants to universities and public offices. Protestants were allowed garrisons in several towns, most notably the port city of La Rochelle. Many in the Catholic Church disapproved, “railed violently against it, and cast innuendoes at the sincerity of the ‘conversion’ of the King, but Henry forced its general acceptance as a part of the law of the land.”105

It is noteworthy that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France four cardinals (Richelieu, Mazarin, Dubois, and Fleury) and one archbishop (Loménie de Brienne) held the position of prime minister.106 Of these perhaps Richelieu (1585–1642), who served during the reign of Louis XIII (1601–1643), was the most able and has become the best known. It was said that “Louis XIII reigned, but that Richelieu governed.”107 Richelieu battled the Huguenots more out of political than religious motives. He was responsible for the siege and the fall of the Huguenot stronghold, La Rochelle. With the surrender of La Rochelle, the Huguenots lost political influence but retained their religious rights for another fifty years. This was one period of French history when “French Protestant lived with Catholic in a peace and harmony seldom seen elsewhere in any part of Europe save in Holland.”108

The Edict of Nantes of 1598 survived almost a century before its revocation, during which time French Catholics and Protestants cohabitated in relative calm (1598–1685).109 However, as early as 1629 with the Edict of Nîmes under Louis XIII, the Huguenots experienced the loss of some gains and their pastors had the right to preach, celebrate the Lord’s Supper, baptize, and officiate at marriages only in villages and cities authorized by the Edict of Nantes.110 His successor, Louis XIV, grandson of Henry IV, governed as an absolute monarch and claimed the divine right as God’s representative on earth. The French clergy pressured the king and obtained the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes on October 17, 1685, also known as the Edict of Fontainebleau. The king’s subjects were compelled to adopt the religion of the one who ruled by divine right. Protestant worship was forbidden in France and the edict led once again to the departure of thousands of French Protestants.111 Protestants lost the right to have separate cemeteries and were compelled to receive the sacraments of the Church. Many Protestants buried their dead in their cellars or gardens. To this day in the Cévennes, private cemeteries are common and allowed by exemption.112 The banned religion became officially designated RPR, religion prétendue réformée (so-called reformed religion).113

A cursory look at the articles of the Edict of Revocation reveals the drastic measures undertaken to extirpate the Protestant religion in France. Article one ordered the demolition of Protestant temples. Articles two and three forbade all religious assemblies with the threat of prison. Articles four, five, and six ordered the expulsion within fifteen days of all Protestant pastors who refused to convert to Catholicism. Article seven outlawed Protestant schools. Article eight obliged all infants to be baptized into the Catholic Church and receive religious instruction from village priests. Articles nine and ten forbade Protestant emigration under the threat of galleys for the men and imprisonment for the women. Article eleven stipulated punishment for those who relapsed into heresy in refusing the sacraments of the Church. Article twelve granted the right to remain in the kingdom to the not-yet-enlightened RPR conditioned by the interdiction of assemblies for worship or prayer. Many methods were utilized to pressure Protestants to convert. The Church opened centers of conversion (maisons de conversion) and placed mounted troops (dragons) in Huguenot homes (dragonnades) to ensure their attendance at mass. In effect, the Edict of Revocation forced hundreds of thousands of dissidents to convert to the prince’s religion without allowing them liberty to leave the territory.114 The fear of the dragons led to waves of conversions among entire villages and accelerated the disappearance of the RPR. In only a few months hundreds of thousands of Protestants converted to Catholicism. Those who converted were called NC (nouveaux convertis or nouveaux catholiques) and placed under strict surveillance. In their deaths the refusal of extreme unction could lead to their bodies being dragged in the streets and the confiscation of all their possessions which could not be passed on as inheritance. Those captured while seeking to flee the kingdom were sentenced to life on the king’s galleys or imprisoned for life. It has been estimated that from 1685 to 1715 over 200,000 Protestants escaped and emigrated to places of refuge including Geneva, England, Germany, and Holland.115

In Gaillard’s opinion the specificity of French laïcité cannot be understood apart from the memory of the Edict of Nantes and its later Revocation. The Catholic Church welcomed the Revocation, aligned itself with the Royal State, and instituted the Counter-Reformation with the rejection of religious liberty and freedom of thought.116 Religious unity was reestablished, and the Revocation engendered a return to oppression. André Chamson’s Suite Camisarde presents the Revocation as a foundational event which sheds light on the religious, regional, and historic collective memory of the Cévenol region of France and the war of the Camisards. The Camisards were Calvinist Cévenol insurgents during the persecutions which followed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They owe their name to the white shirt they wore over their clothing in order to be recognized among themselves.117 The Camisards fought to defend and to reclaim their religious rights obtained under the Edict of Nantes in 1598. They fought above all for the liberty of conscience to freely worship the God of their religion. The war was triggered by the desire of Louis XIV to impose one law and one faith which tore apart the Cévennes from 1702 to 1705. Thousands of men were imprisoned, deported, sent to the galleys, tortured, and more than five hundred villages suffered the great burning [le grand brûlement].118 The power of the Church and the exclusion and exile of hundreds of thousands of Protestants would harden antagonisms for the next century. Yet, according to Montclos, the idea of tolerance was born.119

One of the ironies of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV is found in the defeat of the French almost two centuries later in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 which will be discussed later. Thousands of Protestant Huguenots, who refused to convert to the king’s religion, fled the waves of persecution for places where they could practice their religion unmolested. In 1870, the descendants of persecuted Huguenots from the previous century were counted among Prussia’s military forces. France was soundly defeated at one of the most devastating battles in French military history at Sedan, a center of French Protestantism until the persecution following the Revocation. The humiliating defeat resulted in the capture of Emperor Napoleon III and his army and ended the Second Empire.120

      War of Ideas

Changes in the world of ideas preceded radical change in Europe. According to Fix, “Few transformations of worldview have been as decisive and influential as that which changed the religious worldview of traditional Europe into the rational and secular worldview of modern Europe.”121 The sixteenth century experienced what Jean-Michel Ducomte calls a “laïcisation de la pensée” with the influences of diverse Renaissance thinkers like Erasmus (1466–1536), Francois Rabelais, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.122 Erasmus and Luther were contemporaries with some shared criticism of the Church and criticisms of each other. As Stumpf explains it,

Erasmus criticized scholastic jargon not only because of its lack of elegance but even more because it obscured the true teachings of the Gospels. . . . He sensed a deep incongruity between the simple teachings of Christ and the opulence and arrogance of the Papal Court. . . . But he was neither a religious skeptic nor did he become a Lutheran. His was a lover’s quarrel with the church. He wished to harmonize the church’s teaching with the new humanistic learning.123

Erasmus and Luther have been compared in this way: “If Erasmus looked back to antiquity for the treasure of the classics, the Reformers, particularly Luther, looked back to the primitive community of Christians for the original spirit of Christianity. In this way the Renaissance and the Reformation both epitomized a revival of the past.”124 Walker asserts, “The Renaissance was far from being a revival of paganism” and the humanists