Conclusion

The conclusion argues that France’s Catholic Reformation benefitted from reform efforts initiated in Italy and Spain but was most profoundly shaped by France’s experience of religious war. The movement’s origins lay in the perceived need both to fight the spread of Protestant ideas and to raise standards of clerical behavior. Summarizing the diverse ways in which religious communities responded to the challenges of heresy and civil war, the conclusion further argues that the old religious orders, which had suffered greatly in the conflicts, found themselves at a serious disadvantage when wealthy elites shifted their patronage at the wars’ end to the new reformed congregations, whose penitential fervor and rigorous asceticism had captured their imagination. The new congregations grew at a rapid pace, while the old orders struggled to overcome wartime debts and destruction, fought to determine what reforms to enact, and pressured recalcitrant members to accept their programs for change.

Catholic Reform from the Bottom Up

The chapter examines efforts the Trinitarians of Provence made to reverse a long decline and to adapt their medieval order to reflect the new spiritual climate of the Catholic Reformation. The reform was made by ordinary members despite opposition from their superior general in Paris, who envisioned reform only as a return to the order’s original rule. Founded to ransom Christian slaves in the Mediterranean, the order had fallen away from its rule and experienced declining vocations and impoverishment in the Wars of Religion. The chapter argues that the Provençal monks took their model of religious life from the reformed congregations of Capuchins and Recollects and not from a desire to return to some imagined primitive purity. They wanted to govern their houses in a more collaborative way, to better educate their priests, and to create a more spiritualized community with the interiorized personal piety that characterized the Catholic Reformation.

Battling Demons to Propagate Reform

The chapter traces Sébastien Michaëlis’s efforts to reform the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) in the south of France and shows the close connection between these efforts and his participation in a notorious case of demonic possession. Michaëlis is usually viewed as a determined witch-hunter, whose pursuit of Louis Gaufridy resulted in the latter’s condemnation and execution for sorcery. This chapter contends, by contrast, that Michaëlis was not the mastermind behind the Gaufridy affair but rather was inadvertently caught up in it at a moment when both his reformed Dominicans and the two other reformed congregations involved in the affair—the Ursulines and Jean-Baptiste Romillion’s Priests of Christian Doctrine—were in crisis. Michaëlis wrote the Histoire admirable that recounted the alleged possession and exorcisms of the young Ursuline Madeleine de Demandols to reaffirm and publicize his vision of religious reform and in the hope of spreading his Dominican reform to Paris.

Alternative Visions of the Teresian Heritage

The chapter shows how, within a year after the Discalced Carmelites of Teresa of Avila’s reform were founded in France, opinions diverged on just what constituted an authentic Teresian reform. Spanish nuns brought to guarantee the new order’s authenticity found Paris’s convent of the Incarnation too big, too grand, and too ambitious to lead the order’s expansion. They worked to ensure that the second convent, founded outside Paris at Pontoise, conformed more closely to Teresa’s desire to keep the houses small and poor. The chapter uses written records and art to show how nuns at Pontoise created their own vision of an authentic Teresian convent but in doing so provoked a rivalry that threatened at times to divide the rapidly growing French order. The case illustrates well the challenges not just of defining and enacting religious reform but also of adapting reform to local circumstances and values.

Old Orders in New Times

This chapter traces the story of three convents caught up in the religious wars that devastated Montpellier in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The southern city fell into Protestant hands on the eve of France’s Wars of Religion and remained largely under Protestant control until 1622. Catholic religious life was thoroughly undermined by the repeated expulsions and destruction of property that resulted from the conflicts. This was especially hard on nuns, who, having lost their homes and income, also lost the prestige and sanctity of religious enclosure. Living under wartime conditions that made it difficult to observe their rule, they were unable to recruit new members, much less to enact reforms needed to raise the standards of community life. At the wars’ end, the bishop established convents of Visitandines and Ursulines, reformed orders then gaining popularity elsewhere in France, instead of helping the old orders to reform and rebuild.

Catholic Militants in France’s Protestant Heartland

In 1582, eighteen Capuchin friars arrived in Toulouse from Rome to establish houses from which to fight the Protestant heresy then spreading in Languedoc. Members of a strictly reformed congregation of Franciscans, Capuchins were famed for ardent preaching and ascetic lives. The chapter examines the strategies used to spread their message and shows how they claimed a prominent place in the urban fabric by adapting ritual practices and public service during plague to battle heresy in the streets, as well as from the pulpit. Refused admission to Protestant-dominated towns, they were forced by the continuing conflicts to focus instead on stimulating a renewal of Catholic piety in the towns where they settled. Joining an internalized spirituality with exuberant exterior displays of faith, they helped spread a still-nascent Catholic Reformation in the South. Their militancy nevertheless alienated Protestant onlookers rather than inspiring conversion and hardened confessional boundaries instead of erasing them.

A Monastery in Revolt

King Henri III brought the reformed Cistercian congregation of Feuillants to Paris in 1587 out of admiration for the penitential piety of the congregation’s founder and abbot, Jean de La Barrière. Yet within two years, the Paris monks had rebelled against both their abbot’s royalist politics and the strict asceticism of his reform. Left in charge of the Paris house when La Barrière returned to Feuillants, Bernard de Montgaillard led the Paris monks to join the rebellion against Henri III, known as the Holy League, at the same time that they fought to free themselves from their abbot’s control. The chapter traces the parallels between the monks’ revolt against monastic absolutism and the city’s revolt against its monarch. Analyzing their claims to be perfecting—and not rejecting—the Feuillant reform by returning to their order’s original purity, it illuminates ongoing debates about the nature and ends of monastic reform.

Introduction

The introduction first explains why “planting the cross” is an apt metaphor for the renewal of monastic life that took place in the wake of France’s Wars of Religion. It introduces the six case studies that make up the book and explains how each explores a particular question, or set of questions, about how Catholic reformers envisioned and implemented the changes commonly known as the “Catholic Reformation.” The cases show that “reform” was not simply imposed from above, nor was it fixed or completed with the adoption of a new constitution or rule. Arguments for a return to a religious order’s original purity or a life of greater austerity encouraged debate about how the order should best live out its rule. The introduction concludes with a summary of the circumstances that made religious reform so urgently needed and a brief overview of how the reform movement spread.