MAKING PEACE: THE COMMISSIONS FOR
ENFORCING THE PACIFICATION EDICTS
IN THE REIGN OF CHARLES IX
(1560–1574)
JÉRÉMIE FOA*
Abstract—In view of the evident resistance of established organs of authority to carrying out
the royal will, the French monarchy decided to dispatch men of the sword and robe as
commissioners to the localities. Armed with broad executive power, these commissioners
travelled in pairs from town to town, negotiating with the local community the implementation of a monarchical policy of pacification. To this end they were equipped with the insignia of impartiality (in geographical, religious and financial terms) and they were expected to
proceed in an independent fashion in applying their orders, taking into account the reality of
the local balance of power. In concert with the local communities they accordingly put in
place fresh measures that were capable, at least for a time, of ensuring the peaceful coexistence of Protestants and Catholics: restoring property and positions, rendering up arms, sharing
space and municipal office. This is why, by refusing to accept a negative verdict clouded by
the outbreak of later wars of religion, this article will examine the contribution of these
peace commissions to the creation of longer-lasting strategies.
The kingdom of Charles IX, torn as it was by civil war, scarcely seems fertile
soil for a study of peace. Or at least, not at first sight. Searching for peace
between the battle of Dreux and the massacre of St. Bartholomew might seem
to amount to setting microscopic backfires against the shadows of war. Yet
Charles IX inaugurated at a single stroke both the era of edicts of pacification
and the era of wars of religion.1 Since the repression had failed to restore peace
and unity of faith, the monarchy had to acknowledge the existence of Protestantism in the realm and institute the concrete conditions of peaceful coexistence among the competing Christian faiths. As peace was subject to the
distinction between the ends of the State and the ends of the Church, the
* The author was formerly a student at the École Normale Supérieure at Fontenay-Saint-Cloud. He
is currently undertaking doctoral research at the Université Lumière Lyon 2. This article draws on
the thesis he is writing under the aegis of Professor Olivier Christin, which is entitled ‘La Fabrique
de l’obéissance: missions et commissions d’application des édits de pacification sous le règne de
Charles IX’. The author would like to thank Olivier Christin for his generous assistance with this
project and Julien Schwartz for his cartographical expertise. The article has been translated by Roger
McLure, with help from Malcolm Crook.
1
Edict of January 1562 and of Amboise March 1563, Peace of Longjumeau March 1568, Edict of
Saint-Germain August 1570 and of Boulogne July 1573. Cf. A. Stegmann, Édits des guerres de
religion (1979).
French History, Vol. 18, No. 3, pp. 256–274  Oxford University Press and the Society for the Study
of French History 2004; all rights reserved
JÉRÉMIE FOA
257
common weal and the salvation of the soul, it was henceforth possible to be a
citizen and a heretic.
While the research devoted to probing the intellectual roots and investigating the moral intentions of such ‘religious peace’ is copious, little is understood
about how the operation of pacifying the provinces was actually carried out in
practice. In the aftermath of the tragic civil wars which set neighbour against
neighbour and brother against brother, no simple decreeing of peace would
conjure away the violence rife throughout the land. Though treatises advocated amnesty, there was no amnesia in the villages. Had the property acquired
during the troubles been gained legitimately? How was one to live today with
yesterday’s enemy? And while the edicts of tolerance offered solutions, they
created as many problems as they solved: where was Huguenot worship to
be authorized? To whom were municipal offices to be entrusted? One looks
in vain in some manual of the period for the concrete means of achieving
pacification in the domain of tensions between faiths.2 Peace was but a word,
pacification a task.
We are led to investigate not just the intellectual architects of peace but also
the practical agents of peace, once we stop confusing the history of peace with
the history of theories of peace and refuse to consider pacification as a special
application of a universal norm dictated from the ‘centre’ of power—in a word,
once we break with that charmed history of the State so readily neglectful of
the slips and slides and setbacks which separate the law from its enforcement.3
A swarm of petitions, an abundance of archival evidence, remind us that no
straight line leads from the law to its enforcement. As Francis Garrison notes:
‘the ordinary jurisdictions were incapable of enforcing the appeasement and
tolerance measures’,4 and the monarchy was obliged to hastily devise more
effective means of enforcing its wishes.
In order to entrench the pacifying measures on the ground, the monarchy
decided to send out commissioners for the enforcement of the edicts of pacification, people invested with extensive executive and judicial powers. Situated
as they were at the crossroads of royal wishes and grass-roots demands, these
commissioners of the King constitute the centre of the present study, which
has a threefold purpose: first, to stress the extent to which peace was a day-byday task carried out by means of on-going negotiation between agents and subjects of the King—not an authoritarian decree which might be comprehended
through the mere history of the texts; second, to present an adequately representative segment of the battery of ways and means devised by the commissioners and the King’s subjects for enabling practitioners of the various rival
faiths to live at last as ‘good friends and fellow citizens’; thirdly, not to judge
the peace efforts in the light of their failures, and to stop considering them as
2
S. Carroll, ‘The peace in the feud in sixteenth and seventeenth century France’, Past Pres, 178
(2003), 86.
3
A.M. Hespanha, As Vésperas do Leviathan. Instituções e poder político (Portugal, séc. XVIII)
(Coimbra, 1994).
4
F. Garrisson, Essai sur les commissions d’application de l’édit de Nantes (Montpellier, 1964), p. 45.
258
MAKING PEACE
‘trêves bâclées’, at best the result of exhaustion, at worst the product of cynical
calculation, but to take them seriously; that is to say that we should try to
understand the motives of those involved and what they said they were doing:
making peace.
To be sure, the government often presented what was partly dictated by circumstances and financial necessity as a choice on the King’s part, or as an expression of his authority and compassion. But the pursuit after 1565 of a pacificatory
policy (when the context was radically altered as a result of the clear superiority
of the Catholic armies, the King’s majority and the ending of the Council of Trent)
demonstrated that this was something more than a matter of pragmatism.5 The
aim of this article is not, however, to discern the real intentions of the crown, supposing that this might be possible and that these were not constantly changing
and opaque even in the eyes of the court, but to comprehend how these pacificatory endeavours functioned in practice. These attempts, while they did not prevent the rapid return of war, did nonetheless lay down the theoretical and
institutional basis that is to be found at the heart of the Edict of Nantes.
I
In order to enforce its edicts of pacification, the monarchy dispatched simultaneously into the provinces two types of agent: members of the upper
nobility—marshals of France and governors on the one hand, and maîtres de
requêtes or councillors of the Crown on the other (‘commissioners’ properly
so-called). This sending-out of great nobles and lawyers conformed to a constant factor in the ‘internal diplomacy’ of Catherine de Médicis, ever anxious to
make sure her emissaries possessed the gravitas requisite to the success of
pacification: a marshal carried more weight in negotiating the enforcement of
an edict than a mere petition official. On the other hand, the latter’s legal skills
were indispensable to the resolution of conflicts between faiths.
Pacification was thus the occasion for a conspicuous increase in the presence of royal agents in the provinces. Our present state of knowledge enables
us to estimate the direct commissioners of the Edict of January at about a dozen
men, those of the Edict of Amboise at about thirty, and those of the SaintGermain Edict at about twenty.6 To this must be added the even greater
5
As Bernard Barbiche has shown, the diplomatic language employed helps us a good deal. If the
Edicts of January and of Amboise were not described as such and were sealed with yellow wax (thus
revocable), they were never qualified as ‘treaties’, which demonstrates the desire of the King to
‘reconcile two contradictory imperatives: to impose his will for the restoration of order, something
which necessitated an edict, a solemn act; and to avoid tying his hands in future, hence the utilization
of yellow wax’ (Barbiche). However, following the Peace of Longjumeau in 1568, the pacification
edicts became edicts like any others, styled as such and designed for the long term. As for the Edict of
Saint-Germain, it was sealed with green wax and was described as ‘perpetual and irrevocable’. See an
electronic version of the edicts, with a commentary by Barbiche at http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/.
6
The Peace of Longjumeau (1568) which was too ephemeral, did not give the Crown enough
time to dispatch agents to implement it. There were some exceptions, however—among them the
mission of the maréchal de Vieilleville and of René de Bourgneuf in the West (Archives Nationales
(AN) J 1037, pièce 31; Bibliothèque Municipale (BM) Angers, Ms. 297).
JÉRÉMIE FOA
259
Tables 1 and 2 Peace commissioners under Charles IX
Provinces
Commissioners for the Edict of Amboise (1563)
Bourgogne
Bretagne
Champagne
Guyenne
Ile-de-France
Languedoc
Lyonnais
Normandie
Orléanais
Picardie
Poitou, Saintonge
Provence et Dauphiné
Touraine Maine Anjou
Estienne Charlet et Jehan de Montceaux
Etienne Lallemant et Charles de Chantecler
Absence de commissaires
Antoine Fumée et Jérôme Angenoust / Jacques Viart
Mathieu Chartier et Pierre de Longueil
Jean-Jacques de Mesmes et Jacques de Bauquemare
Michel Quelain et Gabriel Myron
Jacques Viole et Jehan de la Guesle
Jehan-Baptiste de Machault.
Charles de Lamoignon et François le Cirier.
René de Bourgneuf et Pierre de Masparraulte.
Jacques Phelippeaux et Jessé de Bauquemare.
François Briçonnet / Arnoul Boucher et Jean de Lavau
Provinces
Commissioners for the Edict of Saint-Germain (1570)
Champagne, Bourgogne,
Auvergne, Bourbonnais
François de Scépeaux, Maréchal de France (de Vieilleville)
Nicolas Potier et Charles de Lamoignon
Robert Myron, maître des comptes
Honoré de Savoie, Marquis de Villars
Robert de Montdoulcet et François Pin
Jehan de Tambonneau, président en la chambre des comptes
François de Montmorency, Maréchal de France
Antoine Fumée et Simon Roger
Du Val, Sieur de Fontenay, maître des comptes
Henry de Montmorency, Maréchal de France
Edouard Mollé, Jean de Belot puis Claude Faucons
Absence vraisemblable de maître des comptes
Artus de Cossé-Gonnord, Maréchal de France
Philippe Gourreau de la Prousière et François Pin
Guillaume Bailly, président en la Chambre des comptes
Guyenne
Ile-de-France,
Normandie et Picardie
Lyonnais, Dauphiné,
Provence, Languedoc
Orléanais, Anjou,
Bretagne, Poitou
number of commissioners for the ‘final completion’ of the edicts, who toiled in
the wake of the first commissioners, as well as the localized missions and the
assistants of the commissioners. We may safely say that there were, at a conservative estimate, about one hundred royal agents working on the pacification of
the realm between 1561 and 1574. Thus, the process of pacification and the
invention of the commissioners for the enforcement of the edicts—whose links
with future intendants have recently been stressed 7—show that the civil wars
contributed in more ways than intellectually to the modernization of the State.
Pacification was thus a driving force behind the ‘executive turn’ taken by the
French monarchy at the end of the sixteenth century.
The spatial coverage of the missions constitutes a major criterion for evaluating their significance. Having been put in charge of one or several provinces,
the commissioners rode from town to town, covering between 1,500 and
7
M. Antoine, ‘Des chevauchées aux intendances: filiation réelle ou putative?’, Annu Bull Soc
Hist France (1994), 35–65.
260
MAKING PEACE
2,200 kilometres depending on the extent of their mission. As Map 1 shows, in
order to enforce the Edict of Saint-Germain, Edouard Mollé left Paris in
November 1570; he was in Carcassonne in December, then Toulouse (January
1571), Castres (30 March), Montpellier (summer 1571), Nîmes (October),
Grenoble (December) and Valence (February 1572). At a conservative estimate
he covered 2,000 kilometres, to which should be added the distance covered
by his own assistants.8 The duration of these missions was therefore not negligible, if measured by the standards of the time of Charles IX: seven months on
average for the Edict of Amboise and eight for the Edict of Saint-Germain. The
commissioners for the final completion of the edicts worked, for their part,
continuously between 1564 and 1566 then, in 1571 and 1572, in the most turbulent provinces. And in places where tension ran especially high, the pacification authorities tended to institutionalize themselves and some commissioners
took permanent root—in Lyon, Blois and Tour continuously from 1567 to
1572.9 The high point of this institutionalization came in 1571 when the monarchy planned to appoint to the fifteen largest towns of the realm a commissioner briefed to enforce the pacification measures.10
Finally, when we look at the fifty largest towns in the kingdom, we see that
the commissioners visited forty-three of them at least once and twenty-one of
them twice. The penetration of pacification must also be credited with infiltrating the archives, for the smaller towns were in no way neglected by the peacemakers, as demonstrated by their activity at Tulette in the Dauphiné, or at
Ploërmel and Morlaix in Brittany.11 Moreover, the commissioners never failed
to announce their arrival to the neighbouring villages, inviting the inhabitants
to send them their complaints. Thus in the Auxerrois a sergeant journeyed, in
twenty-two days, through ‘all the market towns and villages in the jurisdiction
of Auxerre’ in order to ‘publish there all the articles concerning the commission of Monseigneur the marshal of Vieilleville’.12 Distance was no object when
plaintiffs wished to convey their grievances: the Protestants of Agen took their
case to the commissioners who were currently engaged at Bordeaux.13 So
there is no doubt that the influence of the missions was greater than one might
guess from a mere tracing of their routes. In that sense the missions should be
read as strategies for controlling the territory, considering the extent to which
the challenges directed at the central State were coming from ever further
away from the capital. Without being able to provide figures, we can say that
8
Archives Départementales (AD) Tarn, 34 EDT EE1: at Boissezon, Edouard Mollé delegated
Antoine Lacger, Sept. 1571.
9
M. Pallasse, La sénéchaussée et siège présidial de Lyon pendant les guerres de religion: Essai
sur l’évolution de l’administration royale en province au XVIe siècle (Lyon, 1943). See also
G. Hanotaux, Origines des intendants dans les provinces (1884), p. 27
10
Bibliothèque Nationale (BN), Ms. Dupuy 422, fol. 92 et seq. However, the local archives
contain hardly any trace of their activity.
11
For Tulette, AD Drôme, E dépôt 78, 3 E 304; for Brittany, A. Liublinskaia, Documenty po istorii
grazhdanskikh voju vo Frantsii 1561–1563 (Moscow, 1962), pp. 307–18.
12
AD Bourgogne, B 2641, fol. 67 v°.
13
Archives Communales (AC) Agen, GG 201, pièce 6, Apr. 1571.
JÉRÉMIE FOA
261
Map 1: Pacification in the South of France
the pacification missions affected a considerable number of subjects of the
King, and that made it possible, to some extent, to compensate for the remoteness of royal power.
The neglect of these agents of the administration has often been the consequence of a history too favourably disposed towards centralization, which regarded
262
MAKING PEACE
agents as simple executives, interchangeable puppets of the monarch.14 However, the success of the peace missions depended on the prestige which the
local communities accorded to the commissioners: so as not to incur the same
reproaches as the ordinary jurisdictions, the agents of peace had to put up a show
of impartiality—geographical, religious and financial neutrality.15 And for all that
we may be familiar with the concept ‘impartial State’,16 little is understood about
how this impartiality became embodied in concrete historical agents.
The neutrality of the commissioners manifested itself in the first place in
their geographical detachment. As Stuart Carroll has remarked, the pacification
of quarrels was achieved all the more easily for the arbiters being ‘outsiders’.17
Such was the case with Michel Quelain, councillor at the Parlement of Brittany,
who was dispatched to Lyon to enforce the Edict of Amboise; similarly with the
Marshal of Vieilleville, who refused to go and pacify in the West of the realm,
arguing that he had ‘so many good relatives and friends in Brittany, Anjou and
Mayne, and many good and noble subjects, that only with difficulty could he do
his duty as an honest man: for sometimes the blessing of blood-ties gives rise to
great obstacles, when one is not helped by God’.18 Far from entrenching their
authority in some territory, the commissioners vaunted the validity of an extraneous power that claimed to be pursuing the interest of all by favouring the
interest of none. The rhetoric they used in their public speeches—which
teemed with references to the Universal or to Justice—shows well enough to
what extent the pacification of the towns and village constantly required them
to sacrifice their own point of view to that of the King, himself likened to the
Public Good.19
The religious identity of the commissioners completed the battery of strategies for appearing to represent the general interest. Their mission prohibited
them from representing, or appearing to represent, a religious faction, lest they
lose all credibility. If the King, a Gallican Catholic, continued to be regarded as
such, no oath committed his officials to the Catholic faith. Indeed, Sully wrote
that the Crown had expressly ‘chosen persons who were deemed to be sympathetic to Protestants’.20 The Marshal of Vieilleville owned up willingly to being
14
J.F. Schaub, ‘Francisco Leitao, commissaire à tout faire’, in Les figures de l’administrateur:
institutions, réseaux et pouvoirs en Espagne, en France et au Portugal, 16e–19e siècles, ed. by
R. Descimon et al. (1997), pp. 59–74.
15
At Bayonne, for example, in 1571, commissioner Tambonneau refused to accept the money
that was offered to him by municipal leaders (jurats) (AC Bayonne, BB 9, fol. 178).
16
O. Christin, La paix de religion: l’autonomisation de la raison politique au XVI e siècle
(1997), pp. 147–69.
17
Caroll, ‘The peace in the feud’, 84.
18
Mémoires de la vie de François de Scépeaux, sire de Vieilleville . . . composés par Vincent
Carloix, son secrétaire (1757–86), livre 10e, pp. 275–6.
19
The speech delivered by Etienne Charlet to the Parlement of Burgundy in 1563, sprinkled with
references to the Greek polis, was exemplary (BM Dijon, Ms. 1491, fol. 1406 et seq.), and chimes
with the definition that Pierre Bourdieu gives for a commission: ‘a group of people who are invested
with a mission for the public good and who are invited to transcend their own interests in order to
achieve general benefits’, in Raisons pratiques (1994), pp. 131–2.
20
Sully, ‘Sages et royales oeconomies d’estat’, in Nouvelle collection des mémoires pour servir
à l’histoire de France, 2 vols. (1837), ii. 10.
JÉRÉMIE FOA
263
no great shakes as a theologian, and Catholics and Protestants alike praised his
moderation. The value of this show of neutrality was demonstrated whenever
the commissioners appeared to be less than wholehearted guarantors of the
requisite impartiality. Thus Gabriel Myron, commissioned with bringing to final
completion the Edict of Amboise in Tours—a man doubly suspect as a tourangeau and as coming from a Catholic family—was relieved of his office following a complaint from Protestants.21 Philippe Gourreau de la Proustière, a
commissioner in Anjou and a well-known Protestant, was disowned by the
Marshal de Cossé for having delivered verdicts that were too favourable to his
co-religionists.22 The many examples of denunciation of religious allegiance
among commissioners may be read as proof of a neutrality that was impossible
to achieve in practice. But denouncing private (religious) interest, masked
behind the imperatives of the public good brandished by the commissioners,
put an effective weapon of denigration into the hands of the local communities.23 This was doubtless a fiction, but the religious neutrality of the commissioners was therefore a condition for their success. And when we look at the
action of the commissioners as a whole, we see that they dispensed even-handed
justice to the two faiths.24 The commissioner Antoine Fumée, for example,
reinstated with one hand the Protestant officers of the Parlement of Toulouse,
and with the other restored to the ecclesiastics of Millau the possessions of
which they had been stripped.25 While he allowed the Protestants of Grenoble
to return to their town, Edouard Mollé gave back to the canons of Nîmes the
revenues from the benefices of 1570.26 As new men, strangers to local litigation, the commissioners were invested with a set of specific features (social,
geographical or religious) which justify a refusal to locate within the law itself—
in its intrinsic strength or weakness—the sole source of its effectiveness.
II
Even before the arrival of the commissioners on the scene, the reception and
registration of the edicts of pacification were the object of numerous negotiations and even rejection. Though it became aware of the Edict of Amboise on
26 April 1563, the Parlement of Dijon did not register it until 19 June, three
months after the King had issued it! At Aix, the parlement refused to acknowledge receipt of the Edict for more than a year, so much so that Charles IX had
21
AC Tours, EE 5, pièce 15. Protestants complained ‘Myron is from the town, and so are his
father, mother, brother and relatives, some of whom are priests’.
22
J. Louvet, ‘Récit veritable de tout ce qui est advenu digne de mémoire, tant en la ville d’Angers,
païs d’Anjou et autres lieux’, Revue de l’Anjou (1854), 4 et seq.
23
L. Boltanski, L’Amour et la Justice comme compétences (1990), p. 35 and passim.
24
The verdict of Nathanaël Weiss is thus too severe, for he judges the action of the commissioners solely with regard to the town of La Rochelle: ‘A La Rochelle pendant les guerres de religion’,
Bulletin Historique et Littéraire de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, 14 (1895),
461–77.
25
AD Haute-Garonne, B 57, fol. 72 and AC Millau, BB 3, Dec. 1563.
26
AC Lyon, AA 66, fol. 228, Dec. 1571 and AD Gard, G 443, Apr. 1572.
264
MAKING PEACE
to suspend the court.27 Likewise, lower down the hierarchy, bailliages,
sénéchaussées and finally municipal councils only recognized the edicts with
difficulty: at Mâcon, doubting the King’s real intentions, the échevins decided
to delay publication of the Edict of Amboise.28 The commissioners’ first task
thus consisted in ensuring registration or publication of the edict and, if this
was lacking, to proceed to enforce it. At Lyon, for example, the Marshal de
Vieilleville obliged the sénéchaussée to register the Edict of Amboise on 11
June 1563.29 Once this was achieved, the most important step still remained to
be taken, namely putting its pacificatory provisions into practice.
What with the reinstatement of the mass, the setting-up of Protestant
churches and mixed municipal consulates, and the centralization of arms, there
were few areas of the peace of religion that escaped the attention of the commissioners. The restoration of confiscated property to rightful owners constituted one of the chief sources of conflict in the aftermath of the wars. Now,
nothing enables us better to take stock of the discrepancy between texts and
practices—a true yardstick for the effectiveness of the State—than focusing on
the slowness with which the transfers from new to old owners took place.
The intervals involved were to be counted in months, indeed in years: in
Montauban in 1571 the chapter had not yet collected the tithes for the year
1567!30 And this inertia fuelled the ever-latent temptation to resort to violence.
Here the commissioners of Charles IX played a central role: the King became
once more the guarantor of the order of things and of their rightful owners.
The first task was to reinstate the ecclesiastics in their churches, wherever the
Huguenots had occupied the premises. In Lyon the reinstatement of the Catholics
was due entirely to the commissioners of Amboise, not to either the governor
or the municipality. In Montauban the churches were in the hands of the Protestants until the arrival of the commissioners Antoine Fumée and Jacques Viart in
1564.31 Examples can be multiplied: let us take note of the fact that the settingup of the material conditions of pacification could only happen through the
institution of non-local powers of mediation which had no interest, whether
religious or economic, in the dispossession of one or the other of the parties.
This reinstatement of the ecclesiastics at a material level was echoed by the
restoration of the mass at a symbolic level. On 4 July 1563, the Marshal of
Vieilleville had mass celebrated at Lyon, where it had not resounded in public
space for fifteen months.32 In Romans in 1564 the Protestant consuls awaited
the arrival of the commissioners in order to reinstate the mass, knowing the
latter had just reinstated it in Grenoble.33 This resetting of the balance, which
could not possibly have been achieved through the ‘normal’ channels when
27
BM Dijon, Ms. 1491, fol. 1391 and BN Ms. fr. 15878, fol. 292 (letters of Charles IX appointing
commissioners to replace conseillers from the Parlement of Provence).
28
AC Mâcon, BB 38, fol. 59, 7 May 1563.
29
AD Rhône, BP 3642, fol. 146–9.
30
AD Tarn-et-Garonne, G 227, fol. 233–4, Mar. 1571.
31
G. Lacoste, Histoire générale de la province de Quercy, new ed. (Marseille, 1982), p. 187.
32
AD Rhône, 10 G 125, fol. 404 et seq.
33
AC Romans, BB 9, fol. 101, Oct. 1563.
JÉRÉMIE FOA
265
one faith was in a clear minority, was thus for the most part the work of
the agents of the King.
The commissioners also ensured that Protestants were able to return to their
houses, wherever they had been confiscated. In this major task the necessary
first step was to restore offices to their former incumbents. In December 1563
in Tours, Jean de Lavau and Arnoul Boucher reinstated as a group the Protestant officers of the présidial, in the face of opposition from échevins and ecclesiastics.34 On a more spectacular note, in February 1571, at the end of a month
of legal proceedings, the commissioners Edouard Mollé and Jehan de Mollé
reinstated about fifty Toulouse Protestants in their houses, which had been
confiscated during the third war of religion. Their action illustrated sufficiently
the ill-will by the traditional authorities, which were both complicit in, and intent
on, benefiting from the dispossession of the Huguenots: on 12 December 1569
the syndic of the town had sold the house of the Huguenot Etienne Gaujac, a
procureur at the Parlement. His plea having been thrown out by the capitouls
(municipal leaders) of Toulouse, Etienne Gaujac had lodged a grievance with
the seneschal of Toulouse, who turned a deaf ear. In Toulouse, as elsewhere, a
mixture of financial self-interest and religious complicity united powerful
people in the resolve to ban the restitution of confiscated property. And so it
was the commissioner Jehan de Belot who gave Gaujac back his house, and
who rendered the same service for Anthoine de Ferrier, whose house was
occupied by the bishop of Tarbes.35 It would be a mistake to suppose that this
transfer of property affected only those citizens who were most in the public
eye. Pierre Orneurt, an investigator in the bailliage of Chalon-sur-Saône,
regained his house thanks to the commissioners of Burgundy, and the list of
their interventions includes dressmakers, gatekeepers, ‘widows’, and butchers.36 The commissioners replaced might with right, and publicly affirmed the
power of the King to sanction legitimate property and social hierarchies. Killing two birds with one stone, they wedded the order of the world to the orders
of the King, and refused to cede to violence the right to create the status quo.
The business of pacification was not, however, simply about taking things
back to the status quo ante bellum. It was also necessary to create the conditions
for a lasting foundation of peace by trying to prevent the conflicts generated by
the coexistence of faiths: in theory, the siting of Protestant churches and cemeteries, the staging of Catholic processions, matters of religion and of the internal
organization of churches, all fell within the private domain; but in reality they
impacted on the identity of the whole community. They were therefore matters
for a political decision that was all the more delicate owing to the distinction,
effective in many respects between secular and spiritual matters, having lapsed.
The making of peace required negotiating a definition of the legitimate conditions when occupying public space for religious purposes. And while Penny
34
35
36
AC Tours, EE 4, pièce non-numérotée.
AC Toulouse, AA 15, fol. 137 v° et seq., Feb. 1571.
BN Ms. fr. 4637, Dec. 1563.
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Roberts remarks correctly that the question of the siting of places of Huguenot
worship was one of the most decisive battles of the wars of religion, it would
appear that the commissioners were the foot-soldiers in that battle.37
While the edicts of pacification turned out to be utterly vague as to the sites
of the places of Huguenot worship, the commissioners of the King directly
established about fifty of them: in Castres in April 1571, Edouard Mollé allocated
to the Protestants the church at Villegoudou. In Lyon the commissioners oversaw the construction of the Protestant church des Terreaux.38 No law, in fact,
had the range of reference to encompass the complexity of local situations.
Only a commissioner could testify that the place of worship conceded to the
Protestants in Lyon was nothing more than ‘an old clod of earth ( . . . ) wanting
buildings and walls’.39 The example of Nantes illustrates the skill that the commissioners had to deploy in establishing a consensus on the occupation of
space for religious purposes. On the one hand, the clergy was opposed to the
setting-up of Huguenot worship in the suburbs of the town. On the other hand,
the Protestants demanded the Ile-de-la-Saulsaye as a venue for their sermons.
Being anxious not to offend anyone, the commissioners, though refusing the
Protestants the site at Saulsaye, ‘which is a little island ( . . . ) haunted and inhabited by boatmen and sailors, people difficult to control’, forced the clergy to
accept the presence of places of reformed worship on the outskirts of the
town.40 The smooth running of this work of pacification required the commissioners to bring resourcefulness and flexibility to their enforcement of the law.
By drawing on the ground a visible frontier between the political community
and the religious community—that is, by instating the political as a partly
autonomous sphere, the commissioners offered the communities a visible solution which the over-theoretical edicts of peace were unable to supply. The
commissioners were, for example, obliged to legislate on Catholic ceremonies,
which impacted on the whole identity of the community and threatened the
fragile equilibrium of peace. In order to prevent deviations, the commissioners
Lamoignon and Potier left behind them in each town a ruling obliging the
Protestants to decorate their houses on days when Catholic processions were
held.41 In Mâcon, on the other hand, Charlet and Montceau ordered the town
to decorate the Huguenots’ houses at its own expense.42 Thus, the vagueness
of the edicts always left the commissioners the room for manoeuvre which was
necessary to take into account the differing capacities for causing trouble, as
well as the local balance of power, a condition sine qua non of any peace
being accepted by the majority of the town. This kind of attention did not,
37
P. Roberts, ‘The most crucial battle of the wars of religion? The conflict over sites for reformed
worship in 16th century France’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 89 (1998), 247–67.
38
Mémoires de Jacques Gaches sur les guerres de religion à Castres et dans le Languedoc,
new ed. (Geneva, 1970), p. 109; and A. C. Lyon, GG 84, pièce 41, May 1564.
39
AC Lyon, GG 77, fol. 2.
40
Liublinskaia, Documenty, document n° 117.
41
BN Collection Dupuy Ms. 428, fol. 70. Same ordinance at Mâcon, Troyes, Sens, Tonnerre,
Avallon.
42
AC Mâcon, CC 84, pièce n° 15, 1564.
JÉRÉMIE FOA
267
however, mean accepting the domination of one camp over another. Edouard
Mollé, for example, prohibited an over-ostentatious Catholic procession commemorating the end of the Huguenot occupation of Montpellier. The picture,
then, is neither one of strict equality, nor of total domination, but rather of neutralization of the space of decisions sanctioning the filling of time and of space
by religious interests.
Finally, one of the roads to pacification of the troubles went via a reaffirmation of the royal monopoly on the legitimate exercise of physical force—that is
to say, the systematic regulation of the use of arms: in Grenoble, Marseille, Albi
and so on, the commissioners centralized arms in the hands of the municipality. In Aurillac, in 1572, the commissioners du Bourg and Delmas authorized
daggers and swords for taking to the fields but forbade ‘arquebuses, guns, pistols, halberds and pikes’.43 For the monarchy this move was crucial: short of
squeezing a little more charity out of people’s souls, it was a way of depriving
those with fratricidal impulses of the wherewithal to proceed to the deed. No
less in the matter of offence than of the bearing of arms or of the occupation of
space, the royal decree was partly substituted for religious morality as the
authority validating public behaviour.44 It founded peace, beyond good and evil.
The reaching of an agreement between the parties was, in fact, all the more
difficult owing to the fact that it was no longer possible to resort to religious
ways of achieving consensus. The commissioners decreed, moreover, the disbanding of the various Catholic leagues, the fragmenting function of which was
obvious.45 The commissioners’ policy for laying the foundations of peace was
to establish civic reference points, now that religion was no longer able to unite
a town. Tenaciously, they summoned general assembles, inviting Catholics
and Protestants alike to express themselves peacefully, face to face and in a
secularized grammar.46 They also had them swear on oath to obey the edicts of
pacification and to live together in peace: in these oaths no reference was
made to God, unless exceptionally, nor to any religious form of validation of
the agreement. It was all about allegiance to the royal authority.47
So, while the importance of the mixed-faith consulates in the creation of neutral spaces of decision-making has been remarked on often enough, what has not
been pointed out so often is that the commissioners were almost always the direct architects of this: for example, in Gap, Grenoble, Lyon, Millau, Montélimar,
Montpellier, Nîmes, Orléans and indeed in most of the known cases. This mixed
character of the religious powers was in no way written into the texts of the
edicts. It constituted, however, an effective solution for establishing civil
peace: such was the case at Montélimar, where the agents of the King finally
43
Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Coll. Godefroy, Ms. 80, fol. 84.
Thus, at Lyon, one counts more than ten regulations emanating from the commissioners for
just one year, in 1563. (See also notes 62 and 70.)
45
Potier and Lamoignon prescribed the dissolution of the Catholic Leagues in Burgundy (AC
Mâcon, GG 117, Feb. 1571).
46
At Dijon, a general assembly brought together a hundred people (AC Dijon, D 63, Feb. 1571).
47
At Nantes, the commissioners made the town’s échevins swear to uphold the edict (AC Nantes,
BB 11, July 1572).
44
268
MAKING PEACE
persuaded the Protestants to bring the Catholics into political decisionmaking.48 A key factor in pacification, this mixed government of urban affairs
gave to each faith the opportunity to mediate the management of conflict,
thereby to some extent avoiding recourse to violence. An even more innovative authority was invented in Romans by the commissioners Bauquemare and
la Madeleine, who negotiated the creation of an assembly charged with the dayto-day handling of problems specific to the coexistence of faiths.49
Thus we may say that no authoritarian law solved once and for all the problem of religious coexistence, nor decreed the return of peace overnight. On
the contrary, religious appeasement (admittedly temporary) resulted much
more from a very complex mechanism of incentives/incitements managed by
the commissioners and bargaining strategies contrived by the communities,
than from any blueprint drawn up in the corridors of the Louvre.
III
Choosing to place the work of the commissioners at the centre of this study—
as against establishing a historiography which would play down or disregard
their activity—runs the risk of portraying peace as one-sidedly and highhandedly
imposed by them, without regard to the weight carried by local agents. Yet
pacification was something the communities took on board, or rejected, or
subjected to negotiation.
Historians have had much to say about the obstacles which strewed the path
to pacification, in their search to find here the cause of the commissioners’
‘failure’: working-to-rule, the hostility of the parlements, the fears of the governors , and so on. In our view these obstacles constituted less an impediment
than an electrolysis of the situation, a rendering-visible of the reality of the local
power-system to external agents. The resistance most in evidence was that put
up by the governors. Montluc, the former governor of Guyenne, attempted to
have the commissioner Montdoulcet sacked, by accusing him of having instituted more than two thousand court cases ‘against the Catholics’.50 In 1564,
Montmorency-Damville, the governor of Languedoc, demanded of the commissioners that they put an end to their activities, to no avail.51 Writers have
often multiplied examples of this sort of resistance without inquiring into its
deep motivation. The application of the rule of coexistence between faiths
certainly threatened the standing of governors who had based their authority
on the construction of ‘parties’ promoting religious unity.52 But the opposition
between the commissioners and the governors reflected above all the unease
felt by the upper nobility, now forced into the position of having to legitimate
48
AC Montélimar, BB 46, fol. 32–34, Feb. 1564.
AC Romans, BB 10, fol. 109, Oct. 1563.
50
A. de Ruble, Commentaires et Lettres de Blaise de Monluc, Maréchal de France (1870), v. 290–1.
51
BN Ms. fr. 15879, fol. 97 v°.
52
R. Harding, Anatomy of a power elite: the provincial governors of early modern France (1978),
pp. 46–67.
49
•
Aix
•
Albi
Restitution of property
•
and office
General Assemblies and
•
oath-taking
Controls on bearing arms •
Joint participation in
government
Protestant churches and
cemeteries
Restoration of the mass
Aurillac
•
•
•
Avallon
•
•
Bordeaux
•
•
•
Caen
•
(•)
•
Châlons/M.
•
•
Clermont
•
•
Grenoble
•
•
•
•
•
•
La Rochelle
•
•
•
Lyon
•
•
•
•
•
•
Marseille
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Millau
The means of peace: techniques of pacification used by the commissioners of Charles IX
•
•
•
•
Montélimar
Table 3
Montpellier
•
•
•
Nantes
•
•
•
Nîmes
•
•
•
•
Orléans
•
•
•
•
•
Poitiers
•
•
?
Rouen
•
•
•
•
Romans
•
•
•
Toulouse
•
•
Tours
•
•
•
Troyes
•
•
•
Valence
•
•
JÉRÉMIE FOA
269
270
MAKING PEACE
the privileged place it claimed to occupy within society: faced with a pacifying
process which favoured legal skills, the warfaring skills of the upper nobility no
longer seemed so indispensable to the State. ‘I am dumfounded by all this chicanery I am forced into these days, instead of the arms which I used to know
how to bear’,53 complained Tavannes, the Governor of Bourgogne and a great
tormentor of the commissioners.54 While the wars favoured armed service to
the King, pacification and the executive turn it ushered in were threatening to
substantially change the sociology of service to the State. However, more often
than not the commissioners acted as appreciated collaborators of the governors: Jean d’Estampes, the governor of Brittany, regularly affixed his signature
to that of the commissioners, shoring up with his own authority technical decisions made by the latter. In Montauban, the Protestants witnessed the joint
arrival of the troop of the governor—his men at arms, his horses—and the
troop of the commissioners—their secretaries and trunks full of documents.
Thus pacification carried all the more weight for mobilizing two types of complementary authority—the traditional and the bureaucratic.55
The commissioners also had to face the hostility of the parlements. In
Bordeaux, the court of Guyenne refused for several weeks to register the commission of Antoine Fumée and Jacques Viart, a fact often seen as evidence of hostility and one of the causes of the ineffectiveness of the commissioners. It is,
however, to be interpreted more as a negotiating strategy than as outright resistance: in exchange for the cooperation of the court the commissioners
agreed to share with it its knowledge of matters concerning pacification,
whereas the edict was supposed to withhold that knowledge from the parlements. There was symbolic significance in the fact that they did not carry out
the order they had received to delete certain registers from the court. A few
weeks later the members of the Bordeaux Parlement gave armed assistance to
Antoine Fumée in the delicate matters he had to press home.56 In Rennes and
Grenoble the parlements helped the commissioners and assured them, as they
did at Dijon, of their desire to ‘assist ( . . . ) in the service of the King’.57 Thus,
although conflict is strongly reflected in the archives, in the last analysis the
opposition encountered by the commissioners in their work of pacification
was relatively limited and had little effect. Ostensible opposition enabled
people to take a strong stance in negotiation, but not in any way that gave the
commissioners any lasting worries. The judgments of the commissioners were,
moreover, executable ‘notwithstanding appeal’.
Most of the evasive tactics consisted, in fact, in minor fraud and misinformation, especially during the confiscation of weapons. Not infrequently, the
weapons brought in to the commissioners were rusty, or had not been used for
53
54
55
56
57
L. Pingaud, Correspondance des Saulx-Tavannes au XVIe siècle (1877), p. 200.
BN Ms. fr. 4048 contains all the material relating to this opposition (1564–6).
M. Weber, Économie et Société /1 Les catégories de la sociologie, new ed. (1995), p. 289 et seq.
AD Gironde, 1 B 261, pièce 46, and BM Bordeaux, Ms. 369/2, p. 487–92, Sept. 1563.
BM Dijon, Ms. 1492, fol. 326, 13 Feb. 1571.
JÉRÉMIE FOA
271
a long time—the case at Millau and Dijon.58 In Tours, the Catholic échevins
excelled in this subtle mixture of fraud and negotiation: the town lawyer
pleaded several times ‘before the honourable commissioners, to prevent the
reinstatement of suspended judges and officers of justice, and of the officers of
the municipality who had been stripped of office during the troubles, and also
to prevent the establishment of the sermons being demanded by the adherents
of the new religion’.59 At the same time, he multiplied devices for dodging the
commissioners. We now see how pacification was ‘an opportunity for men of
the law’,60 and thus the extent to which it posed a threat to other agents: to the
men of war and the representatives of the traditional nobility, who were less
skilled in juggling with the law. And while hypocrisy may be the homage
which vice pays to virtue, what needs to be stressed here is not hypocrisy but
quite definitely the homage to virtue, that is to say, the formal respect for the
royal authority.61 With this concern for appearances the subjects of the King
played willy-nilly the game of pacification, and it was in a royal grammar that
the fiercest opponents of the commissioners expressed themselves.
The presence of the commissioners was, in fact, the occasion of the transformation of the conditions of the struggle between Catholics and Protestants. In
their capacity as agents of a process of monopolization of legitimate physical
violence, the commissioners also attempted to limit insults and injurious namecalling.62 This amounted to designating the State as the sole legislator of constraints on the formulation of public discourse directed at any official reception. Whenever the commissioners arrived, the rules would be written down
governing not just the verbal formulation of complaints, but also the etiquette
of public speaking in general. Creating a minimal consensus on the use of public vocabulary thus made it possible to stake out a common political space
within which the various agents would agree, whether they liked it or not,
about the legitimate way of voicing disagreement.63
Despite substantial losses, the archives conserve hundreds of petitions from
the subjects of the King to the commissioners. Now, the motives alleged for
this corpus of remonstrances were always conformity to the edict, justice, the
public good, the security of frontiers and so forth. No mention of salvation, of
the ‘heretic’, or of any transcendental belief; just reasoned, secular argument.
In Albi, the petition of Antoine Gairard to the commissioners is a case in point:
forbidden from living in the town, he demanded that ‘taking into account the
58
AC Dijon, B 173 bis, fol. 197 and Mémoires d’un calviniste de Millau (Rodez, 1911), p. 110.
AC Tours, CC 79, fol. 69.
60
Christin, La paix de religion, p. 104.
61
P. Bourdieu, ‘Un fondement paradoxal de la morale’, in Raisons pratiques: sur la théorie de
l’action (1994), p. 238.
62
Cf. Le reiglement donne par le commandement du roy Charles IX . . . sur le faict de lentretienement de l’Edict par luy cy devant faict, pour la pacification des troubles de ce royaume ;
Publie par le commendement et en presence de Monsieur le conte du Lude gouverneur . . . des
seigneurs de Cussé et Masparraulte Commissaires deputez pour la pacification des troubles en
la ville de Poictiers . . . (Poitiers, 1563), p. Aii v°.
63
O. Christin, ‘La formation étatique de l’espace savant’, Actes Rech Sci Soc, 133 (2002), 53–61.
59
272
MAKING PEACE
King’s will, declared by his edict of pacification, the quality of the supplicant
having a trade and following it, let it please you to order that free residence and
dwelling in the city of Albi be allowed to him, despite the order put upon him
by the consuls to leave the city, an order directly contravening the said edict’.64
Probably helped by a lawyer to formulate his complaint, he bears witness to
how much the subjects took to heart the constraints laid down by the State in
the formulation of their grievances. That the commissioners should respond
favourably to petitions, whenever they were formulated in accordance with
the prescribed rules, was an important factor affecting the possibility of
entrenching these new styles of expressing disagreement. And, on the whole,
the commissioners did listen to petitions that were in conformity with the
edict and refused, as in Millau, to contemplate petitions presented in language
that was too radical.65 This constraint was, moreover, taken on board by the
communities, since at Clermont the third estate twice refused to associate itself
with a scathing petition from the clergy, concluding that the clergy should be
invited to redraft it ‘in the terms laid down by the edict of pacification’.66
Although points bearing on religious faith surfaced often enough in the
grievances addressed to the commissioners, nevertheless, the petitioners were
obliged to set their demands in a legal framework and to express them in a
technical language approved by the monarchy: the language of conformity
with the law, of economy, of strategy, defence of territory and so on. In this
role as master of ceremonies for the hearing grievances, the State brought off
the tour de force of catching the fiercest enemies of its edicts in the trap of an
enforced, strictly juridico-political, ‘complaints pitch’.67 Forcing the subjects of
the King to agree on the manner of voicing their disagreement thus constituted
one of the main outcomes of the pacification of the troubles by the commissioners of Charles IX. It obliged them to give up resistance and to look to bargaining as their role in the pacification of the kingdom.
In the course of a debate on the interpretation of the Edict of Saint-Germain,
Coligny had put his finger on a contradiction between letting bygones be
bygones and the restitution of confiscated furniture. He concluded, however,
that one should entrust to ‘the religious conscience of the commissioners the
execution of the article concerning the restitution of furniture’.68 Now, this
was to appeal, not to the law, which was too rigid, but to the conscience of the
men charged with applying it; it was to make the point that peace would flow
from case-by-case consultation between the agents and the subjects of the
King. This is why the commissioners set up, in the process of negotiation,
conciliation and compensation strategies in order to secure consensus around
64
AC Albi, GG 79, pièce non-numérotée, May 1571.
At least, this is what is reported by the author of Mémoires d’un calviniste de Millau, p. 224.
66
AD Puy-de-Dôme, 5 C 2, fol. 200.
67
A. Tallon, ‘Rome et les premiers édits de tolérance d’après la correspondance du nonce Santa
Croce’, Bull Soc Hist Prot Fran, 144 (1998), 339–52.
68
Pourparler fait à la Rochelle par monsieur le mareschal de Cossé et les commissaires
deputez par le roy pour l’accompagnier ( . . . ), sl. sn. (1571), p. Aiii v°.
65
JÉRÉMIE FOA
273
their verdicts. In 1571, in Montpellier, the Protestants demanded the restitution of the house in which they had been accustomed to worship. The Dominicans, however, had been ensconced there since the third civil war. So Edouard
Mollé decided to release back the house to the Protestants, but on condition
that they sold it at cost price to the Dominicans.69 This was playing the pacification game in a way that excluded nobody from the benefits of peace. The
same compensatory strategies were used in most of the towns in the kingdom.
Far from being simply the executives of orders from on high, the commissioners showed in these ways their ability to apply the law flexibly and to derive
from it the benefits necessary to establishing a relation of trust with the subjects of the King. We have to read between the lines to see the many negotiating strategies practised between the commissioners and the communities.
On several occasions, in fact, the commissioners proved that they knew how
to bend the rules so as to take into account the local balance of power: in Lyon,
marshal Vieilleville granted the Protestants three churches instead of the two
provided for by the Edict of Amboise.70 In Rennes, the commissioners pointed
out that Huguenot worship was not authorized in the towns which had a parlement, but nevertheless assigned a place of worship to the Protestants of the
town, ‘by which assignment the Huguenots may gauge the affection and goodwill with which the said commissioners are pleased to suit and satisfy them’.71
On the other hand, in Argentan, where the Protestants were less powerful,
Jacques Viole and Jehan de la Guesle refused to grant a place for holding sermons in the town, on the grounds that there already was one at Alençon.72
Thus, the latitude enjoyed by the agents of pacification always gave them the
option between a strict and conciliating application of the rules, cast them in
the invaluable role of makers of generous gifts, doling out rights and preferential treatments, according as their ‘greater interest, material or symbolic, [lay]
in being strict or obliging’;73 that is to say, wherever the pacification of localities demanded a strict or accommodating application of the rules. Thus, handled with regard to multiple interests, and to confronting these with each
other, the rules acquired greater weight than those laid down by the King’s
council. And as with the Edict of Nantes, the return to peace was brought
about more through blow-by-blow negotiation, from towns to villages, than
through any irrevocable decision on the part of the all-powerful State.
The St. Bartholomew Massacre hovers like the sword of Damocles over any
study of the reign of Charles IX—an implacable, but perhaps partial, sign of the
failure of the pacifying and conciliating ambitions of the monarch. Unsurprisingly, the massacre sounded the end of the era of commissioners in the
69
AN J 1037, pièce 32.
Ordonnance faicte par Monseigneur de Vieilleville Mareschal de France ( . . . ) touchant la
reduction des Temples (Lyon, 1563).
71
Liublinskaia, Documenty, p. 307.
72
BN Ms. fr. 4053, fol. 10 r°.
73
P. Bourdieu, ‘Droit et passe-droit. Le champ des pouvoirs territoriaux et la mise en œuvre des
règlements’, Actes de la recherche en science sociale, 81–2 (1990), 86–96.
70
274
MAKING PEACE
sixteenth century. The pacification missions during the reign of Henri III,
which did exist, have left little in the way of archives, a fact which incontrovertibly shows that they never had anything like the scope of those under
Charles IX. Though we can discover, scattered here and there, traces of their
endeavours, it is impossible to map itineraries comparable in extent to those of
the preceding reign: these missions were localized, often accomplished by governors and no longer by lawyers, straightaway nullified by the outbreak of a
new war. Though peace treaties were many, actual pacification was thin on the
ground. This situation is no doubt partly explained by the radicalization of the
religious factions and by the weakening of the monarchy.
So are we dealing here with a stillborn pacification, to be relegated to its
place along with so many other ephemeral innovations and talentless inventors? The answer must be a qualified one. There is no doubt but that the commissioners of the King contributed to the invention of procedures conducive
to the peaceful daily coexistence of subjects of various religious faiths: techniques of peace which, to a large extent, were in no way written into the texts
of the edicts, but which were the fruit of patient cooperation between the
commissioners and the subjects of the King. To their credit must be accounted
the relative calm of the years from 1563 to 1567 and 1570 to 1572, as attested
by many chronicles, and of which the commissioners were in our view a driving force. While this pacification was admittedly temporary, it would be wrong
to regard it simply as an interwar period.
In many respects, the pacification under Charles IX constituted a model for
that carried out forty years later by Henri IV. In the first place, the Bourbon
King dispatched into each province two commissioners whose actions and
functions were comparable to those of the commissioners of Charles IX.74 In
many ways, the commissioners of the Edict of Nantes, far from proceeding
from scratch, simply appropriated the arrangements put in place by Charles IX:
the sharing out of cemeteries and consulates, the restoration of property, settling disputes, the prohibition or reinstatement of processions and so on. As a
forerunner to the Edict of Nantes, the pacification under Charles IX acquires
the status of a laboratory experiment and an undeniable founding significance,
the lasting legacy of which remains to be studied: for example, in 1671 in Honfleur as in many other places, the Protestants were still using the cemetery conceded them by the commissioners for the edict of 1570.75 Whence we see that
numerous features of Henri IV’s pacification, which is famous because it was
successful, should be re-evaluated by the yardstick of the reign, doubtless less
lucky but more innovative, of Charles IX. And although peace is no longer
made today as it was in days gone by, the issue of the co-existence of numerous
faiths within the same territory can benefit from the answers suggested 400
years ago in a kingdom torn by civil war.
74
75
Garrisson, Essai sur les commissions, passim.
AN TT 246 (VII), pp. 140–3.