Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France

Separated by Death?: Cemeteries, Burials, and Confessional Boundaries

SEPARATED BY DEATH? Cemeteries, Burials, and Confessional Boundaries s IN THE CIVIC SPACES Catholics and Protestants shared, their daily interactions could provoke conflict but also present opportunities for cooperation. The most sensitive of these locations were those constituting communal sacred space—Protestant temples and Catholic churches , chapels, religious houses, and processional routes—in which the religious groups undertook their devotional activities. In or around these places the possibility for strife was at its greatest, but so too was the potential for religious mixing across the first type of confessional boundary or negotiated accommodations along the second. Through these interactions the confessional boundary took literal, physical shape. This process of confessional boundary building was most visible in cemeteries. Here Catholic anti-Protestant campaigners sought to exclude Huguenots from communal burial grounds, while they, in turn, defended their access to them. As a result, within cemeteries we can see each of the different forms of confessional boundary being fashioned as the contest over communal space, which the Capuchin missionaries had dramatized, unfolded . Fierce, sometimes violent, conflicts broke out over disputed cemeteries and the ceremonies that took place in them. What lay behind these confrontations was the heritage of the Wars of Religion, during which burial grounds and corpses were focal points for some of the bitterest strife. A 1597 “Plaintes des églises réformées” charged that Catholic authorities and royal courts condoned, even ordered, Huguenot remains disinterred, re-  buried, or sometimes just thrown by the roadsides.1 Catholics, like the Jesuit Louis Richeome, insisted that Huguenots had relentlessly “demolished thousands of tombs .l.l. by pure animosity .l.l. [and] disinterred the bodies of saints and disturbed their bones’ rest.” “Was this,” he asked, “a means of reforming the living by digging up the dead and clowning around over their ashes or playing with their remains?”2 We have learned to explain such violence as ritual-like behavior in which each religious group ensured its purity by attacking the pollution emanating not only from living heretics but also from their dead.3 However , evidence from confessionally mixed communities in the seventeenth century indicates that in cemeteries, Catholics and Protestants often achieved remarkable cooperation, reaching agreements on sharing space, attending each other’s funerals, and sometimes burying their dead side by side. The confessional boundary (i.e., the first type of boundary) was blurred when Protestants disregarded the austere funerals Calvinist doctrine demanded and instead sought a ceremony somewhat more akin to that of their Catholic neighbors. Burying Catholics and Protestants side by side also indicated an unclear confessional boundary and an indistinct recognition of confessional identity. The presence of Huguenot remains in the cemetery, an important civic space, signaled the religious minority’s continued membership in a community. A confessional boundary of the second type, which clearly acknowledged confessional difference, could also take shape in cemeteries. It was apparent in communal decisions to share cemeteries through their partition into two adjacent burial grounds. The careful articulation of space still made it possible for both groups to secure their place in the community . Maintaining this boundary distinguished the groups without necessarily implying rejection and exclusion.     1. “Plaintes des églises réformées de France sur les violences et injustices qui leur sont faites en plusieurs endroits du royaume .l.l.” (1597), which Charles Read reproduces in “Cimetières et inhumations des huguenots principalement à Paris aux XVIe, XVIIe, et XVIIIe siècles, 1563–1792,” Bulletin de la société d’histoire du protestantisme français 11 (1862): 132–50, 351–59, see esp. 138–49. 2. Louis Richeome, L’idolatrie huguenote figurée au patron de la vieille payenne divisée en huict livres & desdiée au roy très chrestien de France et de Navarre Henry IIII [sic] (Montpellier , 1607), 157–61. 3. Davis, “Rites of Violence”; Crouzet, Guerriers de Dieu. But a clearer confessional definition and demarcation of sacred space led to the third form of boundary. Each church sought to impose more orthodox standards of religious behavior by distinguishing its funeral practices from those of its rival. The churches had limited success in differentiating themselves in this way until the monarchy’s policy toward the minority shifted from encouraging peace to pursuing persecution. When that happened royal courts and legislation started making the boundary in cemeteries and funerals absolutely clear and discriminatory. The policy tried to break the bonds between neighbors of different faiths by invoking the old fears...