A Church in Need of Reform
Reform seemed as necessary and unavoidable in France as elsewhere. The same bright and dark figures seen in other churches appeared in the French Church: sincere and faithful priests, devout monks and nuns, bishops who gave themselves to religion and left politics alone, but also ignorant and idle priests, dissolute monks, parasitic and begging friars, slack nuns, and bishops who put wealth and family before heavenly reward. As learning advanced, faith declined, and the clergy, who had more knowledge than other men, behaved in ways at odds with their official beliefs about the next world. Some bishops took rich benefices and sees for themselves with their large revenues. The best example is Jean of Lorraine, who took the revenues of the dioceses of Metz, Toul and Verdun, of the archbishoprics of Reims, Lyons, Narbonne, Albi, Mâcon, Agen and Nantes, and of a string of abbeys, and still, strange to say, complained of being short of money. Monks denounced worldly bishops and priests denounced monks. In Brantôme we find a phrase that evidently ran on every tongue in France: "greedy and lewd as priests and monks." The opening tale of the Heptameron concerns a bishop, and ten or a dozen more tales deal with the trickery of monks. In one a speaker says, "I fear monks so much that I dare not confess even my sins to them, for they are worse than anyone." Louise of Savoy herself wrote in her diary for 1522 that she and her son had met hypocritical friars "white, black, gray and of various other colors," and prayed to be spared them, "for if we believe the words of Christ, no class of men is more dangerous than they."
Louise's greed, her son's loose conduct and the lax morals of the court could not improve a clergy so devoted to the king. By the Concordat of 1516 with Leo X, Francis won the right to appoint France's bishops and abbots. He treated these posts as rewards for political service, which strengthened the worldliness of the clergy. The pact in effect freed the Gallican Church from the pope and made it subject to the state. A year before Luther posted his theses, Francis had nationalized Christianity, achieving in France what German princes and Henry VIII later won by war or revolution. What more could French Protestants offer their king?
Lefèvre d'Étaples and the Circle of Meaux
One of them was Jacques Lefèvre, born at Étaples in Picardy and in 1512 a teacher at the University of Paris. That year he published a Latin version of the Epistles of St. Paul, and in his commentary put forward new ideas, two of which became, ten years later, the base of Luther's theology. The first was that man is saved not by good works but by faith in the grace of the Creator, given to the world through the redeeming sacrifice of Christ. The second was that the priest does not turn the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, but Christ himself, by his presence, blesses the sacrament. Like Luther, Lefèvre wanted a return to the teachings of the Gospel; like Erasmus, he wanted the true text of the New Testament recovered, so that Christianity might be freed of medieval legends and the accretions of the priests. In 1523 he published a French New Testament and a year later the Psalms. In one commentary he lashes out at bishops: "How shameful that a bishop should ask the people to drink with him and think of nothing but gambling ... spend his time hunting ... and frequent houses of ill fame!" The Sorbonne accused him of heresy and he fled to Strasbourg (1525). Through Marguerite's intercession Francis recalled him, made him head of the royal library at Blois and tutor of his children. In 1531, when the Protestants' extremism angered the king, Lefèvre took refuge with Marguerite in the south, and lived there until his death in 1537, at eighty-seven.
Guillaume Briçonnet, who became bishop of Meaux in 1516, followed his teacher Lefèvre and set about reforming his diocese. After four hard years he judged the time ripe to spread the new religious ideas, and gave posts in his benefices to famous reformers such as Lefèvre, Farel, Louis de Berquin's circle, Gérard Roussel and others, charging them to preach the need to return to the Gospel. Marguerite praised him and made him her spiritual guide. But after the Sorbonne, the theological school that then dominated the University of Paris, condemned Luther's ideas in 1521, Briçonnet urged his colleagues to compromise with the Church. Like Erasmus and Marguerite, he put the unity of the Church above its reform.
The Spread of Luther's Ideas
The Sorbonne could not keep Luther's ideas from crossing the Rhine into France. Students and merchants brought his writings as the most exciting news of the day, and Froben sent copies from Basel for sale in France. Discontented workers took the New Testament for a herald of revolution and warmly welcomed preachers who drew from it conclusions favoring human equality. In 1523 Jean Leclerc, a wool carder of Meaux, tore down a papal indulgence that Bishop Briçonnet had posted on his church door and put up a notice calling the pope Antichrist. He was arrested and, by order of the Parlement of Paris, branded (1525). He went to Metz and there smashed the religious images before which Christians were to burn incense. He was put to death for it in 1526 with great cruelty (I omit the details). In 1526 and 1527 several other supporters of reform were burned in Paris on charges of "blasphemy" and of denying the mediation of the Virgin and the saints between man and God.
The people of France approved all these executions. They held their faith as divine revelation and thought the destruction of the Church's enemies a religious duty, since in their eyes such enemies robbed the poor and wretched of peace of mind. No man arose in France to rouse the middle class against papal oppression as Luther had done in Germany. Francis's concordat gave favorable ground for a rising against the pope, but Calvin had not yet come to power in Geneva to lead the French from there toward reform of religion and Church. The rebels found backers among the nobles, but the French nobility would not shake the people's beliefs and disturb the court's peace by wholehearted support of new ideas.
The Policy of a King
Francis did not forbid the spread of Luther's ideas so long as they did not trouble France's political and social peace. He himself doubted the pope's authority over the Church, the worth of indulgences and the existence of purgatory. Perhaps he also thought that by granting religious freedom to Protestants he could use them against a pope who increasingly backed Charles V. He honored Erasmus, named him to the newly founded Royal College and liked his views on spreading education and reforming the Church, but only so far as reform did not split the French into hostile camps or shake the Church, which bore the people's moral leadership and the keeping of social order. In 1521 Marguerite wrote to Briçonnet, "The king and Madame [Louise of Savoy] are more inclined than ever to reform the Church." When the Sorbonne arrested Louis de Berquin for translating some of Luther's works (1523), Marguerite had him freed through the king. But the German Peasants' War, which Francis thought a result of Lutheran preaching, soon alarmed him, and before leaving France for Pavia he ordered the heads of the French Church to suppress the Lutheran movement. While the king sat a prisoner in Madrid, Berquin was seized again, and again freed through Marguerite. Back in France, Francis, apparently in gratitude for his sister's labors for his freedom, granted the Protestants liberty. He recalled Lefèvre and Roussel, who had fled the country, and Marguerite thought the cause of reform near victory.
But two things turned the king from Protestantism. One was his urgent need of money to ransom his two sons, left as hostages with Charles in Spain. The French clergy undertook to raise 1,300,000 livres for him on condition that he stand firm against the Church's enemies, and Francis accepted (16 December 1527). The other was his anger when, on 31 May 1528, he heard that someone had broken, at night, the head of a statue of the Virgin and Child outside a church near Saint-Germain. The people clamored for punishment. Francis offered a thousand crowns to whoever caught the culprits, and himself walked at the head of clergy, officials, nobles and commoners, all downcast, to the spot to set a silver head on the statue. Taking advantage of the people's anger and grief, the Sorbonne seized Berquin once more and, while the king was away at Blois, had this stubborn follower of Luther burned alive amid the cheers of onlookers (17 April 1529).
The Affair of the Placards
Francis's treatment of Protestants followed the politics of the day. In 1532, angry at Pope Clement VII's cooperation with Charles V, he drew close to the Lutheran princes of Germany and allowed Marguerite to make Roussel the preacher to a large crowd that gathered in the Louvre. When the Sorbonne protested, he drove it and all its leaders out of Paris. In October 1533, when relations with Clement improved, he promised firm measures against the Protestants. On 1 November Nicolas Cop delivered an address praising the Lutheran teaching at the University of Paris; it enraged the Sorbonne and moved the king to issue another edict of persecution. Soon afterward, as his enmity with the emperor grew, he sent Guillaume du Bellay, a friend of reform, to Wittenberg (1534) and asked Melanchthon to draft a formula reconciling the old faith with the new ideas, so that Protestant Germany might ally with Catholic France. Melanchthon agreed, and rapprochement was moving quickly when a party of extreme French Protestants posted placards in the streets of Paris and Orléans, in other towns, and even on the door of the king's own chamber at Amboise (18 October 1534). They called the Catholic Mass idolatry and spoke of the pope and Catholic clergy as "vermin ... apostates, wolves, liars ... infidels and murderers of men's souls."
The placards so enraged Francis that he ordered all suspects arrested, and soon every Paris prison was full. Many printers were seized too, and printing was forbidden in France for a time. Marguerite, Marot and many moderate French Protestants condemned the placards. On 21 January 1535 the king, his children, foreign ambassadors, nobles and clergy walked in solemn silence to Notre-Dame for a Mass of expiation, holding lighted candles. Francis declared that even if it turned out his own children had posted the placards, he would have their heads. That evening six French Protestants were burned in Paris, in a manner designed to prolong their suffering (I omit the details). From 10 November 1534 to 5 May 1535, twenty-four Protestants were burned alive in Paris, by the book's count. Pope Paul III rebuked the king for this needless severity and told him to cease.
Before the year ended Francis resumed his courtship of the German Protestants. This time he wrote to Melanchthon himself (23 July 1535), asking him to come to Paris "to confer with some of the most eminent scholars of religion on bringing harmony to the Church, which is my highest wish." Melanchthon did not go, perhaps suspecting that Francis wanted him merely to frighten the emperor, or perhaps swayed by the word of Luther and the Elector of Saxony that "the French are not evangelicals but followers of Erasmus." Their judgment was true of men like Marguerite, Briçonnet, Lefèvre and Roussel, but not of the authors of the placards or of Calvin's Huguenots, who were growing in the south. After his peace with Charles (1538), Francis stopped trying to win over the French Protestants.
The Waldensian Massacre
The most shameful disaster of Francis's reign should not be laid wholly at his door. The king had let the Waldensians, who still held the half-Protestant ideas of their twelfth-century leader Peter Waldo, live under his protection in Provence, along the Durance, in a manner like that of today's Quakers. In 1530 they opened correspondence with the reformers of Germany and Switzerland, and two years later drew up a confession of faith based on the ideas of Bucer and Oecolampadius. The pope's representative extended the Inquisition's activity into their territory. The Waldensians appealed to the king, and Francis warned the Inquisition off (1533).
But Cardinal François de Tournon, who accused the Waldensians of treason and conspiracy against the state, moved the king to sign an edict (the book dates it 1 January 1545) condemning to death every Waldensian whose heresy was proved. The leaders of the Parlement of Aix-en-Provence took the decree as license for a general slaughter. French soldiers, at first unwilling to carry out the order, after being forced to kill a few fell into such a frenzy of killing that they slaughtered the entire people. In a single week (12 to 18 April) several Waldensian villages were razed, and in one of them eight hundred men, women and children died. Within two months, by the book's account, three thousand Waldensians were killed, twenty-two villages destroyed and seven hundred men sent to the galleys. Twenty-five terrified women who took refuge in a cave died in a fire lit at its mouth. Protestant Switzerland and Germany protested the merciless slaughter, but Spain congratulated Francis. A year later inquisitors arrested a group of Lutherans who had gathered at Meaux under Pierre Leclerc (brother of the Jean who was branded). After much torture fourteen were burned alive, eight of them first having their tongues cut out (7 October 1546).
The Verdict
The persecution and killing of Protestants is the most shameful chapter in the history of Francis's reign. The courage of the men and women who died for their faith led the French to regard their cause with respect, and thousands who watched them die turned away from their inherited religion. The killings weakened French Protestantism but could not uproot it. Yet in 1530 the French Protestants were still scattered small groups in Lyons, Bordeaux, Orléans, Reims, Amiens, Poitiers, Bourges, Nîmes, La Rochelle, Châlons, Dijon and Toulouse, and the Huguenots, it seemed, had almost vanished from the earth. Francis must have realized at his death that he was leaving his son not only the enmity of neighbors like England, Switzerland and Germany, but the hatred of the French people themselves.