the Protestant revolt would be complete without some allusion
to the contrast between the course of affairs in France and in
the neighbouring countries. The French monarchy, as we have
seen, had usually succeeded in holding its own against the
centralizing tendencies of the pope. By the Pragmatic Sanction
of Bourges (1438) it had secured the advantages of the conciliar
movement. In 1516, after Francis I. had won his victory at
Marignano, Leo X. concluded a new concordat with France,
in which, in view of the repudiation of the offensive Pragmatic
Sanction, the patronage of the French Church was turned over,
with scarce any restriction, to the French monarch, although
in another agreement the annates were reserved to the pope.
The encroachments-which had begun in the time of Philip the
Fair—of the king’s lawyers on the ancient ecclesiastical jurisdiction,
had reached a point where there was little cause for
jealousy on the part of the State. The placet had long prevailed,
so that the king had few of the reasons, so important in Germany
and England, for quarrelling with the existing system, unless
it were on religious grounds. France had been conspicuous in
the conciliar movement. It had also furnished its due quota
of heretics, although no one so conspicuous as Wycliffe or Huss.
Marsiglio of Padua had had Frenchmen among his sympathizers
and helpers. The first prominent French scholar to “preach
Christ from the sources” was Jacques Lefèbvere of Etaples, who
in 1512 published a new Latin translation of the epistles of St
Paul. Later he revised an existing French translation of both
the New Testament (which appeared in 1523, almost contemporaneously
with Luther’s German version) and, two years
later, the Old Testament. He agreed with Luther in rejecting
transubstantiation, and in believing that works without the
grace of God could not make for salvation. The centre of
Lefèbvere’s followers was Meaux, and they found an ardent
adherent in Margaret of Angouléme, the king’s sister, but had no
energetic leader who was willing to face the danger of disturbances.
Luther’s works found a good many readers in France,
but were condemned (1521) by both the Sorbonne and the parlement
of Paris. The parlement appointed a commission to discover
and punish heretics; the preachers of Meaux fled to Strassburg,
and Lefèbvere’s translation of the Bible was publicly burned. A
council held at Sens, 1528–29, approved all those doctrines of the
old Church which the Protestants were attacking, and satisfied
itself with enumerating a list of necessary conservative reforms.
After a fierce attack on Protestants caused by the mutilation of a statue of the Virgin, in 1528, the king, anxious to conciliate both the German Protestants and anti-papal England, invited some of the reformers of Meaux to preach in the Louvre. An address written byJohn Calvin and his “Institutes of the Christian Religion.” a young man of twenty-four, Jean Cauvin (to become immortal under his Latin name of Calvinus) was read by the rector of the university. It was a defence of the new evangelical views, and so aroused the Sorbonne that Calvin was forced to flee from Paris. In October 1534, the posting of placards in Paris and other towns, containing brutal attacks on the Mass and denouncing the pope and the “vermin” of bishops, priests and monks as blasphemers and liars, produced an outburst of persecution, in which thirty-five Lutherans were burned, while many fled the country. The events called forth from Calvin, who was in Basel, the famous letter to Francis which forms the preface to his Institutes of the Christian Religion. In this address he sought to vindicate the high aims of the Protestants, and to put the king on his guard against those mad men who were disturbing his kingdom with their measures of persecution. The Institutes, the first great textbook of Protestant theology, was published in Latin in 1536, and soon (1541) in a French version. The original work is much shorter than in its later editions, for, as Calvin says, he wrote learning and learned writing. His address had little effect on the king. The parlements issued a series of edicts against the heretics, culminating in the very harsh general edict of Fontainebleau, sanctioned by the parlement of Paris in 1543. The Sorbonne issued a concise series of twenty-five articles, refuting the Institutes of Calvin. This statement, when approved by the king and his council, was published throughout France, and formed a clear test of orthodoxy. The Sorbonne also drew up a list of prohibited books, including those of Calvin, Luther and Melanchthon; and the parlement issued a decree against all printing of Protestant literature. The later years of Francis’s reign were noteworthy for the horrible massacre of the Waldenses and the martyrdom of fourteen from the group of Meaux, who were burnt alive in 1546. When Francis died little had been done, in spite of the government’s cruelty, to check Protestantism, while a potent organ of evangelical propaganda had been developing just beyond the confines of France in the town of Geneva.
In its long struggle with its bishops and with the dukes of Savoy, Geneva had turned to her neighbours for aid, especially to Bern, with which an alliance was concluded in 1526. Two years later Bern formally sanctioned the innovations advocated by the Protestant preachers,Geneva becomes a centre of propoganda. and although predominantly German assumed the rôle of protector of the reform party in the Pays de Vaud and Geneva. William Farel, one of the group of Meaux, who had fled to Switzerland and had been active in the conversion of Bern, went to Geneva in 1531. With the protection afforded him and his companions by Bern, and the absence of well-organized opposition on the part of the Roman Catholics, the new doctrines rapidly spread, and by 1535 Farel was preaching in St Pierre itself. After a public disputation in which the Catholics were weakly represented, and a popular demonstration in favour of the new doctrines, the council of Geneva rather reluctantly sanctioned the abolition of the Mass. Meanwhile Bern had declared war on the duke of Savoy, and had not only conquered a great part of the Pays de Vaud, including the important town of Lausanne, but had enabled Geneva to win its complete independence. In the same year (September 1536), as Calvin was passing through the town on his way back to Strassburg after a short visit in Italy, he was seized by Farel and induced most reluctantly to remain and aid him in thoroughly carrying out the Reformation in a city in which the conservative sentiment was still very strong. As there proved to be a large number in the town councils who did not sympathize with the plans of organization recommended by Calvin and his colleagues, the town preachers were, after a year and a half of unsatisfactory labour, forced to leave Geneva. For three years Calvin sojourned in Germany; he signed the Augsburg Confession, gained the friendship of Melanchthon and other leading reformers, and took part in the religious conferences of the period. In 1541 he was induced with great difficulty to surrender once more his hopes of leading the quiet life of a scholar, and to return again to Geneva (September 1541), where he spent the remaining twenty-three years of his life. His ideal was to restore the conditions which he supposed prevailed during the first three centuries of the Church’s existence; but the celebrated Ecclesiastical Ordinances adopted by the town in 1541 and revised in 1 561 failed fully to realize his ideas, which find a more complete exemplification in the regulations governing the French Church later. He wished for the complete independence and self-government of the Church, with the right of excommunication to be used against the ungodly. The Genevan town councils were quite ready to re-enact all the old police regulations common in that age in regard to excessive display, dancing, obscene songs, &c. It was arranged too that town government should listen bo the “ Consistory, ” made up of the “ Elders, ” but the Small Council was to choose the members of the Consistory, two of whom should belong to the Small Council, four to the Council of Sixty, and six to the Council of Two Hundred. One of the four town syndics was to preside over its sessions. The Consistory was thus a sort of committee of
century elapsed before the Concordat was abrogated by the Separation Law of 1905 which suppressed all government appropriations for religious purposes and vested the control of Church property in “associations for public worship” (associations cultuelles), to be composed of from seven to twenty-five members according to the size of the commune.
