The Politics of Piety: Franciscan Preachers during the Wars of Religion, 1560-1600 (review)

When I began my work on the French Wars of Religion decades ago, social tensions and class struggles served as the primary explanations for the violence of the era. Given my then poorly articulated dissatisfaction with largely ignoring religion as a motivating factor, I am pleased to find still another book that presents religion as central to the religious wars. Megan Armstrong puts forward a powerful case for the importance of the Franciscans in galvanizing French Catholic opposition to the French Protestants and aiding and abetting the Catholic League's resistance to Henry III and Henry of Navarre.

The author begins with a succinct overview of the era of the religious wars, which emphasizes the close interplay between politics and religion. In the minds of most French Catholics religious division necessarily led to political sedition because of the irreducible relationship between church and monarchy. The author stresses the importance of traditional pious practices to French Catholics as a means of purging the world of sin, especially heresy. This leads her into a discussion of the Franciscans and how they promoted such devotions through their preaching. She points out the political radicalism of so many of the friars and notes how unusual it was for members of a religious order, for whom obedience to authority was a key aspect of their lives, to be involved in seditious behavior.

Armstrong then devotes a chapter to the internal reform of the Franciscan order. She examines the fissures between the Conventual and the Observant Franciscans in France and the tensions that arose when the Capuchins were introduced there by 1568. The work provides detailed information on the judicial disputes that often ended up in the Parlement of Paris. Armstrong notes that the many patrons of the Franciscans among the French elite often wound up on opposite sides in the final phases of the religious wars. (An appendix provides the names of patrons to the Parisian Franciscans, the nature of their patronage, and the sums involved.) Her explanation for Franciscan success lies in the nature of their piety and preaching, which she finds to have been highly emotional and sensual in the meaning of the word that it excited the senses. These features help to explain the popularity of the Franciscans across the French social classes.

The author then examines the friars' education and their conflicts with the University of Paris. She has important insights into the style of education provided by the university in the late sixteenth century, and she shows that the Franciscans also included humanism in their training. She proposes that they understood its value for understanding and refuting Protestant doctrine. It was within the university, says the author, that the Franciscans met the Catholic League. She emphasizes the League's strength among its theologians, who raised the doctrine of the Catholicity of the French monarchy to a fundamental law of the realm. While the Franciscans were valuable allies of the Leaguers, Armstrong makes it clear that their political views were not identical. The Franciscans placed more importance on the divine origins of the French monarchy and less on the right of the people to elect the king. For her the quintessential Franciscan act of rebellion was the mock execution in their friary church of Henry III in July, 1589, by decapitating his portrait, a highly visual event that fit in well with the Franciscan approach to religion.

In her conclusion Armstrong argues for the importance of the Franciscans along with the Leaguers in securing the Catholicism of the French monarchy. They had ardently argued that the Catholicism of the king was essential because of the king's authority in religion; the monarchs beginning with Henry IV made use of that argument to enhance their power over the Church. Armstrong also indicates that despite the efforts of the Council of Trent and the Jesuits to change the nature of popular Catholicism...