The Liberties of the Gallican Church

With the exception of the defense of the Salic law in the 1590s prior to the conversion of Henri de Navarre, no issue could compete with the Gallican liberties in arousing parlementaire passions. Despite differences between "episcopal" and "royal" variations of Gallican theory, there had been a consensus for generations that only doctrinal matters lay in papal jurisdiction, while administrative control of the church of France lay in France. Moreover, both the distinction between the two aspects and the autonomy of the national church were assumed to have existed from the earliest times. Indeed, in apostolic times, the church was believed to have been a collection of discrete autonomous institutions, and the pope (bishop of Rome) merely primus inter pares. In the course of the centuries, the imperial papacy had gradually succeeded in dominating others, the French church alone having been "restored," starting in the reign of Louis IX and culminating in the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438. As a result, it was a model for the "restoration" of the rest. The Gallican liberties were parallel to the fundamental laws as uniquely French institutions, and the Parlement was the guardian of both.^[53]

The basic tenets were, first, that popes could not command anything whatever concerning temporal matters in the realm of the Most Christian King—if they did, no subjects of the king, even members of the clergy, should obey them; second, that although the pope is recognized as sovereign in spiritual matters, nevertheless, "in France this power is limited by the canons and rules of the ancient councils of the church that have been accepted in this kingdom. " This formulation, featured in many treatises in the latter decades of the century, is found earlier in the works of the royal archivist, Jean Du Tillet, whose large staff compiled a formidable collection of royal and institutional records, that could provide knowledge of precedent and "represent the past as in a mirror . . . in order to make use of a thousand years of experience." The end result was the impressive collection of Recueils des Roys de France .^[54]

[53] . William J. Bouwsma, "Gallicanism and the Nature of Christendom," in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron , ed. Anthony Molho and John Tedeschi (De Kalb, Ill., 1971); Kelley, Foundations ; V. Martin, Gallicanisme ; Donald R. Kelley, "Fides Historiae: Charles Du Moulin and the Gallican View of History," Traditio 22 (1956); Jonathan Powis, "Gallican Liberties and the Politics of Later Sixteenth-Century France," The Historical Journal 26, no. 3 (1983): 515-530; Claude Sutto, "Tradition et innovation, réalisme et utopie: l'idée gallicane à la fin du XVIe et au début du XVIIe siècles," Renaissance et Réforme , n.s., 8 (1984): 279-297.

[54] . Guy Coquille, Traité des Libertez de l'Eglise de France (1594), in Oeuvres (Paris, 1665), 1:111 (my italics); Jean Du Tillet, "Les Libertez de l'Eglise gallicane," in Recueil des Roys de France (Paris, 1602), 83; Kelley, Foundations , 226-229.

A reinterpretation of the European past was required to support this position. The Romanist view of the pope's powers as transferred from the Roman emperor was demolished by Charles Du Moulin in his Conseil sur le faict du Concile de Trente (1564). In its stead he postulated a "translation of empire," in a chain of which Charlemagne was the most important link, from the Roman emperor to the king of France, who thus had supervisory power over the church in his kingdom. At this point disagreement arose among Frenchmen: was the church directly under royal control—as royalist Gallicans held—or, was the crown confined to a "supervisory" role, with the real administration in the hands of French bishops? The latter view was held by churchmen prior to the Concordat (and by some later as well) and by the mainstream parlementaires. This episcopal-parlementaire version of Gallican theory was reasserted and strengthened in the battle over the Concordat of Bologna.^[55] Parlement's relation to the church, its position on ecclesiastical appointments, and its claim that no general law was valid without its registration were all involved. The king (François I) was able to impose his will but not to persuade the Parlement to his view. A backlog of mutual recriminations over these issues, built up in the 1520s, vitally affected relations between the crown and Parlement in the decades ahead, over a new central issue, religious dissent and heresy. Until the mid-1520s, however, François I was the protector and patron of the "new learning" whose leaders were intent on reform of the church from within. It is important for our purposes to understand that within the Catholic fold there arose crucial differences between the crown and the court, which later became (temporarily) obscured by the challenges of reformers who could not be contained within the church. The belief that religion was a necessary reinforcement of national unity, a sort of cement of the state—un roi, une loi, une foi —was a fundamental conviction that proved a stumbling block to any movement that would lead to a pluralistic religious settlement. We shall see that the struggle over the Concordat was a prologue to the reaction of the Parlement at the first appearance of serious religious dissent.

The Gallican issue was never long out of sight during the period of this study, the better part of a century. Like a powerful river that runs for considerable stretches underground, invisible, it was easily ignored, only to surface in periods of tension with varying degrees of force. If the tension involved conflict between the crown and the papacy, or among the French

[55] . Fully treated by Bouwsma, Kelley, V. Martin, de Caprariis. Parlement was the bastion of "episcopal" (or parlementaire) Gallicanism, enshrined in the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, opposing "royal" Gallicanism, at its height in the Concordat of 1516.

prelates, it could explode violently, to disrupt or even destroy apparently stable policies and institutions, as a rampaging river tears up the landscape. Guardian and defender of the Gallican liberties, Parlement was always affected. In quiet periods the court was sensitive even to the shadow of ecclesiastical encroachment on secular jurisdiction. The weapon on which royal, parlementaire, and national jurisdiction chiefly depended was l'appel comme d'abus , which allowed any Frenchman to appeal to appropriate national (secular) authority against a judgment of ecclesiastical authorities, be it the local church court, the bishop, a Church council or decree not "received in this kingdom," or the pope himself. One of the root causes of French resistance to the Trent decrees was that they would have eliminated this valuable recourse.^[56]

Authorization and official reception in the kingdom of papal legates, nuncios, and other agents had to be registered by the Parlement of Paris, which often caused an uproar and sometimes outright rejection, especially during an aggressive pontificate. When the crown pursued policies that involved papal cooperation, as in the crisis over the Concordat (1517-19; chapter 5) and over the appointment of Chancellor Duprat as abbot of St-Benoit in violation of the rights of the monks who had made another choice (1525-26; chapter 6), Parlement would sound the Gallican alarm, much in the way of the 1790s revolutionary cry, La patrie en danger! In 1551, there was an aborted Gallican crisis, when Henri II threatened to call a "national [church] council" in protest against Julius III's convocation of the second session of the Council of Trent—counter to French interests. The flow of money from France to Rome was arrested and the ultimate step—"the withdrawal of obedience"—was threatened, though not carried out.

Beginning in 1563, the Counter-Reformation went into high gear. The papacy took the offensive by condemning eight French bishops and the Calvinist queen of Navarre for heresy and summoning them before the Inquisition, thus greatly encouraging the ultramontane party in France. In this situation king and Parlement stood together and the ultras were defeated. In that same year, however, Parlement lost an important battle (the issue was the proclamation of his majority by Charles IX, who was about to be fourteen years old) when it was definitively forbidden to "interfere in matters of state." This, of course, included foreign policy, with which the Gallican liberties were inevitably connected (chapter 10).

Papal audacity reached its height when Sixtus V presumed to declare

[56] . V. Martin, Gallicanisme , 51-54; Kelley, Foundations , esp. 167, 180-183, 261, 297.

Henri de Navarre ineligible for the crown (1585; chapter 11). During the final phase of the wars of religion—more precisely, the civil war between the Catholic League and the supporters of Navarre (1588-94; chapters 11-14)—Parlement, like the country, was sharply divided and conflict was endemic, though not always at fever pitch. As early as 1564 the core issue was the refusal of both crown and Parlement to accept (register and publish) the decrees of the Council of Trent, and this was the Gordian knot that even Henri IV could not cut. He could end the war, bribe or conciliate the leaders of the League, make peace with Spain, and free France of foreign troops, even force the parlements to register the Edict of Nantes (all in 1598), but he could only ignore, delay, evade, or prevaricate in the face of intensive and increasing pressures by several popes to force French acceptance of the decrees. The papacy lost in the long run, and the crown and Parlement both had a hand in the victory, but never were "allies" less united; indeed, their explicit positions were diametrically opposed, the king pushing compromise, because he needed papal cooperation in other areas, and the court adamant in opposition. The courageous speech of président Jacques-Auguste de Thou, defiant to the king's face, as he explicitly reiterated the court's adherence to the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, is the ultimate expression of Parlement's stubborn defense of the Gallican liberties (see epilogue, 1600-1605).