Civic Agendas and Religious Passions: Chalons-sur-Marne during the French Wars of Religion, 1560-1594.

Mark W. Konnert. (Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, 35.) Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1997. x + 182 pp. $40. 0-940-474-37-9.

These two works, the first written at the close of an illustrious career and the second inaugurating a promising one, exhibit some striking similarities of approach and emphasis, despite their different subject matters. They both begin by inquiring into instances of seemingly anomalous behavior. In One King; One Faith, Nancy Lyman Roelker asks why the "mainstream" magistrates of the Parlement of Paris (centrists who were "conventionally rather than militantly or ideologically Catholic") stayed within the old church, despite denouncing its abuses just as vocally as their Huguenot friends and peers (2). And in Civic Agendas and Religious Passions, Mark W. Konnert asks why the city councillors of Chalons-sur-Marne remained loyal to the crown in the last phase of the Wars of Religion, despite their town's location in the heavily Leaguer and Guisard province of Champagne (viii). In answering their respective questions, both authors begin with assessments of the structures (social, political, economic, religious) that shaped the options of their magistrates, and both then put this synchronic analysis into motion, portraying the interplay of interest and event in historical narratives that traverse the period of reform and counter-reform in France. Finally, both authors downplay the role of religion in their studies, emphasizing instead the influence of political, social, and economic factors.

Roelker begins her compendious work with a generational analysis of mainstream parlementarians, dividing them into an "early generation" that confronted the initial challenge of reform in the 1520s and 1530s, a "transitional generation" of the 1540s and 1550s that consented in principle to the repression of heresy, a "crisis generation" that navigated the shoals of civil war until the mid-1580s, and the "later generations" of the League and post-League periods. Despite their different circumstances, these generations shared a fairly uniform set of characteristics that derived from their social status, upbringing, legal education, life-style, and above all from the "nexus of political-historical and professional values" that defined their sense of their obligations to king and kingdom (59).

A parliamentary brand of Gallicanism, as distinguished from the royal variety, lay at the center of this nexus of "constitutionalism," as Roelker terms it. Mainstream parliamentarians regarded themselves as defenders of Gallican liberties against the assaults of the papacy, the schemes of Ultramontane Leaguers, and even against the king, who could undermine the independence of the Gallican church when it suited his political purposes (as, for example, with the Concordat of 1516). Roelker skillfully shows how the parliamentarians treated Gallican liberties not simply as a religious matter but more so as a constitutional one, as "the touchstone of French national autonomy" and "the shield of the French nation and the sign of its superiority" (67), and how they projected themselves as the historic keepers of this tradition. Gallicanism thus provided the ballast for parliamentary centrists, enabling them to chart their course - leeward or windward as circumstances dictated - amid the tempests of religious reform and civil war. The great strength of Roelker's work, quite apart from her other valuable insights into the parlementaire mentalite, lies in her repeated insistence on the Gallican nature of this corporate body.

In contrast to Roelker's book, Konnert's appears more unassuming. After all, the city councillors of a middling town cannot compare with the illustrious membership of the Parlement of Pads, which constitutes a virtual "who's who" of the French Renaissance. Yet Konnert's local study harbors considerable ambitions, for he portrays the council of Chalons-sur-Marne as a "prism" enabling us to see the Wars of Religion in a new light (162). This prismatic quality is enhanced by the town's status as a bonne ville, one of the many towns that achieved informal, de facto autonomy from feudal overlords during the protracted crisis of the Hundred Years' War. As Konnert points out in his introduction, the history of the bonnes villes during the Wars of Religion has been neglected in favor of that of larger cities, like Paris, Rouen, and Marseille. Yet the records of these smaller towns enable us to view the Wars of Religion "from the inside out . . . from the perspective of those responsible for the order and security of their town," and to see how the civic agendas of a bonne ville like Chalons-sur-Marne could counteract the tendency toward religious violence manifested in the larger cities (16).

In Konnert's story, civic virtues and community solidarity provided the same kind of ballast for the city councillors as Gallicanism did for Roelker's parliamentarians. Proud of their de facto autonomy, and guarding it all the more jealously because it remained without official sanction, the councillors fought (with relative success) all attempts by external forces to bring the town into one religious camp or the other. Although, as Konnert states, they would have preferred to govern a wholly Catholic town, they nonetheless accepted the presence of Huguenots in their midst and, even when hard pressed by the Guises and their henchmen, limited religious repression to moderate fines and confiscations rather than shed the blood of their fellow citizens. The high point of this civic policy came during the tumultuous events of 1588-1589 - with the assassinations of the Guises and Henry III and the accession of the Protestant Henry of Navarre - when the town, virtually alone in its region, openly declared for the crown. This anomalous act, which apparently defied reason, was in reality dictated by self-interest, for the forces of the League constituted the greater threat to the council's autonomy than those of the king. And when peace finally returned, he rewarded Chalons-sur-Marne royally, transferring to it sovereign courts previously seated in competing towns.

Konnert concludes with an interesting question, which brings us back to the observation that neither he nor Roelker grant religious motives their full due in the French reformation. Why, he asks, did it take the kingdom thirty-five years of civil war to arrive at the attitude of toleration demonstrated from the start by the councillors of Chalons-sur-Marne? Let us proffer an answer: leaving aside the possibility that the relative autonomy of Konnert's councillors may have been the exception rather than the rule in the bonnes villes - thus fostering an unusually strong civic agenda in Chalons-sur-Marne - we can posit in general that issues of civic self-interest paled before those of salvation, wherein one's ultimate self-interest lay. After all, millions of Protestants rose to the clarion call of "abuse," a term whose full spiritual import is lost to us moderns. And those Catholics, like Roelker's parliamentarians, who acknowledged abuse while still remaining loyal to their church may have done so not only because of their corporate self-interest but also because they believed the Catholic church, with its tried and true penitential cycle, offered the surer means of salvation, notwithstanding the foibles of its clergy. To conjure the full flavor of the French reformation, therefore, one ought to supplement Roelker and Konnert's pungent rendering of socio-political motivation with a dash of "old-time religion."

ZACHARY S. SCHIFFMAN Northeastern Illinois University