FRANCE
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FRANCE
ance. Leo X understood the danger when the victory
of Marignano opened to Francis I the road to Rome.
The pope in alarm retired to Bologna, and the Con-
cordat of 1516, negotiated between the cardinals and
Duprat, the chancellor, and afterwards approved of
by the (Ecumenical Council of the Lateran, recognized
the right of the King of France to nominate not only
to 500 ecclesiastical benefices, as Charles VII had re-
quested, but to all the benefices in his kingdom. It
was a fair gift indeed. But if in matters temporal the
bishops were thus in the king's hands, their institution
in matters spiritual was reserved to the pope. Pope
and king by common agreement thus put an end to
an episcopal aristocracy such as the Galileans of the
great councils had dreamed of. The concordat be-
tween Leo X and Francis I was tantamount to a
solemn repudiation of all the anti-Roman work of the
great councils of the fifteenth century. The conclu-
sion of this concordat was one of the reasons why
France escaped the Reformation. From the moment
that the disposal of church property, as laid down by
the concordat, belonged to the civil power, royalty had
nothing to gain from the Reformation. Whereas the
kings of England and the German princelings saw in the
Reformation a chance to gain possession of ecclesiasti-
cal property, the kings of France, thanks to the con-
cordat, were already in legal possession of those much-
envied goods. When Charles V became King of Spain
(1516) and emperor (1519), thus uniting in his person
the hereditary possessions of the Houses of Austria and
Germany, as well as the old domains of the House of
Burgundy in the Low Countries — uniting, moreover,
the Spanish Monarchy with Naples, Sicily, Sardinia,
the Northern parts of Africa, and certain lands in
America, Francis I inaugurated a struggle between
France and the House of Austria. After forty- four years
of war, from the victory of Marignano to the Treaty
of Cateau-Cambresis (1515-59), France relinquished
hopes of retaining possession of Italy, but had wrested
the Bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun from the
empire and had won back possession of Calais. The
Spaniards were left in possession of Naples and the
country around Milan, and their influence predomi-
nated throughout the Italian Peninsula. But the
dream which Charles V had for a brief moment enter-
tained of a world-wide empire had been shattered.
During this struggle against the House of Austria, France, for motives of political and military exigency, had been obliged to lean on the Lutherans of Ger- many, and even on the sultan. The foreign policy of France since the time of Francis I has been to seek exclusively the good of the nation and no longer to be guided by the interests of Catholicism at large. The France of the Crusades even became the ally of the sultan. But, by a strange anomaly, this new political grouping allowed France to continue its protection to the Christians of the East. In the Middle Ages it protected them by force of arms; but since the six- teenth century, by treaties called capitulations, the first of which was drawn up in 1535. The spirit of French policy has changed, but it is always on France that the Christian commvmities of the East rely, and this protectorate continues to exist under the Third Republic, and has never failed them.
The early part of the sixteenth century was marked by the growth of Protestantism in France, under the forms of Lutheranism and of Calvinism. Lutheran- ism was the first to make its entry. The minds of some in France were already prepared to receive it. Six years before Ijuther's time, the mathematician Lefebvre of Etaplos (F:i1>(t Stapulensis), a prot^g^ of Louis XII and of I'rancis 1, had preached the necessity of reading the Scriptures and of "bringing back reli- gion to its primitive purity". A certain number of tradesmen, some of whom, for business reasons, had travelled in Germany, and a few priests, were in- fatuated with the Lutheran ideas. Until 1534, Francis
I was almost favourable to the Lutherans, and he even
proposed to make Melanchthon President of the Col-
lege de France. But on learning, in 1534, that violent
placards against the Church of Rome had been posted
on the same day in many of the large towns, and even
near the king's own room in the Chateau d'Amboise,
he feared a Lutheran plot; an inquiry was ordered, and
seven Lutherans were condemned to death and burned
at the stake in Paris. Eminent ecclesiastics like du
Bellay, Archbishop of Paris, and Sadolet, Bishop of
Carpentras, deplored these executions and the Vau-
dois massacre ordered by d'Oppede, President of the
Parliament of ALx, in 1545. Laymen, on the other
hand, who ill understood the Christian gentleness of
these prelates, reproached them with being slow and
remiss in putting down heresy; and when, under
Henry II, Calvinism crept in from Geneva, a policy of
persecution was inaugurated. From 1547 to 15.'>0, in
less than three years, the chambre ardenle, a committee
of the Parliament of Paris, condemned more than 500
persons to retract their beliefs, to imprisonment, or to
death at the stake. Notwithstanding this, the Calvin-
ists, in 1555, were able to organize themselves into
Churches on the plan of that at Geneva; and, in order
to bind these Churches more closely together, they
held a synod at Paris in 1559. There were in France
at that time seventy-two Reformed Churches; two
years later, in 1561, the number had increased to
2000. The methods, too, of the Calvinist propaganda
had changed. The earlier Calvinists, like the Luther-
ans, had been artisans and workingmen, but in the
course of time, in the South and in the West, a number
of princes and noblemen joined their ranks. Among
these were two princes of the blood, descendants of
St. Louis: Anthony of Bourbon, who became King of
Navarre through his marriage with Jeanne d'Albret,
and his brother the Prince de Cond^. Another name
of note is that of Admiral de Coligny, nephew of that
Duke of Montmorency who was the Premier Baron of
Christendom. Thus it came to pass that in France
Calvinism was no longer a religious force, but had be-
come a political and military cabal ; and the French
kings in opposing it were but defending their own
rights.
Such was the beginning of the Wars of Religion. They had for their starting-point the Conspiracy of Amboise (1560) by which the Protestant leaders aimed at seizing the person of Francis II, in order to remove him from the influence of Francis of Guise. During the reigns of Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III, a powerful influence was exercised by the queen-mother, who made use of the conflicts between the opposing religious factions to establish more securely the power of her sons. In 1561 Catharine de' Medici arranged for the Poissy discussion to try and bring about an understanding between the two creeds, but during the Wars of Religion she ever maintained an equivocal attitude between both parties, favouring now the one and now the other, until the time came when, fearing that Charles IX would shake himself free of her influ- ence, she took a large share of responsibility in the odious massacre of St. Bartholomew. There were eight of these wars in the space of thirty years. The first was started by a massacre of Calvinists at Vassy by the troopers of Guise (1 March, 1562), and straight- way both parties appealed for foreign aid. Catharine, who was at this time working in the Catholic cause, turned to Spain ; Coligny and Condc turned to Eliza- beth of England and handed over to her the port of Havre. Thus from the beginning were foreshadowed the lines which the Wars of Religion would follow. "They opened up France to the interference of such foreign princes as Elizabeth and Philip II, and to the plunder of foreign soldiers, such as those of the Duke of Alba and the German troopers (Rcilcr) called in l.)y the Protestants. One after another, these wars ended in weak provisional treaties which did not last. Under
