Abstract
The French Wars of Religion were a series of conflicts of bitter and often desperate struggle fought for over forty years. It was a war characterised by massacres, sieges and heroic resistance, but also by a high level of participation amongst ordinary people. For this was a war as much fought for hearts and minds as for outright military victory. The conflict began with an upsurge of Protestant sentiment born on a wave of aggressive published print. But Protestantism was soon turned back by a Catholic polemical assault of even greater ferocity. Far less than is casually assumed, largely on the basis of German evidence, was the book the exclusive property of evangelicals.1 In France, Catholics out-published and eventually outthought their Protestant opponents. Then, in the last decade of the conflict, Catholics turned the power of the printed word against the crown. While they had initially fought to save the monarchy for their faith, in 1588, on the Day of the Barricades, they turned decisively against the royal leadership that they felt had betrayed them.
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Notes and References
On the Catholic response to the Reformation in Germany, see Richard A. Crofts, ‘Printing, Reform, and the Catholic Reformation in Germany (1521–45)’, in SCJ, xvi/3 (1985), pp. 369–81.
See for instance J.M.H. Salmon, Society in Crisis: France in the Sixteenth Centwy (London, 1975) and Nicola Sutherland, The French Secretaries of State in the Age of Catherine de Medici (London, 1962), The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day and the European Conflict (London, 1973), The Huguenot Struggle for Recognition (London, 1980) and Henri IV and the Politics of Religion, 1572–96 (Bristol, 2002).
Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 2003). This seminal work was first published in German in 1962. It was first translated into French in 1978 and then into English only in 1989. Useful critiques of Habermas and his influence on neo-revisionist interpretations of eighteenth-century political culture include Harvey Chisick, Public Opinion and Political Culture in France during the second half of the eighteenth century’ in EHR, cxvii, 470 (2002), pp. 48–76, Jon Cowans, ‘Habermas and French History: The Public Sphere and the Problem of Legitimacy’, in French History, vol. 13, no. 2. (1999), pp. 134–160 and Jeremy Popkin, ‘The Concept of Public Opinion in the Historiography of the French Revolution: A Critique’, in Storia della Storiograpfia, 20 (1991), pp. 77–92.
See Keith Michael Baker, ‘Politics and Public Opinion under the Old Regime: Some Reflections’ in Jack Censer and Jeremy Popkin (eds.), Press and PreRevolutionary France (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1997), p. 246, cited in Chisick, Public Opinion’, p. 54.
Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print. Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot, 2002), p. 49.
See Yves-Marie Bercé, Fête et révolte: des mentalités populaires du XVIe au XVIIe siecle ([Paris], 1976).
On sermons see Larissa Taylor (ed.), Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period (Leiden, 2001) and Soldiers of Christ. Catholic Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France (New York, 1992). See also Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross. Catholics and Huguenots in sixteenth-century Paris (Oxford, 1991). On the German woodcut see Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformarion (Oxford, 1981, 1994). On English broadsides see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991). On song, see Andrew Pettegree, Huguenot Voices: The Book and the Communication Process during the Protestant Reformation (Greenville, November 1999).
R. A. Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe: Culture and Education 15001800 (London, 1988).
Peter Matheson, The Rhetoric of the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1998), p. 27.
One example of the negative attitude towards this literature can be found in Henri Hauser, Les Sources de l’histoire de France: XVI siecle, 1494–1610 (Paris, 1906–15, reprinted Neudeln, 1967), t. II, pt. 1, p. 22.
Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross, Wylie G. Sypher, ‘Faisant ce qu’il leur vient a plaisir: The Image of Protestantism in French Catholic polemic on the eve of the Religious Wars’, SCJ, 9/2 (1980), pp. 59–84; Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print. Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot, 2002).
Georges Ascoli, La Grande-Bretagne devant l’Opinion francaise depuis la Guerre de Cent Ans jusqu’a la fin du XVIe siecle (Paris, 1927).
James E. Phillips, Images of a Queen. Mary Stuart in Sixteenth-Centwy Literature (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1964).
Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, ed. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave (2nd edition, 3 vols., Oxford, 1976–91).
John Scott, A Bibliography of Works Relating to Mary Queen of Scots, 1544–1700 (Edinburgh, 1896).
Samuel T. Tannenbaum & Dorothy R. Tannenbaum, Marie Stuart, Queen of Scots. A Concise Bibliography (3 vols., New York, 1944).
For an introduction to the work of the St Andrews French Vernacular Book Project, see Andrew Pettegree, ‘The Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book Project’, in A. Pettegree, P. Nelles & P. Conner (eds.), The Sixteenth-Century French Religious Book (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 1–17.
On the advantages of statistical bibliography, see Jean-Pierre V. M. Herubel, ‘Historical Bibliometrics: Its Purpose and Significance to the History of Disciplines’, Libraries & Culture, vol. 34, no. 4 (Texas, 1999).
This bibliography is contained in the second volume of my thesis, ‘Mary Queen of Scots in the Polemical Literature of the French Wars of Religion’ (University of St Andrews, 2001).
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© 2004 Alexander S. Wilkinson
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Wilkinson, A.S. (2004). Introduction. In: Mary Queen of Scots and French Public Opinion, 1542–1600. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286153_1
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