The French Church in the Age of Reform

Abstract

The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saw a series of profound upheavals in the religious sensibilities of Frenchmen that have no simple explanations. The period from 1530 to 1560 saw the development of a clandestine and, to the majority, an increasingly threatening and divisive element within the community. The divisions that became open and violent after 1560 are not the main consideration here, however; rather, the aim is to examine the break-up of unity and the attempts to re-establish it. Of course, in order to understand that we need to examine the state of religious belief in the period before the impact of Protestantism during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. If anything certain can be said about this, it is that religion was certainly alive. That it was well remains a much debated assertion stemming from the model traditionally offered for the explanation of the Protestant Reformation: that the church was decadent, steeped in ‘abuses’ and woefully inadequate for the demands placed upon it; that anti-clerical opinions were rife and the church generally unpopular. Upon this scene, the humanist ‘pre-reform’ movement led in France by Lefevre d’Etaples and reforming bishops like Briconnet of Meaux laid the groundwork for the essential critique of the church that led part of its followers to break definitively with the church in the 1530s as part of a ‘great divide’ in the humanist world.¹