subsidize him and cede to him the towns of Metz, Toul and
Verdun. The Protestant alliance was substituted for the
Turkish alliance, and Henry II. hastened to accept the offers
made to him (1552); but this was rather late in the day, for
the reform movement had produced civil war and evoked
fresh forces. The Germans, in whom national feeling got the
better of imperialistic ardour, as soon as they saw the French
at Strassburg, made terms with the emperor at Passau and
permitted Charles to use all his forces against Henry II. The
Defence of Metz.
Truce of Vaucelles.
defence of Metz by Francis of Guise was admirable
and successful; but in Picardy operations continued
their course without much result, owing to the incapacity
of the constable de Montmorency. Fortunately,
despite the marriage of Charles V.’s son Philip to Mary Tudor,
which gave him the support of England (1554), and despite
the religious pacification of Germany through the peace of
Augsburg (1555), Charles V., exhausted by illness
and by thirty years of intense activity, in the truce
of Vaucelles abandoned Henry II.’s conquests—Piedmont
and the Three Bishoprics. He then abdicated the
government of his kingdoms, which he divided between his son
Philip II. and his brother Ferdinand (1556). A double victory,
this, for France.
Henry II.’s resumption of war, without provocation and
without allies, was a grave error; but more characterless than
ever, the king was urged to it by the Guises, whose
influence since the defence of Metz had been supreme
at court and who were perhaps hoping to obtain
Henry II. and
Philip II.
Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis.
Naples for themselves. On the other hand, Pope Paul
IV. and his nephew Carlo Caraffa embarked upon the struggle,
because as Neapolitans they detested the Spaniards, whom they
considered as “barbarous” as the Germans or the
French. The constable de Montmorency’s disaster
at Saint Quentin (August 1557), by which Philip II.
had not the wit to profit, was successfully avenged
by Guise, who was appointed lieutenant-general of the kingdom.
He took Calais by assault in January 1558, after the English
had held it for two centuries, and occupied Luxemburg. The
treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (August 1559) finally put an end to
the Italian follies, Naples, Milan and Piedmont; but it also
lost Savoy, making a gap in the frontier for a century. The
question of Burgundy was definitely settled, too; but the
Netherlands had still to be conquered. By the possession of
the three bishoprics and the recapture of Calais an effort towards
a natural line of frontier and towards a national policy seemed
indicated; but while the old soldiers could not forget Marignano,
Ceresole, nor Italy perishing with the name of France on her
lips, the secret alliance between the cardinal of Lorraine and
Granvella against the Protestant heresy foretold the approaching
subordination of national questions to religious differences, and
a decisive attempt to purge the kingdom of the new doctrines.
The origin and general history of the religious reformation in the 16th century are dealt with elsewhere (see Church History and Reformation). In France it had originally no revolutionary character whatever; it proceeded from traditional Gallican theories and from The Reformation. the innovating principle of humanism, and it began as a protest against Roman decadence and medieval scholasticism. It found its first adherents and its first defenders among the clerics and learned men grouped around Faber (Lefèvre) of Étaples at Meaux; while Marguerite of Navarre, “des Roynes la non pareille,” was the indefatigable Maecenas of these innovators, and the incarnation of the Protestant spirit at its purest. The reformers shook off the yoke of systems in order boldly to renovate both knowledge and faith; and, instead of resting on the abstract a priori principles within which man and nature had been imprisoned, they returned to the ancient methods of observation and analysis. In so doing, they separated intellectual from popular life; and acting in this spirit, through the need of a moral renaissance, they reverted to primitive Christianity, substituting the inner and individual authority of conscience for the general and external authority of the Church. Their efforts would not, however, have sufficed if they had not been seconded by events; pure doctrine would not have given birth to a church, nor that church to a party; in France, as in Germany, the religious revolution was conditioned by an economic and social revolution.
The economic renaissance due to the great maritime discoveries had the consequence of concentrating wealth in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Owing to their mental qualities, their tendencies and their resources, the bourgeoisie had been, if not alone, at least most apt in profiting by the development of industry, by the extension of commerce, and by the formation of a new and mobile means of enriching themselves. But though the bourgeois had acquired through capitalism certain sources of influence, and gradually monopolized municipal and public functions, the king and the peasants had also benefited by this revolution. After a hundred and fifty years of foreign war and civil discord, at a period when order and unity were ardently desired, an absolute monarchy had appeared the only power capable of realizing such aspirations. The peasants, moreover, had profited by the reduction of the idle landed aristocracy; serfdom had decreased or had been modified; and the free peasants were more prosperous, had reconquered the soil, and were selling their produce at a higher rate while they everywhere paid less exorbitant rents. The victims of this process were the urban proletariat, whose treatment by their employers in trade became less and less protective and beneficent, and the nobility, straitened in their financial resources, uprooted from their ancient strongholds, and gradually despoiled of their power by a monarchy based on popular support. The unlimited sovereignty of the prince was established upon the ruins of the feudal system; and the capitalism of the merchants and bankers upon the closing of the trade-gilds to workmen, upon severe economic pressure and upon the exploitation of the artisans’ labour.
Though reform originated among the educated classes it
speedily found an echo among the industrial classes of the
16th century, further assisted by the influence of
German and Flemish journeymen. The popular
reform-movement was essentially an urban movement;
Transformation of religious reform
into party politics.
although under Francis I. and Henry II. it had already
begun to spread into the country. The artisans,
labourers and small shop-keepers who formed the
first nucleus of the reformed church were numerous enough
to provide an army of martyrs, though too few to form a party.
Revering the monarchy and established institutions, they
endured forty years of persecution before they took up arms.
It was only during the second half of Henry II.’s reign that
Protestantism, having achieved its religious evolution, became
a political party. Weary of being trodden under foot, it now
demanded much more radical reform, quitting the ranks of
peaceable citizens to pass into the only militant class of the time
and adopt its customs. Men like Coligny, d’Andelot and Condé
took the place of the timid Lefèvre of Étaples and the harsh and
bitter Calvin; and the reform party, in contradiction to its
doctrines and its doctors, became a political and religious party
of opposition, with all the compromises that presupposes. The
struggle against it was no longer maintained by the university
and the parlement alone, but also by the king, whose authority
it menaced.
With his intrepid spirit, his disdain for ecclesiastical authority
and his strongly personal religious feeling, Francis I. had for
a moment seemed ready to be a reformer himself;
but deprived by the Concordat of all interest in the
confiscation of church property, aspiring to political
Royal persecution under Francis I.
and Henry II.
alliance with the pope, and as mistrustful of popular
forces as desirous of absolute power and devoted
to Italy, he paused and then drew back. Hence came
the revocation in 1540 of the edict of tolerance of Coucy
(1535), and the massacre of the Vaudois (1545). Henry II.,
a fanatic, went still further in his edict of Châteaubriant (1551),
a code of veritable persecution, and in the coup d’état carried out
in the parlement against Antoine du Bourg and his colleagues
(1559). At the same time the pastors of the reformed religion,
