Anti-Calvinists of Francophone Switzerland

Early conflicts between the Calvinists and Pierre Caroli, Antoine Marcourt, and their allies led to the development of local bastions of sustained opposition to Calvin and his disciples in francophone Switzerland, chiefly in the areas around Yverdon, Morges, and the Pays de Gex. Pierre Caroli fled to Switzerland after the Affair of the Placards. There, he became friends with Jean Lecomte, Thomas Malingre, and Antoine Marcourt. In the first major split among evangelicals in Switzerland, however, he became an enemy of Calvin, Farel, and Viret in a quarrel over prayers for the dead and the trinity. In 1538, the appointment of Marcourt and Jean Morand to replace the exiled Calvin and Farel in Geneva exacerbated the division between the two sides. By the mid-1540s, opposition to the Calvinists was well entrenched in the areas where these individual opponents were active.

Introduction

At the edge of this carpet they go down on both knees. There the ambassador, who was presenting them, knelt on one knee and pulled back the Pope’s robe from his right foot, on which there is a red slipper with a white cross on it. Those who are on their knees drag themselves in this position up to his foot and lean down to the ground to kiss it....

Sebastian Castellio’s Liberal Challenge

Sebastian Castellio presented to French-speaking Protestants a vision of Christianity fundamentally different from that of Calvin. His vision was based on a belief in the opacity of Scripture and thus the temporary, provisional nature of any claims to religious truth. This need for doubt in Christianity led Castellio to his famous opposition to religious persecution and to his praise of reason as the ultimate arbiter in questions of religious truth. Castellio’s opposition to religious persecution emerged most strongly in his criticism of the execution of Michael Servetus, but he continued for the rest of his career to fight with Calvin and Theodore Beza over that issue, as well as others, such as biblical interpretation, predestination, and justification. Unlike recent studies that have downplayed Castellio’s role as a forerunner of liberal Protestantism, this book argues that he should, in fact, be viewed as such.

Jean Morély’s Assault on Calvinist Ecclesiology

In 1562, Jean Morély published a book that advocated local control over the Reformed churches and challenged the Calvinists’ ideas about religious authority. The Calvinists had established a presbyterian-synodal model, which placed religious authority in the hands of the pastors, consistories, and national synods. Morély argued that such authority should lie instead with the membership of each local church. Morély attracted followers in the Paris and Orléans regions, and other churches around France adopted practices he recommended. Morély was supported initially by Odet and Gaspard de Coligny, and Jeanne d’Albret hired him as tutor to the future King Henri IV. Beza and Antoine de Chandieu worked hard to stop Morély, but he continued to attract followers, including Petrus Ramus. After St. Bartholomew’s Day, Pierre Charpentier published a book that identified several “God-fearing ministers,” many of whom were associated with Morély, who detested the Beza and the Calvinists.

Castellio’s Long Shadow

Castellio’s ideas spread widely throughout Europe, and his followers played a more important role in the development of French Protestantism than has hitherto been acknowledged. This chapter reveals the networks of Castellio’s supporters that developed in the Vaud, Montbéliard, France, and elsewhere in Europe. These allies often united around opposition to religious persecution and to the Calvinist teachings of predestination and strict moral discipline. Instead, they favored religious toleration and free will (and occasionally universal election), and they emphasized voluntary Christian piety. The Calvinists perceived the Castellionists as a threat to their dominance of French Protestantism. Fears about a Castellionist in Poitiers, Jean Saint-Vertunien de Lavau, seem to have led both to Geneva’s missionary program into France and to the convocation of the national synods of the French Reformed churches.

The Consolidation of Anti-Calvinism in Francophone Switzerland

The network of anti-Calvinists in the Suisse romande continued to grow through the late 1540s and 1550s, and the early centers of Calvin’s opponents began to coalesce regionally around André Zébédée and Jacques de Bourgogne, Seigneur de Falais. This chapter presents the fullest treatment to date of Zébédée, one of the most important but least studied opponents of the Calvinists. At first, Zébédée was friends with the Calvinists, but he broke with them for their abandonment of Zwinglian theology of the Eucharist and the ministry. In the 1550s, Zébédée teamed up with Jerome Bolsec, who criticized Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, and Jacques de Falais, whose estate at Veigy became a regional anti-Calvinist center. In 1555, Zébédée, Bolsec, and Jean Lange complained about the Calvinists to the Bernese, who banned Calvinism in the Vaud.

The Formation of the Farellian and Calvinist Networks

Guillaume Farel and later John Calvin insisted that religious reform required uncompromising adherence to a particular set of beliefs, initially focused on the Reformed understanding of the Eucharist. This insistence made working within the existing Church completely untenable, and it put them at odds with Lefèvre, Roussel, and the evangelicals who continued to work for internal reform in France. Farel broke from his old friends when he enthusiastically took the Reformed side in the Lutheran-Reformed quarrels over the Eucharist. He moved to Switzerland, where he became an enthusiastic missionary and wrote the first French Protestant liturgy and theological guide. He and his followers also developed arguments against Nicodemism before Calvin did. When John Calvin arrived in Geneva, he altered some of Farel’s early ideas, especially on the Eucharist, predestination, and moral discipline, but he gained followers, notably Farel himself and Pierre Viret.

Reforming the French National Church

Marguerite of Navarre’s evangelical network never abandoned its strategy of pushing for reform within the existing French church. The Meaux group of the early 1520s, led by Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, sought to “bring the Gospel to the people.” Lefèvre and Gérard Roussel made a crucial decision in 1526 to return to France from exile, instead of joining the international Reformed community. This move paved the way for them to continue down the path of internal reform, an effort that hit its peak in 1533, when Roussel preached to huge crowds in Paris. Hopes were dashed the next year with the royal reaction to the Affair of the Placards, but Roussel continued to encourage evangelical reform during his last years as Bishop of Oloron.

Conclusion

The book’s conclusion demonstrates the extent to which the various anti-Calvinist networks overlapped, showing that there was a truly international web of opposition to Calvinism among francophone evangelicals. What chiefly bound them together was hatred of Calvin (and/or Beza), opposition to the execution of Servetus, and disgust at Calvin’s assumption of uncompromising religious authority. This section offers some preliminary explanations for the Calvinists’ ultimate victory, pointing to their dominance of major cities, printing presses, educational institutions, and synods, as well as to their concerted propaganda campaigns against their enemies and their insistence on unambiguous doctrinal statements. Those treated in this book, by contrast, challenged religious authority but mostly failed to establish religious communities. As such, they can be seen as the earliest practitioners of modern theologian Paul Tillich’s “Protestant Principle.”

The Gallican Evangelicals

The Gallican evangelicals of the 1550s and 1560s, represented here primarily by Jean de Monluc, François Bauduin, and Charles Du Moulin, stayed on the path blazed by early French evangelicals and continued to seek evangelical reform within the existing French church. Monluc, bishop of Valence, adopted Protestant ideas and practices in his diocese. He worked with the lawyer Bauduin and Huguenot nobleman Antoine of Navarre to try to forge a religious compromise at the Colloquy of Poissy. Calvin turned against Bauduin, whom he labeled a moyenneur. Legal expert Charles Du Moulin lived briefly among the Reformed in Switzerland, Germany, and Montbéliard before returning to France, where he outwardly abjured the Protestant faith but increasingly wrote about religious matters from an evangelical perspective. Du Moulin turned bitterly against the Calvinists, however, for he feared they were taking over the evangelical movement in France.