Theodore Beza and the Quest for Peace in France, 1572-1598 and Repenser l'histoire: Aspects de l'historiographie huguenote des guerres de religion a la Revolution francaise. (Reviews).

Scott M. Manetsch, Theodore Beza and the Quest for Peace in France, 1572-1598.

(Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 79.) Leiden: Brill, 2000. xiii + 380 pp. $122. ISBN: 90-04-11101-8.

Myriam Yardeni, Repenser l'histoire: Aspects de l'historiographie huguenote des guerres de religion a la Revolution francaise.

(La Vie des Huguenots, 11.) Paris: Honore Champion, 2000. 221 pp. 250 FF. ISBN: 2-7453-0240-X.

Although Theodore Beza has never received the kind of attention from historians that his mentor and predecessor Calvin has gotten, there have nevertheless been a number of major studies devoted to Calvin's lieutenant and successor in Geneva over the years. The works of Fredric Gardy and Paul Geisendorf in French and the studies of John Bray, Ian McPhee, and Jill Raitt in English come immediately to mind, and there have been many other articles and essays devoted to Beza that have significantly altered our perspective of the reformer. Nearly all of these studies, however, have chosen to focus on one of four principal facets of Beza's career: as Calvin's successor in the reformed community in Geneva, as the source of theological variants into orthodox Calvinist theology after Calvin's death, as a humanist Biblical scholar and translator, or as a political theorist and advocate of resistance theory, largely through his authorship of Du droit des magistrats (1574). The principal contribution of Scott Manetsch's s tudy of Beza is that, although he comments on all these areas, his main interest is in Beza as a political strategist and advisor to the French Huguenots after the St. Bartholomew's massacres in 1572. Thus, Manetsch's book, a revised doctoral dissertation written under the supervision of the late Heiko Oberman, offers us something new. Scholars have long recognized the importance of Beza as a political leader and liaison with the French Huguenots in the early religious wars, as Beza's own Histoire ecclesiastique des eglises reformees au royaume de France made very explicit. Manetsch now provides us with a much clearer picture of the political leadership and guidance that Beza extended to the Huguenots in the later religious wars as well, and thus tells a very different story. The Huguenot movement that Beza himself wrote about in his Histoire ecclesiastique was a growing and dynamic movement, and optimism was high for an eventual evangelical victory of the reformed church in France. Manetsch tells the story o f Beza's efforts to rally and renew the Huguenots' confidence in a period of crisis and contraction after St. Bartholomew's Day, and it is no less important.

The central claim that Manetsch makes in the book, in fact, is that Beza played a central role in shaping and helping to preserve the French reformed community when it was under attack by the French crown after 1572, by the Holy League after 1584, and even by the ecumenical efforts of Henry IV to reunite his Protestant and Catholic subjects under one Gallican faith after his abjuration in 1593. While this is hardly a novel or surprising claim to make about Beza, it is a significant part of the narrative of the French reformed church in this period, and Manetsch tells it very well. Based on a variety of sources -- especially Beza's own published and unpublished correspondence as well as the municipal records of the city of Geneva -- Manetsch's study sketches out in some detail the variety of Beza's involvement with French Huguenots in the later religious wars. Moreover, Beza's efforts to safeguard and protect the reformed community in France during this period of persecution (1572-98) are catalogued clearly. W hile I cannot mention all of his contributions in a short review, two areas stand out.

First, the work of Robert Kingdon, Bernard Roussel, Raymond Mentzer, Glenn Sunshine, and others has now made it very clear that the Calvinist church in France was hardly a mirror image of the Calvinist church in Geneva. It should also come as no surprise that doctrinal and political differences could occasionally lead to divisiveness within the French reformed church. Just as Calvin himself did while alive, Beza took on the role of arbiter and referee when these disputes threatened internal unity. Perhaps the most notorious example was Beza's efforts at warding off a doctrinal crisis caused by the merchant Antoine Lescaille, who was an elder in the refugee Huguenot church in Basel. In 1590 Lescaille openly attacked the doctrine of justification by faith and predestination, the very foundation of Lutheran and Calvinist theology While other scholars have commented on the theological implications of this dispute, Manetsch shows that it had political implications as well. When Lescaille sought Beza's protection f rom French ministers in Basel, Beza rebuffed him and urged him to abandon his erroneous views. Lescaille then turned to publishing his ideas - in both French and German pamphlets in Strasbourg -- which obviously had the potential for disseminating the errors. These pamphlets attacked ministerial authority as well as the French and Swiss churches generally, and Manetsch demonstrates convincingly that Lescaille was being read sympathetically by Huguenots in France such as Denis Godefroy, Nicolas Pithou, and Jean Hotman, as well as at the court of the King of Navarre. Lescaille even addressed a pamphlet to the king himself in 1593, blaming the current political crisis on the rigidity of reformed rheology and discipline. Beza worked long and hard, even denouncing Lescaille in print, before ultimately urging local magistrates in Basel to arrest him.

A second, though related, area of activity was Beza's leadership in opposing the various efforts of moyennurs like the aforementioned Jean Hotman, who sought to reunite French Protestants and Catholics by finessing their theological differences, a goal that Beza correctly saw could ultimately mean the re-Catholicizing of French Huguenots. Beza saw immediately that this would never work and openly opposed the efforts of Hotman and Nicolas Seguier in 1591-92 and those ofJean de Serres in 1594-97, even though the latter clearly had the support of Henry IT. Thus, once the French crown had stopped persecuting the Huguenots after Henry of Navarre's ascension to the throne, and even after the Holy Leauge had been defeated by 1595, the Huguenots still found themselves under pressure. Ecumenical efforts at reunification of the French church were hardly the equivalent of the physical and violent persecution of French Catholics, but their danger to the Huguenot cause were just as great, as Beza correctly surmised. Overa ll, while Manetsch's book may contain few surprises for specialists, it is certainly very useful to have Baza's political relations with French Huguenots outlined here in such detail for the years 1572-98. It adds another significant dimension to the already illustrious career of this reformer.

Myriam Yardeni's collection of essays titled Repenser l'histoire consists of ten articles previously published from 1964 to 1997. Her principal justification for reprinting them here is that they form an extended look at how the historiography of the Huguenots has changed among intellectual historians over the last thirty years or so. She has added some useful notes and new bibliographies to her oldest pieces in order to bring them a little more up to date, but, even as originally published, the articles make it clear that Yardeni herself has been one of the principal scholars responsible for the revision of Huguenot historiography over the years. From her pieces on individuals such as Popeliniere, Hotman, Palma Cayet, and Bayle, to her revision of the accepted views of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Myriam Yardeni has been one of the leading figures in shaping Huguenot historiography over the last thirty-five years. Although some of these essays are still easily accessible, many others are not and i t is useful to have them collected here in one volume.