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Gallican Liberties and the Politics of Later Sixteenth-Century France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Jonathan Powis
Jonathan Powis
Affiliation:
University of York
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Extract

What lay behind the anxiety of so many Frenchmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to defend the ‘liberties of the Gallican church’? In a stimulating essay published in 1971, Professor W. J. Bouwsma argued that Gallican ideas transcended any purely national setting, and that they should be studied (to borrow Febvre's distinction) from the standpoint of religious rather than of ecclesiastical history. Beyond the narrowly institutional concerns of traditional French approaches to the subject, Professor Bouwsma glimpsed among the upholders of Gallican liberties a certain cast of mind: a disposition towards religious renewal, an acceptance of the diversity of local church arrangements, and a corresponding distaste for the dogmatic certainties and standardizing ambitions of Tridentine Catholicism. So Professor Bouwsma argued.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , September 1983 , pp. 515 - 530
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

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39 Lettres et ambassades, II 157. Professor Bouwsma, Venice, pp. 254–5, cites the letter in question, but omits Canayc's declaration of loyalty to the Catholic church, warts and all.

40 L'Estoile, Mémoires-Journaux, x, 131—3.

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80 Dupuy 240, fos. 130–9; L'Estoile, Mémoires-Journaux, VI, 248–9. Professor Huppert, Bourgeois genlilshommes, pp. 160–1, regards senior office-holders as consistently hostile to the Society of Jesus; this seems to me an unconvincing claim, and I hope to discuss the question at greater length elsewhere.

81 Dupuy 240, fo. 181.

82 Yardeni, La conscience nationale en France, p. 210.

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91 Dupuy 240, fo. 192. According to L'Estoile, this speech represented Coqueley's amende honorable for his past conduct; Mémoires-Journaux, VII, 14.

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93 Fonds français 4397, fos. 201 v-202.

94 Radouant, R., Guillaume Du Vair (Paris, 1908)Google Scholar, is a valuable guide to Du Vair's career and writings. Du Vair's references to the siege are in Traicté de la Constance, ed. J. Flasch and F. Funck-Brentano (Paris, 1915), especially pp. 62 and 199. On the authoritarian character of much neo-stoic writing see Abel, G., Stoizismus und fruhe neuzeit (Berlin, 1978), p. 217.Google Scholar

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98 Dupuy 240, fo. 66 v, citing Annals, 4, 40. There has been a good deal of recent work on the influence of Tacitus during the period: Salmon, J. H. M., ‘Cicero and Tacitus in sixteenth-century France’, American Historical Review, LXXXV (1980), 307–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schellhase, K., Tacitus in renaissance political thought (Chicago, 1976)Google Scholar; Etter, E. L., Tacitus in der geistesgeschichte des 16. und 17. jahrhunderts (Basel, 1966)Google Scholar; Stackelberg, J. von, Tacitus in Romania (Tübingen, 1960). Von Stackelberg, pp. 11 ff., seems to me to provide a particularly acute account of the Roman historian's relevance to sixteenth-century experience.Google Scholar

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