French Wars of Religion (Pt. 1) - Early Struggles (1521-1547)
From the establishment of the Circle of Meaux to the death of King Francis I in 1547, the growing Protestant communities of France faced an ever-increasing amount of pressure and persecution.
This is the second article in a series on the French Wars of Religion. For the first part, see here.
December 1524
The city of Meaux was in an uproar. What a sacrilege! Laborers gawked by the cathedral doors while merchants huddled in groups and conversed in hushed tones. Inside the cathedral, the bishop of Meaux conferred angrily with the local clergy. “Who had done such a terrible thing?” demanded the bishop, “The perpetrator must be found and punished with the full severity of the law!”
The cause of the bishop’s ire was an impious act committed in the dead of night. The recently elected pope, Clement VII, had sent out a proclamation of a plenary indulgence, whereby all temporal punishment for the sins of the faithful was remitted, provided that the sinners repented and returned to a state of grace in the church. Fasting and prayer were urged, and the penitents were instructed to receive communion to obtain the indulgence’s spiritual benefits. A copy of the indulgence had been posted on the cathedral doors, but under cover of darkness, somebody had torn it down and substituted in its place a blasphemous placard that depicted the pope as the Antichrist. To make matters even worse, the vandal had also mutilated several prayers to the Virgin posted in the cathedral.
The clergy launched a diligent inquiry to apprehend the malefactor. The bishop did his part by issuing a proclamation instructing all churches in his diocese, on every Sunday and feast-day, to publicly excommunicate anyone who knew the identity of the perpetrator and did not reveal it, “with ringing of bells and with candles lighted and then extinguished and thrown upon the earth, in token of eternal malediction.”
It wasn’t long before the culprit was discovered, a hotheaded wool-carder by the name of Jean Leclerc. Leclerc had embraced Lutheranism as a result of reading Jacques Lefèvre’s translation of the New Testament into French (more on that later) and had taken out his ire on the rather tempting target of the pope’s proclamation. Leclerc was hauled to Paris to stand trial before the Parlement on charges of irreverence and, to nobody’s surprise, was convicted.
The sentence handed down by the Parlement was a harsh one. Leclerc was to be publicly scourged by the executioner in Paris for three days in a row before being transferred to Meaux for a repetition of the same punishment. He was then to be branded on the forehead with a fleur-de-lis and banished from the Kingdom of France for all perpetuity. The sentence was carried out in March 1525 before eager crowds, and there was a moment of high drama for all when his aged mother had an emotional outburst as the white-hot branding iron was pressed against his forehead.
Leclerc was forced to leave France, so he decamped to Metz, at the time still an Imperial city. He was incorrigible, though, and apparently hadn’t learned his lesson from his treatment in Meaux. He spoke openly of his objections to the Catholic Church and, as in Meaux, could not restrain himself from acting on his heterodox principles. On the night before a Catholic procession on the city’s outskirts, Leclerc snuck out and toppled the statues and icons. When the populace arrived in the morning and saw the desecration of their figures, they were enraged, and there was little doubt as to who was responsible. Leclerc had made no secret of his past and beliefs and was moreover spotted returning from the crime scene the night before. When the mob confronted him, he did not attempt to deny what he had done and harangued them for their worship of idols. He was only narrowly rescued from being lynched on the spot – perhaps that would have been the better outcome for him, given what occurred next.
Leclerc was executed on July 22, 1525. Per the gruesome sentence handed down, his right hand was chopped off at the wrist, and his arms and breast were subsequently shredded by sharp pincers. He was then “crowned” with a ringlet of red-hot iron, which burned its way down to his brain as the pyre awaited. During this final torture, Leclerc is said to have remained silent, only uttering the verse from Psalms 115:4, “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of man’s hands.” He was then consigned to the flames, which put a fairly quick end to his gruesome suffering. The hotheaded Jean Leclerc was the first martyr of French Protestantism, the first in a long and dolorous line of victims subjected to torture, mutilation, the flame, and the sword.
The story of Jean Leclerc’s engagement with Protestantism began with the French translation of the New Testament by Jacques Lefèvre, and there our tale begins as well. Lefèvre was at the center of the ‘Circle of Meaux,’ a group of prominent humanists gathered in 1521 by the Bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briçonnet, to reform the clergy of his diocese.
The early 1520s were years of great ferment within the Church. Just four years before the creation of the Circle of Meaux, Martin Luther had nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg as a protest against what he perceived as the venality of the Catholic Church. Luther’s movement, which initially set out to reform the Church from within, swiftly transformed into an all-out assault on papal authority and Catholic teaching on the sacraments. By 1520 Pope Leo X issued a papal bull declaring Luther to be “the slave of a depraved mind” and proclaiming that he and his followers were in a state “of excommunication, of anathema, of our perpetual condemnation and interdict.” From that point onward, the breach between the Lutherans and the Catholic Church was final and absolute.
But despite the attention Luther and his followers got, they were far from the only voices calling for reform. Luther had been preceded in his criticism of the Church by such prominent humanists as Erasmus of Rotterdam, who vocally condemned the Church’s shortcomings and marshalled his vast erudition and learning to challenge many traditional teachings of the Church. Many of these humanists who had called for internal reform within the Catholic Church soon joined Luther. Still, there were a great many, including Erasmus himself, who deplored Luther’s break from Rome and continued to profess their loyalty to the Catholic Church even as they continued criticizing the church in many of the same areas as the Lutherans. These intellectuals found themselves in a very awkward position as the dispute over Lutheranism heated up insofar as they didn’t fit in neatly to either side of the conflict and were frequently viewed by partisans of both sides with distrust.
One such humanist was Guillaume Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux. A doctrinally orthodox Catholic, he was nonetheless determined to reform the clergy in his diocese along humanist lines, and to that end, he invited Jacques Lefèvre to come to his diocese and oversee his program of reform. Lefèvre was a rather controversial humanist, though he professed himself to be a faithful Catholic throughout his life. He had gotten himself into trouble in 1517 when he wrote a book (dedicated to King Francis I, who was a patron of the humanists) asserting that Mary of Bethany (the sister of Lazarus), Mary Magdalene, and the penitent Mary who had anointed Jesus’ feet were three separate people. This ran contrary to Catholic teaching and provoked a furious reaction amongst the conservative theologians of the Sorbonne, who eventually declared Lefèvre a heretic, and only left off when the Francis I’s royal confessor interceded to protect Lefèvre from charges of heresy.
It should come as no surprise, then, that even as Lefèvre maintained his connection with the Catholic Church, many of his students did not and became proponents of the new Lutheran teachings. When Lefèvre accepted Bishop Briçonnet’s invitation, a number of those Protestant students came with him, most notably including Guillaume Farel, later to become famous as a friend of Jean Calvin and one of the most influential figures in the early history of Calvinism. It was in Meaux that Briçonnet wrote his wildly popular French translation of the Gospels, which led, among other things, to the radicalism of the unfortunate Jean Leclerc. The Circle of Meaux preached extensively to the populace, much to the dismay of the conservative Dominicans and Franciscans, who were inveterate opponents of humanism and its doctrinal innovations. However, Briçonnet’s campaign of reform was approved by King Francis I himself and was energetically supported by Marguerite of Navarre, the King’s humanist sister who was later to become an ardent patroness of French Protestantism, so for the time being, there was little its opponents could do.
All that changed on the morning of the twenty-fourth of February, 1525. An Imperial army under the command of the renegade Duke of Bourbon utterly shattered the French army at Pavia in one of the most comprehensive defeats of the early modern era. Eight thousand of France’s finest warriors lay dead on the battlefield, including the cream of her nobility, while the remainder, including King Francis himself, were captured by the triumphant Emperor Charles V. Francis wrote to his mother, Louise of Savoy, “To inform you of how the rest of my ill fortune is proceeding, all is lost to me save honor and life, which is safe.”
Louise assumed the regency of the kingdom for the duration of her son’s captivity. During that time, the conservatives successfully persuaded the Queen-Mother to ramp up the persecution of the Lutherans, who were multiplying at an alarming pace all across France. She agreed to form a committee comprised of members of the Parlement of Paris and the Sorbonne, with the express purpose of extirpating Lutheranism throughout France, through whatever means necessary. The executions soon began in Paris. In August 1526, a young Lutheran named Jacques Pauvan was burned at the stake in the Place de Grève, followed shortly thereafter by an obscure and eccentric man known simply as “the hermit of Livry”. Bishop Briçonnet himself came out against the Lutheran tendencies spreading in his diocese and the Circle of Meaux was disbanded, its scholars fleeing in all directions. But this was only the beginning.
When Francis was finally released in 1527, he agreed to pay Charles V a fortune – a literal king’s ransom of 2,000,000 gold coins, 1.2 million of which was due immediately. When Francis returned to France, he was forced to levy new taxes to pay his ransom, which meant that he had to summon the nobles and clergy to an assembly of notables.
When Francis requested that the notables maintain his honor and raise the funds for his ransom, the Cardinal of Bourbon stood up and told Francis that they would raise the funds for him, if Francis remembered his duty to maintain the integrity of the church. Francis had no choice but to agree, and while the church did raise the money he needed through a series of provincial synods, they also used the synods as an opportunity to discuss the problem of heresy and what steps could be taken to eradicate it. Immediately following these synods, things began heating up for the Protestants (no pun intended). An excerpt from the Cambridge Modern History (Vol. II, p. 246) should suffice to convey the general tenor of this period of time:
“There were executions in Paris in October 1527 and December 1528; in Rouen, Pierre Bar was condemned (June 1528), not as a Lutheran but for having denied the divinity of Christ. A fresh attack was launched against Louis de Berquin, who had escaped conviction so often. He now went to prison for the third time (1528), and on this occasion without reprieve; after trial he was executed (17 April 1529). The chronicles of justice record numerous other arrests of suspects and some of these also ended in executions: at Langres in 1529; at Dijon in 1531, 1534, 1536, 1538, 1539; at Beaune in 1534; at Tours in 1526, 1530; at Bordeaux in 1530, 1534, 1535; at Montpellier in 1532, 1533, 1535, 1536, where it was reported that 'the greater part of the town are Lutherans'; at Toulouse in 1530, 1532, 1538; throughout the south, for example, at Cahors, Castres, Mende, Rodez, Montauban, Carcassonne; in several towns in Normandy; and not least in Lyons. They became martyrs for a cause and their fates heralded a bitter and bloodstained future. On this note of heightened tension, the first phase of the Reformation in France drew to a close.”
Although Francis gave the Church the power to eliminate Lutheranism from his kingdom, he himself did not take an active role in the persecutions. He was a man of culture who held the humanists in great esteem, and he had little inclination to engage in the bloody repression of a heresy closely tied to the humanists he so admired. However, a shocking event occurred in 1534 which shook Francis to his core and turned him into a bitter and passionate enemy of the Lutherans.
In short, when the people of Paris, Rouen, and several other major cities arose on the morning of October 18, 1534, they found that every wall in the city was plastered with placards, entitled: Genuine Articles on the Horrific, Great, and Unbearable Abuses of the Papal Mass. The subject of these placards was the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, or the belief that the bread and wine of the Eucharist turned, via a mysterious divine process, into the actual flesh and blood of Jesus. Luther had disagreed with the absolutist Catholic position and maintained that while Jesus’ flesh and blood were indeed symbolically present in the Eucharist, the bread and wine did not actually transubstantiate as the Catholic Church maintained. Well, these guys dialed it up to eleven and went much farther than Luther’s position, embracing instead the doctrine of Ulrich Zwingli (this progression beyond Luther’s theology to the more radical ideas of Zwingli is quite significant and will be discussed at greater length in the next installment of this series). They declared that there was nothing in the host, not flesh and blood, not symbolism, nothing. It was just – bread.
The placards stated their thesis – already provocative – in the most shocking terms. They proclaimed that “the Pope and all his brood of cardinals, bishops, monks, and canting mass-priests, with all who consent thereunto, are false prophets, damnable deceivers, apostates, wolves, false shepherds, idolaters, seducers, liars and execrable blasphemers, murderers of souls, renouncers of Jesus Christ, of his death and passion, false witnesses, traitors, thieves, and robbers of the honor of God, and more detestable than devils.” These offending placards appeared everywhere, including on the door of the King’s bed-chambers in Amboise.
The ordinary people were furious when they read these placards, but even more importantly, Francis himself was apoplectic with rage. This was a direct affront to him and his royal authority, and in his already weakened political position he could not afford such a blow to his temporal and religious authority. He responded to the provocation bloodily, drastically intensifying the purges of suspected Lutherans throughout France. Hundreds of Protestants were arrested in the coming months, tens of whom were subsequently burnt at the stake, and Francis was now irrevocably committed to the eradication of the Lutheran heresy.
What followed was a period of dark terror for France’s Protestants, who had been steadily growing in number despite the persecutions. In 1540, the King revoked the right of appeal for persons convicted of heresy. In the coming years, the entire legal apparatus was turned against the Protestants, and the previously ad hoc measures taken against them were formalized into law. All over France, dissenters were tortured, humiliated, mutilated, and executed. Unlettered peasants who challenged churchmen were burnt alive, and intellectuals either met the same gruesome fate or else fled the country. The tongues of convicted Lutherans were often torn out before their owners met their ends on the blazing pyre, so as to prevent them from addressing the crowds and possibly swaying some of them to heresy. The Archbishop of Sens, in particular, was fond of employing a monstrous device known as l’Estrappade, which entailed hanging the unfortunate convict in chains and raising and lowering him into the flames to prolong his agony.
In 1545, a force of several thousand Provencal and Papal soldiers completely destroyed the Waldensian villages of Mérindol and Cabrières and their environs, slaughtering hundreds of villagers – men, women, and children. In the following year the prominent printer, Etienne Dolet, was burnt alive in Paris, while in Meaux, a secret gathering of 62 Lutherans was discovered and hauled off to prison. There, they were tortured (one young woman told her captors, “If I had been discovered in a brothel, rather than in such a holy company, you would not have treated me thus”). Of those imprisoned, some were sentenced to the lash, others to banishment, and the fourteen most incorrigible to the stake. On October 7, 1546, a circle of fourteen stakes was set up in the market square of Meaux and the heretics were burned alive. Included among the executed was Pierre Leclerc, the younger brother of the headstrong Jean Leclerc whose execution opened up this article.
King Francis I himself died on March 31, 1547, and was succeeded by his son Henry II. Although Francis had attempted to eradicate heresy from his realm with fire and the sword, his attempts had largely failed, and throughout it all networks of Protestants continued to meet in secret, to grow, and to take root. Some gained refuge under the aegis of the friendly Marguerite of Navarre, while yet others fled for the friendly Protestant cities in the Holy Roman Empire and Switzerland. One of these French refugees was a young man by the name of Jean Calvin, who was to soon become a pivotal figure in the development of French Protestantism, and indeed, in the development of Protestantism as a whole.
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Engaging article, but a clear typo in 2d paragraph "a copy of the excess had been posted"