French Renaissance & Wars of Religion

Marignano: the victory of a giant

Six months after his coronation, the twenty-year-old Francis I crosses the Alps with the largest French army the century has seen and defeats the Swiss pikemen at Marignano in a two-day battle. He is knighted on the field by the Chevalier Bayard. Milan is his.

Francis would bring Leonardo da Vinci to France in 1516 with three paintings under his arm — the Mona Lisa among them — and lodge him at the manor of Clos Lucé beside the royal château of Amboise until his death in 1519. The Renaissance châteaux of the Loire — Chambord, Blois, Azay-le-Rideau, Chenonceau — and Pierre Lescot's new Louvre would soon make Francis the great royal patron of the French Renaissance.

The king takes the Gallican Church

Pope Leo X and Francis I sign at Bologna a concordat that gives the king the nomination of all French bishops, abbots, and major priories. In return, France abandons the radical conciliarism of the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges. The French crown now controls the wealth and the personnel of the Gallican Church.

The Field of the Cloth of Gold

Outside Calais, near Guînes, Francis I and Henry VIII of England meet for eighteen days of jousts, banquets, masques, and wrestling in a temporary city of gold and silk. The summit looks like a peace; in reality, both men are courting the new emperor Charles V.

Francis had lost the imperial election to Charles in 1519. With the Habsburg now ruling Spain, Naples, the Low Countries, Austria, and the Empire, France was encircled on every land border. The dynastic struggle between Valois and Habsburg, fought from Pavia to Saint-Quentin, would be the master question of European politics for forty years.

Pavia: 'all is lost save honour'

Outside Pavia in Lombardy, the Spanish-imperial arquebusiers of Charles V destroy the French chivalry under Francis I in a few hours. The flower of the nobility falls; Francis is taken prisoner and carried to Madrid. From there he writes to his mother the celebrated phrase: 'all is lost save honour, and life, which is safe'.

Brittany is united with France

By the Edict of Union at Vannes, the duchy of Brittany — inherited by Francis I's late wife Claude from her mother Anne — is permanently united with the kingdom of France, on condition of preserving its liberties. The last great independent feudal principality is gone.

Placards against the Mass

On the night of 17 October, anti-Eucharistic broadsheets attributed to the pastor Antoine Marcourt are posted in Paris, Orléans, Tours, Rouen, Blois — and on the bedroom door of the king himself at Amboise. A young John Calvin flees France. The first systematic persecution of French Protestants begins.

The same year, Jacques Cartier sailed from Saint-Malo, planted a cross at Gaspé, and claimed for the king the lands of Hochelaga and Stadacona — the beginning of New France in the valley of the Saint Lawrence. Calvin, settling at Geneva, would publish in 1536 the Institutio Christianae Religionis, the most influential French prose of the century and the doctrinal nucleus of the Huguenot movement.

The Edict of Villers-Cotterêts

Francis I orders that all royal acts, judgements, and ecclesiastical records — until now in Latin or local langues — be written 'en langaige maternel françois'. The edict also requires every parish to keep a register of baptisms. The French language and the modern administrative state advance together.

Henry II and the court of Diane

Francis I dies at Rambouillet; his second son Henry II succeeds him. The court is dominated by his Italian-born queen, Catherine de' Medici, and by his older mistress, Diane de Poitiers, for whom Philibert de l'Orme builds the bridge across the Cher at Chenonceau.

Henry's reign saw the chambre ardente of the Parlement of Paris specially erected to try heretics, the foundation of the Pléiade poets around Ronsard and du Bellay, and the seizure of the imperial bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun in 1552 — strategic prizes France would keep for centuries.

Cateau-Cambrésis and the death of a king

Henry II signs the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis with Philip II of Spain. France renounces sixty-five years of Italian ambitions but keeps Calais and the Three Bishoprics. At the tournament celebrating the peace, the king is mortally wounded in the eye by the lance of Gabriel de Montgomery and dies eleven days later.

The death of a strong king at forty left France in the hands of three sickly sons under the tutelage of Catherine de' Medici, with three great noble houses — the Guise (Catholic), the Bourbon (royal, mostly Protestant), and the Montmorency-Châtillon (mixed) — manoeuvring for control. Within three years the kingdom would slide into the Wars of Religion.

The massacre of Vassy

Passing through the Champagne town of Vassy on a Sunday in March, the duc François de Guise and his armed retinue fall on a Huguenot congregation worshipping in a barn. Some seventy are killed. The Protestant prince of Condé takes up arms; the first of eight Wars of Religion has begun.

By 1562 perhaps two million of the eighteen million inhabitants of France were Huguenots, with strongholds at La Rochelle, Montauban, Nîmes, and through the south. The Edict of Saint-Germain (January 1562) had granted them limited toleration; Vassy began thirty-six years of intermittent civil war that would only end with the Edict of Nantes.

The Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre

On the night of 23-24 August, in the days after the wedding of Henri of Navarre to Marguerite de Valois, the queen mother Catherine and Charles IX authorise the murder of the Huguenot leadership in Paris. The order escapes the palace; the city rises, and the killing spreads to the provinces for weeks. Admiral Coligny is among the first to die.

Modern estimates put the Paris dead at two to three thousand and the provincial total at perhaps ten thousand. The massacre radicalised both confessions: the Huguenots embraced the resistance theories of the so-called monarchomachs (Hotman's Francogallia, Mornay's Vindiciae contra tyrannos); Catholic militants would soon organise the Holy League. Henri of Navarre, the bridegroom, saved his life by abjuring his faith and remained a virtual prisoner at court for nearly four years.

The Holy League takes shape

After the Edict of Beaulieu grants the Huguenots wide concessions, the Catholic militants of Picardy form the first chapter of the Sainte Ligue. Henri, duc de Guise, soon takes leadership of a national network that will challenge the crown for the next thirteen years.

Henri III flees Paris; Guise dies at Blois

Henri III brings Swiss troops into Paris against the Guise; the city throws up barricades and the king flees to Chartres. In December, summoning the duke to the royal château at Blois under safe conduct, he has Guise and his brother the cardinal murdered in his bedchamber.

Henri III is assassinated; Henri IV becomes king

Besieging League-held Paris with Henri of Navarre, Henri III is stabbed at Saint-Cloud by the Dominican friar Jacques Clément, sent by the League. With his dying breath he names Navarre his heir. The last Valois dies; the Bourbon dynasty begins.

Ivry and the siege of Paris

At Ivry-la-Bataille in March, Henri IV — 'Ralliez-vous à mon panache blanc' — crushes the League army under the duc de Mayenne and lays siege to Paris. The city eats its dogs, cats, and the grass of the Tuileries before a Spanish relief army under Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, forces him to lift the siege.

'Paris is well worth a Mass'

Convinced that he will never enter his capital while he remains a Protestant, Henri IV abjures his Calvinism at the abbey of Saint-Denis on 25 July. The Parisian apocryphon attributed to him — 'Paris vaut bien une messe' — captures the political theology of the act. Paris opens its gates the following March.

The Edict of Nantes and the peace of Vervins

On 13 April Henri IV signs at Nantes the edict that grants the Huguenots freedom of conscience, restricted freedom of worship, equal civil rights, and some hundred and fifty fortified places of refuge. Three weeks later the Treaty of Vervins ends the war with Spain. The Wars of Religion are over.

With his great minister Sully — the duc de Sully, Superintendent of Finances — Henri rebuilt the bankrupt kingdom: roads and canals, the silk industry of Lyon, the pauline d'or, the founding of Quebec by Champlain in 1608. The Place Royale (now Place des Vosges) and the Pont-Neuf still preserve the urban face of his Paris. The reign would become, in long retrospect, France's image of a benevolent monarchy.

Ravaillac stabs the king on the rue de la Ferronnerie

On 14 May, as his carriage is stuck in traffic on the narrow rue de la Ferronnerie in Paris, Henri IV is stabbed three times by the Catholic fanatic François Ravaillac. He dies on the way back to the Louvre. His nine-year-old son becomes Louis XIII, with the queen mother Marie de' Medici as regent.

The murder of the king who had reconciled Catholic and Protestant — and who was on the eve of an intervention against the Habsburgs in the Cleves succession — ended the Bourbon settlement at its most fragile moment. The seventeenth century — of Richelieu and Mazarin, of the Fronde and Louis XIV — opens with the screams of a queen-regent over a body laid out in the Louvre.