From defense to resistance: justification of violence during the French Wars of Religion (review)

Reviews 165 require the complex structure which he has constructed to sustain it? If the argument does suffer from over-elaboration, it is but what present (academic) times and necessitd demand. Roslyn Pesman Department of History University of Sydney Parrow, Kathleen A., From defense to resistance: justification of violence during the French Wars of Religion (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 83, Part 6), Philadelphia, American PhUosophical Society, 1993; paper; pp. vi, 79; R.R.P. US$15.00. It has long been claimed that the French Wars of Religion bequeathed a coherent doctrine of political resistance to the m o d e m world. Kathleen Parrow's short study is in this tradition. Her thesis is that the convergence of political, religious, and legal idioms of writing resulted in resistance theory and that hitherto, insufficient attention has been given to the specifically legal dimension of the creation. Under the notion of the legal she includes both strict law and evocations of the authority of law and rehearsed mythology about it. In thus embracing the political rhetorics of an appeal to law, the clear cut distinction between the political, legal, and religious inherited from older discussions is inadvertendy undermined. Parrow begins her study proper with an exploration of the accepted legal righttoself-defence. Yet as legal distinctions formally excluded revenge and war, monarchies extended the claims to lawful violent action against then subjects. It is elegandy shown how by various mechanisms, the notion of the royal self was extended, so that self-defence might include those things touching the monarch, cas royaux. Meanwhile medieval notions of communal consent and representation began to suggest the communal 'self that might defend; although, Parrow underestimates the degree to which this had already been articulated by the fourteenth century (p. 38). Together with an inchoate and quasi-legal notion of a just war, all such casuistic materials provided precedent enough for what Parrow sees as their development into a proper theory of resistance during the sixteenth century. She shows succintly how, by twists and turns, Protestant and Catholic minorities appealed to the law in ordertojustify violence against agents and reluctandy against monarchy itself. But what more precisely was the form of justification? Parrow's main, if familiar, claim is that there was a shift 166 Reviews from arguments of self-defence to resistance. She suggests a series of steps in the direction of a right to rebel (p. 42). Yet only once does she cite a pamphlet couching a justification for violence in terms of resistance (p. 40), and only once, if heavy irony and litotes are discounted, is there a justification for rebellion (p. 60). Rather, where w e find it resistance is still a term rapidly to be converted into self-defence. Tyrannicide is its ultimate expression and rebellion remains in an accusatory register. What Parrow actually shows is not a shift from self-defence to resistance but an increasing reliance on an extensive social or communal self whose agents may act pre-emptively if necessary in some public interest. This continuing if euphemistic reliance is required precisely by the need to avoid the accusation of rebellion. It is little wonder that men on ah sides appealed to the law whenever they could and accused then opponents of breaking it first. Parrow's accurate translations of often rare documents make this quite clear, despite the suggestions of a misleading trajectory. If this is put aside, we are left with an elegant synthesis of the materials desperate men juggled before the law, setting an ominous precedent for the following century. Conal Condren School of Political Science University of N e w South Wales Rosener, Werner, Peasants in the Middle Ages, trans. Alexander Stutzer, Cambridge and Oxford, Polity Press, 1992; cloth; pp. xi, 338; 42 figures; R.R.P. AUS$145.00 [distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin]. This survey of German peasant life in the Middle Ages, fust published in German in 1985, is commendably lucid and weU organized. It begins with a discussion of the origins and development of the peasantry in early medieval Germany. Rosener's general approach wiU be famUiar to readers of Duby's Guerriers et paysans, but his...