Neither the Edict of Coucy, nor a similar Edict, somewhat more liberal, which was issued in May, 1536, had much effect in bringing back the exiles to France. The great majority preferred exile to abjuration. Thus while the cause of Protestantism in France lost in this way many of its most ardent supporters, on the other hand there fell away from it the timid and the interested, those who had no wish "to be burned like red herrings," and those who basked in the sunshine of the royal favour. Moreover the sympathies of moderate men, of men like Guillaume and Jean du Bellay, of Guillaume Budé and François Rabelais, were alienated by the iconoclastic outbursts of the Reformers. They were favourable to a reform of the Church by moderate means, but they were statesmen or humanists, and not theologians. Rabelais' Gargantua, which he must have finished just before the affair of the placards, contains several passages of a distinctly evangelical character. But in his later books we find him " throwing stones into the Protestant garden." Lastly, there was a small group who followed the example of the Queen of Navarre and her ally Gérard Roussel, now Bishop of Oloron, and, while still holding the chief evangelical doctrines, continued members of the Catholic Church and conformed to most of its ceremonial. Though this seemed to Calvin an unworthy compromise, it fairly represented the half-practical, half-mystical character of Margaret's religion and her adherence to a certain phase of the Renaissance.
Thus the affair of the placards and the resulting persecution had made too wide a breach between the two religious parties to admit of its being healed. Partly from the timidity of the leaders and partly from the rashness of the rank and file, the first or Evangelical phase of Protestantism in France had failed to bring about a reform of the Church. In the early part of the year 1536 the man, who had initiated the movement, the aged Lefèvre d'Etaples, died at Nérac. Almost simultaneously there appeared a work which was to inaugurate the second or Calvinistic phase of French Protestantism, Calvin's Christianae religionis tnstitutio (March, 1536). Though little more than a sketch as compared with the form which it finally took, it was in essential points complete. It gave the French Reformers what they so greatly needed, a definite theological system in place of the undogmatic and mainly practical teaching of Lefèvre and Roussel. It gave them a profession of faith which might serve at once to unite their own forces and to prove to their persecutors the righteousness of their cause.
It is true that French Protestantism, in thus becoming Calvinistic, in a large measure abandoned the two leading principles of the movement out of which it had sprung, the spirit of free enquiry, and the spirit of individualism. But without this surrender it must in the long run have yielded to persecution. It was only by cohesion that it could build up the necessary strength for resistance. Thus the French Protestants hailed the author of the Institutio as their natural leader, as the organiser
