Protestantism, Poetry and Protest: The Vernacular Writings of Antoine de Chandieu (c.1534–1591) (review)

Antoine de Chandieu’s career as Protestant minister and writer spanned the whole period of the French civil wars: He became one pastor of the Paris Church in 1556 or 1557; was closely involved in the first National Synod of the Reformed Church (Paris, 1559); and played a role in the adoption of the founding documents of the new structure, the Confession de foi and the Discipline. He was also suspected of involvement in the Conspiration d’Amboise (March 1560). During the early days of the civil war he wrote some of the most eloquent rebuttals of Pierre de Ronsard’s Discours des misères de ce temps (1562) and most likely a Tragi-comedie (published in 1561) on the theme of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace. During the civil wars in the 1560s he composed a martyrology of the Paris Church to encourage the faithful and was closely concerned with the controversy concerning Church organization provoked by Jean Morély’s Traicté de la discipline et police Chrestienne (1562), which threatened the cohesion of the nascent Reformed Church at a moment when it most needed unity and single-mindedness. After years of an itinerant ministry in France, Chandieu moved to Lausanne, then to Geneva, in 1568. Thereafter he divided his time among various missions in France and posts in Lausanne and Geneva. He composed his beautifully devotional “masterpiece,” Octonaires sur la vanité et inconstance du monde (1583). He also became involved in theological polemics against Catholic, notably Jesuit, writers as exemplified by his widely successful Response à la Profession de foy publiée contre ceux de l’Eglise Reformée (1586).

Thus Chandieu was an active participant throughout a particularly fraught period in the life of the Reformed Churches in France. The author makes a solid case for perceiving Chandieu as symbolizing the experiences of the French Protestant movement as a whole in this period. The author brings out clearly the evolving situation in which Chandieu operated—from the heady optimism of the 1550s, when it seemed that Reformed Christianity was about to carry all before it; through the persecutions and suffering of the 1560s, reaching a nadir in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572; and to the disillusioned vanitas-theme of the Octonaires (but never losing sight of the hope of better things to come). Finally, in the period of Konfessionalisierung, the theological confrontations on the questions of pastoral vocation and authority drew from him “his most complete defence of protestant belief” (p. 259) in the Response à la Profession de foy, as he confronted the rise of the Catholic League and the threat of a takeover in France by ultramontane and extremist intolerance.

The scope of the book is thus vast; the main lines are clearly drawn, and S. K. Barker well justifies this integrated study of Chandieu and his period. This is a book that needed to be written. On such a vast canvas, however, there are some points that need further clarification. For example, the author writes of the Harmony of Confessions (p. 260) that it was written in Germany by “Salvard.” Actually, Jean-François Salvard was the mainstay of a group of writers working in Geneva and seeking to counter the German Formula of Concord, which counted Chandieu as a member. That involvement, overlooked here, sheds an important light on Chandieu’s thought in the 1580s. More important, in the chapter on “Establishing a Church (1555–1560),” the author properly emphasizes the central role of the Consistory in the Reformed Church structure; but nowhere is there a definition of the consistory and its membership. Yet it would be important to explain the fundamental difference between the Genevan situation, where members of the government were integrated into the structure of the consistory; and the French situation, where that was impossible...