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

Conclusion

CONCLUSION s ACCORDING TO THE CHURCHES’ conversion models, truth resided in the individual conscience. Once a convert accepted the truth, conscience would secure his or her religious affiliation and prevent any recrossing of the confessional boundary. Relapses, however, described conscience as a bridge back across the divide, thereby raising doubts about the boundary’s impermeability and the converts’ true confessional identity . The boundary also remained open because Catholics and Protestants had to live together, govern their communities, carry on their business and professional affairs, marry each other, and bury their dead. French Catholics and Protestants shared these concerns, crossed the confessional border to deal with them, and hence left religious identities blurred. For the churches, the problem was not new in the years when the monarchy was trying to force Protestant consciences into conformity with the majority faith. It had vexed them from the beginning of religious conflict in the sixteenth century. How were they to make clear to people who shared so much the differences between the faiths and the dangers their rivals represented ? The power of conscience was their ultimate recourse. Nearly a century before the relapses at Melle, the religious tergiversations of Pierre Jarrige, and Tarente’s final return to the king and the Catholic Church, Michel de Montaigne turned his always perceptive eye on the issue and found out how troublesome it could be. In his essay “Of Conscience ,” Montaigne tells a story of how, one day during “our civil wars,” a companion and he “met a gentleman of good appearance,” who was “of the opposing party” (i.e., a Huguenot). “I knew nothing of it,” the essayist reports, “for he pretended otherwise; and the worst of these wars is that the cards are so shuffled that your enemy is distinguished from yourself by no apparent mark either of language or of bearing, and has been  brought up in the same laws and customs and the same atmosphere, so it is hard to avoid confusion and disorder.”1 For Montaigne, writing in the wake of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacres and during or immediately after the fourth civil war, such confusion posed a dilemma: How could you tell friend from foe when all spoke the same language, followed the same laws and customs, and breathed the same air?2 Montaigne was certain he knew; he was confident that conscience made the truth of one’s confessional affiliation evident. He continues his story by describing how the gentleman in question seemed so fearful and constantly on guard “that I finally guessed that his alarms were caused by his conscience.l.l.l. So marvelous is the power of conscience! It makes us betray, accuse, and fight ourselves, and, in the absence of an outside witness , it brings us forward against ourselves.l.l.l.” Those who do not hold to the true faith, like the unnamed gentleman, reveal their internal disorder in their outward demeanor and behavior. Those who are true believers are not at war with themselves. “As conscience fills us with fear, so also it fills us with assurance and confidence.”3 In the sanctum of the conscience , truth was clear, and, as a result, people of the rival faiths could be clearly distinguished from each other. Montaigne’s language foreshadows the rhetoric of the conversion models with their descriptions of conscience as an alarm that never sleeps or as an internal tribunal that puts converts on trial until grace helps them overcome all obstacles on the path to truth. But, as we have seen, the conversion models did not succeed in securing individual confessional identity or in building the third form of boundary. Nor did the other discourses of differentiation that issued from the opponents of coexistence, targeting shared civic and religious space, religiously mixed families, and women’s roles in their churches. They did not succeed in creating an impermeable barrier between the groups that would isolate Protestants completely and   1. “Of Conscience,” in Complete Essays, 264–66, see esp. 264. Frame’s edition dates the essay to 1573–1574. 2. Recall the Huguenots’ 1597 complaint about being denied access to cemeteries: “our fathers had rights to [parish cemeteries] .l.l. that were public and common. Have we not inherited their rights just as much as this French air we breathe, the cities we frequent, and the homes we inhabit?” See “Plaintes des églises réformées,” in Read, “Cimetières et inhumations” (1862), 142. Also see above, p. 111. 3. “Of...