When God's will leads to a civil war
What to do in the event of a religious uprising: compromise or take the plunge? Religious Pragmatism in the Early Modern age, Part 1: France, on the Calvinist civil war in the 1560s.
In the previous episode, I explained why religious toleration was unthinkable in the 16th century. Mutual understanding between Catholics and Protestants was a sinful idea. The adversary was the spawn of the devil and had to be exterminated root and branch. Religious division under one monarch was the worst possible scenario.
But religious unity was hard to find. With Luther's excommunication a door was closed that could no longer be opened. And for the growing support of the Genevan ayatollahs, a comparison with the antichrist from Rome was absolutely out of the question. The genie was out of the bottle.
The problem of religious division was mainly felt in Germany, France, the Netherlands and England. In Germany, where the Reformation had begun, religious divisions were defused with the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio from the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. The local ruler decided which religion was the state religion. If the citizens did not like it, they had only to pack their bags to a neighbouring state where the religion of choice was offered. In Germany, the debate about religious toleration no longer had to be conducted on a razor's edge.
But in the meantime, roughly ten percent of the French had become Protestant, most of them Calvinists to be precise, and the movement included many men of prestige, including many high nobility. And the Calvinists were much more militant than the Lutherans. Heretical persecutions and massacres only seemed to make them more combative. It would lead to religious wars, especially in the 1560s. The situation in France seemed hopeless. In-depth discussion about religious toleration therefore began around the year 1560.
The Dutch revolt started later, around 1568. Dutch state formation began in 1579 with the Union of Utrecht, and two years later with a declaration of independence, the Act of Abjuration. Discussion about religious toleration therefore started later in the Netherlands than in France, and pro-toleration writings by the Dutch in the 16th Century often have been inspired by earlier French thinkers.
The debate in England closed the line, and is mainly personified by John Locke, who, as an exile in Amsterdam between 1683 and 1689, became acquainted with the tail end of the toleration debate in the Netherlands. Locke's Letter concerning toleration was published in 1689.
The circle then closes again in France, with Voltaire, who had undergone his philosophical maturation mainly in England, and was well acquainted with the work of Locke. With the publication of Voltaire's Traité sur la tolérance in 1763, religious toleration gradually became a mainstream idea and the rise of tolerance as a virtue began.
So if we want to find the origins of the debate about religious toleration, we have to go to France in the 1560s, with thinkers such as Michel de L'Hospital, Etienne Pasquier, Sébastien Castellio and Jean Bodin. But because this article is about pragmatic toleration, we actually have to take one step back, to a book that Pasquier and Bodin had on their bedside table, and probably also L'Hospital: Il principe by the Florentine Niccolò Machiavelli.
The naughty Florentine
With Il principe, Machiavelli hoped to regain the favour of his lord, Lorenzo de' Medici, ruler of Florence. Il principe was a mirror for princes, a genre that was quite commonly practiced by political thinkers: written advice to rulers on how to approach running a state. Usually these were pious and moralistic advice, bigoted and boring.
Machiavelli, a contemporary of Erasmus, took a more mischievous approach. A monarch must use trickery and deception when circumstances require it. A monarch must remain in the saddle at all costs, even if it means bloodshed or loss of morality. To remain popular one has to work on one’s public image and it is okay to violate the truth. It is better to be feared than loved; one always has to be a little enigmatic and unpredictable. Divide and conquer. The end justifies the means. Machiavelli's book was an ode to amoral, cynical power politics.
The book was published in 1532, five years after Machiavelli's death, and immediately became a scandal and a sensation. The book was read avidly, but in accordance with Machiavelli's advice, readers fell over each other in their condemnation of its amoral content. However, the core of the message stuck. For rulers, pragmatic self-preservation must come first. If morality and state power come into conflict, then morality should step aside. Virtue is a bonus, as long as you stay in the saddle.
How one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation; for a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil.
Something which looks like virtue, if followed, would be his ruin; whilst something else, which looks like vice, yet followed, brings him security and prosperity.
— Niccolò Machiavelli, Il principe (1532)
That was a new, revolutionary idea. The prevailing idea was that monarchs should be guided by Christian morality; the ideal monarch was a beacon of virtue. Machiavelli argued that monarchs should be guided primarily by pragmatism. Machiavelli does not talk much about the fate of the subjects. The interests of the monarch, the state and its subjects apparently coincided. Those subjects thrive best when that interest takes precedence over all other considerations. Because that produces a stable state, a requirement to get the best out of the subjects.
Reasoning in this way, one can argue that a monarch should also allow religions other than his own, if that suits the monarch best. Pragmatism then outweighs the monarch's own religious beliefs.
Peace and stability outweigh the morality of the sovereign.
Machiavelli, Bodin
The pragmatism of the politiques
France in the 1560’s
In the previous episode, I already outlined the history of toleration for Protestants in France. We are now zooming in. What was going on in France in 1560? The bottom line was that the French kings had let the Protestant issue die down a bit. Until about 1540 there were small pockets of Lutherans and here and there a Calvinist in France. It wasn't much, and they were often foreigners. As far as they were French, they were only 'little people', the king thought. Nothing to worry about. Leave it to the church. However, the Inquisition was almost no longer active in France, unlike in Spain, Portugal and Italy. Thus, from 1539 onwards, Calvin's following began to grow. Decrees were passed, promising severe punishment for heresy. But enforcement faltered; the magistracy was not up to its task, due to large-scale incompetence and corruption. There were also magistrates who themselves had switched to Calvinism. Calvinism also appeared to have appeal to the elite; many noblemen and members of the gentility gradually joined. In the 1550s, the influx of Calvinists seemed unstoppable, despite grand words from King Henri II, who promised that rivers of Protestant blood would flow through France if he had his hands free. It wouldn't get that far. Henri was injured in a tournament and died in 1559. His sons were still too young to succeed him and later proved to be not particularly competent as adults. Their mother, Catarina de' Medici, took charge, but could not prevent the infamous French court intrigues from paralysing the government in the power vacuum, led by a handful of rival high noble clans, especially the De Guise and De Bourbon families.
Michel de L’Hospital
Michel de L'Hospital (1506-1573) was an astute lawyer who received his humanistic training mainly in Italy. Possibly there in Italy, he had already heard of Machiavelli’s scandalous book. In 1560, he made it chancellor of France, a top position under the king, responsible, among other things, for the judiciary and the administration of justice. L'Hospital had two powerful protectors: Catarina de' Medici and Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine. Catarina de' Medici was the daughter of Lorenzo, the ruler to whom Machiavelli had dedicated his infamous book, and the niece of Pope Leo X. She was taking care of business, on behalf of her incapable son. But she wasn't in charge alone. She had to share power with her brother-in-law, François de Guise, brother of the cardinal. The powerful De Guise family was militantly Catholic and would later do everything in its power to eradicate Protestantism root and branch. Catarina and the De Guise family would plan the Saint Bartholomew's Massacre in 1572, the massacre that killed the leaders of the Protestant French nobility. So L'Hospital had very powerful, very Catholic friends. That made it all the more striking that he made a name for himself in 1560 with an argument to give the French Protestants a little space.
The violence came from both sides, but seemed to be mainly initiated by Catholic troops. Calvinist meetings were dispersed, and cities run by Calvinists were captured. Anyone who realises what happened in Calvinist Geneva can imagine that the takeover of French cities designed according to the Calvinist model was unpalatable for the royal authority. In response to the Catholic violence, many Calvinists joined the troops of Protestant nobility, such as the prince of Bourbon-Condé. The Huguenot troops also conquered cities and engaged in retaliatory actions, such as the massacre of monasteries. The Huguenot Wars were also an extension of rivalry among the highest nobility over power in the kingdom.
What to do now with those pesky Protestants? Several attempts were made to unite Catholics and Protestants theologically. Perhaps a national French church was even conceivable, without Vatican interference and with concessions to the Protestants. This idea was seriously considered in moderate circles, but was blocked by Rome and Geneva. Under this constellation, L'Hospital was appointed in 1560. L’Hospital was first and foremost a nationalist, and a man of law and order. Debris had to be cleared; the magistracy had to become an effective instrument of national government again, with effective combating of rebellious Huguenots. But he was also a realist. One cannot contain religious chaos with rhetorical violence; this must be done with policy. And prudent policy requires that one formulates achievable objectives. First, it was impossible to persecute all Protestants. In any case, there was freedom of conscience at the time: if you believed in Calvin's teachings in your spare time, then you had nothing to fear. But public expressions, such as public worship, were prohibited. The state had no time for good heretical churchgoers: L'Hospital thought that the ecclesiastical courts should deal with that. Ecclesiastical courts had no authority to order executions. A pastoral approach was required: conversion under duress is impossible. From now on, justice only had to deal with Protestants who were actually actively subverting authority.
You can't force someone to change their mind
Erasmus, L’Hospital, Castellio
L'Hospital was not in favour of religious toleration; he repeatedly called religious division a punishment from God. His mission was to defuse religious violence, one way or another. He was not interested in theological arguments: the theologians had to fight it out among themselves. This was done under heavy pressure in 1561, in the Colloquy of Poissy. The French ecclesiastical top was present, a heavy delegation from Rome, and on the Protestant side Théodore de Bèze himself. Even the eleven-year-old King Charles IX was present, to emphasise the importance of the meeting. The task was to bring about theological reconciliation. The Vatican delegation had been instructed not to give an inch. The Pope was terrified that a national church of France with protestant tendencies would emerge outside his authority. De Bèze dropped out when a compromise was suggested based on Luther's Augsburg Confession. The colloquium was a grand failure.
L'Hospital saw that it was now time for plan B. The core of that plan had been advocated that year by an anonymous author, probably the young lawyer Étienne Pasquier, in his Exhortation aux princes. The Catholic majority would like to work hard to eradicate Protestant evil forever. But punishing Protestants was pointless and would only escalate matters further, L'Hospital thought.
That would be repugnant not only to the name of Christians we bear, but also to humanity. (...) How could we order the troops to fight against their fathers, sons, brothers, wives, or relatives? (...) Those who remain Catholic do not cease to live in peace and love with those who adopt the new faith. Likewise, one can live in peace with those of different opinions in one kingdom. (...) It is not about the maintenance of religion (constituenda religione) but about the maintaining of the commonwealth (constituenda republica). (...) The point is not to decide which of the two confessions is better, but simply whether Protestant preaching should be allowed or not. Many can be citizens who will not be Christians; even the excommunicated do not cease to be a citizen.
Michel de L’Hospiital, speech in St-Germain, 3 January, 1562
This speech by Michel de L'Hospital in January 1562 went down in history. It was the first time that a prominent thinker suggested that a kingdom could have more than one Christian religion.
Unfortunately, it didn't work out at all. The 1560s were characterised by new edicts, which were continually broken. The Calvinists were satisfied with nothing less than ecclesiastical autonomy for themselves and the complete reformation of France, or rather: all humanity. The militant Catholics, led by the troops of the De Guise family, had had enough and left a trail of blood through the country. L'Hospital was finally relieved of his duties in 1568, and retired sulkingly.
If things don't go the way they should, then it has to be the way it goes.
Pasquier, L’Hospital
But L'Hospital's pragmatic attitude made a difference; the thinkers willing to compromise, focused on the national interest even received a nickname: the politiques. If things don't go the way they should, then it has to be the way it goes. Machiavelli's influence remained implicit but unmistakable: the stability of the state should take precedence over the morally best option of a hegemonic, undivided Catholic Church.
Sébastien Castellio
The next contribution was by Sébastien Castellio. He had previously appeared as a thorn in Jean Calvin's side with a fierce plea for religious toleration on theological grounds, in his De haereticis, an sint persequendi (1554). But he also closely followed the desperate situation in France from Basel. A year before his death, in 1562, he wrote his Conseil à la France désolée, advice to the desolate France. Castellio, by the way, was definitely not a politique; he was an outsider. But for the sake of chronology, I will include him here.
National unity is more important than religious unity.
Castellio
Castellio took his position as an outsider seriously: both camps suffered. Both Catholics and Calvinists were in fact engaged in coercion. Castellio saw only one way out: allowing two religious communities to exist side by side. National unity was more important than religious unity. In doing so, Castellio went further than L'Hospital and Bodin, who considered toleration for Calvinists only permissible on a temporary basis.
Repression will not achieve your goal; it is counterproductive and it leads to a spiral of violence.
Castellio, Bodin, Locke
Jean Bodin
The ideas of the politiques were most systematically expressed in 1576 by Jean Bodin, in his Six livres de la république. The book was not about religious toleration, it is considered the first book in the world that sought to approach political science systematically. Bodin's work would later have a great influence, including on Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius.
Although Bodin explicitly distanced himself from Machiavelli, his argument was inspired by him. The people are quarrelsome, by definition. The monarch must always choose a position above the parties, in order to nip conflicts in the bud. Stability comes first. Issues of faith are particularly likely to fuel division, especially because no one has a monopoly on the truth about faith. The monarch would be wise to harshly suppress theological troublemakers who are looking for their own religious movement. But if that doesn't work, and once a movement has a firm foothold, then oppression is too late. Then just deal with it. How to do that? By standing above the parties. Don't take sides, but rise above them. This is the only way to maintain your authority and guarantee stability.
Furthermore, Bodin's views hardly deviated from those of L'Hospital. A unity church is ultimately the ideal, but for pragmatic reasons temporary admission of a Protestant denomination is the least bad option.
The king must stand above the parties, so if necessary he must also remain religiously neutral.
Bodin
To be continued
So much for the situation in France in the second half of the 16th century. In the next episode, the discussion will move to the Netherlands, where a rebellion broke out around 1570 against the crass actions of the Catholic king, far away in Madrid.
Soon a number of Dutch provinces seceded, where almost everyone had their fill of religious interference from Madrid and Rome. A general church was formed, which was dominated by the Calvinists. The silent majority was not anti-Catholic, but two denominations publicly side by side, that was still a bridge too far. But the Calvinists did not have so much power that they could force their confession on the entire population, even if they had that ambition. Religious toleration for other confessions arose more or less silently, as long as they acted discreetly and did not challenge the primacy of the general church. The mostly pragmatic administrators were fine with it this way.
We will discuss how this situation arose and how it was discussed in the next episode, about religious pragmatism in the Netherlands around the year 1600.
For further reading
Niccolò Machiavelli, Il principe (1532), also available online in English
Hans Guggisberg, Castellio und der Ausbruch der Religionskriege in Frankreich. Einige betrachtungen zum Conseil à la France désolée, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (1977)
Edmond Beame, The use and abuse of Machiavelli: The sixteenth-century French adaptation, Journal of the History of Ideas (1982)
Mario Turchetti, Religious concord and political tolerance in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century France. Sixteenth Century Journal (1991)
Seong-Hak Kim, Michel de L’Hôpital: the vision of a reformist chancellor during the French religious wars (1997)
Rainer Forst, Toleranz im Konflikt. Geschichte, Gehalt und Gegenwart eines umstrittenen Begriffs (2003)
Andrew Fiala, Toleration and pragmatism, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (2002)
Joseph Bergin, The politics of religion in Early Modern France (2014)
This was the thirteenth newsletter in a long series on Toleration and Christianity. An overview of all articles in this series can be found in the overview article Toleration in the history of Christianity.
To remain focused, I want to finish this series first, before we switch back to the series about Morality and Toleration.