La coexistence confessionnelle à l’épreuve: Études sur les relations entre protestants et catholiques dans la France moderne (review)

Much as ecumenism and interfaith dialogue offer hope for lessening the religious tensions of the twenty-first century, so early-modern Christians throughout Western Europe pursued confessional coexistence as a potential solution to the unrelenting, murderous conflict that accompanied the Reformation. To be sure, coexistence was not the same as toleration, but at least it presented possibilities for containing conflict. Chief among the places where this important if not always successful experiment unfolded was France. There the religious divide pitted a powerful Catholic majority against a determined Protestant minority. The nine essays gathered in this volume span three centuries; explore the economic, political, religious, and social dimensions of confessional coexistence; and bring an array of historical sources to bear on the subject.

Denis Crouzet and Pierre-Jean Souriac’s essays are the most politically oriented. The former focuses on the Queen Mother Catherine de Medici’s oscillation between patience and anger, dissimulation and openness, deception and violence in her efforts to realize concord and stability. Souriac examines the oft-cited, though little-studied, surety towns where armed Huguenot garrisons protected Reformed worshipers, concluding that the provisions offered security but meant that the urban bourgeoisie was unlikely to take up arms when the Protestant Henri, duc de Rohan, rose against the Catholic monarchy in the 1620s.

A second set of essays examines the various arrangements for confessional coexistence in the seventeenth century. Philippe Chareyre surveys developments at Nîmes, a southern Protestant bastion. Drawing on a close reading of church disciplinary records, he emphasizes the practical need for coexistence to maintain social cohesion and economic prosperity. Michelle Magdelaine and Edwin Bezzina also direct attention to particular communities, in this instance Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines and Loudun. The former investigates the contours of confessionally mixed marriages, while the latter presents the results of an exhaustive analysis of wills. Christian Aubrée shifts attention to the Parisian metropolis, where he probes the intricacies of Catholic-Protestant interactions in the credit market. He points up one of the less scrutinized aspects of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685: a financial crisis brought on by the crown’s seizure of Protestant assets and the collapse of the so-called banque huguenote. Adopting a broader perspective, Yves Krumenacker describes the major methodological approaches in current scholarship on seventeenth-and eighteenth-century religious cohabitation. Thus far historians have underscored the importance of chronology, the values attached to lieux de mémoire, confessional power struggles within local communities, the importance of legal frameworks such as the Edict of Nantes of 1598, the pressure of external groups upon any given community, the practical motivation for coexistence, the frustrations of irenic endeavors, and the cultural bridges explicit in literary efforts toward the construction of a République des Lettres.

The collection concludes with two essays that probe the limits of confessional coexistence as displayed in the century following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Protestant revolt of the early-eighteenth century in the rugged Cévennes mountains stands at the center of Chrystel Bernat’s analysis of the permeability of confessional frontiers. Valérie Sottocasa’s piece on the fragility of religious coexistence in southern France during the same period nicely complements Bernat’s contribution. An introduction by Myriam Yardeni and conclusion by Olivier Christin complete the ensemble.

Altogether, the essays gathered here, although plainly introductory, are accessible, encompassing, and perceptive. They touch upon the major elements of an important subject, suggest useful methodologies, and propose a range of interpretative viewpoints. Finally, although they are centered on the particular circumstances of early-modern France, they add to our knowledge of a seemingly ever-present problem and evoke the possibilities and obstacles toward its resolution...