FRANCE
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FRANCE
the banners of the Reformation party or under those
of the League organized by the House of Guise to
defend Catholicism, pohtical opinions ranged them-
selves, and during these tliirty years of civil disorder
monarchical centralization was often in danger of
overthrow. Had the Guise party prevailed, the trend
of policy adopted by the French monarchy towards
Catholicism after the Concordat of Francis I would
have assuredly been less Galilean. That conconlat
had placed the Chxirch in France and its episcopate in
the hands of the king. The old episcopal Ciallicanism
which held that the authority of the pope was not
above that of the Church assembled in council, and the
royal Gallicanism, which hekl that the king had no
superior on earth, not even the pope, were now allied
against the papal monarchy strengthened by the
Council of Trent. The consequence of all this was
that the French kings refusetl to allow the decisions of
that council to be published in France, and this refusal
has never been withdrami.
At the entl of the sixteenth century it seemed for an instant as though the home policy of France was to shake off the yoke of Galilean opinions. Feudalism had been broken ; the people were eager for liberty; the Catholics, disheartened by the corruption of the Valois court, contemplated elevating to the throne, in suc- cession to Henry III, who was childless, a member of the powerful House of Guise. In fact, the League had asked the Holy See to grant the wish of the people, and give France a Guise as king. Henry of Navarre, the heir presumptive to the throne, was a Protestant; Sixtus V had given him the choice of remaining a Protestant, and never reigning in France, or of abjur- ing his heresy, receiving absolution from the pope himself, and, together with it, the throne of France. But there was a third solution possible, and the French episcopate foresaw it, namely, that the abjuration should be made not to the pope, but to the French bishops. Galilean susceptibilities would thus be satis- fied, dogmatic orthodoxy would be maintained on the French throne, and moreover it would do away with the danger to which the unity of France was exposed by the proneness of a certain number of Leaguers to encourage the intervention of Spanish armies and the ambitions of the Spanish king, Philip II, who cherished the idea of setting his own daughter on the throne of France.
The abjuration of Henry IV made to the French bishops cm July, 159.3) was a victory of Catholicism over Protestantism, but none the less it was the vic- tory of episcopal Gallicanism over the spirit of the League. Canonically, the absolution given by the bishops to Henry IV was imavailing. since the pope alone could lawfully give it; but politically that ab- solution was bound to have a decisive effect. From the day that Henry IV became a Catholic, the League was beaten. Two French prelates went to Rome to crave absolution for Henry. St. Philip Neri ordered Baronius — smiling, no doubt, as he did so — to tell the pope, whose confessor he, Baronius, was, that he himself coidd not have absolution until he had absolved the King of France. And on 17 Septem- ber, 1.595, the Holy See solemnly absolved Henry IV, thereby sealing the reconciliation between the French monarchy and the Church of Rome. The accession of the Bourbon royal family was a defeat for Protestantism, but at the same time half a vic- tory for Gallicanism. Ever since the year 1598 the dealings of the Bourbons with Protestantism were regulated by the Edict of Nantes. This instrument not only accorded to Protestants the liberty of prac- tising their rehgion in their own homes, in those towns and villages where it had been established be- fore 1.597, and in two localities in each hailliagc. but it also opened to them all employments and created mixed tribunals in which the judges were chosen equally from among Catholics and Calvinists; it
furthermore made them a political power by recog-
nizing them for eight years as masters of about one
hundred towns which were known as " places of
surety" (placeK de surdi). Under favour of the politi-
cal clauses of the Edict the Protestants rapidly became
an impcrium in imjurio. antl in 1027, at La Hochelle,
they formed an alliance with England to defend, against
the government of Louis XIII (1610— 1.3^ the privi-
leges of which Cardinal Richelieu, the king's minister,
wished to deprive them. The taking of La Rochelle
by the king's troops (November, 1G2S), after a siege
of fourteen months, and the submission of the Protest-
ant rebels in the Cevennes, residted in a royal decision
which Richelieu called the Grace d'Alais: the Protes-
tants lost all their political privileges and all their
"places of surety", but on the other hand freedom of
worship and absolute equality with the Catholics were
guaranteed them. Both Cardinal Richelieu and his
successor. Cardinal Mazarin, scrupulously observed
this guarantee, but under Louis XI V a new policy wa-s
inaugurated. For twenty-five j'ears the king forbade
the Protestants everything that the Edict of Nantes
did not expressly guarantee them, and then, foolishly
imagining that Protestantism was on the wane, and
that there remained in France only a few hundred
obstinate heretics, he revoked the Edict of Nantes
(1685) and began an oppressive policy against Prot-
estants, which provoked the rising of the Camisards
in 1703-05, and which lasted with alternations of
severitj^ and kindness until 178-1, when Louis XVI
was obliged to give Protestants their civil rights once
more. The very manner in which Louis XlV, who
imagined himself the religious head of his kingdom,
set about the Revocation, was only an apphcation of
the religious maxims of (Jallicanism.
In the person of Louis XIV, indeed, Gallicanism was on the throne. .\t the States-General, in 1614, the tiers Hat had endeavoured to make the assembly commit itself to certain decidedly Galilean declara- tions, but the clergy, thanks to Cardinal Duperron, had succeeded in shelving the question; then Riche- lieu, careful not to embroil himself with (he pope, had taken up the mitigated and very reserved form of Gallicanism represented by the theologian Duval. As for Lotus XIV, he considers himself a God on earth — his religion is the State's; ever)' subject who does not hold that religion is outside of the State. Hence the persecutions of Protestants and of Jansen- ists. But at the same time he would never allow a papal Bull to be published in France until his Par- liament had decided whether it interfered with the "liberties" of the French Church or the authority of the king. And in 1682 he invited the clergy of France to proclaim the independence of the Galilean Church in a manifesto of four articles, at least two of which — ■ relating to the respective powers of pope and a coun- cil — broached questions which onh' an oecumenical cotmcil could decide. In consequence of this a crisis arose between the H0I3' See and LouLs XIV which led to thirty-five sees being left vacant in 1689. The pol- icv of Louis XIV in religious matters was adopted also by Louis XV. His way of striking at the Jesuits in 1763 was in principle the same as that taken by Louis XIV to impose Gallicanism on the Church — the royal power pretending to mastery over the Church. The domestic polic)' of the seventeenth-century Bourbons, aided by Sully, Richelieu, Mazarin. and Louvois, com- pleted the centralization of the kingly power. Abroati, the fundamental maxim of their policy was to keep up the struggle against the House of .\ustria. The resvill of the diplomacy of Richelieu (1624—42) and of Maza- rin (1643-1661) was a fresh defeat for the Hou.se of Austria; French arms were victorious at Rocroi, Fri- bourg, Niirdlingen, Lens, Sommershausen (1043-48), and, by the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and that of the Pyrenees (1659), .ALsace, .\rtois, and Roussillon were annexed to French territory. In the struggle
