Rise of French Laïcité. Stephen M. Davis

It took a spiritual crisis in his own life to shake Luther out of this way of thinking. He did his best but discovered that it was not good enough. . . . After much searching, he found the answer in the words of the prophet Habakkuk, quoted by the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans: “The just shall live by faith” (Rom 1:17; cf. Hab 2:4). The scales dropped from his eyes as he realized that it is by grace that we are saved through faith and not by our works, however meritorious they are in themselves. The foundations of the old system were shaken to the root, and the result was the Protestant Reformation.52

      On October 31, 1517, Luther nailed his famous ninety-five theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg and was ordered by the Church to recant his error. Benedict describes Luther’s resistance:

He dug in and soon was calling for a reduction in the sacraments from seven to three (later two) and the abolition of the monastic orders, while denouncing the Church of Rome as hopelessly corrupt. Although excommunicated by the pope and condemned by the Imperial diet of Worms, he was protected by the Elector of Saxony. Thanks to the printing press, Luther’s example and ideas galvanized widespread agitation for change in the structure of the Church across the German-speaking world. Parisian booksellers also began to sell his writings to eager customers as early as 1519. The Sorbonne condemned Luther’s teaching in 1521, and secular laws soon made possession of his writings a crime.53

Luther translated the Greek New Testament into German in 1522 and the Hebrew Old Testament into German in 1534, the latter considered a foundational work for modern German. He is credited with establishing five fundamental principles or solae: sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, and soli Deo Gloria. These scriptural truths set his teaching apart from the teaching of the Church and announced an inevitable rupture.54 Luther’s influence in France would soon be eclipsed by that of Calvin, yet “between 1528 and the 1540s, Luther was by far the most widely translated foreign theologian in this period.”55 Questions have been raised about the Reformation’s necessity or inevitability. “Such questions cannot be answered with any degree of confidence. The fact remains, however, that Luther himself regarded the Reformation as having begun over, and to have chiefly concerned, the correct understanding of the Christian doctrine of justification.”56

Calvin was born in Noyon, France in the region of Picardy. He received a classical education through which he acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of authors from antiquity and from the patristic period. He later studied law until the death of his father in 1531.57 In 1533 he converted to Protestantism and in 1536 wrote the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “which evolved through subsequent revisions into the most forceful and successful exposition of Reformed Protestantism of the sixteenth century.”58 He established himself in Geneva in 1541 and began calling upon believers living in places with no Protestant church to separate from the Catholic Church and if necessary relocate to a place where they could worship freely:

As growing numbers of French evangelicals heard this call and fled to Geneva, the number of Genevan presses multiplied, and clandestine networks were established for distributing their products throughout France. . . . No less than 178 French-language editions of one or another of Calvin’s treatises, sermons, and commentaries appeared during his lifetime. His sharp critique of Catholic theology and worship and uncompromising call for separation from it increasingly dominated evangelical propaganda.59

      The Reformers proclaimed the divine authority of the Scriptures and encouraged personal Bible reading. Consequently, there was no longer one authoritative voice and interpreter of the Holy Scriptures. As people began reading the Christian Scriptures for themselves the divide between ecclesiastical authority and the faithful grew. Andrew Fix writes,

For centuries the Catholic church had maintained that the only criterion of truth for a religious proposition was the authority of church tradition, pope, and councils. Luther proposed a radical new standard for religious truth at the Diet of Worms in 1521 when he maintained that whatever his conscience was compelled to believe when he read Scripture was religious truth.60

Baubérot asserts that in France in the early 1500s the piety, theology, and practices of the Church were not in crisis. He describes pre-Reformation times as a vast market of salvation and quest for personal salvation, which led a host of men and women to choose the religious life, the way of Christian perfection governed by perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.61 At least initially, the new ideas which came from Germany found favorable soil in diverse intellectual and religious milieu.62 As Trueman and Kim observe, “France, with a strong monarchy, a vibrant intellectual culture at the University of Paris, and indeed, an interest in exerting independence from the Roman church, looked in the early sixteenth century like fruitful soil for Protestant reform.”63 There were also attempts at reform from within the Church which targeted the clergy and religious life. Those who called for reform denounced the abuses of the clergy at all levels of the hierarchical ladder, from the absentee bishops accumulating undeserved privileges, to the ignorant and concubinary village priests, and to the lazy and drunken monks.64 Jonathan Bloch considers it an error to imagine that Christianity in France was united and strong at the dawn of the Reformation and maintains that pagan elements were present in the various expressions of Catholicism. He explains that this situation permitted Protestantism to progressively gain a foothold without meeting the resistance that a united Catholicism would have provided.65

Prior to the Reformation, the monarchy and the Church were wedded without religious competition. Kelley states that “within a generation the ostensibly religious upheaval precipitated by Luther involved not only the formal break-up of Christendom but a whole range of secular disturbances.” He further affirms that the Reformation must be understood “not merely as a changing design upon a historical fabric but as a violent, multi-dimensional, and perhaps multi-directional process which needs examining from several angles.”66 Scholars uniformly look to the Reformation as the beginning of religious, social, and political turmoil in France which would destabilize both the monarchy and the Church. Eugène Réveillard, deputy of Charente-Inférieure, wrote in 1907 that the Reformation, in the measure it brought back religion and Christian churches to the purity of their origins according to the intention of the Reformers, marked the beginning of the restoration of the principles of liberty of conscience and of worship, and at the same time, the separation of powers—civil and ecclesiastical.67

Xavier de Montclos considers it a mistake to only see reciprocal rejection and condemnation in the Reformation or Counter-Reformation. He believes that these two great branches of Christianity in modern times both responded to calls for a deeper and more evangelical religious life.68 Monod regards the sixteenth century as marked by several significant changes. First, it was the beginning of the individualization of faith which made adherence to faith traditions possible but not obligatory. Second, it was the time of the pluralization of the faith which in time would find protection by law. Monod considers that the religious revolution and schism of the sixteenth century, characterized by pluralism and individualism, led to relativism and the possibility of the “subjectivation of religious teaching.”69

In a few decades, the Reformation’s influence in France “not only shattered the unity of religion, but it led to the contesting of the monarchy itself.”70 This new religion became known as Calvinism and its followers were called Huguenots.71 According to Kelley, “The origin of the term ‘Huguenot’ has been long debated. The present consensus is that it derives from the word for the resisting Swiss confederations (Eidgenossem), but it seems to have emerged during the conspiracy of Amboise, and opponents of the ‘foreign house’ of Guise construed it as designating their allegiance to the descendants of the royal dynasty of ‘Hughes’ Capet.”72 However, Carter Lindberg states that “the French Calvinists preferred the term Réformés, the Reformed. Catholic satires of the time called them la Religion Déformée.”73 The first Reformed churches appeared in France beginning in 1555. In 1559 a national synod gathered in Paris and adopted a confession of faith which was ratified in 1571 at La Rochelle and called La Confession de la Rochelle.74 By 1561–1562 Calvinism became a considerable power in the kingdom, about two million people. Among them were academics and former religious workers, bourgeoisie from legal