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This Protestant religious expression “threatened the perception of nation forged by both king and subjects, because the king’s own coronation oath required him to protect and defend his realm and his subjects from heresy.”76 Montclos asserts that beginning in 1540 persecution became practically systematic with many Protestants dying at the stake. Their strength and determination frightened the Catholic hierarchy and constrained the authorities to seek a solution.77 The growth of this new faith raised fears and concerns that needed to be addressed by the royal family since the converts to Protestantism “were simply too numerous to suppress.”78

      Wars of Religion

The concept of the inseparability of King and Church would initially lead to compromises under Catherine de Medici (1519–1589). The Edict of January accorded the Huguenots partial rights to privately practice their religion in government approved places in January 1562. Religious gatherings were forbidden in population centers where the Huguenots were concentrated. According to Lindberg, “Huguenot public worship was allowed in private homes in towns and outside the towns’ walls. This was the watershed for French Protestantism.”79 The edict was rejected by most French Catholics who raised the question, “How could the regent, wife, and mother of a king of France advocate the Huguenots’ legal right to exist within the kingdom, when the king’s own coronation required their suppression?”80 It was a fundamental principle that the “coronation oath required him to protect and defend his realm and his subjects from heresy” and that “much of the symbolism and ritual of the coronation itself served to imbricate the monarchy and the Catholic Church together, making Protestantism or any other form of heresy a threat to royal authority.”81 The authorities of the Church considered Catherine’s edict in contradiction with the Council of Trent (1545–1563) which had anathematized the heresy of Luther and Calvin. She soon became aware of the dangerous situation in which the edict placed her and sought to side with and placate the Catholic faction. War seemed inevitable. “The Huguenot political and military resources were not sufficient to bring France into Protestantism, but they were strong enough to ensure their existence as a rebellious minority.”82

The massacre of Protestants in Vassy in March 1562 by the Duke of Guise foreshadowed the bloodshed which would follow in the Wars of Religion for almost forty years. At stake was the status of the Reformed religion in the kingdom.83 At Vassy, the Duke, with 200 armed men, came across a large congregation of Huguenots gathered in a barn for worship and set upon them. Some 70 Huguenots were killed and many more wounded. The incident sparked more massacres, and the religious wars were on.84 The result was tragic and “only after four decades of civil war would the nation re-emerge with any semblance of community, imagined or otherwise.”85 Around this time, Sébastian Castellion (1515–1564), who ministered alongside Calvin for a time in Geneva, wrote in the preface of his Traité des hérétiques (1554), “Who would want to become a Christian when they see that those who confess the name of Christ are bruised at the hands of Christians, by fire, by water, by sword, and treated more cruelly than robbers and murderers?”86

The landscape of post-Reformation France was permanently altered. There would follow in the next centuries an innumerable succession of contestations, religious suppression, upheavals, bloodshed, governmental turbulence, and riots in the streets. It seemed that under then-present structures of government there could be no peaceful coexistence between two competing religions especially now that “when the Huguenots took up arms they lost the image of a persecuted church. And when in 1562 they looked to English Protestants for assistance . . . they lost their patriotic credibility.”87 However, Catherine de Medici’s Edict of January 1562 had broken with the past and “made France the first Western European kingdom to grant legal recognition to two forms of Christianity at once.”88 According to historian Philip Benedict,

Within three months, violent Catholic rejection of the legitimacy of toleration combined with Protestant hopes for the imminent triumph of their faith to plunge the country into the first of a deadly cycle of wars that would recur eight times over the next three decades. So frequent and gruesome were the massacres accompanying these conflicts, so searing the sieges, and so numerous the assassinations of leading political actors, that the events of the “time of religious troubles” burned themselves into French and European historical memory for centuries to come.89

In short order, the inability for two incompatible faiths to live peacefully side-by-side led to the massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day on August 24, 1572, which then spread from Paris to other cities.90 What began as a “controlled operation against the leading Protestant noblemen grew into a vast bloodletting by ardently anti-Protestant members of the civic militia, who had allowed themselves to believe that the king had finally sanctioned the long-hoped-for eradication of all Huguenots.”91 Benedict claims that “if the exact division of responsibility for the massacre may never be apportioned with certainty, its broader ramifications are clear.”92 The massacre “precipitated a massive wave of defections from the Protestant cause. In the wake of the killing, Charles IX forbade the Reformed believers from gathering for worship—to protect them against violence, his edict proclaimed, but also because he undoubtedly realized that the massacre might end the Protestant problem once and for all.”93

As the massacres continued in the provinces for several months, fearful Protestants defected and reembraced the Catholic religion. Others fled to find refuge abroad or in Protestant-controlled regions in France. It has been estimated that “Kingdom-wide, for every person killed in the St. Bartholomew’s massacres, dozens returned to the Catholic fold or fled abroad.”94 One Catholic historian reports that Pope Gregory XIII (1502–1585), upon receiving the news of the massacre, decreed a jubilee of thanksgiving, struck a commemorative medal, and commissioned Italian artist Vasari to immortalize the event by a fresco on the walls in the Vatican Sala Regia.95 Protestants and Catholics were both prisoners of a system of thought that considered heresy the greatest enemy and mutual extermination an act of justice in the name of God.96 One major consequence of the massacre was “a flurry of publications about the limits of obedience to royal authority that made the years after 1572 one of the most fertile periods of political reflection in all of French history.”97 Another consequence was the change in relations between Catholics and Protestants shocked by the brutality of the massacre on a previously unknown scale:

Episodes that had become common during the previous twelve years—Protestant attacks on holy images or religious processions; Catholic attacks on Protestants returning from worship or seeking to bury their dead; the cold-blooded slaughter of neighbours of the opposite faith—all but disappeared from most corners of the kingdom after 1572, in part in revulsion from the sheer scale and horror of the events of that year.98

According to G. R. Evans, “The massacre had its effect, because it removed many of the leading figures of the Protestant movement and sent many Huguenots into exile in more sympathetic lands, and it may have contributed in that way to the eventual triumph of Roman Catholic dominance in France.”99 The following years cycled through brokered peace and revocations, times of limited freedom of worship for Protestants, and times of outcry and Catholic outrage whose “manifestos spoke of a ‘holy and Christian union’ to defend the Roman Church against ‘Satan’s ministers’ and of restoring provincial liberties ‘as they were in the time of king Clovis.’”100 The 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s massacre had not produced its desired effect to rid the kingdom of schismatic Protestants and in the course of time led to “a growing, if still begrudging, acceptance of the argument that religious toleration was less an evil than endless warfare.”101 As a result,

Many of both faiths [Catholics and Protestants] drew the lesson that where two religions were so deeply rooted in a single country that even violence could not exterminate them, a measure of toleration was preferable to the costs entailed in trying to restore religious uniformity, although no French author was as yet willing to defend freedom of worship as a positive good under all circumstances.102

In light of these events, Gaillard dates the concept of laïcité in France to the Edict of Nantes in 1598 conceived by Henry IV to end the civil and religious torment which plunged France into chaos. He calls it “embryonic laïcité.”103 The State became the guarantor of civil peace and liberty of conscience

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