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- Author: Elizabeth C. Tingle x
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This book explores the theory and practice of authority during the later sixteenth century, in the religious culture and political institutions of the city of Nantes, where the religious wars traditionally came to an end with the great Edict of 1598. The Wars of Religion witnessed serious challenges to the authority of the last Valois kings of France. In an examination of the municipal and ecclesiastical records of Nantes, the author considers challenges to authority, and its renegotiation and reconstruction in the city, during the civil war period. After a detailed survey of the socio-economic structures of the mid-sixteenth-century city, successive chapters detail the growth of the Protestant church, assess the impact of sectarian conflict and the early counter reform movement on the Catholic Church, and evaluate the changing political relations of the city council with the urban population and with the French crown. Finally, the book focuses on the Catholic League rebellion against the king and the question of why Nantes held out against Henry IV longer than any other French city.
This study of Nantes is about the impact of the religious wars on the exercise and understanding of authority in the city, principally that of the municipal government. This chapter explores the city context of events, including the motives for Nantes' participation in the religious wars and for its revolt against the crown in 1589, also exploring why the Catholic League rebellion lasted longer here than in any other town. This is not a simple narrative of Nantes' experiences of the religious wars. The central focus is on authority, its theoretical construction, its institutional embodiment, its reception and negotiation, and changes within these over time. During the religious wars, the understanding and exercise of many different levels of authority came under close scrutiny by contemporaries, and the nature and legitimacy of authority were questioned. This book offers a study of city governance in a period of pressure and change, and also examines the changing relationship of the city government and the royal state.
This chapter discusses the city of Nantes and its people in the mid-sixteenth century. The streets and quays of Nantes were populated by a rich variety of people. In the mid-century, it was the largest city of the province of Brittany, with a population of about 20,000, and, like all early modern towns, it had a sharply pyramidal wealth structure. Relations between city, province and crown, and between individuals, were understood in terms of law and contract; there were mutual obligations between different authorities and social groups. There was a strong moral and religious dimension to royal, civic and household authority, mediated through the theology and culture of the Catholic Church. The rise of Protestantism challenged the fundamental cultural premises upon which civic culture was based. More importantly, the sectarian and military conflicts unleashed from 1560 both threatened the effective authority of crown and city agents and called into question the relationship between the two.
The theory and practice of urban authority and governance were deeply affected, while the relationship between the city and the crown was strained. In this chapter, the process and significance of the growth of Protestantism in Nantes are assessed, and the repercussions of the movement for political and religious life in the city are also discussed. The emergence of Protestantism in Nantes had a profound and immediate impact on attitudes to the authority of city institutions and on practical governance in the town, even though the movement was relatively small compared with those in other cities. In these circumstances, the city authorities had great practical difficulties in maintaining order and effectively exercising their authority. Further, undermining practical governance was the corrosive impact of Protestantism on the ideological props to authority in the city. Contemporary authors emphasised the religious and cultural threat posed by heresy to the influence and institutions of the Roman church.
The authorities in Nantes watched helplessly as France was engulfed in civil war. The outcome of war was not only a new decisiveness by the crown and the city's elites to assert their authority separately, but also in concert, to restore order to religious and secular affairs. The 1560s and early 1570s were a period of new initiatives in crown–city relations, for the more efficient administration of the kingdom, a result of the crisis of the early civil wars. This process of declining confidence, followed by the repositioning of authority within the city of Nantes, is the subject of this chapter. While royal authority was fissured by the military crisis, its administration in Nantes held firm. At the local level, day-to-day order and respect for royal authority were maintained.
Religious policy, taxation and war created tensions within this polity, but the new town council was determinedly loyal to the king. But these ultimately failed because the king was unable to impose either a religious settlement or peace on the kingdom, or to find sufficient revenue to allow for taxation reform. There were serious disputes between the king and the city in that decade over taxation and the creation of royal offices, but crown authority and its power to act were not challenged. The war that broke out on the southern marches of Brittany in the mid-1580s caused the king's authority to be eroded in the province. Governors took over royal fiscal and administrative authority, while Nantes' municipality was forced, through military and economic emergency, to govern on its own, with less resort to the crown for advice.
This chapter discusses the forging of Catholic confessional identity, of religious and military strife, its relationship with indigenous spiritual revival and Tridentine reform, and its impact upon the political culture of Nantes during the mid-sixteenth century, by which time Catholic spirituality was undergoing change. Historians such as A. Galpern have argued that belief and participation in traditional rituals declined in this period. In a study of the Champagne region, Galpern argues for a decrease in religiosity in the 1540s and 1550s, shown by changing styles of religious art, which became less emotionally intense; changes in poor relief, with the rise of centralised municipal institutions; a drive against beggars and indiscriminate almsgiving; and declining confraternity membership. It is also suggested that there was increasing alienation of certain social groups from collective piety, in particular, a distancing of elites from popular groups, a product of increasing hierarchy in towns, growing oligarchy in city government, and differentiation in guilds between masters and journeymen.
This chapter explores the aims of the Nantais in their rebellion, and the relationship between the city and Mercoeur, also revealing the reason it took so long for Nantes to submit to Henry IV. Nantes played a central role in the Bretons' rebellion against the crown. In Charles Laronze's view, the League was above all else an urban movement, where the Breton towns fought in defence of their commercial interests, political privileges and religious beliefs. From 1589 onwards, Nantes became Mercoeur's ‘capital’, the site of the League's provincial administration, with a parlement and Chambre des Comptes. The city wanted to become the capital of Brittany, to regain the parlement lost to Rennes in 1560, and to dominate provincial administration and politics.
Throughout the religious wars, the stability of urban governance in Nantes was striking. This arose from the shared nature of authority, which was widely disseminated among many different groups in the city. Urban government was not simply a system of regulation imposed from above. While participation in the municipality itself was the preserve of the wealthy elite, this was a relatively open group. Further, all householders could take part in the general assemblies of the city, as witnesses to communal decision making, giving a wide sense of involvement in urban affairs. The day-to-day administration of the city's hospitals was largely in the hands of men of the middling sort. The bourgeois militia was another important vehicle through which authority was disseminated downwards through the community.