CHAPTER VIII.

THE REFORMATION IN FRANCE.

THE long contest for Gallican rights had lowered the prestige of the popes in France, but it had not weakened the Catholic Church, which was older than the monarchy itself, and, in the feeling of the people, was indissolubly associated with it.1 The College of the Sorbonne, or the Theological Faculty at Paris, and the Parliament, which had together maintained Gallican liberty, were united in stern hostility to all doctrinal innovations. The Concordat concluded between Francis I. and Leo X., after the battle of Marignano, gave to the King the right of presentation to vacant benefices; to the Pope, the first-fruits. It excited profound discontent, and was only registered by Parliament after prolonged resistance and under a protest. It abolished the Pragmatic Sanction, which had been deemed the charter of Gallican independence; but it weakened the Catholic Church, only as it led to the introduction of incompetent, unworthy persons, favorites of the court, into ecclesiastical offices, and thus increased the necessity for reform.2 In Southern France a remnant of the Waldenses had survived, and the recollection of the Catharists was still preserved in popular songs and legends. But the first movements towards reform emanated from the Humanist culture.

A literary and scientific spirit was awakened in France

1 Ranke, Französische Geschichte vornehmlich im 16. u. 17. Jahrhundert, i. 110. 2 On the corruption consequent upon the Concordat, see Ranke, Französische Geschichte, i. 131.

through the lively intercourse with Italy, which subsisted under Louis XII. and Francis I. By Francis especially, Italian scholars and artists were induced in large numbers to take up their abode in France. Frenchmen likewise visited Italy and brought home the classical culture which they acquired there. Among the scholars who cultivated Greek was Budæus, the foremost of them, whom Erasmus styled the "wonder of France." After the "Peace of the Dames" was concluded at Cambray, in 1529, when Francis surrendered Italy to Charles V., a throng of patriotic Italians who feared or hated the Spanish rule, streamed over the Alps and gave a new impulse to literature and art. Poets, artists, and scholars found in the king a liberal and enthusiastic patron. The new studies, especially Hebrew and Greek, were opposed by all the might of the Sorbonne, the leader of which was the Syndic, Beda. He and his associates were on the watch for heresy, and every author who was suspected of overstepping the bounds of orthodoxy, was immediately accused and subjected to persecution. Thus two parties were formed, the one favorable to the new learning, and the other inimical to it and rigidly wedded to the traditional theology.1

The Father of the French Reformation, or the one more entitled to this distinction than any other, is Jacques Lefèvre, who was born at Étaples, a little village of Picardy, about the year 1455, prosecuted his studies at the University of Paris, and having become a master of arts and a priest, spent some time in Italy. After his return he taught mathematics and philosophy at Paris, was active in publishing and commenting on the works of Aristotle, which he had studied in the original in Italy, as well as in printing books of ancient mathematicians, writings of the Fathers, and mystical productions

1 Weber, Geschichtliche Darstellung d. Calvinismus im Verhältniss zum Staut, p. 33 seq.

of the Middle Ages. Lefèvre was honored among the Humanists as the restorer of philosophy and science in the University. Deeply imbued with a religious spirit, in 1509 he put forth a commentary on the Psalms, and in 1512 a commentary on the Epistles of Paul. As early as about 1512, he said to his pupil Farel: "God will renovate the world, and you will be a witness of it;" and in the last named work, he says that the signs of the times betoken that a renovation of the Church is near at hand. He teaches the doctrine of gratuitous justification, and deals with the Scriptures as the supreme and sufficient authority. But a mystical, rather than a polemical vein characterizes him; and while this prevented him from breaking with the Church, it also blunted the sharpness of the opposition which his opinions were adapted to produce. One of his pupils was Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, who held the same view of justification with Lefèvre, and fostered the evangelical doctrine in his diocese. The enmity of the Sorbonne to Lefèvre and his school took a more aggressive form when the writings of Luther began to be read in the University and elsewhere. The theologians of the Sorbonne set their faces against every deviation from the dogmatic system of Aquinas. Reuchlin, having been a student at Paris, had hoped for support there in his conflict with the Dominicans of Cologne ; but the Paris faculty declared against him. In 1521 they sat in judgment on Luther and condemned him as a hertic and blasphemer.1 Heresy was treated by them as an offense against the State; and the Parliament, the highest judicial tribunal, showed itself prompt to carry out their decrees by the infliction of the usual penalties. The Sorbonne formally condemned a dissertation of Lefèvre on a point of the evangelical history, in which he had controverted the traditional opinion. He, with Farel, Gérard Roussel, and other preachers, found an asylum with 1 Melancthon replied. Seckendorf, i. 185.

MARGARET OF NAVARRE.

245

Briçonnet. Lefèvre translated the New Testament from the Vulgate, and, in a commentary on the Gospels, explicitly pronounced the Bible the sole rule of faith, which the individual might interpret for himself, and declared justification to be through faith alone, without human works or merit. It seemed as if Meaux aspired to become another Wittenberg. At length a commission of Parliament was appointed to take cognizance of heretics in that district. Briçonnet, either intimidated, as Beza asserts, or recoiling at the sight of an actual secession from the Church, joined in the condemnation of Luther and of his opinions, and even acquiesced in the persecution which fell upon Protestantism within his diocese.2 Lefèvre filed to Strasburg, was afterwards recalled by Francis I., but ultimately took up his abode in the court of the King's sister, Margaret, the Queen of Navarre.3

Margaret, from the first, was favorably inclined to the new doctrines. There were two parties at the court. The mother of the King, Louisa of Savoy, and the Chancellor Duprat, were allies of the Sorbonne. They were of the class of persons, numerous in that age, who endeavor to atone for private vices by bigotry, and by the persecution of heterodox opinions. Margaret, on the contrary, a versatile and accomplished princess, cherished a mystical devotion which carried her beyond Briçonnet in her acceptance of the teaching of the Reformers. But this very spirit of mysticism, or quietism, produced in her mind an indifference as to external rites and forms of

1 Henri Martin, Histoire de France, viii. 149.

2 Beza, Histoire Eccl. d. Eglises Ref. au Royaume de France, livre i. (1517). The last books of this work are by another hand, but written under the oversight of Beza. Herzog, Real-Encycl. art. "Beza."

3 The middle path which Roussel and others, who accepted the doctrine of justification by faith, but remained in the Roman Catholic Church, endeavored to take, is exhibited by Schmidt in his work, Gérard Roussel, prédicateur de la Reine Marguerite de Navarre (1845), and in the articles, by the same author, in Herzog's Real-Encycl., "Briçonnet," "Gérard Roussel," and "Margaretha von Orleans."

ecclesiastical order; so that while she received the Protestant idea of salvation by faith, and of the direct personal communion of the soul with Christ, she was not moved to withdraw from the mass, or separate formally from the old Church. There was a warm friendliness for the Reforming preachers, a disposition to protect them against their enemies, a type of piety that no longer relished the invocation of saints, and of the Virgin, and various other peculiarities of the Catholic Ritual, yet left the sacraments and the polity of the Church unassailed. The' passionate attachment of Margaret to her brother, of which so much has been said, illustrates her nature, in which sensibility had so large a place.1 The authoress of a religious poem, the "Mirror of the Sinful Soul," which was so Protestant in its tone as to excite the wrath of the Sorbonne, and of many devotional hymns; she also composed, in her later days, the " Heptameron," a series of tales in the style of Boccaccio, in which the moral reflections and warnings are a weak antidote to the natural influence of the narratives themselves.2 Before the death of her first husband, the Duke of Alençon, and while she was a widow, she exerted her influence to the full extent in behalf of the persecuted Protestants, and in opposition to the Sorbonne. After her marriage to Henry d'Albret, the King of Navarre, she continued, in her own little court and principality, to favor the reformed doctrine, and its professors. Occasionally her peculiar temperament led her to entertain hospitably

1 See the judicious remarks of Henri Martin, viii. 83, n. 4. M. Genin, in his Supplément à la notice sur Marguerite d'Angoulême, which forms the preface to the Nouvelles Lettres de la Reine de la Navarre, has given an improbable version of this "triste mystère," which attributes a culpable intention to the sister. An opposite view is presented by Michelet, La Réforme, p. 175.

2 See the brief but admirable remarks of Professor Morley, in his interesting biography of Clement Marot (London, 1871), i. 272. It is a curious illustration of the manners of the French nobility at this time, that Margaret should be the writer of these stories, and that her daughter, the virtuous and noble Jeanne d'Albert, should have published them in the first correct edition. See Merle d'Aubigné, History of the Reformation in the Time of Calvin, ii. 170.