1. Introduction: the glory of France
Introduction: the glory of France In the period covered by this volume, the character and destiny of the Roman Catholic Church found expression, to a remarkable degree, in one nation—France. It would not be going too far to describe the 17th and 18th centuries as "the age of France", at least as far as Roman Catholicism is concerned. This is not to say, of course, that Italian, Spanish, or German
Catholicism made no worthy contributions. However, it was undoubtedly French theologians, French spiritual writers, and French crises and conflicts, that formed the heart of Roman Catholicism in this period. Even those leading Catholic figures who were not French, like Cornelius Jansen
(Dutch) and Miguel de Molinos (Spanish), discovered their most receptive soil in France, where their ideas became national and controversial movements. This has huge advantages for the student. In taking France as a template for our study of Catholicism, we gain focus and clarity, without sacrificing anything essential in the wider story.
1. The reign of Richelieu France began the 17th century still recovering from the wreckage of its
"wars of religion", which had pitted French Protestants (Huguenots) and Catholics against each other for forty years, spilling blood on an epic scale.
The wars had concluded when the Valois dynasty of kings, which had ruled France for 250 years, perished with the assassination in 1589 of Henry III, by the hand of a fellow Catholic who thought his royal master had drawn too close to the Huguenot heretics. Ironically, the laws of succession meant that the Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre, now became France's lawful monarch as Henry IV (1589–1610). The new king converted to Roman
Catholicism in 1593 in order to cement the loyalty of his Catholic subjects.
Whatever people may have thought, then and now, about the ethics of Henry's conversion, it was a spectacular political success. The civil wars were over. Huguenot and Catholic could live at peace again as fellowFrench under the tolerant Henry IV, and the task of rebuilding a shattered country could begin.
It is not our task to tell the political story in these pages, except when it blends with the religious story. But we do need to know a few facts. Henry
IV set France on the path to a dramatic recovery of fortunes. When he died in 1610 (assassinated by another fanatical Catholic), his son Louis XIII (1610–43) was only eight years old. For a time, power lay in the hands of Louis' mother, Marie de Medici (1575–1642). However, the following decade saw the rise to power of one of the 17th century's most famous, powerful, and enigmatic figures, Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu—
Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642), as history knows him. The son of a prominent aristocratic family of Poitou, a bishop at the age of 21, by the 1620s Richelieu was all-powerful as Louis' chief minister. It seems pointless to speculate on the sincerity of his Catholic faith. Some have considered him a complete cynic, interested only in political power. Others have defended his integrity. Rather than debate his character, it is more important for us to consider his impact on the France of his day. In many ways it was Richelieu who lifted his country to greatness as a nation-state, centralizing political power in the royal court (or in Richelieu's hands as chief minister), unifying the country culturally and spiritually around the monarchy, and making sure that France emerged as the real winner of the Thirty Years' War that engulfed most of Europe between 1618 and 1648.
Richelieu's domestic policy, as well as helping establish an "absolute" monarchy (the king exercising an active and virtually unchecked supremacy in church and state), was also instrumental in revitalizing the fortunes of French Catholicism. On the one hand, Richelieu warmly supported the French Catholic Church as embodying the true faith; France was to be a Catholic kingdom to the core in its beliefs, values, and symbols (he inspired
Louis XIII to dedicate France to the Virgin Mary in 1638). In particular, Richelieu gave strong support to the very successful methods of Vincent de
Paul for training an effective parish clergy (see section 3.4). On the other hand, he dealt a staggering blow to the political status of French
Protestantism. Henry IV had, in the Edict of Nantes in 1598, granted a generous measure of religious freedom and civil privileges to the Huguenots. Richelieu took away the civil privileges. When he was officially appointed chief minister in 1624, the Huguenots were virtually running an independent state of their own, including their own army, in their heartland of southern France. They were also capable of defiantly rebellious behaviour, e.g. seizing for themselves the islands of Ré and Oléron near La
Rochelle, one of the most important Huguenot fortress-cities.
Richelieu would not tolerate this Protestant state-within-a-state or its acts of rebellion, and by 1627 there was open war between his government and the Huguenots. The conflict was centred on La Rochelle; Richelieu personally led a military force to besiege the city. The English invaded and occupied the island of Ré to aid the Huguenots (and stir up trouble for the French Catholic government), but suffered a serious defeat when they also tried to occupy the island of Saint Martin. Deprived of English help, the citizens of La Rochelle were finally starved into submission by Richelieu's army by November 1628. The siege had been devastating; only 5,000 of the city's original 25,000 inhabitants were left alive. In the aftermath, Richelieu had all Huguenot fortresses destroyed, dismantled the Huguenot southern army, and stripped Huguenots of all the political rights they had enjoyed under the Edict of Nantes (e.g. there would be no more government grants to help educate Huguenots for the pastorate). Richelieu had annihilated the pretensions of French Protestantism to be anything other than a minority faith, existing solely by the reluctant permission of a Catholic state.
Paradoxically, however, Richelieu's foreign policy favoured Protestantism outside of France. As we saw back in Chapter 1, when it looked as though the Holy Roman Empire, under the Catholic Habsburg
Emperor Ferdinand II, was about to defeat the Protestant forces in the Thirty Years' War, so creating a powerful Catholic Empire, Richelieu threw
France's weight behind the Protestant cause. Catholic French armies fought alongside Protestants against the Catholic Habsburg armies of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. Even when Richelieu was not sending French armies into Germany, he was financing Protestant armies, whether from Germany,
Denmark, or Sweden, to keep the Habsburgs in check. His policy ensured the exhaustion and bankruptcy of the Catholic Habsburg empire, and the future dominance of France on the European military and political stage.1
2. The majesty of a king The dominance of France aimed at by Richelieu was achieved by Louis
XIV (1643–1715), who came to the French throne the year after Richelieu's death. He was only four at the time, and affairs were governed by Richelieu's successor as chief minister, Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602–61).
However, once Louis had begun to rule in his own name in 1661, he soon drove France to heights of political, cultural, and military glory. If we imagine Europe as a single country, and the nations as cities, we could say that France became Europe's capital city under Louis XIV. Its political unity, military strength, language, literature, and art all contributed to its splendour. The glory of France so captivated people's minds that French now became the preferred language of the educated classes across Europe.
Louis' palace at Versailles became the eighth wonder of the world for its beauty and opulence.
Louis was a remarkable man. He inspired awe in everyone; his majesty was not borrowed from royal robes, but emanated from his personality. He both believed and acted on the most exalted view of his authority. The "divine right of kings" was to Louis an absolute truth, embodied in his own person: he was the representative of God on earth, anointed with supernatural power over all persons and institutions within his realm.
French kings were, as a matter of fact, anointed to office with "holy oil" in a coronation ceremony that almost made the king look like a priest as well.
The oil, it was believed, had been sent down from heaven to Saint Remigius, who had baptized Clovis, first Christian king of the Franks in the late 5th century. With all the dynamism of his imperious character, Louis acted the part—an absolute monarch whose will was law. Into his strong hands fell the whole machinery of the centralized French state built up by Richelieu.
There has been much debate about Louis' piety. Certainly he conformed to the outward religious practices required of a devout Catholic, and there is every reason to think he did so with serious intent. No one could survive in Louis' court unless they too conformed. The day always began and ended with worship. The king observed all the festival days of the Church; during Lent, he fasted rigorously, and expected everyone around him to do the same. Beyond these formal structures of piety, however, there seemed little to indicate any personal spiritual-mindedness in the great monarch. It was
as though he related to God, not so much as an individual soul, but as a king to the only King whose majesty transcended his own. Archbishop Fénelon, one of the most outstanding of France's devotional writers in our period
(see Chapter 7 section 2 on Quietism), once wrote a letter intended for Louis and published in Fénelon's works:
You do not love God. You merely fear Him, with a slave's fear. Your religion is made up exclusively of superstitions and trivial, superficial customs. You are like the Jews of old, whom
God charged with honouring Him only with their lips, and not their hearts. You are meticulous about petty things, yet stubborn in other things which are horribly wrong.
The "horribly wrong" things no doubt, in Fénelon's mind, included the king's mistresses. Louis had a number of these during his reign. However, in 1683 or 1684 he finally married Madame de Maintenon, the devout former governess of his illegitimate children by his third mistress, Madame de Montespan. The marriage was marked by mutual fidelity; the era of royal mistresses was over. Madame de Maintenon herself loved Louis with a love permeated by a higher light:
Lord God, I desire through the whole of my life to adore whatever Your providence decrees for me. I submit without reservation. Grant that I may be of service to the king in the salvation of his soul. May I be saved together with him!
Yet even when, prior to his marriage, Louis had been dallying with mistresses, he would sit and listen to bold preachers rebuking him to his face for his immorality. We marvel at the courage of these preachers, such as Bishop Bossuet (see section 3.5, below); we can hardly help marveling, too, at Louis, who took these rebukes without a murmur, and never punished those who uttered them. As one historian commented, no modern dictator would allow anyone to address him in this way. In part it testifies to the paradoxes in Louis' personality.
The relationship between monarchy and Church under Louis was deep and pervasive. It was Louis who appointed bishops, abbots, and abbesses, although technically the right of "investing" his appointees belonged still to the pope. Nor did this lead to the French higher clergy becoming a servile body of royal yes-men. Some were of that type, but a surprising number were not. The French Catholic Church under Louis had its fair share of men possessing moral and spiritual integrity, as we shall see. A body known as the Council of Conscience existed to advise the king in all Church affairs, including the choice of bishops; Louis was president of the Council, and
took its meetings and deliberations very seriously. There can be no doubt that the Church's profile and dignity in French society were enhanced by this intimate alliance with the great king. However, one cannot help thinking that Louis knew how strongly he benefited from the bond between Church and crown. It lit up his already dazzling monarchy with the radiance of religion. As his official title proclaimed, he was "the Most Christian
King". The sanctions of religion bestowed a majestic credibility on the popular French motto, "One faith, one law, one king" (in French, une foi, un loi, un roi).