Countering the Reformation in France and the Netherlands: Clerical Leadership and Catholic Violence 1560-1585

On 2 September 1572, the city of Antwerp was awash with rumours that 'the soldiers and Spaniards and Italians might commit murder like in Paris'. Just over a week had elapsed since the Feast of St Bartholomew. Three thousand Huguenots had died in Paris, and in the French provinces the killing was still going on. But, as the Lutheran chronicler Godevaert van Haecht noted, Antwerp was not Paris: 'In Paris, the citizens have turned on each other, and although the people here, too, were diverse in religion, they trusted that nothing like that would happen, unless it were done by the foreigners'.¹ Six years earlier, in the annus mirabilis of 1566, the Calvinist public prosecutor of the city of Tournai, Pasquier de le Barre, had also remarked on this contrast between France and the Netherlands. In the Low Countries, he noted, Calvinists who left town to attend a clandestine prêche — an open-air sermon — had nothing to fear: 'the other workers gave them no hindrance, nor did they pour forth insults or sharp words, which was much the contrary of what happened to them [in France] where similar prêches were held in the fields and outside the cities'.²

The contrast is puzzling, since in other respects the parallels between the situations in France and the Netherlands were really quite remarkable.³ Only a few years later than in France, Calvinism in the Netherlands had suddenly begun to manifest itself openly. As in France, it spread rapidly and from below, gaining the support of a vocal minority of the population, lesser nobles and rich city dwellers as well as artisans. As in France, the number of executions had dwindled as the number of heretics had grown.⁴ And as in France, the Protestant pressure for toleration was mounting. Moreover, Calvinist behaviour in the Netherlands was no less provocative than it was in France. Throughout the 1560s and 1570s Calvinists in the Habsburg Netherlands behaved much the same as their French counterparts had been doing since the late 1550s. In the early 1560s there were nightly chanteries — demonstrations by psalm-singing crowds — in Tournai and Valenciennes, and prêches in the countryside. In 1566 a month of iconoclastic violence shattered the interiors of churches in much of the Habsburg Netherlands; in Tournai and Valenciennes, Calvinists seized power for a time. In 1572 and 1573 the rebel armies in Holland and Zeeland killed priests, plundered convents and mocked the sacraments; church property was requisitioned, and from 1573 Catholic worship was outlawed there. Between 1577 and 1585 Calvinists in Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Ypres and Brussels disturbed processions, burned books, broke images, expelled priests and eventually banned Catholic worship altogether.⁵ Yet, whereas Calvinists in France met with Catholic outrage, with gruesome violence on the streets, with mutilation of corpses and mass demonstrations, with lynchings, drownings and mock trials, Catholic lay people in the Netherlands were almost completely passive in their response to Reformed activism. This article seeks to examine why this should have been the case.

The contrast between France and the Netherlands has been brought into sharper focus by recent developments in the historiography of France. In 1973 Natalie Zemon Davis published her famous article on 'The Rites of Violence' in the French Wars of Religion, which initiated a radical change in historical thought about the civil wars that plagued France between 1562 and 1598.⁶ Davis was aiming primarily to argue that there was a rationale behind the seemingly senseless and bizarre episodes of collective popular religious violence which abounded in the Wars of Religion. However, in the process of explaining how French religious rioters had used an existing, and meaningful, cultural vocabulary of ritual popular violence, she highlighted by implication a point that at that time was rarely made: namely, that the Wars of Religion were...