1. This is not to say that the French Protestants had given up all hope of eventually controlling the French Church through the conversion of the king; Greengrass 1994.

2. Quoted in Greengrass 1983a: 376; on the origins of the term “Huguenot” to designate French Protestants, see Gray 1983.

3. See Benedict 1981: 9–94. The term “Reformed” may be preferable to the term “Calvinist,” for despite the obvious influence of Jean Calvin, not only in France but more generally in Europe during the second half of the sixteenth century, we should not exaggerate the unity of the movement or the influence of a single leader; what is more, “Reformed” along with the originally derogatory “Huguenot” is what the actors themselves used.

4. See the map of French Protestantism in Mandrou 1977: 127.

5. On the character and fate of Protestant dissent in Spain, see Kamen 1994.

6. See the map of Netherlandic iconoclasm in Parker 1985: 77.

7. On the limited success of the early Reformation, see the articles collected in Pettegree 1992a, especially the introductory survey by Andrew Pettegree.

8. On both the utility and difficulty in adopting this term, see Schilling 1992 and Scribner 1994.

9. For an early and very suggestive comparison, see Van Gelder 1930; unfortunately, suggestive beginnings like this have rarely spawned systematic international comparisons in the largely “national” historiographies of the Reformation era. See also Van Nierop 1995 for a comparison that is very similar to my own except that it focuses more clearly on elite politics on a grander scale. Woltjer 1994 presents a very useful comparison on the question of popular violence in particular.

10. On the interdependence of these histories, see Parker 1985 and Sutherland 1980.

11. On the connection between humanism, municipal schools, and early interest in reform, see Pettegree 1992b and Nicholls 1992.

12. For a brief survey in English of the history of the French Reformation, see Greengrass 1987; there is no equivalent for the Low Countries, though the collection of pathbreaking essays in Duke 1990 comes close.

13. See Greengrass 1987: 11–12 on eating meat on Friday and stealing the Host (“a surprisingly frequent occurrence”). The first iconoclastic attacks in the Netherlands occurred in Antwerp and Delft in 1525 (Pettegree 1992b: 9); in Paris an image of the Virgin was smashed in 1528 (Nicholls 1992: 125).

14. Altogether at least 1,300, and perhaps as many as four or five times that number, were executed between 1523 and 1566 under the combined reigns of Charles V and Philip II (see Duke 1990: 71, 99). This was clearly the most sustained and destructive persecution of Protestants anywhere in Europe.

15. Reformation historians use the term “confessional” to denote the various strands of theological and ecclesiastical difference (often articulated in formal, propositional “confessions” of faith) in European Christianity during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation era and beyond; the most general confessional tendencies (each with regional variations) are, thus, Catholic, Lutheran, [Swiss] Reformed (i.e., Zwinglian or Calvinist), and Anabaptist, each with its own increasingly distinctive confessions.

16. Though the Dutch exile church in London was very promising when it was established in 1550, it was quickly closed down following the death of its patron, Edward VI, in 1553 (see Pettegree 1986).

17. See Audisio 1984 and Cameron 1984. Unfortunately, most historians have considered these events as largely peripheral to the French Reformation considered on a “national” scale.

18. On the limited growth of Reformed Protestantism in the countryside of Languedoc, see Le Roy Ladurie 1979 and Molinier 1984.

19. The largest gathering appears to have been approximately 25,000 at Laer on July 14; meetings of 20,000 were reported at Ghent and more than 10,000 at Valenciennes and Tournai. See Crew 1979; Pettegree 1992b:chap. 5.

20. See the map of France prior to the civil wars in Salmon 1975: 28.

21. For the better part of five years, the peasants of coastal Flanders staged the most sustained rural insurrection of the otherwise rebellious fourteenth century, which not only demonstrated the revolutionary potential of rural communities but also modeled a remarkably successful political alternative to seigneurial domination of the countryside. See Te Brake 1993.

22. This heroic, if unsuccessful, defiance of Charles V’s various attempts to consolidate his control in the Low Countries resulted in the complete revocation of Ghent’s traditional liberties as a chartered city, but not before Charles had traveled from Spain to preside personally over the symbolic humiliation of the whole community. See the vivid contemporary account of both the revolt and the city’s humiliation in Rowen 1972: 16–25.

23. And more generally in Europe as well. The Comunero Revolt in Spain, for example, may be seen as a classic example of Blockmans’s Great Tradition, but there, too, urban resistance to the monarch was predicated on a pattern of urban riots that would seem to be evidence of the Little Tradition of popular challenges to urban oligarchs; see chapter 2 above.

24. By August 23 Margaret had conceded freedom of worship for Protestants where preaching had already taken place (Pettegree 1992b: 132).

25. See, for example, the very impressive and useful chronologies in Salmon 1975: 333–342 and Crouzet 1990: 1: 23–41; for a recent narrative account, see Holt 1995.

26. Not only was the most prominent Huguenot leadership summarily executed, but some 3,000 Huguenots in Paris and 8,000 more elsewhere were killed in the space of just a few days. See Benedict 1978; Diefendorf 1991.

27. After earlier military failures, this modest success gave the Beggars a base from which to “liberate” large parts of Holland and Zeeland. See Parker 1985.

28. For brief introductions, in English, to these very complex histories (and historiographies), see Knecht 1989 and Holt 1995 on the French civil wars and Limm 1989 on the Dutch Revolt.

29. This account of events in Toulouse is based on Greengrass 1983a, which includes a map of the Protestant and Catholic strongholds within the city; cf. Davies 1979.

30. Greengrass 1983a notes that the failure of anticipated outside support and a severe shortage of food as well as military reversals quickly demoralized the Protestant forces.

31. Though these municipal conflicts will certainly not pass muster as “great” revolutions, they do pass the test of “revolutionary situations,” which is predicated on the condition of multiple sovereignty and highlights exclusive claims by challengers and a significant level of popular support for those claims as proximate causes. Cf. Tilly 1978, 1993.

32. In the successive peace settlements of the civil wars in which the monarchy allowed limited freedom of worship to Huguenots, Paris was invariably excluded from the list of places where Calvinist worship was formally authorized; see Salmon 1975. On the divisions between Huguenots and Catholics and the bitter fate of evangelical Protestantism in Paris, see Diefendorf 1991 who emphasizes the critical importance of popular mobilization on numerous occasions between 1562 and 1572.

33. The following account of events in La Rochelle is based on Meyer 1977; see also Meyer 1984 and Trocmé 1976.

34. On the ebb and flow of the rebels’ military campaigns through the end of the century, see the maps in Parker 1985: 210–212, 229.

35. Following the immediate failure of Spanish repression due to mutiny and bankruptcy, the Pacification of Ghent (1576) recognized the Reformed church as the official church in Holland and Zeeland; following the failure, in turn, of the Pacification (which included all the Low Countries provinces), the Union of Utrecht, negotiated exclusively by the northern rebel provinces and the city of Ghent in 1579, gave the Reformed church the status of a “public” church but prohibited the persecution of religious dissenters. Consequently, not only other Protestant confessional groups—especially Lutherans and Mennonites—but also Catholics continued to exist as worshiping communities albeit under occasionally severe limitations. See especially Spaans 1989 for an analysis of this confessional interaction within a single urban community (Haarlem).

36. Although they did not formally abjure their “sovereign” until 1581 (and they did not give up their search for a replacement until the end of the decade), the provinces of Holland and Zeeland had effectively become independent of the Brussels government in 1572, and under their tutelage the other signatories of the Union of Utrecht—formally known as the United Provinces of the Northern Netherlands—had begun to create the conditions for fully independent self-government after 1579 (Te Brake 1992). Likewise, the “United Provinces” of southern France established a self-governing confederation after the debacle of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. See Garrisson 1980; Parker 1985; Heller 1991:chap. 3.

37. Under this ill-fated agreement, the elite leadership of the amalgamated provinces, meeting extralegally as the Estates General, had extracted important political concessions from the incoming governor-general, Don Juan, in return for the restoration of Catholicism everywhere except in the provinces of Holland and Zeeland.

38. Robert Wuthnow (1989) uses the term “figural action” to denote the ways in which culturally critical discourses go beyond simple criticism of the status quo to suggest concrete and often symbolic actions by which ordinary people might mark themselves as part of a larger movement. Though Wuthnow uses this discursive element to explain the nonrevolutionary “success” of the Reformation (as well as the Enlightenment and European socialism), it may be just as useful in describing the discursive qualities of “successful” cultural innovations more generally, including the Counter-Reformation (cf. Delumeau 1977).

39. For a detailed analysis of this process in the city of Paris up to its deadly culmination in the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, see Diefendorf 1991.

40. The league may be considered successful to the extent that it forced the Huguenot claimant to the French throne, Henry IV, to abjure his Protestantism in 1593 in order to establish his authority in the whole of the kingdom. This partial victory helped enormously to depoliticize and demobilize the Counter-Reformation coalitions that were implacably opposed to a “heretic” king; by the same token it undercut the local political support of those elites who had used the league to establish their independence from the central government.

41. There was, for example, but one bishopric (Utrecht) in all of the northern provinces, and by contrast with France (with some 80 bishoprics) and even perhaps the southern Netherlands, where in many places ecclesiastical and political elites were often linked by family networks, the ecclesiastical establishment in the north was very much marginal to and in extreme cases estranged from those who occupied positions of local and provincial power. See Israel 1995.

42. Cf. Bercé 1990, Salmon 1975, and Heller 1991 who differ relatively little in their sense of the essential chronology of what happened in the course of these revolts but disagree profoundly in their understanding of their political significance. Bercé sees them as vertically integrated coalitions against the central state whereas Heller insists on their antiaristocratic thrust.

43. I borrow the concept of modularity from Sidney Tarrow (1994) who (unfortunately from my perspective as an early modern historian) insists that it is an exclusive property of the repertoires of “modern” social movements. On the contrary, the evidence from sixteenth-century Europe suggests that both the modularity of popular political practice and the social movements of which modularity is said to be characteristic appear to have a longer and more complicated history than the current literature admits.

44. The political-structural comparison between an empire and a collection of (more or less contiguous) territories under a single overlord (albeit with various sovereignties) is especially telling in this case, because it was the same Charles of Habsburg who was emperor in Germany and territorial lord in the Low Countries until his abdication in 1555; presumably his personal determination to stem the tide of heresy did not vary and thus cannot be considered a salient factor in the very different histories of religious dissent in the empire and the Low Countries.

45. In fact, Judith Meyer (1977, 1984) argues that La Rochelle was more like an imperial free city than a typical French city in this respect.

46. In fact, from Natalie Zemon Davis (1975:esp. chap. 6) to Denis Crouzet (1990), research that focuses specifically on the problem of violence has been among the most fertile and suggestive work on the French Reformation. The same might be said less emphatically for the work on Dutch iconoclasm (see Duke 1990:esp. chap. 6). The difficulty, as I see it, is that by focusing on the ritualized and ideological aspects of many acts of violence, abstracted as a general problem outside the context of specific events whether violent or nonviolent, this research cannot address the obvious question of its variations in time and place. See also Woltjer 1994, which highlights a number of structural and institutional factors that comport well with the more dynamic argument I am making here.

47. The formal accommodation of religious diversity in France was certainly exceptional but not unique: The kingdom of Poland (and later the combined kingdom of Poland and Lithuania), which had become known as a “refuge of heretics,” formally recognized the fact of religious diversity under the Warsaw Confederation of 1573 (see Lecler 1960). It is unclear, however, how much popular support Protestantism involved in this “republic of nobles” (Fedorowicz 1982). See also Christin 1997 on France and Germany.

48. I do not mean to suggest that the political status quo was frozen in place in the southern Netherlands; rather, it is clear that henceforth development was channeled within the narrow confines of aristocratic and provincial “privileges.” Cf. De Schepper 1987.