The French wars of religion

The French wars of religion
No wars are more terrible than civil wars. They tear at the very fabric of society, rending its institutions and destroying the delicate web of relationships that underlie all communal life. The nation is divided communities break into factions; families are destroyed. At every level of organization the glue that binds society together comes unstuck.

For nearly half century civil war tore France apart. Massacres of Catholic congregations matched massacres of Protestants ones. Assassinations of Catholic leaders followed assassinations of Protestants ones. Kings of France died at the hands of their subjects. Leaders of Protestants and Catholic movements died by the order of the king, Aristocratic armies roamed the country wreaking havoc on friend and foe alike. Indeed, the religious causes that brought the wars about were soon forgotten.

Protestantism came late to France. The unyielding hostility of the monarchy had prevented Lutheran reforms from making much headway there. Through a series of concessions made by the papacy in the fifteenth century and codified in the Concordat of Bologna (1516), the French kings had gained the right too make ecclesiastical appointments and thus controlled much of the wealth of the Church.

Lutheranism held little attraction for Francis I (1515-1547) and he rigorously suppressed it, sending John Calvin among others, into exile. The Catholic church directed by the monarchy proved even more resistant to reform than had the Catholic church directed by the papacy. It was not until after Calvin reformed the church in Geneva and began to export his brand of Protestantism that French society began to divide along religious lines.
The French wars of religion

The Crises of the Western States (16th century)

The Crises of the Western States (16th century)
One King, One faith, One law. This was the prescription that members of all the European states accepted without question in the sixteenth century. Society was an integrated whole, equally dependent upon monarchical, ecclesiastical and civil authority for its effective survival. A European state could no more tolerate the presence of the two kings. But reformation had created two churches. The coexistence of both Catholics and Protestants in a single realm post a stark challenge to accepted theory and traditional practice.

In Germany where the problem first arose, the Peace of Augsburg (1555) enacted the most logical solution. The religion of the ruler was to be the religion of the subjects. Princes, town government, or bishops would determine faith. Not surprisingly, this was a policy more convenient for ruler than for the ruled. Sudden conversions of princes, a hallmark of Protestantism, threw the state into disarray. Those closely identified with Catholicism as well as those firmly believed in its doctrines had no choice but to move to a neighboring Catholic community and begin again. Given the dependence of ordinary people upon networks of kin and neighbors, enforced migration was devastating. Protestants minorities in Catholics states suffered the same fate. The enmity between the two groups came as much from bitter experience as from differences of believe.
The Crises of the Western States (16th century)