The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France (review)

Gallicanism was self-invented, as early modern scholars began to construct its documented history as well as to formulate its basic principles. According to one story, it began as a movement of "reform," especially in the wake of the Great Schism, although it had a prehistory going back centuries to the primitive church and the conflict between church and state. It was given its modern form in 1510, when Louis XII, drawing on earlier precedents, called a council, but of the clergy, which "declar[ed] that there was no reason the king could not fight a just was against the pope" (Julius II). The council was a failure, but authors of many sorts began to pour forth a steady stream of rhetoric, beginning with Jean Lemaire des Belges and continuing especially with the learned jurists of the day, their erudite humanism creating what Parsons calls "a new historicist Gallicanism" that carried political theory down a road different from the secularism of Machiavelli and Hobbes. After the "Gallican crisis of 1551" began the stream of long accumulated "Gallican liberties," collected first by Jean du Tillet, Pierre Pithou, Charles Dumoulin, and their successors into the seventeenth century and the time of Bishop Bossuet. "By the time that Henry IV had consolidated his power, then," according to the author, "a Gallicanism had appeared on the scene that was based on historical research and narrative. . . ." It had also divided the three estates.

The controversial story of Gallicanism has been told in many ways, but the later phase has usually been avoided. Mr. Parsons has remedied this with a work of careful scholarship and at the same time has linked it with modern questions of political ideology. Yet he tries to avoid anachronism and so prefers the term "republic" to monarchy in his book. Like other recent authors he emphasizes the religious dimension, as the nature of seventeenth-century polemic demands, and he has discovered the neglected significance of the assemblies of the clergy, which began in the wars of religion, and the parquet, or gens du roi, which supported juristic Gallicanism down to the eighteenth century. This was the source of much of the pamphlet literature generated by the érudits and jurists and the clergy concerning the king's sovereignty, the high points between Gallicanism and its opponents found in the Estates General of 1615 and the Assembly of the Clergy of 1617. From this and surrounding litigation Parsons moves from "absolutism" into "the pure area of theory." In general, erudite Gallicanism, drawing its strength from humanism, reached its peak in the early seventeenth century.

Mr. Parson's account fits well within the standard story of secular state-building, and indeed, ignoring the culturalist turn of this generation, he remains convinced that Ranke's survey is correct in its general outlines. Gallicanism began as a support of centralizing monarchy from the seventeenth century to the Revolution and after that turned against the supposed legacy of Jean Bodin. In this way Gallicanism, out of its religious origins, became a force for Revolution.