The Biblical Image of the Providential Ruler in the Protestant Propaganda on the Eve of the French Wars of Religion

French Protestantism has remained famous in the history of political thought mostly for its theories regarding popular sovereignty and the right of the people to resist and replace a tyrannical ruler. However, before the civil wars pushed them on this revolutionary path, French Protestants stressed the duty of obedience even in the face of manifest tyranny. The reasons for this were ideological, due to the significance placed on St. Paul’s assertion that all political power was divinely ordained, but also pragmatic, as Calvin and his followers were acutely aware of the danger of antagonizing the secular authorities. More importantly, they were fervently hoping for the conversion of France to the Reformation and, in their mind, the surest way such a process could take place was through the conversion of the king and the royal family. Therefore, Protestant propaganda of that time constantly urged the most important French royals to convert to the Reformation, and, for this purpose, they deployed a language full of references to the pious Biblical rulers who led their people towards the true faith—whom the addressees of these propaganda texts were advised to emulate, lest they incur God’s wrath. This paper aims to analyze the occurrences and the role of these references in the Protestants’ dialogue with the French monarchy.

Soldiers and Saints, Magistrates and Martyrs

This chapter shows that the martyr “instincts” of the longer Christian tradition are quite varied on the question of violence, sainthood, and martyrdom. Historically Christianity has been willing to laud figures involved in violence as martyrs and saints, usually in connection to the “sword” of the state. Largely composed of case studies as varied as the soldier martyrs of the patristic church, supposed martyrs in the medieval Crusades, civil magistrates acclaimed as martyrs in the Reformation, and missionary martyrs during the era of colonialism, this chapter probes the complexities involved when “sword-bearers” are named as saints or martyrs. After examining the language of martyrdom that some Protestant thinkers applied to soldiers for the true faith during the European “wars of religion,” the chapter ends by analyzing the important but tenuous emerging distinction between “holy war” and “just war” as articulated by Martin Luther.

Agrippa d’Aubigné

Born in 1552, Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné was taken by his father, at the age of eight, to look upon the severed heads of Huguenots executed for their part in the failed Conspiracy of Amboise. The spectacle marked the child, stirring his devotion to the Protestant cause, which determined his whole life. His military career included serving in the first three Wars of Religion under the prince de Condé, and then in the army of Henri of Navarre. When wounded at the battle of Casteljaloux (1576), Aubigné experienced a religious vision, which, he claims, was the first inspiration for his epic poem Les Tragiques, written and revised over some forty years, before its publication in 1616. His best-known work for modern readers—monumental, and by turn dramatic, satirical, and deeply moving—it is above all imbued with his Calvinist faith in the ultimate triumph of divine purpose, despite the horrific scars wrought by the civil wars. Yet Aubigné’s personal relationship with other leading Protestants was often tense. When Henri IV converted to Catholicism in 1593, Aubigné felt bitterly betrayed and retreated for a while to his family and his provincial estates in Poitou, where he penned his Lettre à Madame, urging the king’s sister, Catherine de Bourbon, to hold firm to her Protestant faith. The need to make his voice heard and shape the Protestant cause impelled him, however, to return repeatedly to the political fray, albeit with increasing disappointment. The accession of Louis XIII and the Regency of Marie de’ Medici fueled his anger against those Protestants willing to appease the new regime. Never inclined to hide his views, he indulged his full satirical venom in his novel Les Aventures du baron de Fæneste (1617–1619), while the seditious views voiced in the first two volumes of his Histoire Universelle (1618–1619) saw this work condemned to be burned. In the last decade of his life, Aubigné took refuge in Geneva (1620–1630), where his marriage with Renée Burlamacchi brought companionship and literary support, not least in her role, after his death, of ensuring his many manuscripts were safely transmitted to the pastor Tronchin, his literary executor. Aubigné may appear as intransigent, and easily moved to anger and scorn, but he was also devoted to his family, as shown in his manuscript Sa Vie à ses enfants, and he had a striking regard for women who stood fast for their Protestant faith.

A French History of ‘Most Shamefull Villanie’

By the 1580s, fragments of individual suffering in France’s Wars of Religion were being pieced together to form a larger picture within English cultural memory. A significant contribution came from Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie (1589), ostensibly based on the testimonies of Huguenot exiles. The French Historie reverses the villain–hero pairing of Chantelouve’s tragedy (Chapter 11): Charles IX becomes a consummate dissembler, while Coligny (in keeping with Protestant polemical discourse) becomes a blessed martyr. However, Dowriche’s underlying concern is to promote a selective kind of epistemic vigilance (in Relevance Theory, an ‘alertness to error’) in her readers: they must not be blind to the presence of ‘a strange Italian weede’—the villainy of Machiavelli and Catherine de’ Medici—proliferating like a rhizome across European culture.

Responding to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

This is the first of four chapters scrutinizing villainy in the French Wars of Religion (1562–98). Chapter 11 considers the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in August 1572, a mass killing that began with the murder of the Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny. Partisan responses to Coligny’s murder soon followed; of particular interest is La Tragedie de feu Gaspard de Colligny (1575) by François de Chantelouve. The latter, a militant Catholic, makes a vindictive mockery of the erstwhile admiral in the course of his tragedy. For Chantelouve, Coligny was a villainous traitor and a threat to France’s monarchy; Charles IX was thus justified in sanctioning Coligny’s death. Yet Chantelouve does not straightforwardly echo the official legal justification for the Massacre that had been commissioned by the Crown in 1573 from the leading jurist Guy du Faur de Pibrac.